The Flash Fans Are Still Debating the Series’ Best Storyline (And Their Choice Might Surprise You)

With nine seasons and 184 episodes, The Flash is the longest-running series in the Arrowverse franchise, and every moment of it is packed full of content. The series told a lot of stories between 2014 and 2023, but the general consensus among fans online is that the beginning is still the strongest part. This epic saga began with Barry Allen uncovering a time-traveling conspiracy theory to shape his life, and early episodes chronicled his fight against it. It’s relatively self-contained compared to all the crossovers, callbacks, and webs of interconnected melodrama that would follow in future seasons, yet commenters online still call it the series’ finest moment. Read on for a look back at the Eobard Thawne arc, but fair warning: there are spoilers ahead.

The Flash was the second series in the Arrowverse, spinning off from Arrow itself with a backdoor pilot in 2013. With a lot of support and excitement behind the series, it started strong with a short but fun take on The Flash‘s origin story and the setup of a long network serial. It introduced the supporting cast, including Iris West, Caitlin Snow, Cisco Ramon, and Dr. Harrison Wells. Wells was the mastermind behind S.T.A.R. Labs, where the technology that accidentally gave Barry super speed was developed, and the lab became one of the primary settings for the show.

Wells, of course, represents the first big subversion of expectations for the show. The friendly mentor and enthusiastic scientist was just a facade hiding the season’s main villain, Eobard Thawne — a.k.a. Reverse-Flash. Fortunately, the accident that gave Barry superspeed created several other super-powered threats for him to face, giving him practice with his powers before he really had to face Thawne. In the meantime, all that time together built the betrayal up to massive proportions.

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In the end, the depth of Thawne’s contrivance and betrayal was unveiled shockingly and perfectly as the season came to an end. Thawne’s true story made all the sci-fi madness the characters had experienced up to that point seem like nothing. He had actually traveled back in time from a point nearly two centuries in the future, where The Flash was a legendary hero. Hoping to replicate The Flash’s powers, Thawne experimented on himself but accidentally tapped into a “negative Speed Force,” similar to Barry’s power but not identical.

With superspeed came the ability to travel through time, and Thawne realized that he was destined to become The Flash’s greatest enemy. He grew bitter over this and his failure to change his path, resulting in him coming to hate The Flash in earnest. He clashed with The Flash for years and eventually learned the speedster’s secret identity. Thawne traveled back in time hoping to kill Barry as a child, but ended up killing Barry’s mother and framing his father for the murder instead. In the process, Thawne lost the ability to travel through time and became stranded in Barry’s lifetime.

Thawne then murdered the real Dr. Harrison Wells and assumed his identity, carrying out much of the groundbreaking work he knew Wells had done. After coming back in time to prevent The Flash from existing, he ended up needing to create The Flash in the hopes of using Barry’s power to return to his own time. He is nearly successful, but Thawne’s ancestor, police detective Eddie, sacrifices himself to erase Eobard from the timeline.

Other Contenders

On fan forums and social media, this seems to be the most popular story arc cited in retrospective discussions of the series. In trying to unpack why, fans often praise the pacing of Season 1. They note that this story was allowed to build up and blossom over the course of nearly 23 episodes, with few interruptions. This season only dedicated one episode to its crossover event with Arrow, and it fell in perfectly with the rest of the story. By contrast, later seasons tried to juggle multiple stories, and they needed to pivot at some point to accommodate a larger Arrowverse crossover event which may not have been particularly relevant to the season at large.

That’s not to say that there are no other contenders for favorite Flash storyline. Many fans loved this version of the legendary “Flashpoint” tale, as well as Barry’s battle with another speedster named Zoom. However, fans qualified these as picks with missed potential, unlike Thawne. Many said the same of Killer Frost, wishing she had a longer arc devoted to her as the main villain.

The Arrowverse may be named after Arrow, but The Flash did a lot of the real work building the franchise up and opening new possibilities for it. You can stream the series on Netflix at the time of this writing, along with several other Arrowverse titles.