Who killed Barry Allen’s mom in The Flash? Meet Reverse Flash.

Modern time-travel films will naturally depart audiences with questions, irrespective of how onerous they attempt to maintain the story clear. That will be the case with The Flash as nicely, given its difficult multiverse tackle time journey. But there’s one massive query the film merely isn’t in answering.

Who truly killed Barry Allen’s mom?

The film has obscure solutions. The comics have deeper solutions.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Flash, the movie.]

Image: Geoff Johns, Ethan Van Sciver/DC Comics

If you’ve seen The Flash, the DC film that’s one of many final entries in the Snyderverse continuity — or when you’ve seen The Flash, the TV present on the CW — then you already know. Barry Allen’s emotional origin story is that when he was a child, his mom was murdered, and his father was convicted of the crime. Barry was impressed to turn out to be a forensic analyst in half to uncover proof to overturn his dad’s conviction.

The occasions of The Flash the film, in addition to the comedian guide crossover occasion Flashpoint, are sparked when Barry stretches the bounds of his pace powers to journey again in time and try to stop his mom’s homicide altogether.

So who killed Barry Allen’s mom?

Barry Allen as a personality has been round virtually 70 years, and he didn’t at all times have a tragic childhood. That’s a element that was grafted onto him in 2009’s The Flash: Rebirth comics collection, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Ethan Van Sciver. Their points start with Barry changing into unusually preoccupied along with his mom’s premature dying, in addition to his father’s dying in jail, heretofore unmentioned particulars of his backstory.

The twist reveal was that it was Agatha all alongside.

Image: Disney Plus

Just kidding.

As Rebirth reveals, one in all Barry’s oldest villains, Eobard Thawne (aka Professor Zoom, aka the Reverse-Flash) had traveled again in time, and he didn’t merely homicide Barry’s mom and body his father for it, he additionally brought on principally each different dangerous, unhappy, or disappointing factor that had ever occurred to Barry. Due to his interference with the timestream, Barry had retroactively at all times had a tragic childhood.

Who is the Reverse-Flash?

Image: Geoff Johns, Andy Kubert/DC Comics

There are a number of variations of the character in comics, however essentially the most well-known of them is Eobard Thawne, who’s sort of like The Flash’s Joker.

Thawne is a scientist from the 2400s who was an obsessive fan of the traditional superhero The Flash, a lot in order that he’d undergone future cosmetic surgery to look identical to Barry and painstakingly recreate Barry’s accident with chemical compounds and lightning in order to present himself pace powers. Then he traveled again in time to fulfill his hero, solely to find an exhibit on the villain Reverse-Flash in Central City’s Flash museum. In a really time-travel whammy means, the proof that Thawne was destined to turn out to be his hero’s worst enemy — and finally die at Barry Allen’s arms — cracked his psyche and have become his villain origin story.

Image: Mark Waid, Greg LaRocque/DC Comics

In Flash: Rebirth, quite a lot of hay is made out of the truth that time-traveling Flash characters can’t truly change the previous; occasions that occur wherever in the continuum simply loop round into inflicting themselves, like with the Reverse-Flash’s origin story. But for Comic Book Reasons that you simply don’t have to know, Thawne’s pace powers work otherwise than Barry’s, and he can change the previous.

But this presents Thawne with a problem. He can’t kill Barry, or cease him from changing into the Flash, as a result of then he himself would stop to exist. So The Flash: Rebirth is the story of what he determined to do as a substitute. He went again in time to secretly comply with each spare second of Barry’s life and make it the worst it might presumably be, whereas nonetheless leaving Barry as sufficient of a hero to encourage Thawne to turn out to be the Reverse-Flash.

And, I imply, the person was thorough. Was Barry Allen ever capable of have a celebration balloon with out unintentionally releasing it into the sky? Was he ever capable of eat an ice cream cone with out tripping on one thing too quick to see, and watching the scoops plop on the bottom? It appears unlikely.

Image: Geoff Johns, Ethan Van Sciver/DC Comics

The crown on all this, after all, was that Thawne framed Barry’s father for his mom’s homicide, which Barry found in the pages of The Flash: Rebirth. Barry’s try to journey again in time and reverse Thawne’s meddling in his life — and the way it went very poorly — was the story of Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert’s Flashpoint miniseries, on which the 2023 film The Flash is predicated.

Is Eobard Thawne in the Flash film?

No. Thawne is in the unique Flashpoint miniseries that The Flash is predicated on, however he’s actually simply there to brag at how spectacularly Barry screws up whereas making an attempt to cease him. It appears seemingly that the workforce behind The Flash felt like that they had sufficient happening with out introducing Eobard Thawne and the concept that he time-travel-ruined Barry’s life — so in this film, they only depart the query of who truly killed Barry’s mom broad open, as if it didn’t actually matter. And in quite a lot of methods, it doesn’t: The Flash is about Barry coming to new phrases along with his mom’s dying, which he’ll must do whether or not or not he finds out who killed her.

Also, it’d be fairly wild to carry in Michael Keaton’s 1989 Batman — who famously has the identical sort of “I created my villain and my villain created me” type of factor happening — after which do the identical plot with the film’s essential man, too.

It appears unlikely that The Flash will get a direct sequel, with the DC Films slate about to maneuver in a really totally different path. But the area is actually there for an enormous previous Reverse-Flash reveal. Who is aware of, perhaps Barry Allen has danced with the satan in the pale moonlight.