After Tuesday night’s episode of The Flash, “The Fury of Firestorm,” the teaser next week’s episode five, “The Darkness and the Light,” gave us our first full look at the presumed big bad of the season, Zoom. Prior episodes this season have hinted at him: Atom Smasher, Sand Demon, and King Shark all told Barry Allen that Zoom had sent them to kill him. And, of course, Jay Garrick gave us the most background information in describing his prior fights with him.
What we got from Jay was that whoever Zoom is, he wants to be the only speedster. He probably would have been content being the only speedster on Earth-2, but a rift opened and the villain discovered that there were other worlds to run through.
Voiced by Tony Todd, but presumably not actually physically played by the imposing actor, Zoom turns out to look like this:
In the comics, pre-New 52, Zoom looked like this, not too far off from the television show’s Reverse Flash, played by Tom Cavanagh:
The Flash’s Reverse Flash:
To be fair, in the comics, Reverse Flash (Eobard Thawne) also went by the name Professor Zoom, and after his death was replaced by Hunter Zolomon, who took on the name of Zoom.
But this television version of Zoom looks more like a recurring theme in executive producer Geoff Johns’ work on the character of The Flash in comics. First, in his run during the early 2000s, Johns created “the Black Flash,” a harbinger of death for speedsters in the DC Universe. Generated out of the Speed Force itself (which has been mentioned on the show), the Black Flash is the one thing no Flash can outrun.
After Flashpoint, in which Barry Allen and the Reverse Flash ended up messing with timelines and launching “The New 52,” a brand new starting point for DC’s superheroes, the Black Flash faded from continuity. And there we’d end it, except just last week in Justice League #45, The Flash merged with the harbinger of death for the New Gods… in a story written by… Geoff Johns.
Becoming the God of Death by hosting “The Black Racer”, The Flash looks like this:
…which seems pretty similar to Zoom on television, though with better red highlights. It’s very unlikely that this is meant to be the same character. More likely, Johns just loves the idea of an ebony speedster.
Below is the teaser for next week, and as regular watchers have noted, a version of Harrison Wells is back.
