DC Fans Think S.T.A.R. Labs Exploded Thursday Night in New York City

On Thursday night, the sky over New York City lit up a brilliant and eerie blue, the culprit being an incident at the Con Edison electrical facility in Astoria, Queens. However, DC fans have other ideas about what really happened — and it involves S.T.A.R. Labs.

On Twitter, New Yorkers quickly began speculating about what exactly was causing the night sky to glow electric blue (pun not intended) with many pointing to alien invasion, Netflix’s Bird Box making the leap from fiction to reality, or even Godzilla making his presence known. Those are all fine theories, but for fans of The Flash, the true source of the blue light is easy: the particle accelerator at S.T.A.R. Labs exploded which means we’re all about to be metahumans now.

As fans of The Flash — particularly The CW television series — can tell you, a particle accelerator explosion is exactly how Barry Allen (played by Grant Gustin) gets his powers. During the series pilot, the S.T.A.R. Labs accelerator is turned on and quickly explodes with the event sending dark matter spreading all across Central City. Barry, who is working as a crime scene investigator for the Central City Police Department, is hit by this wave of black matter as well as struck by actual lightning, his body sent crashing into shelves of chemicals in his labs. The result? When Barry finally wakes up from his coma months later, he has super speed and becomes the hero known as The Flash.

So, when Con Edison had its incident — the blue light is said to have been called by something called an arc flash, the phenomenon that occurs when electric current flows through air between conductors resulting in the release of heat and light — fans couldn’t help but declare it an incident at S.T.A.R. Labs with some people wondering if Barry is okay, if the timeline remains intact, and, perhaps best of all, when we can all expect our own super human powers.

We’ve curated some of our favorite Flash-related reactions to the Con Edison explosion for you to enjoy so read on to see how people reacted to “S.T.A.R. Labs” lighting up the New York sky last week.

Has anyone checked on Barry?

Definitely STAR Labs

Seriously, though.

So, superpowers?

Con Ed? Yeah, right.

This is all Cisco’s fault.

The Flash is about to become reality, y’all.

Dreams do come true!

How does one check for super powers?

Queens IS a long way from Central City….