The Flash - Season 1

[Guy Gardener]

I doubt that Older Flash was the Flash from the original (unseen) timeline home to Thawne.

Thawne from Timeline A, was already fighting Barry from Timeline B before he started timeline B by murdering the lovely Nora.

Yup, doesn't follow the rules, which doesn't matter.

 

[Gryffindorian]

Nah, you're thinking of good time travel rules.

These are bad time time travel rules.

Central City and the world and the universe has not changed, Thawne's contributions as Harrison Wells will continue to exist even though he shouldn't have been there because he doesn't exist anymore. It's that he could have existed up to the point that Eddie shot himself that he didn't not exist until it was absolutely impossible, just like how Roddy McDowell didn't replace Al as Sam's observer on Quantum Leap until Al's death in 1942 was an absolute certianty.

This implies a plastic quality to time, it allows the odds to play out until there are no odds, just facts.

Think of it as when a bride changes her name. She's suddenly a different person as far far as paper work is concerned, but her previous contributions to the world under her maiden name are not scrubbed out.

The problem with the "from that point forward" logic is that it's faulty. If Professor Zoom had been killed in that exact moment in 2015 (killed by Barry, hit by an asteroid, eaten a toxic burrito, etc.), then he would've simply died and ceased to live without affecting the flow of time. But Eddie offed himself in an attempt to erase Eobard from existence, as if he had never been born in the first place. The ripple effect should impact all past, present, and future: 2325, 2000, and 2015.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that the opening arc is going to have to end with Barry fixing the events when he returned from the past. It will also end with allowing Wells to escape back through the anomaly setting up the premier of Legends. It is possible that the Legends team may be involved as well and/or Jay Garrick.

I just can't imagine the show going forward in any positive way with the level of destruction to Central City caused by the Flash Team. Barry would be devastated to the point where there is no way he could redeem himself or overcome his guilt.

The thing I don't get most about this alteration of the timeline and supposedly Barry needing to fix anything. Isn't this already the alternate timeline?

Thawne admitted to Barry that he travelled back in time in order to kill Barry's Mom in front of him and have it be so dark an event he never became the Flash. So in the original timeline Barry was the Flash and his Mom wasn't murdered in front of him as a child.

That leads me to think there's a different dynamic at play: predestination. If Zoom's initial motive was to prevent Barry from ever becoming the Flash, then he had failed miserably. All he accomplished was shake things up a bit that resulted in expediting Barry's transformation into a speedster.

 

[Morpheus 02]

A couple quick thoughts...


I think the Flahs that waved off our Barry comes from a future timeline, where he DID save his mom, but the results were distastrous. So he was expecting himself to come back, and was able to wave him off. (We may still see Flashpoint afterall..or if not, it will be told to us in some kind of exposition)

I also think that this future-Flash got to the Allen home a few seconds before Reverse Flash, and was able to talk to his dad however briefly. Just enough to plant the seeds that this tragedy would help Barry become a man who could help many others.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that Henry Allen is taking his imprisonment EXTREMELY well? i think he was given enough information to hang on to...and when he discovers Barry is the Flash -- it makes his imprisonment worth it. Henry doesn't know many details, but enough to not give up hope.


And though not visually exciting..wouldn't a vasectomy have done the job just as well, without ending Eddie's life?

 

[Guy Gardener]

The problem with the "from that point forward" logic is that it's faulty. If Professor Zoom had been killed in that exact moment in 2015 (killed by Barry, hit by an asteroid, eaten a toxic burrito, etc.), then he would've simply died and ceased to live without affecting the flow of time. But Eddie offed himself in an attempt to erase Eobard from existence, as if he had never been born in the first place. The ripple effect should impact all past, present, and future: 2325, 2000, and 2015.

Let me just restate

Nah, you're thinking of good time travel rules.

These are bad time travel rules.

