You must be unfamiliar with the Scarlet Speedster’s on-screen past if you believe that the newest Flash movie is taking a long time to arrive on theatre screens. Technically, a film about Central City’s greatest hero has been in the works since the 1980s; to be completely honest, we do not blame the filmmakers.
Comparable to describing the Fermi Paradox to an eighth student, the Speed Force’s entire notion is difficult to translate to the screen. The majority of The Flash’s core has been successfully captured by the CW TV show, and the DCEU is doing its best to follow it by adapting a narrative that radically altered DC history.
His self-centeredness spawned a whole alternate history in which Superman was “missing,” Batman was not Bruce Wayne, Wonder Woman & Aquaman triumphed, and he himself has no special abilities. After stopping his lifelong fan turned rival Eobard Thawne, Barry eventually regained his powers and “fixed” the timeline, but what if he hadn’t?
What if Barry Allen was simply incapable of putting the planet back together again? Without the Scarlet Speedstar, what horrors would surface, and how would they approach reality itself? In this video, we will provide answers to such queries. This is Flashpoint: Explored from Tales from the Dark Multiverse.
Here’s a couple of things you should know before we explain the issue
Okay, so let us try to explain what the Speed Force is to you before we discuss the event. Although the meaning of its name might be obvious, it is not that straightforward. One of the seven cosmic forces that give all superhumans in the DC Multiverse their abilities is the Speed Force. It is not just something that accelerates you; it is the entire definition of motion and velocity. In essence, time and space keep progressing and expanding thanks to the Speed Force.
This is why you tend to think, “Oh man, I want to be as fast as The Flash,” anytime you see Barry Allen perform a spectacular knockdown sequence involving 10 people on a splash page. You actually want to be able to manipulate time like The Flash, my friend. We also need to discuss Eobard Thawne’s special relationship with this energy since he has the ability to manipulate time like The Flash.
We all know that Thawne is essentially Barry Allen’s Eminem’s Stan. He is a scientist, professor, or museum curator from the year 25th, depending on your continuity, who is such a huge fan of the Flash that he actively intends to kill him and succeed him. Thawne subsequently evolved into the Reverse-Flash, the Scarlet Speedster’s most recognisable adversary, who tormented his hero by going back in time and basically messing with his entire life.
Professor Zoom is responsible for some of the worst tragedies to have ever taken place in Barry Allen’s life; most-notably, the fact that it was he who killed Barry’s mom that fateful night. Now, here’s the thing we don’t want to start a turf war here, but recall what MCU Tony Stark says in Avenger’s Endgame when past-Thanos invades his timeline: “You mess with time, it tends to mess back.”
This isn’t true for the Reverse-Flash. Because Thawne wields the Negative Speed Force, he also possesses the ability to freely move through time with no personal consequences. Think of the Negative Speed Force more like a virus than an opposite; one that is capable of infecting the Speed Force itself, while allowing its wielder relative mastery over the concept of time itself.
This is why Barry needs the cosmic treadmill; because he uses that machine to go against the very function of his powers. As long as Barry keeps moving forward, he doesn’t upset the “natural order” or things. The Speed Force is supposed to be moving in one direction, after all; so when it faces pushback, it tends to…mess things up. Now that we’ve explained that, let’s look at what happened during the original Flashpoint event.
Reality Unmade, Realities Re-Made: What went down during the original “Flashpoint”?
Imagine a world where Bruce Wayne isn’t Batman. In fact, he isn’t even alive; that night in Crime Alley, it was Bruce who died, and Thomas & Martha who acted as witnesses. Imagine a world where Superman doesn’t crash-land near a Kansas farm owned by a kind, loving, morally-upright couple; but the city of Metropolis, which is the hub of scientific experimentation in the United States.
Imagine a world where Wonder Woman & Aquaman aren’t Gods trying to adapt to humans; they are trying to conquer them, carving up planet Earth amongst themselves as it crumbled to ashes. And imagine a world where their comrades- Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter & The Flash- never existed. Well, you don’t have to wrack your brain too much because this is the reality that Barry Allen wakes up to in Flashpoint issue #1.
Barry Allen had led a life designed around the concept of re-building. He started doing that ever since his mother died. He found love, lost it, then found it again. He found a family of speedsters with whom he could run his cares away. And he even found friends in the Justice League.
But none of that could ever take away the pain that was caused by the death of his mother; and then one day, he decided it was too much, and something needed to change. Driven by an insane urge to revive his mother, Barry Allen went back in time to prevent it from happening in the first place. And in doing so, ended up creating the world we just spent a minute asking you to imagine.
