The Flash Spoilers: Ending, Deaths, Cameos, and the DCU’s Future

Even so, the good guys die again. Supergirl has her throat slit by Zod, and Batman has a Kryptonian giant smash his organs in. It’s at this point that things click for Barry the Older. Some things in time are immutable—or “canon events” as Spider-Man: Across the Universe more elegantly explained several weeks ago. Just as there apparently will always be a Bruce Wayne/Batman (though his age and appearance might change) in the multiverse, for whatever narrative reason, Zod is destined to win against Justice League 2.0 and conquer the Earth.

Now we’d suggest there is a glaring plot hole in this, what with Superman (Henry Cavill) defeating this version of Zod and this exact same invasion all by himself in 2013. Ergo, this is not a canon event. But for the purposes of The Flash, it is perceived as one, with Barry the Older realizing things cannot be changed while Barry the Younger refuses to accept reality and continues to travel into the past, weakening the multiverse more and more each time as he fails to save Kara, Bruce, and the world.

To be fair to Young Barry, he’s the only Barry who grew up with a mother. To accept that this fight is unwinnable means he must accept her dying. His fear of letting go after apparently years (decades?) of trying to win the fight transforms him into the Dark Flash. As it turns out, the Dark Flash was an alternate, younger version of Barry all along. As Barry the Younger admits (although now with gray hair), he is a time paradox because he pushed Barry the Older out of the Speed Force at the start of the movie, which crash landed older Barry in 2013. There, the original Barry mentored his younger self into inadvertently becoming the Dark Flash. And after Barry the Younger takes a stab wound for Barry the Older, which was inflicted by his own even older variant self, both die leaving the original Barry alone. Confused, yet?

Honestly, this feels more like a late in the game rewrite than a cathartic conclusion to the sci-fi conundrum. Based purely on my own speculation, I wonder if the Dark Flash was someone different at another point, but it was rewritten to be Barry all along. Whatever the case may be, the explanation in the final film is a muddle, but it does at least set up an emotionally satisfying grace note to the climax.

Rather than fight Zod or his younger/older self, the original Barry goes back to the early 2000s and undoes the change that triggered this whole headache. He puts the can of crushed tomatoes back on the shelf so his mother still asks her husband to get them, and she is thus left alone to be murdered by an unknown assailant (a dangling plot thread that also suggests this was a rewrite).

It’s messy, but seeing Barry be forced to say goodbye to his mother and accept some things cannot be changed—our scars make us who we are, as Batman is wont to say—is fairly moving. And a lot of it is a credit to Miller, who conveys the heartbreak of having to lose his mother all over again, saying goodbye to her as a stranger at the grocery store.