Last night's The Flash wasn't a particularly memorable installment – among other things, it brought over Diggle from Arrow and then didn't really let him enjoy himself, which is the whole point of these crossovers – but it did finally unmask Zoom, and I have a few thoughts on that coming up just as soon as I get to be Quint…
So Zoom is Jay Garrick.
But which one?
When you're dealing with parallel realities, and when you've gone to the trouble of introducing two versions of the same guy – one of whom has the same name as the alter ego of a version of Zoom from the comics – this becomes a reasonable question.
There had been so many fan theories about Jay being Zoom, or Jay being the Man in the Iron Mask, or somehow both, that I spent a lot of last week's episode tracking when Jay took a “nap” on Earth-1 and whether we would see Zoom on Earth-2 during those times. Sometimes, there was overlap; at others, Jay was up and around and doing stuff with Caitlin at the exact moment we were seeing Zoom on the other earth. The simplest explanation is that Zoom is Hunter Zolomon, who for supervillain reasons traveled to another universe to inflict punishment on his doppelganger, that the Jay Garrick who's been kissing Caitlin was on the up-and-up, and is now dead (or Zoom's prisoner), etc.
But this is a show that deals with time travel and alternate timelines in addition to parallel worlds, which means that Zoom could be the Good Jay of the future, or of an alternate timeline, and that the prisoner in the mask could somehow also be Jay, and the whole thing could be a DC Comics riff on All You Zombies.
None of these answers is hugely appealing to me, because Jay has been so forgettable. Maybe this turns out to be an Angelus on Buffy or Ward on Agents of SHIELD situation, where a previously bland character becomes much better when the actor's allowed to play evil instead of sincere hero, but despite my deep affection for comic book Jay Garrick, nothing about the show's take on Jay has been of interest so far. The only major emotional fallout of the villain turning out to either be Jay or his doppelganger is that it's going to upset Caitlin, which doesn't have nearly the same resonance of the team discovering last year that Professor Wells was really the Reverse-Flash.
Also note that season 1 revealed this much sooner – and, even before that, gave us plenty of reasons to suspect Wells of being bad in some way – which ultimately hit much harder than this did. The Reverse-Flash arc was always going to be a tough act to follow, which is why the show might have been better off doing something very different this year, rather than jumping straight into this Zoom arc. This season's been an improvement in some ways, like having Iris in the loop and part of Team Flash the whole time, but the unmasking of the new big bad probably shouldn't be eliciting a shrug.
What did everybody else think?