SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for The Flash #50 by Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter, Hi-Fi and Steve Wands, on sale now.


Sometimes, a unique power, gift or ability becomes so overused that it becomes more of a trope than a special event, and that can lead to creators deciding to tone it down or even take it away to force characters to no longer rely on it in every situation. Secret War took Nick Fury off the board for this reason, and the semi-recent “The Truth” series of storylines in the Superman books did the same with most of the character’s powers, to show us why he’s still Superman without being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

This week’s milestone The Flash #50 does this not just for Barry Allen, but for every DC character with access to the Speed Force, taking away a key ability which speedsters have become over-reliant on in the past decade or two. With so much going on in "Flash War," it’s easy to miss the importance of this monumental change, but the destruction of the Force Barrier has already led to some major knock-on effects for the rest of the DC Universe, and this new change will surely only make things worse.

RELATED: The Flash #50 Features The Return Of A Fan-Favorite Speedster (Finally!)

Back To The Future

Hunter Zolomon tricked Wally West into breaking the Speed Force Barrier in order to unlock the powers of the hidden Strength and Sage Forces, taking on the mantle of The Flash for himself with the ability to access all three cosmic powers. Though the Flashes are able to defeat him for now — he’s still out there, waiting to attack again at any moment — their adventure through Hypertime has led to a disastrous knock-on effect; the Speed Force is now detached from the space-time continuum, meaning there is no temporal energy in the Speed Force and speedsters can no longer travel through time at their will.

RELATED: What Does Flash Wars' Major Return Mean for Barry, Wally & the DC Universe?

The new status quo is a shocking one for the Flash Family, who have become used to going up and down the timeline of the DC Universe as easily as they go up and down a busy city street. Wally West’s link to the Pre-Flashpoint timeline allowed him to channel temporal energy into attacks which cut Zoom off from his connection to Hypertime, but it seems that in doing so he’s cut off all speedsters from the extra-dimensional timestream.

In the present, this means that time-travelers like Commander Cold of The Renegades are stranded from their home time, but it also has major knock-on effects that have already led to the destruction of the twenty-fifth century as we know it and unleashed a potentially multiversal-scale villain with a massive grudge against the Flashes.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='The%20Flash%27s%20history%20of%20time-travel']



Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey

The Flash has been traveling through time for almost as long as he’s been in comics and originally he did this with the aid of The Cosmic Treadmill, which allowed him to harness his super-speed to power a time-machine and travel to any time in the history of the DC Universe.

The Cosmic Treadmill debuted in The Flash #125 — just two issues after the landmark “Flash of Two Worlds” story which reintroduced Jay Garrick — in a story which saw The Flash and Kid Flash travel to the far future and distant past in order to save the present from a destructive trace of aliens known as the Dokris using the Cosmic Treadmill, which Barry Allen himself invented and built because that's the sort of thing that happened in the Silver Age.

RELATED: A Third (And Brand New) Flash Enters The Flash War

The Cosmic Treadmill became standard over the years, though in more recent stories The Flash has been able to travel back and forth through time without it. Going back to the 1990s, Wally West often found himself stranded in an unfamiliar future due to running too fast, while the now-infamous Flashpoint saw Barry Allen race back in time in order to have his mother from the Reverse Flash, only to return to a dark and disturbing dystopia forged by his carelessness with time travel.

The Flash’s love of time travel has also become somewhat of a meme in regards to the television show, with the trope becoming so common that fans have started referring to Barry as engaging in a lewd act with the timestream as a reason why things are different or unpopular in the show.

Time Warp

Without access to time travel, The Flashes are forced to abandon a special ability which had admittedly become a crutch, and resign themselves to operating only in the present day. That’s going to be hard when Wally West knows that his children are out there somewhere in Hypertime and Commander Cold is desperate to get back to an era which he doesn’t know no longer exists.

There’s also the still present threat of Hunter Zolomon who is still at large and will only be more dangerous than ever now that he no longer has access to the timestream; Hunter hasn’t been forced to live linearly for some time, and it just may end up sending the already mad villain over the edge. Plus, Bart Allen is back in the present day, which is cause for celebration, but as a refugee from the 30th century, he may be somewhat perturbed to know that he can’t go visit his mother or friends in the Legion of Super-Heroes.

RELATED: Flash War Settles The Superman v Flash Debate Once And For All

The solicitations for upcoming issues of The Flash post-"Flash War" suggest that Barry Allen is heading deeper into the Multiverse to search for answers, with a trip scheduled at the House of Heroes which sits at the center of all creation. Barry recently visited the House of Heroes in Dark Nights: Metal and knows that if anyone can fix the damage done to the Force Barrier, it might be the multiversal heroes of Operation: Justice Incarnate and The Flashes of Infinite Earths. Combined with the problems of the Still Force and the six other hidden forces present in Justice League at the moment, it’s a bad time to be The Flash and things are only going to get so much worse before they get better.