Spoilers ahead for tonight’s episode of The Flash.
At the end of the first season of The Flash, there was a bit of a question as to who the “real” hero was.
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Barry Allen may have punched out Eobard Thawne, but it was Eddie Thawne who won the day by committing a shocking suicide and breaking time, causing Eobard to never have existed in the first place.
Now that, after months of working to prevent Savitar from murdering Iris West, Barry has learned that a version of himself from the future appears to actually be Savitar, that makes him a pretty selfish hero when compared to Eddie if he’s not willing to throw himself into the Speed Force to stop Savitar, right?
That is — if Future Barry is actually Future Barry.
What if, instead, we were to discover that Savitar is actually Flashpoint Barry?
It would track with what Danielle Panabaker told ComicBook.com earlier this week about her take on Killer Frost:
“It’s definitely something that I had a lot of questions about at the beginning of the season,” Panabaker explained. “The way it was explained to me is that Killer Frost is this evil person who lives inside of Caitlin. She was created out of Flashpoint and she just wants to get out, sort of similar to Magenta, who we had earlier this season. So she’s been inside of her and she’s just jouncing to get out and cause some trouble.”
Besides Magenta, a similar quirk happened with the Alchemy character, who appeared as part of Julian’s personality following the events of the Flashpoint episode.
If it’s as simple as a future Barry being Savitar, he should be able to kill himself and save everyone Savitar hurts; he should be able to replace Jay Garrick in the Speed Force Limbo and prevent Savitar from ever existing; he should be able to simply commit himself to being a different, better person and NOT fall into the trap of becoming Savitar to begin with.
The fact that such quick and easy solutions are clearly not what they’re going ot spend the last few episodes of the season doing, suggests there’s more to the story than just “this is future Barry.”
The voice-over, when it was suggested that Savitar would be a version of Barry that exists without hope or love, could actually support the theory: “our” Barry traveled back in time and supplanted a happy, peaceful version of Barry who grew up with his parents and had a lifetime of happy memories. When those memories started to flood into Barry and he worried he might lose himself, he opted to travel back in time and allow Eobard Thawne to muder Nora Allen.
…So our Barry heads home, somber and sad but feeling vindicated. And while the Flashpoint reality crumbles, we know that the Flashpoint versions of many characters were “saved” somehow and incorporated into their Earth-1 doppelgangers to create the villains who battled Team Flash in the first half of the year.
We also know that for a long time, Savitar needed a “host” or something to keep him tethered to Earth-1 and prevent him from being pulled back into the Speed Force. Could it be that he was, in essence, a being of pure Speed Force at one point, his physical body gone?
If so, that would provide the writers with a few “outs,” not least of all is that he can’t pull an Eddie Thawne-style heroic self-sacrifice without leaving the city defenseless against Savitar, who wouldn’t die anyway because he’s not actually from our future.
The Flash airs on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
More The Flash news:
- Why Harrison Wells Could Be Savitar on The Flash
- Teddy Sears Interested In Returning to The Flash
- David Dastmalchian Explains How Abra Kadabra Could Return
- The Flash Gets an Easter Egg Right in the Title As Time Runs Out to Save Iris
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Image Courtesy of HBO
