12 Worst Time Travel Goofs In The Flash (So Far)

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.