Why Harrison Wells Could Be Savitar on The Flash

It’s just a few hours until the East Coast finds out who lives inside Savitar’s armor on The Flash, and there are basically two front-runner candidates everyone is backing.

In first position is Ronnie Raymond, the former Firestorm, who was seemingly killed when his body was tossed into a singularity at the start of season 2. Since Killer Frost is so easily swayed by his appeals, and since Ronnie was Caitlin’s husband and Killer Frost’s partner on Earth-2, it seemed likely Ronnie’s was the face she was seeing.

Coming in a close second is Barry Allen, whose miserable, unhelpful future self reminded fans that “Future Barry” has been suspicious ever since the concept — with blue lightning, no less — showed up in the comics a few years ago.

The notion of Barry coming from the future to become Savitar is somewhat fraught, though; when he headed to the future in “Once and Future Flash,” and then came back reinvigorated and focused, it seems likely some elements of that future were changed.Would that alter Savitar, or his plans? It seems like a dicey way for him to get what he wants.

We’re thinking that, like in season 1, it could actually be Harrison Wells again, though.

Excuse us — H.R. Wells.

Why? Well, read on…!

SKETCHY BEHAVIOR

Was it just us that caught a recent episode, when H.R. vanished for the period of time where the good guys were running and fighting andhaving trouble with Savitar, only to appear at the end of the week and basically pass off a joke as a non-answer when one of the other Team Flash members asked him where he had been?

That’s weird, right? Because that seems weird.

For that matter, seeking out a job where you get to be the scientific genius behind a dangerous and quasi-legal endeavor on an alternate Earth seems like an odd choice for somebody with no scientific background ot make. Yeah, he was using it to furhter his writing career, but as far as we know his writing career didn’t really need that much help, and the biggest thing that sending his work back to Earth-19 seemed to get him was arrested and almost put to death by Gypsy.

Doing something that could get you put to death for no real reason besides “It’s pretty neat” isn’t entirely normal behavior.

Similarly, that he tried to get himself mixed up with Jesse Quick even though he clearly doesn’t have a personality type that lends itself to being her surrogate dad, and that he spearheaded the idea that would lead to the Flash Museum, are things that seem to indicate that he’s got a knowledge and an interest in moving the Flash legacy forward. That is, again, something that could also be said about season 1’s evil Wells.

WALLACE

There have been a few “tells” in his dialogue that fans have picked up along the way this season.

The big one is that unless we’re forgetting somebody, H.R. and Savitar are the only people to consistently refer to Wally West as “Wallace.” Yeah, that’s his full name, but…well, it’s a weird thing. Nobody else does it.

The relationship with Wally is, in and of itself, an interesting one. It’s easy enough to take H.R. at face value and accept that he just wants to help…but when Harrison Wells/Eobard Thawne was working with Barry in the first season, it was always about making him faster and faster, so that the Reverse-Flash could harness his speed for his own ends.

When Hunter Zolomon/Zoom was working as the fake Jay Garrick with Barry, he wanted The Flash to go faster, ever faster, even encouraging the use of the Velocity formulas, with the hope seemingly being that Savitar would be able to steal that speed.

Now? Who’s the guy on the series who’s been working on making Wally faster than Barry?

TRACY BRAND

When Barry comes back from the future, all he has to give him a lead on beating Savitar is a set of plans put together by Tracy Brand, an engineer who built the “Speed Force trap” that holds Savitar when Barry eventually defeats him.

It’s interesting that Barry doesn’t send himself back armed with the knowledge of where all the other Flashes in the multiverse are, or what other superheroes might help. In spite of the fact that Older Barry reached out to the Legends, there’s no mention of using time travel to save Iris or avert a catastrophe. 

Superheroics, here, take a back seat to super-science, and even then, Barry doesn’t think that Brand will be able to design her trap in time.

…But you know who might be able to? The brilliant mind behind the particle accelerator.

By becoming the official Team Flash Wells, H.R. effectively removed the scientific brilliance of Harrison Wells from the equation, replacing it with somebody whose down-home folksy wisdom can be helpful…occasionally.

If science is the key to stopping Savitar, then it stands to reason that the guy who took the super-science genius off the Team Flash roster is, at a minimum, not doing them any favors.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE STORYTELLER

In “Once and Future Flash,” basically every member of Team Flash had a pretty crappy life in the future — except H.R.

It could be argued that, as a comic relief character, he’s designed to be the kind of opportunistic character who would bounce back…but it’s equally difficult to imagine that he doesn’t have some kind of protection helping him out when he writes thinly-veiled stories about how Mirror Master — the gangster who runs the city in which Wells lives — gets beaten down.

Wells’s life is pretty much just like the one he left on Earth-19: he’s successful, he’s writing his books…and, as Savitar said in an episode earlier this season, he does love a good myth — like the way H.R. mythologizes Barry’s adventures both by sending them back to Earth-19 and by writing about them after Barry’s real-world retirement in the “Once and Future” episode.

This is a minor thing, but it certainly strikes us as difficult to believe that if Savitar ruined the lives of everyone on Team Flash, he just happened to leave Wells alone…unless he had a reason to.

All of this seems kind of questionable, right? How could he even pull it off?

…Well, remember that in the comics, Jesse Quick’s father is also a speedster named Johnny Quick — and that on some Earths, Johnny Quick (whose costume isn’t entirely dissimilar to the speedster hero on the cover of Wells’s book) is a villain.