Reverse Flash
15 years ago - 31-year-old Eobard Thawne appears in our own time erasing his entire timeline, driving him insane. Obsessed with Barry Allen and seeing him as the key to returning to his own time, he depletes his speed reserve and has to construct a new force reactor to recharge his powers.
13 years ago - 33-year-old Eobard fully recharges his powers and attempts takes over the Rogues, killing Lisa Snart & Sam Scudder. He is stopped when Barry Allen & Wally West help Leonard Snart defeat him.
9 years ago - 37-year-old Eobard attempts to draw Barry Allen into the Speed Force by trying to Murder Iris Allen. Their battle leads to Barry's expulsion from the Justice League, but when he tries again they are both drawn inside. Barry outruns him, managing to save Iris by depositing her in the 30th century. Barry is absorbed into the Speed Force, while Eobard is killed.
2938 (alternate) - Eobard is born in a now-erased timeline.
2958 (alternate) - 20-year-old Eobard begins his revolutionary work on Speed Force Fusion.
2963 (alternate) - 25-year-old Eobard develops his Speed Force reactor, granting himself access to a cumulative Speed Force effect.
2969 (alternate) - 31-year-old Eobard constructs his cosmic treadmill to travel back in time and gain Barry Allen's Speed Force access, inadvertantly destroying his entire timeline and driving himself insane.
We've done a lot of work to strip away DC's penchant for time travel and alternate timelines across our project, but now we've finally arrived at the place where a lot of that STARTED. Classic Silver Age Flash stories were lousy with time travel, and a huge part of that was the fact that Barry Allen's arch nemesis was a speedster from the future with a time traveling "cosmic treadmill". Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash, is as close to ground zero for DC's time travel problems as you're likely to get..
So how do we fix that? This isn't a character we can possibly leave out. Even though a new and very cool version of Reverse Flash (Hunter Zolomon's 'Zoom') was invented as a nemesis for Wally West, trying to do Barry Allen without Eobard Thawne would be like trying to do Superman without Lex Luthor. If Thawne's history of time travel is unavoidable, then the best solution is to steer headlong into it. We said, only Rip Hunter and Brainiac 5 are able to time travel without destroying timelines. You'll never get home and everything you remember is gone forever. Thawne shows us exactly what that looks like.
So how do we fix that? This isn't a character we can possibly leave out. Even though a new and very cool version of Reverse Flash (Hunter Zolomon's 'Zoom') was invented as a nemesis for Wally West, trying to do Barry Allen without Eobard Thawne would be like trying to do Superman without Lex Luthor. If Thawne's history of time travel is unavoidable, then the best solution is to steer headlong into it. We said, only Rip Hunter and Brainiac 5 are able to time travel without destroying timelines. You'll never get home and everything you remember is gone forever. Thawne shows us exactly what that looks like.
|
Reverse Flash's Comic HistoryThawne was a recurring enemy across Barry Allen's entire run as the Flash starting all the way back in 1963. In practice, he might have started out life as simply a color-swapped doppelganger of Barry, but as time passed a lot of very clever writers managed to use the this simple concept to slowly turn Thawne into a brilliant, brutal, nemesis, always able to cut Barry right to the core.
He basically went unused after the death of Barry Allen in the Crisis of Infinite Earths. When Wally took over as the Flash he really took off when he was given his own caste of villains, and that meant his own Reverse Flash. Thawne would occasionally show his face thanks to some time travel shenanigans, always making quite the appearance. After the return of Barry Allen, the massive cross-company story Flashpoint introduced the idea that Barry's mother had been killed in the past by Thawne. This was the catalyst of the entire Flashpoint storyline, a broken alternate world caused by Barry's attempt to go back and save his mother. This story was used as the excuse for the 2011 continuity rebooting 'New 52', and Thawne was right in the thick of it. So, as we can see... There is a LOT of nonsense that comes from this character time traveling all over the place. |
Our Reverse Flash StoryWe want Eobard to be vicious, brilliant, and twisted, but the last thing we want is to have him zipping all over time. So instead, we base his story on just one single jaunt through time.
In order to make that work, we had to actually dive even deeper down this rabbit hole. If you time travel, your timeline is lost. So Thawne's home timeline is gone. He's born in an alternate version of 2938 which no longer exists. He has no past knowledge of history, no ability to continually move through time. Otherwise, He actually works really well as a brutal expert at manipulating the Speed Force. The Flash is pretty unique in that he has a well-defined external power source that is tapped into by different characters in different ways, and Thawne knows more about it than anyone else. When you combine that with the fact that he knows Barry's secret identity and is obsessed with him, he becomes one of the best villains in history. Meanwhile, we've also made Thawne's final plan the event that is actually responsible for killing Barry rather than the multiverse-spanning Crisis of Infinite Earths. It ends with Thawne dead, Barry absorbed permanently into the Speed Force, and Iris now living in the 30th century. We've managed to condense all the time travel in the Flash's story into these contained events. |
|