In the Flashpoint universe, Thomas Wayne ended up becoming the Batman; a lethal vigilante with no qualms about leaving dead bodies in his wake. Martha Wayne went insane after hearing about her son’s death, gave herself a Glasgow smile, and became the Joker. Kal-El was kept in confinement ever since he landed on Earth and became so weak, he looked more like Elongated Man if anything.
Diana & Arthur fell in love, then fell out of love, and decided the whole world needed to pay the price. And Barry Allen got the one thing he always wanted; he got his mom back. Still, his memories didn’t line up with the fact that his mom was alive again, so he tracked down Batman in order to figure out how to fix all this. Barry theorized that the Reverse-Flash was behind whatever was happening because he glimpsed him once and knew Thawne’s time-travelling abilities.
So he convinced Thomas Wayne to help him re-create the experiment that made him The Flash, so he could set this world right before returning to his own. The first attempt failed, and Barry was burnt badly. But after he convinced Thomas that he was his only hope at saving Bruce, Dr. Wayne agreed to recreate the experiment a second time. This time, it was successful, and Barry Allen once again became The Flash.
Alongside Batman, Cyborg (who was this timeline’s greatest hero) & Captain Thunder, he went to fight on the front lines of the Amazon-Atlantean War in New Themyscira when Thawne unveiled himself to Barry and told him the truth. He wasn’t in an alternate timeline; this was the original DC timeline which had been changed by Barry himself who used the cosmic treadmill to go back in time and prevent his mother from being killed. When Barry encountered Thawne, he pulled the entire Speed Force into himself, which fractured the timeline so hard that Reverse-Flash became a temporal anomaly; while Barry Allen got to have the life he had always wanted.
In the end, The Flash did what heroes do; save the day and set things right. After bringing the Amazon-Atlantean War to an end, he ran back in time to stop himself from saving Nora to put everything back in place. All of this was only possible because Barry’s hope that re-creating his accident would give him his powers back turned out to be true. But in the Dark Multiverse, hope is a futile thing, as Barry is about to find out to his utter dismay.
The Catastrophic Consequences of an Experiment gone wrong: The Night Barry Allen Died
The Multiversal entity Tempus Fuginaut turns his gaze to an Earth in the Dark Multiverse that is still stuck in the Flashpoint reality. We see a familiar scene laid out in front of us; Barry Allen, doused in chemicals, strapped in an electric chair on a rainy night. Thomas Wayne asks him if he’s sure he wants to do this, and Barry assures him that this is how he became The Flash the first time around. With his mind fixated on giving his son his life back, Dr. Wayne pushes the lever and says that all-too familiar phrase, “They say lightning never strikes twice.”
In the positive matter universe, it did; after Barry suffered 3rd degree burns to 75% of his body, it was restored when he and Thomas gave the whole struck-by-lightning deal a second shot. But this is the Dark Multiverse; here, even a single shot is 50-50 on the best of days.
And by that logic, this was probably the worst day of Barry Allen’s life. Instead of giving Barry a near-death experience, the bolt outright killed him; and with him, all hope for restoring the Flashpoint reality “back to normal”. This brought the Reverse-Flash, who had been lurking in the shadows all this while, to the forefront. He took a minute to ponder the fact that Barry’s death might erase him from existence because, as he’s said often before, if Barry Allen doesn’t become The Flash, Eobard Thawne doesn’t become Professor Zoom.
But, with Barry dead, Thawne notes that he has truly become a paradoxical existence; a man displaced from his own timeline, and now lacking the very purpose that created him. He continues to lament that Barry, in his own haste to see his mommy again, didn’t fully appreciate the lengths that Thawne had gone to in order to make him miserable. He tells his former hero/adversary’s corpse that he should feel a sense of loss at his passing; after all, The Flash has defined Eobard’s life to the point it broke his sanity into pieces so fine no amount of gorilla glue will be able to keep it all together.
He says that now that Barry had shown him his disgusting mortality, all Thawne could feel was a disappointment. He even denounces the Flash as an adversary, saying calling his single-minded pursuit of Barry Allen a waste of time; which is correct, but not in the sense Thawne means it over here. He takes Allen’s Flash Ring off his fingers and claims it as a war trophy, saying, “I’ll wear this now. A badge of honour. A reminder. So I don’t let what happened to you, happen to me.”