There is a behind the scenes possibility. Rather than actually following the rules that they made in this show, Greg decided to scrub what we had learned over the last 22 episodes, and use new bad inconstant rules that morons and children could get behind, or more likely he had wanted to do this looper homage all along, but couldn't control all the scripts he didn't write between the pilot and finale so well, that his stringers cocked up the genius coup de grace he'd outlined 14 months earlier.

There are more children and morons watching this show than persons who can understand empirically the distinct rules for a given universe vs a different universe... And really this way the morons (and children) are happy, while the tiny minority that do not get a head ache whenever time travel is concerned (Fuck you Kathryn Janeway.) actually get off on knowing that they are smarter than the people making the Flash, even though that apparent victory is a false flag.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

In a hilarious alternate universe Eddie would have just shouted:
"Hey, Eobard! I'm gonna use a condom!"
Eobard stops using Barry as a punchingbag for a sec.
"Wait, what? What are you ta....aaaaasrgh"
Fizzles out of existance.

 

[DWF]

Looking back at the season, something that I'm impressed with is that the show wasn't afraid to resolve all of the sorts of plot threads that another show might have teased out for seasons and seasons, even the entire run of the series....Barry went public as a hero and got his official name, his entire main supporting cast (including Iris) knows who he is, Zoom was exposed, Barry went back in time to try to save his mom....

It did in a single season what Smallville took a decade to do.

Maybe half a decade, Smallville didn't something similar in their 100th ep. And really it's a given that Barry wasn't going to save his mother, that've erased the entire season.

 

[Guy Gardener]

What's wrong with that?

Worked great on Witchblade.

 

[Tom Hendricks]

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa09OhAak4I[/yt]

Someone slowed down the footage of the speed force scene, lets you get a good look at the images.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I think that it's too early to chatise the creators for breaking their own rules of time travel, as we're still learning them. The big difference with what happened to Zoom is that he was the time traveler here, not Eddie. In much fiction involving time travel, alternate futures are a possibility...thus there's a certain logic that Zoom, time traveler from the future could exist and effect thing, up until the moment when Eddie killed himself, thus making his existence impossible.

(I'm calling him Zoom for ease and clarity...he wasn't really Wells, Eddie was also called Thawne, nobody calls him Eobard, and Reverse Flash is just clunky.)

I think the Flahs that waved off our Barry comes from a future timeline, where he DID save his mom, but the results were distastrous. So he was expecting himself to come back, and was able to wave him off. (We may still see Flashpoint afterall..or if not, it will be told to us in some kind of exposition)

Good point...another nifty time paradox thingie...that half the reason that Future Flash was ever there in the first place was to stop himself, not to save his mom...(the other half being that in all scenarios, Child Barry had to be saved so that the Flash would exist).

 

[Marc]

And though not visually exciting..wouldn't a vasectomy have done the job just as well, without ending Eddie's life?

Down the track yes, but not then and there. No time, no-one to do the procedure and Eobard Thawne would attempted to stop it.

Plus he'd it would have allowed him to return to the future where he'd again have access to time technology and who knows what he'd do.

Also can see how they can keep Tom Cavanaugh though could be construed as a reset.

Timeline 1 - The original Wells was going to build star labs (in fact we know he did in E.Thawne's original time line).

Timeline 2 - Thawne travels back in time to beat The Flash and took Well's body and proceeded to build star labs when he failed.

Timeline 3 - Now Thawne has been wiped from time so he can't have travel. So the original harisson Wells lives to build his dream but Barry Allen has become the flash much sooner.

And with that it's no wonder time travel and paradoxes gave Kathryn Janeway headaches

 

[CorporalClegg]

I'm confused about something...

I don't know a lot about the Flash's existence in the comic books. Is he supposed to be ageless to some degree? I've always figured that, since there are so many of them, that they're mostly mortal or live normalish lives.

Yet if he and Thawne are supposed to be rivals so far off into the future, then Barry must live a pretty long time. I've always thought, or at least it's always seemed to me, that he and Thawne were contemporaries.

 

[Christopher]

I'm confused about something...

I don't know a lot about the Flash's existence in the comic books. Is he supposed to be ageless to some degree? I've always figured that, since there are so many of them, that they're mostly mortal or live normalish lives.

