Just when you thought the mystery behind this character couldn't get any deeper, Tuesday's episode of The Flash revealed that Eobard Thawne killed Harrison Wells a full 15 years ago, and has been posing as the man ever since. We knew, of course, that Harrison had a wife named Tess Morgan who died in an accident. While it seemed a little too convenient at the time, it turns out she absolutely did die in an accident: one that Eobard Thawne intentionally set up so that Tess would die and Harrison Wells would live. After causing the crash, Eobard ignores Harrison's heartbreaking pleas to save his wife and instead pulls him out of the car. He reveals that the particle accelerator that created Barry wasn't slated to happen until 2020, but he needs it to happen sooner in order to get back to his time as quickly as possible — at which point he uses some gruesome device to take on Harrison's form, killing the real Harrison Wells in the process.
First off, my heart is literally snapping in half for the actual Harrison, because it looked like he and his wife Tess were truly in love. But this raises all sorts of questions about Eobard's intentions regarding the particle accelerator, and what happened in the original timeline, before he tampered with it. Was it the fact that he rushed the accelerator's creation what caused the widespread damage, or would it still have been this bad if he'd waited until 2020? What was so important that he had to kill Harrison right then, and not wait another six years? Presumably the future wouldn't be going anywhere while he stayed in the past, and six years doesn't seem like a long time to wait when you consider how much stress he is enduring trying to keep the future from changing now.
The saddest part is, it really looks like in the original timeline, Harrison Wells might actually have been the mentor that Barry, Caitlin, and Cisco deserve. But now that we know that he has truly been Eobard Thawne the entire time, it's clear that he never had good intentions towards any of them. Hopefully now that Barry is suspicious of him, it won't be too long before the truth is found out.
Image: Diyah Pera/The CW
