In this season of "The Flash," the show has unveiled a very interesting and confusing mystery surrounding the identity of Barry Allen's latest villain, Zoom. First, the evil speedster is revealed to be Jay Garrick, and then Jay Garrick is revealed to be Hunter Zolomon, who happens to look exactly like Jay Garrick? This is a bit of a head-scratcher, so I'm going to unravel the mystery of Jay Garrick and Hunter Zolomon on The Flash .
Well, let's dig a little deeper into what these reveals are, starting with what we learned about Hunter Zolomon's backstory in the latest episode of The Flash . It's here that we learn that Hunter is from Earth-2 and witnessed his father murder his mother as a child (a backstory surprisingly close to Barry's own), which led to him becoming a serial killer. Then, after becoming the Speedster, Hunter took on the role of hero Jay Garrick because it was "fun" -- and he presumably established his Zoom persona at the same time. However, Hunter is a bad guy and he wants more speed, so he starts trying out Velocity 6, which starts killing him. The Singularity then opens between Earth-2 and Earth-1, which launches him into a whole new world of speedsters whose speeds he needs to steal in order to survive.
This is where things start to get tricky. After the Singularity opened in the show's season 1 finale, Hunter traveled to Earth-1 to spy on their version of The Flash. However, when Hunter realizes that Barry doesn't have enough speed, he reprises his role as Jay to infiltrate the STAR Labs team and help Barry become stronger. All was going well until Caitlin delved into Hunter's health and realized he was dying, then delved into Jay Garrick's Earth-1 doppelgänger and realized he didn't exist. Hunter is now ahead of Caitlin, showing her the Earth-1 version of Hunter Zolomon, attributing the different names to the differences in their universes.
Still here with me? Because things are about to get trickier. As Barry, Cisco, and Harrison Wells travel to Earth-2, Hunter realizes he can't be in two places at once, and travels back in time to capture a previous version of himself, taking on the role of Earth-1 Up Jay's character - the hunter/Zoom later kills him through the breach - leaving him free to become a Zoom on Earth-2. So, basically, Jay Garrick doesn't really exist on The Flash. As far as we know so far, it's always been some version of the Hunter. However, that doesn't mean we don't get to see the real Jay Garrick in The Flash .
After fans reacted negatively to the news that the Jay we saw in The Flash was always evil (because it went against the comic book tradition of the character), executive producer Greg Berlanti Twitter said the show will never make Jay evil. So, it looks like we'll be seeing the real Jay Garrick step up in The Flash , and I doubt we've actually seen him before. Remember the man in the iron mask who was imprisoned in the speed lair on Earth-2? He typed out the name "Jay" to Barry, who seemed to become frustrated when Barry assured Jay that he was safe on Earth-1. Maybe the man is referring to himself, and if he is, given the headgear Zoom chose for the prisoner, we might assume Jay looks the same as Hunter Zolomon.
Of course, this brings up a whole new set of problems. For example, if Jay Garrick is a real person on Earth-2, does that mean Hunter stole his identity, and if so, why do they look exactly the same? Or, if Jay Garrick exists on Earth-2, why doesn't he exist on Earth-1? Unfortunately, the mystery of Hunter and Jay doesn't seem to be fully solved just yet, so we'll have to keep watching The Flash to figure out how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Photo: Diyah Pera, Cate Cameron/The CW