Yet if he and Thawne are supposed to be rivals so far off into the future, then Barry must live a pretty long time. I've always thought, or at least it's always seemed to me, that he and Thawne were contemporaries.

No, the Reverse Flash comes from the Flash's future. He traveled back in time to the present to become a rival to the Flash. Or that's how it works in the comics. Some stories involve the Flash (or a Flash) traveling forward to Thawne's future, but either way, they originate in different eras and interact through time travel. Also, apparently, their families have an ongoing feud, various generations of Allens and Thawnes clashing.

 

[The Old Mixer]

And Professor Zoom, a.k.a. the Reverse Flash, isn't the Flash's only foe from the future in the comics....

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij7W_js2fhg[/yt]

 

[Guy Gardener]

It was just an off hand comment by Wally about the Good old days "Whenever Bruce would try to make us wet ourselves with his Jokers stories, Uncle Barry would match him step for step with his Abra Kadabra stories".

 

[sojourner]

Every time I hear "Barry" some little part of my mind keeps playing the sound clip of the mom from Close Encounters yelling the name as she looks for her son.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Are we getting Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick in season two?

 

[Grendelsbayne]

And though not visually exciting..wouldn't a vasectomy have done the job just as well, without ending Eddie's life?

Down the track yes, but not then and there. No time, no-one to do the procedure and Eobard Thawne would attempted to stop it.

Plus he'd it would have allowed him to return to the future where he'd again have access to time technology and who knows what he'd do.

Also can see how they can keep Tom Cavanaugh though could be construed as a reset.

Timeline 1 - The original Wells was going to build star labs (in fact we know he did in E.Thawne's original time line).

Timeline 2 - Thawne travels back in time to beat The Flash and took Well's body and proceeded to build star labs when he failed.

Timeline 3 - Now Thawne has been wiped from time so he can't have travel. So the original harisson Wells lives to build his dream but Barry Allen has become the flash much sooner.

And with that it's no wonder time travel and paradoxes gave Kathryn Janeway headaches

Vasectomies aren't 100% dependable anyway. There's a (very, very small) chance of the tubes growing back.

But Thawne still has to have traveled through time - I have no idea how, as it makes no sense - but if his unbirth were to have undone his actions in Barry's past, then all of the characters would have instantly been shot into a different alternate universe where Barry's mom never died. That clearly didn't happen, so, somehow Thawne's actions must have remained intact.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Counter intuitively the contiguous snowballing only occurs forward of the changes to the timeline made by temporally foreign interlopers.

It's a one way street.

I think a hilarious thing they could have done was that after Eddie shot himself and Thawn didn't disappear, afterwhich Thawn might have said something like "Idiot! You knocked up the girl next door when you were 14! Your son, my great great grandfather is already playing little league!"

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Counter intuitively the contiguous snowballing only occurs forward of the changes to the timeline made by temporally foreign interlopers.

It's a one way street.

I think a hilarious thing they could have done was that after Eddie shot himself and Thawn didn't disappear, afterwhich Thawn might have said something like "Idiot! You knocked up the girl next door when you were 14! Your son, my great great grandfather is already playing little league!"

Still makes no sense to me, but whatever.

I am curious, though - when putting into motion a plan to create a wormhole that might cause a black hole to form in less than 2 minutes, why on Earth was everyone standing in the control room when the accelerator's off switch was apparently in a completely different place?

I mean, after lucking through all the other stupid things that happened in this episode and then the world almost ends because Caitlin and Ronnie first have to run to a different room before they can turn the accelerator off?

There was a good scene or two in there, but sadly I have to say this finale was more disappointing than Gotham's...

 

[Guy Gardener]

It was half assed.

My only theory for how poorly they used what they had already established as the rules for time travel, is that they dumbed it down for the 9 years old who were watching, and that Eddie was always going to die from the first time his character was storyboarded... Which means that everything else we learnt about time travel in the year betweeen then and there, shouldn't have been taught.