As it often happens with beloved sci-fi shows, fans of Battlestar Galactica continue to follow the entire cast from project to project, enjoying their performances in just about everything. So it's exciting to learn that Battlestar’s Aaron Douglas, who played Chief Galen Tyrol, is heading to Central City to play a villain on The Flash that could be one of Barry’s toughest side rogues, and one that has actually been a part of the show all along.
As The Turtle, Aaron Douglas will have the greatest power possible for a bad guy whose enemies have super speed: super-slowness. Well, he himself won’t be super-slow, but he has the power to slow time, and Team Flash will likely have a molasses of an experience trying to stop him. It doesn’t automatically sound like he’s an Earth 2 villain sent by Zoom to take Flash down, but the character was created as an antagonist for Jay Garrick, who’s from Earth 2 in the show, so we’ll just have to wait and see where The Turtle comes from.
The Turtle first battled Garrick’s Golden Age Flash in the 1940s, and while the character wasn’t one of the most memorable villains ever, he continued to pop up over the years. His successor called himself Turtle Man, and sometimes the names were interchangeable, while other times saw The Turtle using Turtle Man as his sidekick. Such is the comic book existence. We can probably expect this live-action version to use a few gadgets that mess with time to complement the metahuman powers, since speed-related things and technology are The Flash’s sci-fi bread and butter.
Now here’s the crazy part. According to executive producer Andrew Kreisberg, Cisco has been trying to track down The Turtle for ages. Here’s how he explained it to EW.
To Barry’s surprise, everybody knows about Cisco’s hunt for the great white whale, which is The Turtle; he’s the only one who didn’t know about it. We love the idea that there was a villain that they knew about, but they just haven’t bothered to tell the audience about yet.
Kreisberg went on to say that this is one of the best Flash episodes that they’ve put together yet, calling it “big and emotional.” The Flash has got a lot of story to get through in the rest of the season, including reintroducing viewers to returning villain Reverse-Flash and the first real appearance of Killer Frost, along with everything involving Harrison Wells’ daughter. But I’ll be perfectly happy if this does indeed feel like one of the best episodes.
Aaron Douglas, whose acting chops turned what was supposed to be a minimal role in Battlestar Galactica into one that lasted the entire duration of the Syfy hit, followed up on his Battlestar run with a leading role on the Canadian drama The Bridge and the CW comedy Hellcats. Since then, he’s Douglas remained frequently seen in genre projects like Hemlock Grove and The Returned, with appearances on the small screen in Eureka, The Strain and most recently in iZombie.
It feels like The Turtle has been using his power on our TVs during this long midseason hiatus. Thankfully, The Flash will return to The CW for the rest of Season 2 starting on Tuesday, January 19. To find out when the rest of your favorite shows are returning and premiering, check out our midseason TV schedule.
