The Flash Reveals That The Ray Is Part of the Post-Crisis Earth

The post-"Crisis on Infinite Earths" world of the Arrowverse is a strange place to be, and for most of the characters they will never have remembered living anywhere else. But for most of our heroes, whose pre-Crisis memories were restored by J'Onn J'onzz (David Harewood) in "Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Five," things are very disorienting indeed. One hero who might fall somewhere in the middle is The Ray (Russell Tovey). A former denizen of Earth-X, The Ray, his "Freedom Fighters," and his boyfriend Leo Snart (Wentworth Miller) battled Nazi doppelgangers of Earth-1's greatest heroes, in a universe where the Germans had won World War II.

At least, that's how things used to be. With Earth-X being one of the destroyed universes that was into the fabric of Earth-1 to create Earth-Prime in the post-Crisis timeline, a new timeline Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) is keeping at STAR Labs suggests that The Ray debuted in 2016 on Earth-Prime, establishing himself as a superhero for a while before the events of "Crisis on Earth-X." You can catch the clip over on TVLine.

Those events, the blackboard speculates, were not an indication of a multiverse in the rewritten history, but rather that the villains were "time-traveling Nazi clones" of the heroes. That might raise some serious logical and logistical questions, but given that one of the members of the strike force was Earth-1's Eobard Thawne (Tom Cavanagh), who has the capacity for time travel and has shown little concern for messing with the past before, you have a kind of built-in way to make that work.

The events of the Freedom Fighters: The Ray animated series will likely still be rendered non-canon, since the other Freedom Fighters aren't mentioned on Cisco's board and since so much of the story there hinged on the idea that the Nazis had actually won the war. Of course, until and unless Tovey comes back to reprise the role of The Ray, we may never know for sure. It is also possible that he survived the rebuilding of the universe because he, like the Paragons at Vanishing Point, was outside of time during the big battle, since he fought alongside Wally West and Felicity Smoak in the Crisis on Infinite Earths 100-Page Giant comics that tied into the events of the TV crossover.

The Flash returns from its post-"Crisis" break tonight at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, followed by a new episode of DC's Legends of Tomorrow at 9.