Barry Allen’s superhero career on The Flash hasn’t even lasted a year, but he’s already teamed up with heroes like The Arrow, Firestorm and The Atom. And what's more, a preview for next week’s episode “The Trap” hints that Barry will have a future with DC’s most famous superhero team: the Justice League. Take a look at the comic page below to catch the name drop.
If you don’t regularly follow The Flash’s social media accounts, they put up an illustrated version of a scene from the upcoming episode on a weekly basis. This week, we follow up on Barry, Cisco and Caitlin in Harrison Wells’ future room, which is wear he hangs up his Reverse-Flash suit and hatches sinister plans. While looking around, Wells’ A.I. Gideon turns on and welcomes Barry. He is surprised that she knows him, which prompts her to start listing his future accomplishments. After saying he is the director of the Central City Police Department’s CSI division, she states he is a “founding member of the Justice…,” but is cut off before finishing.
Although time travel plays a huge role in the series, there’s little that fans know about what’s in store for Barry. The episode “Tricksters” showed a future Barry traveling back in time to stop Reverse-Flash from killing his younger self. There is also the newspaper that Wells frequently looks at from the year 2024 that states Flash disappears during a mysterious crisis. Evidently, at some point Barry will also help form DC Comics’ premiere team of superheroes, who have been joining forces to keep the world safe since 1960. Although the team’s origins has been retconned many times, Flash is frequently included as one of its first members.
One thing worth considering is whether the TV team actually will be called the Justice League, considering what’s coming up in the DC Cinematic Universe. Justice League Part One is hitting theaters in 2017, followed by Justice League Part Two, and given how certain characters seem to be limited to either the films or television - Flash being one of the few exceptions - it’s possible the film division may not want the TV division to use the name. If there is such a restriction, The Flash and Arrow can get around that by calling their group the Justice Society, the superhero team that preceded the League in the 1940s.
Regardless, if/when we actually see the Justice League/Society form in the DC TV universe, don’t expect its lineup to match common ones from the comic books. Oliver Queen would likely also be one of its founding members, and other members would range from Black Canary to Firestorm, and maybe even a few heroes we haven’t met yet. With the expansive mythology these shows have managed to build, it’s only natural that eventually these protagonists would start to pal around with each other on a regular basis. We’ll be getting this to a degree in the Arrow/Flash spinoff should that project be green-lit, so things are looking good for DC superhero team-ups on TV.
