In DC Comics history, there is no other story more relevant to the history of Barry Allen than 1985’s Crisis On Infinite Earths for his heartbreaking self-sacrifice to save the multiverse. The lead of CW’s The Flash, Grant Gustin, confirmed recently that the Crisis is the direction they want to go in.
From the show’s beginning, the foundation has been laid for this epic event and is still being established. In the final scene of the season one pilot, it was forecast in Eobard Thawne’s 2024 page one article “Flash Missing, Vanishes in Crisis” written by Iris West-Allen. In one section, it claims that The Flash vanishes during a battle with the Reverse-Flash and other heroes. In the comic, to stop the Anti-Monitor, Barry ran around his antimatter cannon to cause a feedback loop that would destroy it. Sadly, however, he ran so fast that he virtually disintegrated and joined the Speed Force, leading to protégé Wally West to continue on as the Flash until 2007’s The Flash: Rebirth. Season Two introduced the concept of the multiverse and characters like the Earth-3 Jay Garrick Flash (played by John Wesley Shipp), and Earth-2 Zoom. They even used it to link the Supergirl series to the Arrowverse as Earth-38. In the finale, audiences got another homage to the comic when they saw one of Barry’s Timeline Remnants (temporal duplicates created when he goes back in time and meets a copy of himself) suffer the same fate to stop Zoom’s Magnaton from destroying the multiverse. Season 3 dropped in cameos from characters like the Accelerated Man from the Elsewords Superman: Red Sun story and Gypsy. With a palette like the Multiverse, it would make the Crisis both a certainty as well as historic.
At this past San Diego Comic Con Flash Panel, Gustin explains, “We don’t really talk about [The Crisis] on a yearly basis but it was mentioned early on and that’s a goal. Obviously, we’d have to go I think ten years to reach that. So there’s a possibility for sure. It’ll be fun to get there.”
They have already adapted Flashpoint – the event in which Barry created a disastrous alternate timeline by going back in time to save his mother from The Reverse-Flash – this past season, albeit abridged to one episode and an entire season of dealing with its consequences. To have an event like Crisis will take a more-established Multiverse and the show will have to last six more seasons so that Barry’s sacrifice will seem more earth-shattering and Wally can take up the mantle of The Flash. As to whether that happens or not is up to the fanbase, which has never faltered since the show began and has seen better ratings than the show that started it all, Arrow.
The Flash returns to The CW on October 10th.