A Ray of Hope for the Broken Bat, a Flash of Death for the rest of the world
No sooner had he put on the Flash Ring than he was attacked by Thomas Wayne from behind. Eobard sighed the same sorry sigh he always let slip when someone tries to attack him; because all of them- especially Batman- should know that a direct assault is never going to work on him. He quickly deposits the Batarangs that were flung at him in Batman’s shoulders, and proceeds to list all the ways in which he could kill him. He taunts Bruce by telling him he has no chance standing up to a man who can accelerate or decelerate his aging process, atomize him with a touch, write him out of existence, or just ram his hand through Bruce like a harpoon through a whale.
But given that his adversary was clearly at the brink of death, one of Thawne’s other time-based powers reveals a deliciously twisted truth to him; the man he was fighting wasn’t Bruce Wayne. Eobard takes his time going through Thomas’ memories, reviewing his meeting with Barry Allen, chuckling when his own suit fell out of the Flash Ring, and realising that, despite the death of the very man who had promised to bring him his son back, Thomas Wayne still had hope.
And to Thawne’s crazy mind, this wasn’t something to be sniggered at; it was something to be cherished. He realised that with Barry Allen erased from existence, he was now the only person in the universe with a connection to any extremity of the Speed Force- Positive or Negative- and his crazy mind was salivating at the prospect of the world it could create. He thanks Barry for the gift he has given him, and tells Thomas he’ll see him soon.
As Thawne speeds through the streets of this desolate reality, he can feel the past, present & future of many of its denizens. Given that the reality itself is on the brink of annihilation, it does make sense that Reverse-Flash will be able to sense these things.
He comments on the fact that the world he’s in represents both hope and despair. Barry Allen hoped to change his lonesome fate by going back in time and saving his mother from a fate that was destined to take place. It ruined the lives of millions on Earth, and trillions across the cosmos. Thawne was ecstatic at the prospect of moulding such a fractured existence in his own image; and he knew just where to begin.
America’s Darkest Hour: Eobard Thawne becomes America’s “new hope” – The Flash!
The scenery shifts to the White House, where we see Victor Stone holding a confidential meeting with the President of the United States. Being the only government-endorsed superhero in America, he took it upon himself to look for other “enhanced individuals” like him to help safeguard the Bastion of Liberty from the acts of not one, but two divine tyrants. But most of the obscure names he’d assembled for his enhanced strike unit abandoned him the moment they realised their reality’s greatest hero was not going to fight by their side; Batman had refused to work with Cyborg, so Victor was forced to negotiate with the ones still willing to fight.
Through conviction, persuasion and some rather liberal wallet-greasing, he was able to put together a team that included Citizen Cold, Pied Piper & the Green Lantern Abin Sur. Both parties were in the midst of negotiating strategies for dealing with the Amazonian-Atlantean threat when Thawne sauntered into the Oval Office and killed every super-powered individual within it; he kills the Enchantress by causing her to rapidly age to the point her body rots in an instant before revealing to the President that he held his own office thanks to Thawne’s time-travelling shenanigans.
Eobard reveals that over the years, he whispered into the right ears and got the necessary elections rigged to get this particular man into power. Cyborg is able to pull one final rallying cry out of his butt when he commands all units to converge on the POTUS’ location and blasts Eobard with ultra-amplified sonic waves that momentarily stun him. But that’s akin to a mildly annoying fleabite for the Speedster, who can travel 14,000 times faster than the speed of sound.
Thawne fries Victor’s EMP receivers before atomizing him and getting back to the point he was making to the President. The Reverse-Flash said, “Diana has Britain, Greece, all those places. Arthur has the seven seas and more. I want America.” He assures his stooge that he can still be in the administrative position of power; Thawne didn’t want America to go to work for it; he just wanted to own it.
And so, the very next day, the President of the United States announced that America had a new superhero who was going to single-handedly end both the Atlantean & Amazonian threat to her shores. He introduces every watching American to “The Flash”, who promises to end the threats his great country was facing once and for all, saying, “Trust me when I say this; they’ll never see me coming.”
The Fragility & Reality of Hope: Eobard Thawne “becomes” Barry Allen
We see the new “symbol of hope” for America with his feet up on the Resolute Desk, pondering the nature of said hope. His aid, the President of America, reminds him that he has to take care of the Amazonian & Atlantean threat, but he brushes it off with talk of elections while his mind focuses on his real problem; Barry Allen. Eobard Thawne had spent his entire life obsessed with the man; to the point he changed his own face to look like his. But now that Barry was gone, he found he couldn’t detach himself from his “personal hero’s” legacy.
