The Flash‘s newest big bad might be a lot more than meets the eye.
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Spoilers for tonight’s episode of The Flash, “The Death of Vibe”, below!
After coming face-to-face with him in last week’s installment, Team Flash began to investigate more about Cicada (Chris Klein), a serial killer who uses lightning bolt-shaped daggers to hunt and kill metahumans. As Nora Allen/XS (Jessica Parker Kennedy) explained, Cicada’s real identity had evaded everyone in the future, and none of the Arrowverse’s most powerful heroes were able to stop him.
This led to the team looking for new resources to fight Cicada, ultimately bringing on Sherloque Wells (Tom Cavanagh) to help. Sherloque revealed that he had built a sort of profile on Cicada, which would lead them to the hideout of a man named David Hersch. XS and Barry Allen/The Flash (Grant Gustin) apprehended Hersch, but Barry quickly realized that something didn’t line up. While Hersch had been tied to several anti-government attacks, his physical information – and the lack of lightning bolt daggers – didn’t match Cicada.
Ultimately, Team Flash learned that Sherloque had essentially copied his “profile” on Cicada from the previous times he’d solved the crime on different Earths, which all seemed to lead back to that Earth’s David Hersch. But as it turned out, Earth-1’s version of Cicada actually isn’t David Hersch at all, and that some other man ultimately took on the mantle as a result of Nora traveling back in time.
As the episode went on, we learned bits and pieces about this new version of Cicada — that he is a father whose daughter is in the hospital, and that he answers to a name that sounds like “Orlin”.
(At the moment, it doesn’t seem like Cicada’s real name has any sort of DC Comics proxy. There is a New 52-era Green Lantern whose name is “Orlan”, but it’s safe to assume there isn’t a connection there.)
This puts a pretty major twist on what fans were probably already expecting with Cicada, differentiating him quite a bit from his comic counterpart. While fans already knew that Cicada wouldn’t be the abusive metahuman preacher that he is in the comics, the notion that the show is sidestepping the David Hersch name altogether adds a whole other layer of mystery.
“We don’t know who he is.” Gustin said of Cicada in an interview last month. “He’s mysterious. He’s just kind of an intimidating, big scary man that can render pretty much all of these metahuman superheroes useless, more or less, in battle. He comes on really hard and fast the first time we meet him, so right away there’s an intimidation factor that’s through the roof, similar to Zoom.”
“It is nice to have a villain that we can change up what Barry’s obstacle and the team’s obstacles are, and how to take somebody down.” showrunner Todd Helbing told ComicBook.com after the Season 4 finale. “The Thinker, DeVoe, [was] a lot of fun and we certain see the benefits of doing that. Having a meta that isn’t a speedster and the new ways that we can pose challenges for those guys is fun. So I think for next season, it’s certainly not going to be a speedster.”
What do you think of the changes The Flash made to Cicada? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
