What.Is.Happening?? This was my main thought as I watched the season premiere of “The Flash”. We have all noticed that “The Flash” has made a name for itself over the past three seasons and what started out as a cutesy, spin-off of Arrow, has now evolved into an amazing cast of characters and story plots all on its own merits.
The season 2 finale left us doubly shocked as first; Barry’s father is killed,(right when he just got him back for good), and second; when Barry’s grief causes him to go back in time and stop the murder of his mother. Although part of me silently cheered when he stopped his mother from being killed, with all things time travel, there is always a price to pay. As we see in the season premiere.
Flash forward (pun intended) to three months later and here is Barry living in a parallel time where his parents are both alive and happily married but Joe and Iris do not know him at all and he is not the Flash. Joe is not a great police captain but rather an alcoholic detective, who is both down on his luck and has no relationship with his kids. Wally is “Kid Flash” in this universe and he and Iris actually work together at stopping meta-humans. But they have no base of operations, no Cisco Ramon and no Katelyn. Barry seems to finally be happy and grateful his parents are alive but things are off. He has the Reverse-Flash as his prisoner and the Reverse-Flash taunts him that their mutual enemy–Time–will eventually catch up to him.
Barry wants to believe that he is perfectly happy and everything is fine, but when he starts to lose his memories of his other life and events start to spiral out of control, he realizes that he must do what he has been dreading. As Wally’s life hangs in the balance after being stabbed by The Rival, Barry realizes the price that all of his former friends and family have had to pay for his happiness. He heads back to The Reverse-Flash with is head low and sorrow in his heart as he asks him to go back in time and kill his mother.
After they do so, the Reverse-Flash takes Barry back to the moment in time before he left just three months ago and Barry thinks everything has been fixed. But as he goes inside and talks to Joe and Wally, he asks where Iris is, to which Joe responds “That’s not funny”. And then Joe tells him that since his father was just killed he is going to let that slide and then he walks away. Barry turns to Wally for guidance and Wally tells him “you know they don’t talk.” Somehow, despite his best efforts to “fix” things, life still hasn’t returned to normal and we have no idea what will happen to Barry in this new version of his life.
