The Arrowverse has become a complex web of timelines, TV shows, and crossover events. Barry
Allen, star of The Flash, is a wonderful entry point into this shared universe, having started
on Arrow and become a headlining hero in his own right. This is his story, from beginning to end.
By all accounts, Barry Allen had an ideal childhood. His memories of it are filled
with watching old musicals with his mother, Nora, and traveling to museums with his father, Henry.
That would all change on March 18, 2000, when Nora was killed by an inexplicable phenomenon.
Barry, startled by a commotion downstairs,
discovered his mother surrounded by strange streaks of red and yellow lightning.
He briefly made out a man in yellow, tearing through the room at impossible speeds.
When his father told him to run, Barry took off... and suddenly found himself several blocks away.
By the time Barry made it back to his home, his father was being dragged away in handcuffs and
his mother was dead. Barry went to live with the family of his closest friend, where his
budding interest in science became a full-blown obsession. Though he couldn't prove his father
was innocent on his own, he knew there had to be a way to exonerate him with concrete evidence.
He dedicated the rest of his schooling to studying physics, chemistry, and criminology.
Barry inhabits the Arrowverse, the CW's live-action superhero canon. This shared
universe began with Arrow, a 2012 series centered around Oliver Queen, AKA Green Arrow.
Barry's beginning in the Arrowverse arrives in the second season Arrow episode "The Scientist."
"Who the hell are you?" "And do your parents
know you're here?" "I'm Barry Allen."
By this point in his life, Barry Allen has become a criminologist
still deeply troubled by his mother's death. He travels to Star City
in the hopes of meeting his idol, Green Arrow. He lies his way onto his team,
pretending to be working a case on behalf of Central City's police department.
While there, he impresses Green Arrow by correctly figuring out a lot of
information about the way the masked vigilante operates. Barry's story eventually falls apart,
however, forcing him to reveal that he's looking to work on supernatural
cases. If he can prove a case to be the work of things beyond our current comprehension,
he believes he'll be able to exonerate his father and solve his mother's murder. After
solving a cold case and saving Green Arrow's life, Allen hops a train back to Central City.
After his adventures on Arrow, Barry Allen's standalone story truly begins. On that train
back to Central City, he meets fellow physicist Martin Stein, and the two quickly bond over their
shared interest in a particle accelerator project being run out of S.T.A.R. Labs.
"They say it's gonna change the world." "I hope so."
Even as Barry carries on his work as a crime scene investigator,
he can't shake the idea of the work being done by S.T.A.R.
Barry's fixation is understandable - the particle accelerator promises to reveal undiscovered realms
of science. Since he has dedicated his life to solving the mystery of his mother's death,
any grand expansion of scientific understanding is of interest to Barry.
He didn't need to be enamored with the accelerator for what came next, however:
The massive machine explodes, sending a shockwave across the city.
Barry is struck by lightning through a nearby window and falls into a coma.
When he is hospitalized, the staff notice all sorts of strange phenomena, including a
constant flat-lining that has no ill effect upon him. The mind behind S.T.A.R. Labs' accelerator,
Dr. Harrison Wells, realizes that Barry's heart is beating too fast to register on
hospital equipment. When it becomes clear that they are dealing with something entirely
out of the ordinary, a comatose Barry is moved to S.T.A.R. for closer observation.
Barry wakes after nine comatose months, and quickly discovers that something is wrong
with him. He heals from injuries rapidly, and begins experiencing time dilation.
Moments slow down as his perception heightens to impossible speed.
He runs, realizes that he's been given the gift of super-speed, and sets about testing
the limits of his new powers. In the course of figuring out what's going on with him,
Barry realizes that he's not alone in possessing superpowers. In the wake of the accelerator's
explosion, all sorts of Central City criminals have developed extraordinary abilities.
Barry comes to grips with his powers, and begins to solve crimes and foil villains in
Central City as the Flash. As he uncovers more and more about the fallout of the explosion,
he begins to suspect that Dr. Harrison Wells is not who he seems.
