While Matt Letscher played the original version of Eobard Thawne, a.k.a. Reverse-Flash, Tom Cavanagh had significantly more screen time as the character on The Flash thanks to the evil speedster stealing Harrison Wells’ likeness. Despite Cavanagh’s Thawne dying in the Season 8 finale, we’ll see him one last time in The Flash series finale, titled “A New World, Part Four”… but what if it wasn’t actually the last time? Cavanagh has come up with an idea for another Flash spinoff, and it’s clear he’s poured a lot of thought into this.
Just a few weeks after The Flash brought its Reverse-Flash storyline full circle, Cavanagh’s Eobard Thawne is back in the final episode to antagonize Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen, thanks to his descendant, Eddie Thawne, who’s become Cobalt Blue and also brought back Zoom, Savitar and Godspeed to help cause trouble. Ahead of the episode airing, Tom Cavanagh chatted about his time on The Flash with TV Insider, and while recollecting about Season 1, he shared the following Reverse-Flash centric spinoff idea:
It was so exciting to be a part of it. And then when we were trying to figure out what to do when you’re invited back for a second season? You can’t have Reverse Flash versus Flash year after year because we did that story. And hence the idea of Wells. There were so many that I had in the back pocket, but around the era of, maybe it was Sherloque, I had this idea I took to Greg, that was basically ‘What if the villain, this Reverse Flash, falls for a civilian on planet Earth as he’s trying to get back to his own time and his own home?’ And how does that complicate matters? Like, does he become more languid and less villainous? Does he pay the price in pathos? Ultimately if you wanna step in and really dig in to tell a story like that, you can’t do it on The Flash because the television show is about The Flash. [Laughs].
For those who need a refresher, Eobard Thawne was stranded in the year 2000 immediately after he killed Barry Allen’s mom. As such, despite despising Barry with all his heart, he knew he’d need his nemesis’ super speed to get back home, so he killed Harrison Wells, took his likeness and accelerated the development of the S.T.A.R. Labs particle accelerator, which he then used in late 2013 to give Barry his powers and create Central City’s meta-humans. Per Cavanagh, sometime during The Flash Season 5, when Sherloque Wells was Team Flash’s resident Wells, he came up with this idea of Eobard falling in love with someone as he’s plotting and scheming how to escape his contemporary prison. It’s a storyline The Flash could have never delivered since it would take too much time away from focusing on Barry, hence why it would’ve been told in a spinoff.
Interviewer Damian Holbrook commended this idea, saying he liked it even more than “something set within the World of Wells,” i.e. centered on the numerous versions of Harrison Wells Tom Cavanagh played over The Flash’s first seven seasons. That led to the actor talking about how this spinoff would provide additional real estate to explore Eobard Thawne’s dark psyche, saying:
And here’s the thing about it, and you can understand this because you’ve been involved with the show: He’s not just the dark that you put the light in. He takes enjoyment out of his activity. The Reverse Flash does, Thawne does. He is up for it. He delights in it. He’s not filled with a rage that blinds him, right? He’s like, ‘If I’m going to blow up Central City and kill The Flash, by God, I’m gonna have a good time doing it.’ And I think that is a signature characteristic to the Reverse Flash. And then I think, if he is enjoyable to watch, then this is one of the reasons [to explore his story], because he delights in the anarchy and the mayhem. For somebody like that, who has a level of charisma to then embark on a different journey, even as a villain? That is something that people might watch.
As someone whose appreciation of Reverse-Flash increased as I watched The Flash, I would certainly be down to watch a spinoff about him, whether it utilized Cavanagh’s idea or went with a different angle. Unfortunately, taking into account The CW’s programming being radically overhauled, plus the plans in motion for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Universe franchise, the chances of this spinoff ever happening are almost certainly zero. That said, DC Comics should seriously consider having Cavanagh write this as a limited comic book series. It would give Arrowverse fans a little more time to spend with his version of Eobard Thawne and obviously be a lot less expensive to put together compared to a full-blown TV project.
The Flash series finale airs tonight at 8 pm ET, but not to worry, because along with there being plenty of other shows on the 2023 TV schedule worth looking into afterwards, there are many upcoming DC TV shows CinemaBlend will be covering as they progress down the creative pipeline.
