What If Tom Felton Is Playing This Character on The Flash?

09/10/2016 10:00 am EDT

Since Harry Potter actor Tom Felton spent so much of his childhood playing Draco Malfoy, an unlikable and evil character, the expectation was when he came to The Flash, that would probably be his role.

"They came to me for a reason," Felton joked during our interview with him at Comic Con International: San Diego in July.

When he comes to Central City in the fall, Felton will be playing play Dorn, a fellow CSI whose intellect rivals Barry's and who suspects that the Fastest Man Alive is hiding something.

"He's as smart as Barry," Felton told us in the video interview embedded below.
At least in the forensic world, Barry's not used to having a mind as sharp as his around -- and he has a smug air of superiority, I think, over Barry. So, hey, it lends itself to many different choices and many different storylines. It's not really worth speculating because I'm sure the writers have something much cooler in mind."

What could be cooler than being Barry's at-work nemesis? Why, being his in-tights nemesis, of course, and fans have already speculated that Felton might turn out to be Doctor Alchemy, a longtime member of The Flash's Rogues who will make his debut in the hit show's third season. Presently, all we know about Alchemy is that his voice will be played by a different actor at first than when his identity is eventually revealed -- much like the series did with Zoom last year.

In the comics, Doctor Alchemy is generally Albert Desmond, a villain who uses an item called a Philosopher's Stone (for you Harry Potter fans out there) to transmute matter.

At one point during Mark Waid's beloved run on The Flash in the '90s, though, Doctor Alchemy was out of commission and a successor -- Curtis Engstrom, The Alchemist -- appeared wielding Desmond's Philosopher's Stone.

An interesting element of the Engstrom version of the character is that while Desmond was a common criminal before he came into possession of the Philosopher's Stone, Engstrom was a gifted biochemist who worked at S.T.A.R. Labs. His life of crime actually began after he came into possession of the Stone, when he used particles of it to perform medical miracles and decided that in order to get what was coming to him, he would steal his revolutionary development and ransom it back to his employer.

The thing about The Flash's big twists so far is that they've been deceptively simple. Going into The Flash's first season, everyone assumed Harrison Wells would turn out to be the Reverse-Flash, and while the writers deftly misled enough of the audience of the course of the season to make it a genuinely entertaining revelation when he came out as Eobard Thawne, the "slap" of thousands of viewers collectively smacking themselves on the forehead and saying "Of course!" could be heard around the world. Ditto Jay Garrick, who came to Central City and made both audiences and even Barry himself immediately suspicious. Give him a few really heartfelt scenes with Caitlin, though, and suddenly when he's the bad guy it's mind-blowing.

So the idea that Felton could be Doctor Alchemy is one that immediately got into the fan-theory network. What if he were, though -- but not the Doctor Alchemy everyone is expecting, and perhaps not even the first one we encounter?

After all, if he's a version of Engstrom, he'd have to get the stone from somewhere to be tempted by its power.

What do you think of our latest bit of deductive reasoning? Sound off in the comments below!

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