The CWZoom has a face! And that face is very familiar to every viewer of The Flash, because, as expected, the unmasking of the uber-villain (at last!) revealed someone we've known for a while.
Are you ready? Because we're about to drop the name of the person (or people) revealed as Barry Allen's supervillain nemesis at the very end of the "King Shark" episode. Seriously, spoilers. Like, soooooo many spoilers.
Are you suuuuuure you're ready? Alright, can't say we didn't warn you.
The S.T.A.R. Labs gang spent much of the episode angstily mourning the loss of Jay Garrick, who was snatched back through the breach at the end of last week's Earth-2 escape. But in the final moments of this week's episode, we finally caught a glimpse of the bad guy's face as he pulled off his mask. And Zoom is…none other than Jay Garrick! Or Hunter Zolomon. Or whichever one was not the Jay Garrick who just got pulled through the breach at the end of last week's episode.
Either way, he has the face of Teddy Sears and we have SO many questions.
Flash showrunner Andrew Kreisberg had approximately zero spare minutes to talk to us about the big reveal, since he's busy, you know, making the show, but he was able to answer two of our million questions over email. His answers are short and sweet, and will absolutely not make the month-long wait for new episodes any easier, but hopefully they'll help ease the pain a little!
First things first, the answers about Zoom's identity won't be coming immediately—there will still be pieces of information parceled out from episode to episode. "We'll be learning the truth about Jay Garrick as the season progresses," he tells us. "Some of what he told Barry and the team was true and some of it was misleading."
And second, yes, they did toy with making Zoom someone else. "At the earliest stages of planning the season there was some discussion that Zoom was Barry's Earth-2 doppelganger but we very quickly moved away and fell in love with the idea that it was Jay," he confesses.
While we'll have to wait FOREVER (okay, several weeks) to find out more, it is interesting to note that Zoom's identity does appear to be pulled from the comics (at least to a certain extent).
In the comics, Hunter Zolomon (a.k.a. who Jay pointed out as his Earth-1 doppelgagner) is Zoom. His transformation into the evil masked speedster is quite a complicated one. After Wally West had become the new Flash, Zolomon was injured in an accident thanks to Gorilla Grodd and lost the use of his legs. He tried to get Wally's help in turning back time to prevent the accident, but Wally refused, leaving Zolomon to try it on his own.
Hunter tried to turn back time himself, and it worked, but he also got himself all tangled up in the timeline and gained some insane speed force abilities. He decided to become Zoom to torment Wally as revenge for refusing to help him. So in the comics, Zoom's beef is with Wally West, and not with Barry, meaning we've got a lot to learn about what has happened between our Flash and this version of Zoom.
What do you think of the big reveal? Do you have any new Zoom theories?