Editor’s Note: this interview contains minor spoilers for the Flashpoint timeline on The CW’s The Flash. Read at your own risk!
When Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) went back in time to save his mother and accidentally created the Flashpoint timeline, he forever changed the lives of everyone around him on The Flash.
Although he then went back to set things right—heart wrenchingly letting the Reverse-Flash (Matt Letscher) kill his mother like he did originally—the timeline was still changed in ways most don’t notice, like Arrow‘s Diggle (David Ramsey) having a baby son instead of a daughter. But other ways, like Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) having Killer Frost powers and Wally West (Keiynan Lonsdale) acting out of desperation to get speedster powers, are going to cause some major problems for Barry and the rest of the STAR Labs team.
In this week’s episode of The Flash, “Shade,” when Wally (Keiynan Lonsdale) starts having dreams about being Kid Flash like he was in Flashpoint, Barry realizes he has to tell Wally, Iris (Candice Patton), and Joe (Jesse L. Martin) about what happened to Wally in Flashpoint in order to keep him safe from the mysterious meta-human, power-granting Dr. Alchemy.
“For Wally, ever since we met him, he’s always been missing something in his life,” Lonsdale told Nerdist on set in Vancouver. “Originally, that was his father and sister—even despite not knowing about them. So now that he has that, now it’s discovering that there’s something missing in him.”
According to Lonsdale, Wally on some level knows these dreams mean something more than just a desire to get speedster powers like his Earth-2 crush Jesse Quick (Violett Beane).
“I think he has always felt a little bit unsure of his place and what he’s supposed to do in this world,” Lonsdale says, “Especially dealing with the fact that he’s having dreams and knows that there’s potentially another path he can take with that.”
When Wally and Jesse were caught in the same dark matter burst from the particle acceleration explosion, she was granted with speedster powers while nothing happened to him. That discovery and disappointment has caused him to act recklessly to try and draw out any latent metahuman powers inside of him, like jumping in front of a speeding car, but so far, nothing has worked.
“What we’ll see is that he’s not reckless for no reason,” Lonsdale says. “His passion, there’s a desperation and as he wants to prove himself, we’ll start to understand why he is reckless. He sometimes maybe doesn’t put enough value on his own life, which is something that he needs to learn.”
He continues, “It’s definitely going to go deeper and deeper as these dreams go further and manipulate in different ways, and he’ll definitely be more affected, not necessarily as just more reckless, but it will strike a struggle in him.”
Another character dealing with loss this season is Cisco (Carlos Valdes). After Flashpoint was rectified, his brother Dante (Nicholas Gonzalez), it turned out, was killed by a drunk driver. When Barry refused to go back in time to save him—since he learned the hard way what it meant to manipulate the timeline—it put a strain on their friendship, and Cisco has lost some of his cheer and happiness as he dealt with the grief.
“It’s been really interesting and really challenging in a lot of ways too,” Valdes told Nerdist on set in Vancouver on playing Cisco’s grief. “I feel a lot of ownership over this character so I have found it interesting to balance the comic expectations of this character while at the same time grounding him out in the realistic grief that he’s undergoing at this moment. It’s been interesting and continues to be interesting to explore how that grief defines Cisco and his trajectory from here on out. It becomes clearer as more episodes transpire that Dante’s death played a role into Cisco’s growth as a person.”
What are you most excited to see from this week’s episode of The Flash? Tweet me your thoughts at @SydneyBucksbaum!
The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
Images: The CW
