12 Worst Time Travel Goofs In The Flash (So Far)
Where we're going, we don't need common sense.
The CW’s hit DC comics adaptation The Flash pulled out and waved the time travel card surprisingly early on in its latest run on television.
Although the scarlet speedster’s ability to travel in time has been a part of the character for several decades in the comics, you’d have thought they’d have given the new show a chance to bed in for a year or two before bringing on the hard stuff: like sinking a few beers before ordering a round of shots.
After all, time travel is an absolute b*stard to write without creating plot holes the size of King Shark’s king size toothbrush.
Why is this important? Because all storytelling requires a narrative on friendly terms with its own internal logic. Time travel stories, however, require bulletproof internal logic to succeed, given that they live and die on the consistency of cause and effect.
This is especially true of the story currently being told in The Flash, since not only do the nuts and bolts of the plot hinge on the consequences of messing with cause and effect, but the broader character arc pivots on Barry Allen - the Flash himself - being held accountable for the consequences of messing with cause and effect.
So have they pulled it off? Not remotely. Here are some of the most glaring errors regarding their time travel shenanigans so far: the mistakes, blunders and goofs in the narrative of The Flash that indicate that they don’t really know what they’re doing.
12. They’ve Already Overegged The Pudding
Were this a genuine 'many worlds' fiction, there would be no possibility of time travel 'changing history' at all.
If you were to draw a diagram representing the many worlds theory, it’d look a lot like the branches of a tree. Every decision, no matter how small, creates a new branch, which continues onward as a new timeline. Fractal flora, flowering into an infinity of futures.
Time travellers would, theoretically, either skate up and down the branches or find a way to leap from one branch to the other. While doing so, any attempt to change history would simply see them hop onto a new branch: ‘resetting’ history would be a matter of finding the right branch again.
However, the Arrowverse’s version of the DC Multiverse, while sticking to a variation of the infinite parallel worlds theory, clearly also allows for the possibility of travelling in time to change history: after all, that’s half of the arc plots in The Flash to date and the entire premise of Legends Of Tomorrow. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but there’s a lot more explanation and exposition required to make them work side by side in the same continuity.
And that’s part of the problem: the CW’s DC superhero universe is now completely dependent on how all of this time travel fiddle faddle hangs together.
On an ongoing basis, with sixty-odd episodes of television a year, the various interrelated creative teams on those three shows now have to reconcile Legends Of Tomorrow’s high concept of protecting the timestream from change and The Flash’s storylines featuring multiple rogue speedsters changing history willy-nilly and the fact that Supergirl takes place in a parallel universe where history has taken a different turn… not to mention the fact that The Flash regularly opens portals to these parallel worlds as well.
It’s only been two years, and already this time travel/multiverse/parallel world set-up is hopelessly confused and incredibly confusing, and bound to become even more so.