"I don't know how, but he's the man in yellow. Harrison Wells is the Reverse-Flash."
Everything comes to a head when Barry's adoptive father Joe West
and his S.T.A.R. Labs' associate Cisco Ramon uncover Harrison Wells' body.
Barry's crew heads to the lab and discover "Harrison Wells" to be a false persona.
"This isn't possible." "Caitlin,
I ran the DNA test twice. It's a perfect match."
They uncover a secret room containing the yellow costume of the man Barry
saw the night his mother died, as well as a news clipping from 2024.
The team works out that Wells is someone from the future:
Eobard Thawne, a villain known as Reverse-Flash, who regularly battles the Flash in his own time.
He goes back to Barry's timeline to kill him as a child, but is thwarted by a future version of
the Flash, and ends up stuck in the past. He took on Wells' identity to guide the lab toward making
the particle accelerator. The explosion was an intentional event to create the Flash, so that he
might harness Barry's abilities to return to his own time. After several fights between Eobard and
Barry, police detective Eddie Thawne realizes that he can stop Eobard from ever existing.
Since Eobard is a direct descendant of Eddie,
Eddie knows that killing himself would cause Eobard to wink out of existence.
Eddie shoots himself with his service pistol, and Eobard disappears.
"I've controlled your life for so long, Barry. How will you get along without me?"
The second season of The Flash gives Barry a new nemesis. Like Eobard, he disguises
himself as a friend, despite actually being from another time and place. He is Hunter Zolomon,
and he has traveled to Barry's dimension through a rift created by Eobard's disappearance.
Zolomon comes from another Earth, where he is a serial killer obsessed with making himself fast.
He has traveled to Barry's Earth in order to harvest his speed energy.
He disguises himself as Jay Garrick, a Flash from yet another timeline, and befriends Barry.
All the while, he acts as the villainous Zoom, giving Barry a reason to hone his powers - a
process Jay helps with, naturally. Zolomon manages to call forth a time remnant of himself so that
Barry can see it die. Believing that his mentor has been killed, Barry trains all the harder.
Eventually, the S.T.A.R. Labs team learns of Zolomon's true identity, leading to a showdown
between Zoom and the Flash. He kills Flash's father, Henry, and attempts to destroy the
entire multiverse, but Barry outsmarts him using the same time remnant trick Zoom used on him.
Time Wraiths pull Zoom out of the universe and trap him within the Speed Force.
Barry's entire life has been driven up to this point by the dream of obtaining justice for his
father. With his dad suddenly dead, Barry is completely unmoored. He simply cannot tolerate
any further suffering. He has lived his life in pursuit of one goal - righting the wrong that
has kept his living parent separated from him - and that goal has been snatched away.
"I feel more broken than I've ever felt in my entire life."
In spite of all he's learned about timeline meddling being dangerous,
Barry runs back to the night his mother died and saves her life.
He then beats Reverse-Flash unconscious and uses a dampening cage to trap him in a prison in 2016.
In this newly altered timeline, Barry begins to lose the memories of his former life.
Surprisingly, Barry is still an investigator, living a happy life with his family fully intact,
pursuing a relationship with his childhood friend, Iris.
Despite the seeming peace of this reality, all is not well. Barry's treks around Central City
make him realize that his friends are suffering. Iris' younger brother Wally West becomes the Flash
in Barry's absence, but with nowhere near the same level of support. Without the backing of
a team like S.T.A.R. Labs, Wally runs himself ragged fighting a villain called the Rival.
Barry agrees to help Wally where he can, but eventually sees that it is no use.
After Wally is seriously hurt while fighting, Barry is faced with a terrible choice.
He can reset the timeline by freeing Reverse-Flash to kill his mother, or he can allow his friends
to continue suffering in the new world he has wrought. Barry makes the choice you'd expect of
a hero, taking Reverse-Flash back to the past. He accepts that injustice to prevent a greater one.
