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The Flash: 3 Burning Questions About Reverse-Flash And Time Travel

By Nick Tylwalk

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WARNING: This article contains major spoilers and discussion about Season 1, episode 16 of The Flash, “Out of Time.” If you haven’t watched it already, you really should, because it’s excellent. Failing that, we’ve got a full recap that can also get you up to speed.

One of the most compelling aspects of the way Season 1 of The Flash has unfolded is the disconnect between what we know as viewers and what the characters know. The biggest example is that Harrison Wells was revealed as the Reverse-Flash a while ago, but most of the series regulars have only varying levels of suspicion that the doctor isn’t what he seems.

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That all got blown to smithereens this week, as Wells showed his true colors (mostly yellow with a dash of red) to Cisco Ramon, killing him in the process. He also set Caitlin Snow on high alert, while Barry Allen told Iris West he was the Flash right after they finally gave in to their feelings for each other.

A few moments later, all of those worms got shoved right back into the proverbial can once Barry accidentally broke the time barrier and ended up a day or two in the past — where ironically, he had already bumped into himself earlier in the episode.

Confused yet? We are too, though it’s mixed with a feeling of excitement. Here are three questions on our minds after “Out of Time” left us at the edges of our seats.

  • How far in the future is Reverse-Flash from?

Right before he killed Cisco with a vibrating hand to the chest, Wells … uh, I mean Eobard Thawne, expressed some remorse for doing so, as he’d grown to consider Cisco almost like a son. Then he noted that from his perspective, Ramon had been “dead for centuries.”

This could mean that The Flash is following the trail blazed by the comics, where Thawne is from the 25th century. It would certainly explain his secret room and talking computer, which appear to be well beyond even the technology possessed by S.T.A.R. Labs.

Don’t look for this question to be answered before the season finale, as it looks like Barry’s inadvertent trip to the past may muck things up a bit and keep us from getting to the scene we saw with Thawne and Ramon — though that’s a good thing if it gets us Cisco back!

  • Why is Reverse-Flash stranded in the present?

Thawne’s speed level and mastery of his powers have been a bit inconsistent over the course of the season. He’s obviously more experienced overall than Barry, handling him fairly easily the first time they fought and demonstrating uses of speed we haven’t seen yet from the Flash, like his “speed mirages.”

At other times, Thawne’s speed has failed him, and he’s been seeking technological means to stay fast. If we was able to run fast enough to break the time barrier and get to the present (or the past, from his perspective), why can’t he simply run back there now? And if he’s already faster than Barry, why is he so certain he needs help to get back to his own time?

The answer could be related to the Speed Force, the extradimensional energy force that powers nearly all the speedsters in the pages of DC Comics. If Thawne was the only one running around at super-speed in his time, he’d have the whole pool of energy to himself. With Barry also zipping around in the present, it’s possible that the Speed Force prefers him to Thawne, or sharing it keeps them both slower, relatively speaking.

Of course since Thawne was responsible for Barry’s transformation into the Flash in the first place, it’s kind of his own fault if that’s the case. The key here is that Reverse-Flash has been stranded in the past for 15 years, so he’s been aware of his limitations and is convinced he can’t make it back on his own. That’s certainly worth keeping in mind.

  • What events that we’ve already seen happen can Barry change?

Given what we’ve seen from the promo for episode 17, we’re going to be getting a crash course in how the rules of time travel work on The Flash very soon. Barry’s ultimate goal is to prevent the murder of his mother, but since he was already there on that night as the Flash, he could have already tried and failed in that attempt.

In the shorter term, we can assume Cisco’s murder and Wells’ need to leap into action are going to be reset. The thing is, a lot of those dominoes were falling without Barry’s knowledge, and he hopped into the past without even knowing that Cisco was dead. He won’t be trying to stop something he didn’t even know about from happening, so it’s more likely his tinkering with previous events will just make things unfold differently in general, thanks to the so-called “butterfly effect.”

What’s fun about time travel is that we could also be wrong about all of this. The Flash should have already been on the must-watch list of any comics and super hero fan, but questions like these mean that you don’t dare miss an episode for the rest of the season.

Next: More Flash: will Caitlin and Cisco ever get super powers?

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