Warning: spoilers for The Flash are in play. If you haven’t caught this DCEU inevitable intersection just yet, you’ve been warned.
Oh my, oh my, where do I begin? Welcome back once again to the CinemaBlend Time Travel Labs! Yes, it’s been a while since we've discussed the topic. However, thanks to the Sacred Timeline being broken not too long after we went over how The Tomorrow War’s time travel works, things kind of got weird. One could even say, they’ve gone multiversal; which means it’s time to talk about how The Flash’s time travel works!
Yes friends, mark down one more Mike variant to keep track of, thanks to another rip in the timeline being created by Ezra Miller’s DC hero. If only I had the power to go back and correct my own timeline, where previous cliffhanger endings didn’t exist. Maybe that opportunity will be presented in the future, but for now fuel up on those all important calories, and let’s dash into how The Flash travels through time.
The Time Travel in The Flash
After traveling back in time during the ending of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), also known as The Flash, wants to change his personal history for the better. Hijinks, and a lot of continuity breaking, ensues.
Who's Time Traveling?
Barry Allen, Barry Allen, and… Barry Allen? Three different variants of the Scarlet Speedster are in play here: one from Present Day, one from an alternate 2013, and one that’s endured an undefined amount of time traveling back through the Speed Force.
From When To When?
Get your notepads ready, as The Flash has quite a bit of time travel to pin down. From 2023, Barry Allen zooms back to 2004, to prevent his mom’s death. That action causes us to zoom forward to a newly rewritten 2013, and eventually back to a new variation of 2023. I’ll explain that later.
The Purpose Of Their Trip
Barry Allen just wants to save his mother Nora (Maribel Verdú), which opens a can of worms throughout time. As a result, two different Barrys try and correct the timeline through several different trips, as the new spin on Man of Steel’s Kryptonian invasion leads to the deaths of Batman (Michael Keaton) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle).
How Time Travel Happens In The Flash
If you’re a fan of The Flash in pretty much any medium, you know that the Speed Force is key to Barry Allen’s ability to travel through time. Provided that poor Barry has fueled up on enough calories to keep his status as a snack hole in check, traveling faster than the speed of light, or even time, isn’t a problem.
By running fast enough to outpace the passage of time, Barry creates what’s called a “Chronoball.” Think of it this way: if the timeline was controlled by a mouse, The Flash is the trackball that scrolls to the point in time you want to change. The visual representation of this process actually works in that very way, as time is like a film that can be rewound through this process.
Once Barry Allen sees the moment he wants to change, he stops and allows himself to sink into that moment through a portal. Strangely enough, this takes into account something that Back to the Future's time travel gets right, as the exact physical location of the moment in question is also taken into account when our hero travels. Of course, there are still plenty of ways he can be thrown off course, especially if a mysterious presence that couldn’t possibly be an aged and bitter version of himself tries to stop him.
Can History Be Changed As A Result Of Time Travel In The Flash?
Oh, boy howdy, it can… but to a point! Thanks to one can of tomatoes, Nora Allen lives! Which sets off a cascade effect in The Flash’s story that wildly alters the story we thought we knew. In his world, Kal-El never made it to Earth, and his cousin Kara Zor-El/Supergirl is imprisoned by the Russian government.
So this universe has no Superman to call its own, and General Zod (Michael Shannon) and his Man of Steel invasion force are about to succeed. And to cap it all off, Eric Stoltz actually finished filming Back to the Future, rather than being cut from all but one frame of Robert Zemeckis’ influential sci-fi classic.
However, history is only so flexible, as the DCEU has its own version of “Fixed Points in Time,” dubbed “Inevitable Intersections.” Events titled as such cannot be changed, and in the new “Nora Lives!” timeline, Supergirl and Batman are destined to die by General Zod’s hand.
What Are The Consequences Of Time Travel In The Flash?
The DCEU was always going to be changed after The Flash’s events. But this story actually invokes a rather interesting concept that throws everything out of whack: “Retrocausality.” As Bruce Wayne explained with some dry spaghetti, if you alter one point on a timeline, the entire thing snaps.
This causes a ripple effect that basically changes the past and the future, thanks to that action. Once Barry saved Nora from her mysterious, and still unsolved, murder, it threw events off on either side of that inflection point. Which, once again, creates the ultimate no-win scenario for Barry Allen, in which he has to choose the life of his mother or the fate of planet Earth.
Also, if you’re a fan of how Star Trek: First Contact’s time travel works, you’ll notice that Barry Allen is protected by a temporal wake. As his mind doesn’t adjust to the new timeline, he’s as clueless as we are when Bruce Wayne all of a sudden looks like George Clooney in The Flash’s surprise ending.
In DC’s world, if you’re a time traveler, you apparently can never go home, as apparently each change breaks that spaghetti anew. So maybe in the sequel, we can see Val Kilmer's Batman reappear to give Barry Allen a thumb up for whatever his next adventure may be.
More Time Travel To Come
You know something? It actually felt good to be back at it in the CinemaBlend Time Travel Labs. Which means that, conditions permitting, I think this might be the start of keeping this little corner of the universe back on the rails.
Though since we’re in a multiverse, there’s still those versions of myself that are waiting to teach everyone how time works in Timecop and Loki Season 1. Come to think of it, I think I need to take a long, hard look at cataloging my multiversal selves and the assignments they’re awaiting.
But not before diving into another upcoming time travel assignment! Next time, prepare to dust off your fedoras and crack out your bullwhips, as we’ll hopefully be looking at how Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s time travel works. In the meantime, I’m about to try and answer yet another outstanding question about this strange new world: can we blame the awkward Max rebranding on Barry Allen?
