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

Back in the first season episode ‘Rogue Time’, when the Flash went back in time a day for his Groundhog Day experience, there should have been two Barry Allens in the past… but there weren’t.

As he breaks through to travel back in time, we see his past self disappear, and then Barry is just suddenly in his place, receiving radio signals from the Cisco of the past as though their conversation was never interrupted.

To make matters worse, Our Barry doesn’t time travel to the present day again - or if he does, he does it the old fashioned way, by living it sixty seconds at a time. The Barry in the past doesn’t come back - he’s just gone.

‘Rogue Time’ never gives us an explanation as to why that is, or how Our Barry is just able to step into the shoes of his suddenly missing past self. It’s not a normal function of time travel in fiction. The closest there is to an explanation is Harry Wells’ theory of the ‘time remnant’: the living echo of a speedster from a now defunct timeline.

Here, however, the time-travelling Barry - Our Barry - simply takes over from the Barry of the past, who vanishes without trace. Why? He belongs in that time. Our Barry is the visitor.

More to the point, in the second season episode ‘Flash Back’ Our Barry travels back to 2014 to persuade Eobard Thawne, masquerading as Harrison Wells, to train him to run fast enough to stop Zoom in his own time.

In that episode, he has to drug his past self to keep him out of the way long enough to impersonate him, so that Thawne doesn’t realise he’s talking to a Flash from the future who knows who he really is.

That’s how this should work: two Flashes, one present day, one strange visitor from the future. Why does it work differently on other occasions?