12 Worst Time Travel Goofs In The Flash (So Far)
1. Cause And Effect Is A Cascade, Not A Magic Bullet
Even if you presuppose that rational scientific explanations for time travel will take a back seat here to comic book science (and that’s fine: The Flash treats time travel and the Speed Force with a degree of mysticism, just as the comics do, and just as Lost and Doctor Who did on television before it), cause and effect are still vitally important.
This whole storyline is supposedly all about cause and effect. It’s about the ramifications of our decisions, about accepting responsibility for the consequences of our actions. That’s precisely what Jay tries to teach Barry in ‘Paradox’: that rather than trying to fix things, he should be learning to live with the mistakes he’s made.
This article has laid out some of the more glaring issues with that: massive gaps in continuity, missing explanations, wonky exposition and generally a complete disregard for actual cause and effect. Even accepting all of this nonsense on face value, everyone is surprisingly willing to accept the fact that Barry went back in time - in complete disregard of their lives, their safety and their happiness, and unilaterally screwed with the people closest to him.
None of this reflects well on the supposed hero of this show. In Flashpoint, Our Barry spends three months having breakfast with his mother and stalking Flashpoint Iris at the coffee shop. He doesn’t look up his friends to find out whether they’re okay after he rewrote their whole lives ab initio and without permission.
He doesn’t even seem curious as to what’s happened to them: and even when he finds out, he never looks into how it happened. He never tries to figure out what action has brought about this reaction; what cause has created this effect.
But then, Our Barry Allen isn’t actually the real Barry Allen, is he? The whole Flash timeline isn’t the real timeline. Everything we’ve seen, from the opening narration of the very first episode, is an alternate timeline: it’s what happened after the Reverse Flash of the 22nd Century travelled back in time to 2024 to kill the Flash, and both men then travelled back in time to the year 2000, and Henry and Nora Allen’s house.
Nora Allen, Harrison Wells and his wife weren’t supposed to die in the year 2000. Henry Allen wasn’t supposed to be put in prison. Barry Allen wasn’t supposed to become the Flash until 2020, when the real Wells activated the particle accelerator he built without 22nd century knowledge.
We’re told that Flashpoint is a mirage, a fantasy, a timeline that shouldn’t have been; but so is the so-called ‘original’ timeline we’ve been following from the very beginning. Who knows what the other knock on effects have been? Not us... because, despite all protestations to the contrary, cause and effect isn’t something that this show is interested in.