Throughout the previous four seasons of The Flash, Team Flash has collected different alternate reality versions of Harrison Wells like they’re Pokémon — each played by national treasure Tom Cavanagh — and the latest version of the character finally showed himself in the third episode of Season 5.
Cavanagh confirmed over the summer that his newest Season 5 Wells would be Harrison Sherloque Wells — not to be confused with “Sherlock.” Because even though this one’s supposedly a master detective obviously riffing on a Sherlock Holmes stereotype, this Sherloque is a French one (the third French Wells in the multiverse for those that are counting). At one point, an annoyed Cisco says Sherloque even smells like poutine, a delicious but stinky French Canadian dish involving french fries, cheese curds, and gravy.
So how does this new Wells find his way to Earth-1?
Spoilers for The Flash Season 5, Episode 3, “The Death of Vibe” follow.
Sherloque Wells likes tea on 'The Flash'.
After encountering Cicada for the first time last week, Team Flash is desperate to eliminate this latest threat as soon as meta-humanly possible. Nora gets the idea to enlist the help of Herr Wells, the German doppelganger that participated in Season 4’s interdimensional Council of Wells. He outsources the request to the (supposedly) most brilliant detective in the multiverse: Harrison Sherloque Wells.
Sherloque has the usual astute powers of observation ascribed to most iterations of Sherlock Holmes, immediately diagnosing Cisco’s heartbreak and which leg Barry favors. But he’s also a bit of a jokester and charlatan. Sherloque constantly belittles around him, especially poor Ralph Dibny, the only other self-proclaimed detective around that he calls a “baby giraffe.”
Sherloque charges an exorbitant fee to track down a terrorist named David Hersch. On any other Earth in the Arrowverse or in the comics, he would’ve been right, but because Nora messed with this timeline, Cicada has appeared years earlier than he was supposed to as a totally different person.
Sherloque Wells is a pompous and stylish interdimensional detective on 'The Flash'.
The so-called brilliant detective Sherloque travels the multiverse with knowledge of Hersch, exploiting interdimensional knowledge to solve the Cicada case repeatedly to make a lot of money. After failing to do the same on Earth-1, he immediately fails at faking his death after sending all his money back to his many ex-wives.
So does that make Sherloque more like H. Lothario Wells, the Texan Hugh Hefner knock-off, or H.R. Wells, the fiction author who once tricked Team Flash and pretended to be a famous scientist? For one thing, Sherloque loves tea about as much as H.R. loved coffee.
Despite Sherloque’s tricks, Team Flash decides to imprison him on Earth-1 indefinitely to work off his debt. It feels oddly archaic, but we’ll take any reason just to have Tom Cavanagh back on the show again.
The Flash Season 5 airs Tuesdays on The CW at 8 p.m. Eastern.