Thawne remarked that this world they lived in was created by one man’s hope, saying there is an audacity to that, something to admire. He asks his stooge whether hope any matters if those with the power & will to enforce it do something about it; the President, of course, just wants to make it out of there alive. So Thawne reminds him that he’d simply bring him back to life, informing him that his death would take place at Thawne’s whim and that he should find some hope in that.
The scene switches to show Thomas Wayne brooding in his Batcave, with the “Flash” announcement playing on a screen behind him and Barry Allen’s crisp carcass lying in front of him. He muses over the fact that Barry called Thawne even more powerful than he was; if that is true, and if he did indeed possess all of Barry’s abilities and then some, then what did that mean for his life?
And more importantly; what did it mean for his son? Batman had just received a classified message from Victor Stone when “The Flash” rushed into his Batcave. He praised Stone’s resilience, commending him for having the wherewithal to back up his consciousness to the Ethernet. Batman quips that he should be busy running the President behind-the-scenes, but Professor Zoom simply says that he can be in many places at once.
The pair have a conversation about the heinous acts that Eobard committed towards Barry Allen; Thawne confirmed that he did kill Nora Allen, but what truly gives him indescribable pleasure is the fact that Barry had the gall to hope against hope that he could fix the unfixable. Thawne explained to Thomas that the Negative Speed Force allowed him to weave through time like a skilled craftsman; Barry Allen, on the other hand, preferred to tear right through the fabric to get to his end goal. His brashness created the perfect playing field for him, and Thawne was going to become its crazy king.
Thomas Wayne clarified that he did not much care for Eobard Thawne; as far as he was concerned, Thawne was dangerous, and he would do everything in his power to stop the man…except he was also the only one who could bring Bruce back. The father in Thomas Wayne asks him if he could help him bring Bruce back; and would he, if it were possible.
Thawne replies that he could fix everything wrong with Thomas’ life in an instant if he wanted to; but he doesn’t, so he won’t, jetting out of the Batcave and leaving a trail of red lightning in his wake. Eobard knew that this would only light a fire in Thomas’ mind; he knew that Batman would stop at nothing to bring him down and beat him within an inch of his life, if it were only to see his dead son again. And so, a maniacal Reverse-Flash proclaims to his dead rival that he is becoming just like him, as he makes his way to Paris.
“The Flash” declares war and Batman looks for a cure
We arrive at the Eiffel Tower to bear witness to a massacre; the Atlanteans had already sunk the once-great city during their war with the Amazonians. The 1000 proud soldiers lying dead on the battlefield lost their lives to the Flash, who had their king at his mercy. Eobard confessed to Arthur that attacking him was not a personal decision; it was pure politics. He reminded him that he could have just as easily wiped them out of existence, or killed his entire empire in the blink of an eye.
Instead, he just took out a token force and impaled their King with his own trident. In Thawne’s mind, this was mercy. And besides, he thought the Queen would be more reasonable anyway, as the panel zooms out to show us Aquaman hanging lifeless from the Trident of Poseidon with the bodies of his followers strewn about like trash at a junkyard. In the meantime, we catch up with Thomas Wayne, who is in an underground facility with a robot that inhabits the consciousness of Victor Stone.
Thomas cracks a rare joke, asking Cyborg if he should call him “Robbie” since he was a robot now, but Victor quickly shuts him down and reminds him of their mission. The classified document he had sent to Thomas was regarding a classified government project codenamed “Superman”. Dr. Wayne initially expressed his hesitation about using this alien in their fight against their divine conquerors, but Stone managed to convince him that this was their best shot at standing a chance against any of the super-powered individuals who have appeared on their planet in the past few years; including Eobard Thawne.
So Batman & Cyborg orchestrate a jail-break for Kal-El and take him to Wayne Manor, where he spends 5 days absorbing 144 million watts of solar energy; and counting. Victor Stone is in awe of the god-like potential that this being was capable of harnessing, and given the fact that despite being isolated he had a strict no-killing rule, he might just become the superhero the world needs.
But all Thomas can think about is that gun he swiped from that defence facility as part of his contingency plans. Presently, The Flash dumps Aquaman’s lifeless body at Wonder Woman’s feet and warns her to back off of America because he owned it. He says that her and her old gods were finished, and that there was a new god in town now. She asks him what would happen if she didn’t.
He simply tells her, “I won’t be merciful.” He does a rather successful press run back home, taking pictures with the President in the front lawn of the White House and fixing the world with medieval diplomacy; but he isn’t a fool. He knew that sooner or later, the Atlanteans would attack America in retaliation to losing their King. Ocean Master would also want revenge, so he was prepared for anything that could potentially happen.
