‘The Flash’ showrunner Eric Wallace previews a grim future for Barry Allen as he gets ready for the ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ crossover…
The closing moments of ‘The Flash’ season 6 debut helped to set the stage for the events to come after the Monitor arrived at STAR Labs with an ominous warning for Barry Allen that to stop the upcoming crisis coming to Earth, he would have to die.
The upcoming ‘Arrow-verse’ crossover that will kick off in December is the biggest and most ambitious yet as the DC Universe series on the CW will tackle the famous comic book storyline ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’.
In that event series, the Anti-Monitor — a powerful cosmic being — decides to destroy the multi-verse and with it billions upon billions of lives to condense everything down into one universe that he will then rule with an iron fist. During the course of the story, Barry Allen sacrifices himself in order to stop the Anti-Monitor and save the multi-verse from collapsing.
Now the stage is set for a similar outcome after the Monitor delivered that devastating news to Barry in ‘The Flash’ season 6 debut where he told the scarlet speedster that he would die on December 10 as part of the upcoming fight to save the multi-verse. According to ‘Flash’ showrunner Eric Wallace, the warning from the Monitor isn’t just some lip service to hype the crossover but rather a dire warning about the stakes involved in this massive event series.
“The Flash will die. He just said it. We’re not messing around,” Wallace said when speaking to the media at ‘The Flash’ premiere screening. “The countdown begins next week. What kind of urgency does that give [Barry and Iris]? An extreme one. It turns the dial up to 10 and it makes you think, ‘Is every moment together our last? What can we do? Should we fight this? Is it inevitable?’
“These are all the things that they’re grappling with for these next seven episodes, because [episode] 8 ends and it’s ‘Crisis’ [crossover] time. It’s time to go off to, literally, cosmic war. So the relationship is strained. But it’s also going to bring them closer together than ever before, because that’s what tragedy does.”
Now ‘The Flash’ has dealt with inevitable death previously because back in season 3, Barry traveled into the future where he discovered that the love of his life, Iris West, was murdered by another speedster named Savitar. The bulk of that season was then set around Barry’s need to prevent that tragedy from ever happening as he sought to save the woman he loved from dying.
Things are different this time around because it’s Barry who’s marked for death but this time his sacrifice is expected to play into the fight that will help save or risk billions of lives across the multiverse. With each passing week, Barry and the rest of Team Flash deal with the fallout of that prophecy while awaiting doomsday when he’s expected to perish.
This will also tie back to the new villain introduced in the debut episode because his storyline will run concurrent with Barry as he figures out whether or not he should even try to cheat death again.
“What this story has enabled us to do is to look back at any other time when somebody was facing life and death, and see how they reacted then,” Wallace explained. “We know how they reacted with Iris; how will they react next week? And I will tell you — no spoilers — it’s different. It’s not the same, because of what they learn next week. That’s the great part of the story.
“[The upcoming episodes] are all about, ‘Do I accept death? Or do I fight it? That’s also the reason why Bloodwork [aka Dr. Ramsey Rosso] is the villain this season. As we now know, he has HLH cancer and is dying, so for the first time in the show’s history, we have a villain and a protagonist who are going through the same thing. It was very deliberate, because they’re going to learn about halfway through the season, ‘Maybe we’re not so different? And what does that mean?’”
The upcoming ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ crossover will start on Sunday night December 8 before reaching a cliffhanger on December 10 with the last episode of ‘The Flash’ in 2018. The crossover will then conclude in January with back to back episodes of ‘Arrow’ and ‘Legends of Tomorrow’ on Tuesday, January 14.
