I Love Time Travel - Part 21 - The Flash - “Rogue Time”

Dude is fast.

           Lay off superhero fiction.  I’m tired of hearing the bitching.  Hollywood is only making movies and TV shows about people with capes and superpowers. Wah,wah, wah.  You know why?  There are two reasons:  They make zillions. The second reason is, for the most part, they are good.  They are just flat-out good now. The right people are making them, writing them, starring in them.  It is as if America had these characters sitting around for decades and we’ve just recently figured out a way to bring them to life and not be embarrassed by the results.  I, for one, can’t get enough of it.

            The Flash is in its first year on the previously unwatchable (save Arrow) network, the CW. By the end of the first episode, I knew it would work.  The show accomplished what so many movies in the past fail to do when you create a superhero world.  You create a fictional town with fictional problems, full of conflicts and villains and relationships.  You create superpowers and peril and secret identities.  You mix in some inner turmoil.  All of this is negated if you fail to nail down the tone.  The tone is everything.  The tone is the difference between a haunting and interesting Batman, and one with Bat-nipples and a car that looks like a giant dick. The wrong tone takes all the lore and throws it against wall to be laughed at and ridiculed.

            Barry Allen has superpowers, like so many other famous heroes.  But the character is known for being light-hearted and fun.  He is the class clown of the Justice League.  He has abilities that defy physics but he’s also sort of a goofball.  It maintains a balance of the potential danger of such a power with a likable guy who just wants to help people. The Flash got the tone just right.  Barry is a sweetie-pie who is also a nerd.  That’s all you have to know.  There is no brooding, no hidden darkness. He’s just a young guy trying to do the right thing.

            When the show began, the idea of Flash as a time traveler was planted early.  Barry’s mother was killed when mysterious strangers invaded his home when he was a boy.  They could not be identified because they were moving too fast.  It’s not too difficult to connect the time loop dots.  But in the most recent episode “Rogue Time”, we finally see the Flash take a trip backwards, albeit by accident, and have to deal with the consequences.

            I guess that’s what makes this episode unique in time travel lore.  Most of the time, when the past is altered to one’s benefit, the character learns a lesson about reconstructing a timeline. That’s fine. Certain events cannot be changed without repercussions; every change causes ripples, space-time continuum, etc.  “Rogue Time” was a little different.

            Barry tries to keep a tidal wave, unleashed by a weather-controlling bad guy, from destroying the city. He circles the beach at warp speed to create a something that will stop the something.  Because he reaches a certain speed, he zips back about 24 hours in time.  The Flash is right back at the beginning of the previous week’s episode.  He knows where the bad guy is and he figures he can stop all this mess from happening before it starts.  However, he learns that old time travel chestnut that time cannot be toyed with; that preventing one disaster may create another.  Barry makes the decision to alter time to change the city despite the consequences.  Of course, it sucks for the Flash.

            Instead of following Barry through his mess, the episode turns to his friend Cisco and what previously would never have happened if Barry had not changed things.  In fact, unbeknownst to Barry, Cisco was murdered for uncovering someone’s true identity.  The bulk of the story is now the events that fill the vacuum caused by Barry’s immediate disposal of the bad guy.  Cisco ends up in trouble, there is a Captain Cold sighting and Barry has to clean up a completely unrelated mess.

            Plus, the actions of the previous timeline led to love for Barry.  Iris, the woman he pines for, admits to Barry that she loves him.  Barry reveals he is the Flash, they kiss, and then…he tries to tackle a tidal wave.  In the new timeline, the drama never happens, but Barry assumes the feelings are still there.  He is wrong.  It is explained to him that emotions are not predictable; it could have been the events of the previous timeline that led to Iris professing her love.  Now, the feelings are still locked away.

            And you know what?  Barry has to deal with that shit.  There is NO resetting of the old timeline. That is what makes this episode kinda funky. The new timeline is life now.  He threw away the old one. Iris still isn’t into him, Cisco is alive, and Barry got a really shitty lesson about time travel.

            In time travel stories, there is always that moment characters decide meddling with time isn’t worth it and the DeLorean is inevitably run over by a train.  The Flash got that lesson, but to Barry, he’s stuck in a kinda crappy timeline.  His friend is alive (no one knows he was killed), but the love of his life thinks he’s kind of a creep now.  Plus, he has that loneliness of being the only one who knew what could have been. The worst part is, as far as speeding fast enough to travel through time, he is absolutely positive this is only the beginning.