But as he greeted the entire Atlantean fleet at the North-Eastern Coast of the United States, he sensed something…off. None of the Atlantean ships were firing at him; in fact, it was just the opposite. They were standing still as if awaiting orders. But as he was trying to figure out just what was going on, a familiar sonic boom pierced the skies as Thawne was shocked out of his boots by a rejuvenated Son of Kyrpton.
Alliances, Betrayals, and Endless Change: The Fate of the “Dark” Flashpoint
Superman engages The Flash in battle, who quickly realises he’s no match for the Kryptonian in a physical battle. Thawne gets taken by surprise when Kal-El rams him at full-speed. He’s annoyed when the Kryptonian manages to break out of his “trap” by simply blowing the rocks apart. And he gets pissed when Superman’s heat vision manages to graze him, what with it being faster than the speed of light and all. He tries to blitz Kal-El instead, hoping to disorient him enough and break him that way, but turns out, he’s the one who was getting played all this while!
Superman lures him to a spot where Batman & Cyborg are waiting with ultra-sonic wave emitters whose frequency was strong enough to render anyone who steps within it immobile. Everything seemed to be going according to the plan. Even though Superman was hurting alongside Thawne, they were both contained for the moment.
That wasn’t enough for Thomas Wayne. He betrayed Cyborg by enacting lethal force against Thawne and causing his ally’s systems to temporarily malfunction, so he could finally get what he had wanted all along; for Thawne to reset the timeline to its original state, bringing Bruce back to life and taking his life in exchange.
He was prepared to kill him and take him powers if that is what was needed. The last bullet from the machine gun was poised to strike its mark when Superman stopped it, re-stating his commitment to not killing people. And then everything happened at once. The Flash stopped moving; Superman’s kindness had interfaced with his semi-clairvoyant abilities, showing him the hope that Kal-El could inspire in the world if he were allowed to live and get out there.
That hope was taken away from the cosmos the next instant, when Thomas Wayne shot the alien dead with a Kryptonite bullet. Cyborg loses it and starts wildly accusing Thomas of being mad, and the latter simply starts raving about how all he cares about is his son and he will do anything to get him back. At that instant, the Atlantean fleet revealed that it was stationary because it was waiting for backup; invisible jets dotted the North-Eastern skyline.
The Amazonians and the Atlanteans had formed an alliance that would conquer the entire galaxy; starting with America. What’s more; they had forged an alliance with the New Gods of Apolokolips and gained access to Darkseid’s fearsome army. Witnessing all this chaos, destruction and madness, Eobard Thawne picks up the bullet meant to kill him and acts upon the last words he registers Thomas Wayne saying; run.
See, he realised that since he was now free to shape reality any way he wanted it to be, he set about doing just that. But not before giving Thomas Wayne a little present; the bullet he took? He travelled to that fateful night in Crime Alley and lodged it in Joe Chill’s cranium, thus keeping the Waynes together and depriving the world of a Batman. And then, he went on to re-imagine the entire universe into his own, twisted concept of “perfection”.
And because perfection only lasted for fractions of a second for speedsters, his universe was never static; it was stuck in a cycle of constant, and eternal re-births, thanks to the deranged god who now ruled over all of its established reality. Or rather, controlled it.
Marvelous Verdict
This issue of Tales from the Dark Multiverse isn’t for your average comic book reader; let us explain what we mean by that. Writer Bryan Hitch is a legendary creative, but sometimes, his creativity tends to involve a lot of exposition and layering. That is not possible to achieve within a single issue; Hitch does his best to make it so, and it ends up with more philosophical speech bubbles than action-packed splash pages.
But trust us when we say; this is definitely the craziest Dark Multiverse story you will ever read; and yes, we are aware that it is already a re-imagining of Flashpoint! There is something to disturbingly unnatural about the world Hitch has created, that by the time you finish the issue, you will agree with Thomas Wayne’s outburst on Cyborg when he asked him to fight and save the world he was living in; after Batman shoots Superman dead, Victor Stone chastises him for killing their only hope for saving this world.
Thomas Wayne looks at him like a man possessed and screams, “Not this one. I don’t want this one. I want the one that has my son in it.” And looking at the entire story, we whole-heartedly agree with Dr. Wayne. Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Flashpoint might be a little confusing at times because it covers one of the messier Crisis events in DC history but that’s what makes it so great as well. Because if you’re stuck in a universe that’s always changing, and no one is allowed to come in or go out, then are you really living? And is the answer to that question something you’re comfortable with?