It might be easy to forget some of the crazy shit that went down towards the end of The Flash’s second season, but a new theory about the identity of Savitar, the so-called god of speed, has everything to do with Barry’s use of a time remnant in the big Season 2 finale in his race against Zoom.
Variations on the theory have circulated for months now, with perhaps the oldest coming from redditor BlupHox, who noted “the death scene [of the time remnant] strongly looks like the scene when Barry tried to get his power back.”
In the final battle against Zoom, Barry teamed up a copy of himself so that he could fight Zoom while the “time remnant” ran against the motion of the Magnetar to create an out of phase pulse that disabled the device, preventing it from destroying the Multiverse. That Flash’s body burns up and disintegrates amidst an explosion of yellow-red lightning. It looks like this:
Several episodes prior — in “Rupture” — Zoom had succeeded in taking all of Barry’s speed, and in an act of desperation, Team Flash recreates a smaller version of the particle accelerator explosion in an effort to give Barry his powers back. It seemingly doesn’t go super well. He’s vaporized, and though the team assumes he’s dead, he was actually absorbed into the Speed Force (near the 3:00 mark below is when it happens):
The two disintegrations look almost identical, which could mean that the time remnant used to stop the Magnetar might have similarly gotten absorbed into the Speed Force and quickly forgotten by his friends — or worse: Because Barry created Flashpoint that very night, that time remnant would have been truly trapped with nowhere to return even if it wanted to. It would be a version of Barry that spent his own eternity trapped while the other Barry got to live out his idyllic reality in Flashpoint.
This theory fits together nicely as a version of the prevailing assumption that Savitar is some version of Barry himself, whether it’s from the future or not. Savitar is privy to a LOT of personal information about the team from their shared past, present, and future. He also says at one point, “I created myself,” which could quite literally apply directly to this theory. Savitar is constantly going on about how Barry “took everything” from him: “Everything you took from me, I want it back. And I’m going to take it back. Then, I will destroy you.”
Perhaps Savitar is just that time remnant from the Season 2 finale — or any one of numerous others — that’s jealous enough of the main universe Barry that’d he’d spend an eternity trapped in the Speed Force dreaming of revenge.
It’s also worth noting that time remnants are the “remains, or ‘remnants’ of an aborted timeline,” which would include that future version of the Flash that battled with the Reverse-Flash on the night that Nora Allen died. When the main Barry created altered the events and created Flashpoint, did he erase that Barry’s timeline from existence, or did he just destroy the future he came from to create the most dangerous time remnant of all?
