We’ve got our first good look the latest evil speedster The Rival on CW’s The Flash and he’s throwing Barry Allen around like a rag-doll, especially once crippling time-amnesia hits our speedster.
Set in the new altered “Flashpoint” reality, the latest trailer finds Barry grappling with mixed memories of various rewritten and overwritten timelines. Being a superhero capable of extreme speeds means time travel and alternate realities aren’t always easy to understand, even for the characters. And though Kid Flash views himself as the Flash of this reality, there’s clearly some debate as to who is “really” the one and only Flash. Presumably, they could just race to figure that one out, but let’s not get too picky.
The real big news here we get our first good look at the show’s new big-bad, the black-suited villain known as “The Rival.” In Golden Age DC comics continuity, The Rival began his life as a man named Edward Clariss, a colleague of Jay Garrick, who in turn, is another version of the Flash (you might remember a few Jay Garricks from Season 2). The Rival then is not Reverse-Flash, but instead, evil Flash. And if the trailer is any evidence, it looks like this mysterious villain has powers perhaps rivaling Barry’s.
At this point it’s unclear if this version of The Rival is connected to either the villainous Jay Garrick of Earth-2 or the heroic Jay Garrick of Earth-3.
The Flash debuts on October 4 on the CW.