Once the timeline is restored, however, not everything is back to where it once belonged.
Relationships have changed, and fragments from Flashpoint begin to find their way into Barry's world.
Season three of The Flash had perhaps the most-confusing villain in the history of the series.
Savitar was a time remnant, a sort of speedster super glue that works to stick
together the space-time continuum whenever a Speed Force user smashes it to bits with all their time
travel. Savitar exists in a paradoxical time loop. Essentially, by killing Iris,
Savitar sets into motion the creation of the time remnant that will eventually become Savitar.
"And I only need two more things:
for Iris to die, so that you can be driven so far into the dark that I can be born."
In order to save his future wife, Barry and his friends enlist the help of Earth-3's Flash,
Jay Garrick, to defeat Savitar once and for all.
Barry and Iris finally take their marriage vows during the fourth season of The Flash,
but the ceremony actually starts in a season 3 Supergirl episode. Friends of the bride and
groom are at the proceedings when it's interrupted by an assault from the villains of Earth-X — an
alternate Earth where the Axis Powers won World War II and subsequently conquered the globe. The
attack heralds the fourth of the Arrowverse's annual crossover events, "Crisis on Earth-X."
The leaders of the "New Reichsmen" include evil counterparts to the Arrowverse heroes,
like Dark Arrow Oliver Queen, and his wife Overgirl, Earth-X's answer to Supergirl. Barry and
many of the other Arrowverse heroes are captured and placed in Earth-X's concentration camps.
With the help of the Earth-X heroes the Freedom Fighters,
Barry and the other heroes are rescued. Tragically,
Martin Stein is mortally wounded while trying to open a portal back to Earth-1 and later dies.
After the heroes drive back the Earth-X assault,
the wedding of Barry and Iris is finally made official.
The Flash's fourth season introduces a slew of new baddies, all created by a single mastermind.
When Barry confronts this head honcho, he finds a dying man in a wheelchair
named Clifford DeVoe. He underestimates the man, and Barry is framed for his murder.
DeVoe transfers his consciousness into the body of one of the metahumans he created. While in prison,
Barry and a number of other metahumans nearly get sold to a black market dealer in superpowers named
Amunet Black. Barry is eventually able to clear his name, and DeVoe continues to hop around the
bodies of those he created. The Flash and his friends set about warning his remaining progeny.
DeVoe reveals his plan: He hopes to use a series of satellites to permanently rewire every human
on Earth, a plot he calls "The Enlightenment." Barry teams up with Amunet Black, and they destroy
DeVoe's main satellite with a bomb procured via their connection to illegal markets.
DeVoe had planned for that eventuality, however. He takes over the satellite system at S.T.A.R.
Labs and initiates the Enlightenment. The Flash very nearly fails to stop DeVoe, but a new Speed
Force user named Nora appears and helps to stop the destruction. But Nora comes bearing bad news:
"I think I made a big, big mistake."
Nora tells Barry and Iris that she is their daughter from the future. She came back in
time to stop a new villain named Cicada, who is an unstoppable force in her own timeline.
It is revealed throughout the season,
as Barry and his allies attempt to mitigate the havoc being wreaked on the timeline,
that Nora is regularly traveling back into the future to work with the villainous Eobard Thawne.
The bad guy, it seems, has earned Nora's trust while imprisoned, and he's manipulated
her into traveling to the past to set in motion events that might set him free.
A magical dagger that holds Thawne captive in a prison of the future is destroyed in the past,
allowing him to break out of prison and reappear in the main timeline. The timeline-shifting
ends in Nora winking out of existence, leaving Barry and Iris without a daughter.
A lot of DC lore has come to the screen over the last few decades,
but until season 6 of The Flash, no one had attempted to take on Crisis on Infinite Earths.
As a villain known as the Anti-Monitor threatened to wipe out all existence on
the page, the landmark crossover comics event gave DC a clean slate by wiping out
the myriad parallel universes that had appeared to account for decades of continuity problems.
