Warning! SPOILERS for The Flash season 8 and Legends of Tomorrow season 7.
Barry Allen’s efforts to save the life of the Reverse-Flash in the final chapter of The Flash season 8’s Armageddon event were rendered completely pointless by a Legends of Tomorrow season 7episode, which revealed the final fate of those who run afoul of the Speed Force. Rather than being destroyed, the corrupted speedsters and their time remnants are redeemed and put to work policing the timeline. While this neatly answered the question of just how Time fixes itself in the DC Universe, it also rendered moot the moral conundrum at the heart of Armageddon’s last episode.
The Flash season 8 episode “Armageddon – Part 5,” found Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash, begging Barry Allen and his friends for help after his efforts to rewrite reality left him in danger of being erased from the timeline completely. This led to a long argument between the membership of Team Flash regarding the morality of allowing Thawne to die and a battle with the time-traveler Despero. In the end, Team Flash drained the speed from Eobard Thawne and sent him to a special ARGUS prison. It was a fate that, to Thawne’s twisted mind, was far more cruel than simply allowing him to die. It was also, as Legends of Tomorrow revealed, a wasted effort.
The Legends of Tomorrow season 7 episode “The Fixed Point” found the team of time-travelers trying to intentionally cause a paradox and break the timeline, as part of a plan to lure their evil robot doppelgangers (including a John Cena parodying robot Citizen Steel) into a trap. This led to the revelation that there was a subculture of time-travelers in the Arrowverse, who gambled upon one another trying to change those fixed points in time that could never be undone, for some unknown reason. After deducing that their efforts to avert World War I were being thwarted by someone with the power to stop time and contriving a device that made Captain Sara Lance immune to time manipulation, the team discovered that the mystery agent was their old enemy Eobard Thawne and that it was the same remnant of the Reverse-Flash (played by Matt Letscher) who led the Legion of Doom in Legends of Tomorrow season 2.
After a brief fight, Thawne explained how he had become the guardian of June 28, 1914 and the moment when Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination triggered World War I. After his apparent death at the hands of the Black Flash in Legends of Tomorrow‘s season 2 finale, Thawne was pulled back from the brink of nothingness by the Time Wraiths, who enforced the laws of the Speed Force and dealt with those speedsters who traveled in time carelessly. Stripped of his superspeed and reeducated, Thawne was assigned to spend the rest of his existence reliving the same day over and over, while ensuring that other time travelers didn’t alter one of the most essential moments of human history. The original Reverse-Flash did this with the help of an advanced bracelet, which kept him anchored to one moment in time while simultaneously empowering him to stop time as often as needed during that one day.
While this revelation helped to explain just how fixed points in time stay fixed and how the timeline is restored when the Legends of Tomorrow aren’t involved, it also made the ending of Armageddon even more ridiculous. Granted that Team Flash had no way of knowing that the Speed Force didn’t kill wayward speedsters, it still seems odd that the Time Wraiths didn’t intervene after all the problems caused by the Reverse-Flash and Despero. This is particularly odd given the conceit from The Flash season 7 that the Speed Force had taken on the appearance and personality of Barry Allen’s mother, Nora Allen and had become friendly enough to the West-Allen family in the future for The Flash’s children to address her as “Speed Force Nana.” Given that Barry and Iris were in regular contact with the Slow Force avatar Deon Owens, it seems unlikely that they couldn’t also consult with the Speed Force directly to confirm Thawne’s final fate, if he were erased.
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