To date, The Flash certainly hasn’t shied away from its comic book roots. Sure, it may be its own beast, but its embracing of the source material, among other things, has allowed it to flourish in a way that not many other superhero shows have been able to.
As you may be aware, the season 4 premiere is actually titled “The Flash Reborn,” which’ll no doubt cause devout readers of the comics to recall Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver’s modern classic, The Flash: Rebirth. And, believe it or not, the producers very nearly titled the premiere just that, but had a very sound reason to pull it back it bit.
Here’s what executive producer Andrew Kreisberg had to say regarding that subject when recently speaking with Entertainment Weekly:
“We were actually going to call it Rebirth, and then realized everybody was going to think we were doing Rebirth, which is why we changed it to ‘The Flash Reborn’. These first three years were really about growing up and now they’re all adults, which is both good and bad. They’ve all become pretty expert at what they do and they’re not as wide-eyed about everything that’s happening to them. For Barry and Iris, they are finally going to get married this season and then it’s going to be: Can they stay married with everything that’s coming up against them?”
So, even though we know to expect some changes be made to Barry Allen, it’s very understandable why Kreisberg and company wouldn’t want to be too on the nose. Aside from the aforementioned story arc that was actually titled “Rebirth,” fans may also have thought they were riffing off the currently running Rebirth era of DC Comics, especially the Lightning Strikes Twice arc that kicked off the Scarlet Speedster’s latest line of adventures.
Furthermore, said arc began with a Speed Force lightning storm not unlike what we saw at the end of season 3. But in the books, that disaster imbued citizens of Central City with powers of their own, and we don’t know if that’ll happen on the show. If so, it’d be comparable to Smallville‘s second meteor shower, but it also gave birth to the villainous Godspeed – and we’ve already been told not to expect any more evil speedsters.
The Flash returns for its fourth season on Tuesday, October 10 on The CW.
