The Flash: Three Big Questions After The Zoom Reveal

Note: This article contains a major spoiler for the end of this week’s episode of The Flash, “King Shark.” Please go watch it first or read our recap if you need to catch up.

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The biggest question hanging over The Flash Season 2 since the beginning has been answered. The black mask has come off, and the Zoom reveal at the end of “King Shark” dropped jaws all over fandom. Literally in some cases, and figuratively for sure.

So that’s that, right? Zoom is … one last spoiler warning seems appropriate here …

Jay Garrick. Yep, on the surface, it appears that the members of Team Flash has fallen victim to a variation on the trick played on them in Season 1, when their greatest enemy was hiding in plain sight. Barry Allen and his friends trusted Jay — and in the case of Caitlin Snow, even fell in love with him — as the one person from Earth-2 with the knowledge to help stop Zoom while being skeptical of that world’s Harrison Wells.

Yet it’s more than simple role reversal or mistaken identity this time. As we saw at the end of “King Shark,” the Jay our heroes knew wasn’t the exact same person behind the black cowl, nor was he a Speed Force illusion of some sort. They shared the same face, but clearly one of them was not who we thought he was. Maybe both of them. Plus there’s that mystery prisoner still being held in Zoom’s lair.

Related Story: The Flash: Who is the Man in the Iron Mask?

In other words, this subplot is far from over. Just like any good midseason mystery, the Zoom reveal just led to more juicy questions, and here are our three biggest going forward.

Which Jay Garrick is Which?

I think I speak for longtime DC Comics fans everywhere when I say that I don’t want to believe that the Jay Garrick, the heart and soul of the Justice Society, is Zoom. The Earth-2 on TV is much different than any world to carry that designation in print, but the writers and producers of The Flash are so well-versed in comic lore that they surely know how wrong it is for an Earth-2 Jay to be the ultimate evil, even for the shock value it would generate.

There’s got to be another boot left to drop. One possibility is that Zoom really his world’s Hunter Zolomon, which would help explain the scene with Caitlin in the park, and that he simply co-opted the name of Jay Garrick to throw the Flash and company off his scent. This would make sense if the “real” Jay is under that mask, and while it doesn’t explain the dead Jay, we have another fun theory that might.

Could There be More Than Two Earths in the Mix?

Since we’ve seen three men with Teddy Sears’ face at this point and there could still be another one being held captive, it’s time to consider the idea that Zoom could be the Jay Garrick and/or Hunter Zolomon from yet another Earth. The 52 (now closed) breaches all connected Earth-1 to Earth-2, but The Flash set up the idea of a multiverse right at the beginning of Season 2, and that’s way too tantalizing to remain unexplored.

So let’s run with it. Zoom obviously knows a lot about traveling between worlds, and that could be due to the fact that he’s native to yet another Earth. Following this train of thought, Jay Garrick might really have been from Earth-2 with Hunter Zolomon as his Earth-1 doppelganger, while Zoom would be the same man from a third parallel world.

And while some versions of heroes have already shown up as twisted, evil duplicates on Earth-2 (Ronnie, Caitlin and Cisco, for starters), which might blunt the concept somewhat, there’s precedent for evil versions of heroic figures from DC Comics to another Earth home. The speedster of Earth-3 has always been a bad guy and a member of the Crime Syndicate, making for a ready-made evil Jay if the writers go that route.

Will We See the Cosmic Treadmill?

One of the best comic references this season has been the explicit mention of the fact that Earth-1 and Earth-2 are vibrating at different frequencies. Now that all of the portals between worlds have been closed, there needs to be another way for Barry to make good on his vow and help the masked man and the citizens of Earth-2.

This might be it:

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the Flash using the Cosmic Treadmill to travel between worlds. In the Silver Age, Barry Allen originally invented it to travel through time, but after meeting Jay Garrick, he also discovered it would help him focus and maintain the speed and internal vibrations he’d need to journey between alternate Earths as well.

There’s already a treadmill in S.T.A.R. Labs that Barry has been using throughout The Flash. With the minds they have assembled on Team Flash now, bolstered by the arrival of Harry’s daughter Jesse, it’s easy to see them tinkering with it to enable the Flash to vibrate his way back to Earth-2. Plus, doesn’t “Cosmic Treadmill” just sound like something Cisco Ramon would dub it?

No worries, either, as there is precedent for modifying it to take others with the speedsters too:

Just like we said, the Zoom reveal was only the middle of this particular story, and there’s still time for it to take a few more twists and turns before the end of Season 2. Got a favorite theory of your own? Hit us with a comment below or shout it to us and the world on Twitter.