In creating a single, unified DC universe, countless iterations of
famous characters were killed. In the comics, this included Barry Allen,
who sacrificed himself in a move that allowed other heroes to defeat the Anti-Monitor.
Television's Arrowverse saw a similarly cataclysmic restart in season 6 of The
Flash — and viewers who only knew Barry through Grant Gustin's portrayal finally
came to understand the terms "pre-Crisis" and "post-Crisis."
Season 6 of The Flash begins with Barry learning that the
Crisis is coming sooner than Team Flash had hoped.
"December 10, 2019. On that day he will answer the call. And make the ultimate sacrifice."
It becomes clear that the Flash will die during the multiverse-wide shakeup, and
Barry begins preparing all of his friends, family and fellow crimefighters for a world without him.
At the same time, a villain called Bloodwork threatens Central City. Bloodwork is attempting
to find a cure for a deadly disease that runs in his family, but the treatment he found turned him
monstrous and filled him with a need for the blood of others to maintain an eternal life. At some
point, he realizes that his blood can effectively control others if it gets into their system,
and he sets out to create an army of "Blood Brothers." Bloodwork's quest for never-ending
life and Barry accepting his fate are played as mirrors of each other throughout the season,
even as Allen is infected and controlled by the villain. Bloodwork's master plan to
infect the entire city ultimately backfires, and all of his minions are returned to normal.
In their confrontation with the Anti-Monitor, another Flash named Barry Allen from a
different part of the multiverse ends up sacrificing himself to save existence.
Barry Allen does die, it turns out — just not the one who leads The Flash.
"Sorry kid. But this has to happen."
The season closes with Barry attempting to carry on in a newly created multiverse that only he and
a few other metahumans know is not the world as it was. His actions during the Crisis also destroy
the Speed Force, the borderline mystical reserve of energy from which speedsters pull their powers.
After the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, Barry and Wally learn the Speed Force is in
trouble. Confronting the Speed Force's human manifestation, Barry learns that when Oliver Queen
used his Spectre powers to get Barry back into the Speed Force during Crisis, it contaminated things.
The Speed Force seemingly dies, leaving Barry and Wally only weeks of residual speedster powers.
With the help of Nora West-Allen's diary, Team Flash builds an Artificial Speed Force
that Barry can access, but once again the cost is too high. Even though Nash Wells sacrifices
himself to power the ASF with his multiversal energy, Team Flash learns the ASF is causing
Barry's thinking to go as fast as his body, with catastrophic consequences to his personality.
Once Barry realizes what's happening to him, he disables the new source of his powers.
But with the help of the re-emerged Harrison Wells,
the residual Speed Force within Iris and the ASF,
Team Flash later succeeds in essentially rebooting the Speed Force, giving Barry back his powers.
On the night of the S.T.A.R. Labs particle accelerator explosion, Eva McCulloch is
killed as she's thrown into a mirror. The dark matter creates a mirror-universe duplicate of Eva
with all of her memories stuck in the Mirrorverse - a universe governed by different physical laws.
The new Mirror Eva tricks Iris into allowing herself to be pulled into the Mirrorverse,
while a mirror duplicate of Iris replaces her on Earth-Prime.
After also capturing and creating duplicates of Singh and Cisco's girlfriend Kamilla,
Eva, now calling herself MIrror Monarch, finally escapes to Earth-Prime.
Mirror Monarch plans to take over the globe by replacing everyone with mirror counterparts,
and Barry is distracted, dealing with the death of the Speed Force.
Once it's restored, Barry and Iris are able to stop Mirror Monarch's plans and make her see the
error of her ways. She returns Earth-Prime's people and retreats to the Mirrorverse.
But it's clear that Mirror Monarch has left a dark scar on Central City. Iris joins a support
group founded specifically to help those who were abducted and traumatized by the villain.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Looper videos about your favorite Arrowverse heroes are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.