While we still have a reasonably long wait for the seventh season of The Flash to arrive, information is starting to filter through about The CW show. Now the ostensible flagship of the Arrowverse since Arrow ended, The Flash will reportedly be delving into some surprising areas in its next year and the latest reveal is that John Wesley Shipp will be returning to the production to play Jay Garrick, although details of what this’ll involve are so far unclear.
This is good news for fans of the character, though, who appeared to be one of the casualties of the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” event, due to the reset of the Multiverse and the loss of the original Earth-3. Speaking to Den of Geek, Shipp revealed that showrunner Eric Wallace has discussed ways of bringing Garrick into the picture for new episodes, including his wife Joan (Michelle Harrison), saying:
“I know Jay Garrick is coming back to the CW show, but they were supposed to be at a further point in the story. They didn’t get to play out the end of season six because of COVID as we know, so they’ve got to tie up some things. Eric Wallace has said that he does want to talk to me about some ideas about Jay Garrick going forward. We know that Joan and Jay are on Earth-Prime. We’ll see what they come up with. My experience with this group is that they’ve given you every reason to have faith that whatever they come up with is going to be interesting and you’re going to want to play it.”
The note that Garrick and Joan are on Earth-Prime does throw up some intriguing continuity issues over the existence of multiple Flashes, and may provide some more retroactive links to the 1990 series with the character. When Garrick will appear is another question, though, given that the program will first have to resolve the open-ended storyline from the COVID-19-shortened sixth block of episodes, something that’s already being teased by The CW.
Of course, The Flash‘s frequent use of time travel, and the long-term effects of the Crisis mean that we could see many different permutations of Garrick, who presumably hasn’t yet had his memory of the loss of the Multiverse restored. For now, though, we’re just glad that we’ll get more of Shipp, despite him having a pretty great send-off earlier this year. Indeed, bringing back Garrick currently seems to be the least of the headaches for The Flash team, considering that Ralph Dibny’s recasting will still need to be explained.
