This article contains spoilers for The Flash episode “Welcome to Earth 2.” Look away now if you are spoiler averse.
The Flash may have struck gold with its Earth 2 storyline. We’re getting a look at a lot of doppelgänger villains and good guys this way, making the show even more fun to watch. Tonight, Barry and Cisco traveled to Earth 2 with Wells to try and save Wells’ daughter, Jesse. We were treated to more cool doppelgänger bad guys, and one of them included Cisco’s double, who goes by Reverb. It turns out that Reverb has some awesome powers that Cisco has never imagined he could have.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, one of The Flash’s executive producers, Aaron Helbing, let a group of reporters in on what watching Reverb in action is going to do to Cisco.
Once you're exposed to something that's possible, once Cisco saw the magnitude of the powers that he's capable of, anything is possible now. We may explore that. Getting anyone to play a doppelgänger that's evil is in some ways the most fun you can have.
Right now Cisco, and his Vibe persona, can look into alternate time lines and universes. Cisco can’t completely control his power yet, but Wells has created a device that will hasten the process for him. So far, he’s been using his sporadic abilities to find out where criminals are hiding or about to strike next, or where innocent people are being kept by those criminals. But, Reverb is a different story. He has Cisco’s visions of different timelines and parallel worlds (and has been using those powers to spy on Cisco), but has grown into someone who can also shoot vibrational shock waves to battle the good guys.
Cisco is still getting used to the ability to glimpse those parallel universes; without the goggles that Wells created for him, his power is largely only of use when Cisco’s fear response has been triggered, so it’s pretty easy to see how Reverb would get to the young scientist. Cisco’s powers are currently only of help to those like Flash, someone with more active abilities who can get to the scene of a crime or help victims at a moment's notice. After seeing Reverb with powers that can be used for offense (pun intended) and defense, it’s inevitable that Cisco would want a piece of that for his own life, if for no other reason than to protect himself against the constant metahuman threat.
Now that Reverb has met his quick demise at the hands of a pissed-off Zoom, it’ll be interesting to see where they take Cisco next. There will be no rehabilitation for Reverb, so how will Cisco learn to hone his talents and end up as powerful as his Earth 2 self? Maybe he'll turn to Wells for help in getting stronger. Or, maybe he'll start trying to learn on his own, only to give up so that he doesn’t turn evil like Reverb. I suppose only time will tell.
