Caffeinated Clint
On last night’s episode of “The Flash”, we finally – and I’m not just referring to the elongated bout between Killer Croc and the Star Labs crew that took up much of the episode – got to the bottom of the season’s most oft-asked question : Who is behind Zoom’s mask?
** Spoilers **
Turns out that Jay Garrick is Zoom – one incarnation of Garrick, anyway. We don’t quite know how this Garrick fits in though, considering the guy we know as Jay Garrick – from Earth 2 – is dead. Or is he? Jesus, even I’m flippin’ confused.
Earlier in the season, we saw an Earth-1 version of Garrick who went by the name of Hunter Zolomon. Andrew Kreiseberg, the show’s EP, tells EW that “He is Hunter Zolomon, a.k.a Jay Garrick. How all of that plays out and what’s actually happening, we’ll leave for after the break, but we wanted to go out on this run of episodes with a big reveal, just the same way we did at the end of episode 9 in season 1, where we revealed that Harrison Wells was the man in the yellow suit. Zoom’s identity is finally revealed.”
It’s an even larger betrayal than last year in some ways, because they’re all going to feel like they should’ve been inoculated against it. ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.’…They let this person in. Part of the reason he was able to do that was because there was a hole in the center of their group, and he knew that. He was able to step in because they wanted it so desperately. Barry was missing his mentor, Wells, and here comes Jay offering to be his mentor. Caitlin had lost Ronnie, and then here comes Jay offering to be her new knight in shinning armor.
For us, there was all of this great, delicious irony to the whole thing. It happens in a way that didn’t make them look stupid, that the reason he was able to manipulate them was because he was playing on their emotions. It wasn’t because they were gullible. They actually took precautions in the beginning – Barry locked him up right away – but all of them had that need for a center and for a new star to right their ships by. Jay’s one charming, smooth guy and he was able to manipulate them in that way.”
Apparently the identity of the man in the iron mask, trapped in Zoom’s cell, is an even bigger surprise (but I think we all know who that’ll turn out being).
It’s “an even bigger surprise than this one” says Kreisberg and the mystery will be one to “pull you through the season”.
The show is on hiatus until March 22 when it returns for it’s final few episodes of the season.
