Even though Harrison Wells (both the original and the disguised Eobard Thawne) died in The Flash Season 1, fans haven’t seen the last of the S.T.A.R. Labs scientist. It was announced earlier this year that Tom Cavanagh will remain a main cast member in Season 2, leaving the question of how exactly he’ll be involved with the show. While there have been slight teases about this over the last several months, it’s now been confirmed that we will indeed be getting an alternate Harrison Wells in The Flash’s sophomore season, and his appearance will be explained through standard comic book science.
Executive producer Gabrielle Stanton told TV Line that fans should not expect to see the same kind of Harrison Wells in Season 2. Stanton said:
Harrison Wells will be back, but he's going to be a very different Harrison Wells than we've seen before...We've got other worlds. We've got other timelines. All I'm going to say is he's from one of those places.
During San Diego Comic-Con, series star Grant Gustin said that Harrison Wells’ survival would be connected to the multiverse, alluding that he’ll come from an alternate Earth. However, now it appears the creative team is being more secretive with where this version of Wells comes from. If the alternate Earth theory is correct, it’s likely this is the Wells from Earth 2, which is where speedster Jay Garrick lives (although the outlet curiously notes Jay as coming from the past in today’s scoop). If that’s the case, then any number of things could have happened to Wells that took him on a different path from the one the audience knows. He may not even be quite the genius that the Earth One (a.k.a. The Flash’s main Earth) Wells was.
However, if the new Wells comes from another timeline, it’s possible this would be the same Wells seen in the “Tricksters” flashbacks, but one who wasn’t killed by Eobard Thawne, a.k.a. Reverse-Flash, and went on to create S.T.A.R. Labs unimpeded with his fiancee Tess Mercer. Who knows, perhaps this is the same timeline where the Barry Allen that Eobard hated so much, the older Barry with the brighter red costume that signaled to our Barry not to save his mother in the Season 1 finale, comes from. Let’s just cross our fingers that the new Wells isn’t another disguised Eobard that somehow crossed into the main time stream; or even worse, the true identity of Zoom.
The Flash Season 2 will premiere on Tuesday, October 6 in its normal timeslot on The CW.
