The Flash: First Look at Wally West In Costume

Wally West will appear as Kid Flash in the new season of The Flash, The CW confirmed today…

…by releasing the first official image of actor Keiynan Lonsdale in costume.

But longtime Wally fans like myself shouldn’t get our hopes up too high: according to the network, the still comes from the season premiere, titled “Flashpoint,” suggesting that this could be a Wally West from an alternate timeline.

In the comics, the original Wally West — a white man with red hair, who actually served as The Flash for a while after Barry Allen’s apparent death — recently returned. After DC’s 2011 “The New 52” reboot, he had been replaced by a young black character who shared his name (now revealed to be a cousin of Wally’s, both named after the same uncle). It’s that Wally who Lonsdale was cast to “play,” although it’s the classic Wally costume — now appearing in Teen Titans, or at least soon to be — that he’s wearing.

Flashpoint was a five-issue miniseries written by Geoff Johns and featuring art by Andy Kubert. It told the story of an alternate universe where there was no Superman or The Flash, Wonder Woman and Aquaman’s nations were on the brink of war, and Batman was Thomas Wayne, driven to the edge after the murder of his son in Crime Alley.

With the world hanging in the balance as a dark and ultra-violent war between Atlantis and Themyscira plunged parts of Europe into the ocean, Barry Allen was the only one who could remember the pre-Flashpoint world, and had to work to restore his powers so that he could travel back in time and fix it.

The big twist, for those who don’t know it, is that the terrible, near-apocalyptic timeline was the result of Barry Allen traveling back in time to save his mother from being murdered by the Reverse-Flash.

There was a lot of talk at the end of The Flash‘s first season that Flashpoint could be coming, since Barry appeared poised to travel back in time to save his mother. Instead, he stayed his hand, let history run its course, and returned to discover the multiverse.