'The Flash' Introduces Barry's New Foe, Zoom

Barry Allen managed to close the singularity over Central City on The Flash. That was the easy part. The hard part? Dealing with its aftermath. For Barry, that includes cleaning up the city he (sort of) destroyed, and it's also already brought him a brand new bad guy: Zoom. Who is Zoom on The Flash? I want to call him Professor Zoom, a DC Comics Flash villain, but we're not even at that point yet, since this is square one.

Let's start with who Zoom isn't: Eobard Thawne (and that includes Harrison Wells, too). Hopefully. Probably. Maybe? But then again, he could be, because everything seems to be fair game in the Flash universe right now.

Let's back up a second. The only thing we know about Zoom so far is that he promised metahuman Al Rothstein, aka Atom-Smasher, that he'd bring him "home" if he killed Barry. From this, we can deduce that Atom-Smasher is not from this world or timeline, and may possibly have ended up in this timeline after the singularity. It's likely that the same thing happened to Zoom.

That'd link up with the character established in the comics as Professor Zoom, but — and this is a huge but — in the comics, Zoom is actually Eobard Thawne. It's been firmly established that Eobard Thawne was Reverse-Flash, not Zoom. So you know what this means? Zoom could literally be anyone at this point in time, and the only person we can exclude is Eobard/Wells.

At Comic-Con this past year, showrunner Andrew Kreisberg confirmed that Zoom and Reverse-Flash are not one in the same, stating that, “[Zoom's] faster than the Reverse-Flash, faster than Flash and will be very hard to catch. He's going to be terrifying and scary and fast, and it's going to be all kinds of cool.” That still doesn't help us figure out just who he is, and if he's even a professor. Can you even get a masters in speeds?

If we are to follow the comics, Zoom really goes by the name Hunter Zolomon. But who is he? It seems that's what we're going to spend this season of The Flash trying to figure out. If you thought decoding Harrison Wells was tricky, get ready, because it sounds like Zoom is going to be even tougher.

Image: Cate Cameron /The CW