Summary
- The Flash Family faces complex changes as a new speedster with time-traveling powers unveils a dark future for the DC Universe.
- Inspector Pilgrim can navigate through his personal timeline, discovering a plot involving the Flash’s rogues and a cosmic crisis.
- While Pilgrim sees speedsters as the issue, collaboration with the Flash may be the key to saving the DC Universe from destruction.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Flash #7!The latest ‘speedster’ in Flash lore might not be able to travel the world faster than the speed of light, but he’s got an impressive skill nonetheless. The Flash Family’s corner of the DC Universe has gotten complicated and introduced several unbelievable changes.
From classic enemies returning with powerful upgrades to new layers of reality revealing themselves, the Flash’s world has become extremely complicated. All these changes have caught the attention of a new super-powered person with a vested interest in speedsters. He might not be able to run fast, but his power has revealed a dark and terrifying future for the DCU.
Inspector Pilgrim Can Speed Through His Personal Timeline
In The Flash #7 by Si Spurrier, Ramón Pérez, Sofie Dodgson, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Impulse and Max Mercury are trapped in a layer of existence Max has nicknamed ‘Ickto’. Both speedsters’ powers aren’t working as long as they’re in Ickto, and they’re being pursued by a pack of monstrous Uncoiled. Thankfully, before Max and Bart are torn apart, the duo is saved by the Linear Men, a subdivision of the Linear Bureau, an organization dedicated to protecting the stability of the DC Universe’s timeline.
..Pilgrim can travel up and down the timeline of his own life
Max Mercury and Impulse are taken to the Linear Bureau’s headquarters in a pocket dimension where they meet Inspector Pilgrim, a member of the Bureau’s Investigation Division. Pilgrim shows the two around and tells them that he’s a speedster as well. But rather than being able to travel fast, Pilgrim can travel up and down the timeline of his own life, calling himself “a speedster in the fourth dimension”. Unfortunately, where Pilgrim used to be able to travel several hundred years into the future, he now can’t travel more than a few months.
Inspector Pilgrim reveals that something has murdered the DC Universe’s future. Pilgrim reveals he discovered this while traversing through his personal timeline. After sliding up his timeline, Pilgrim was nearly destroyed by falling into an endless void of nothing. Thankfully, the Linear Bureau rescued Pilgrim and the extra-dimensional investigator determined a potential cause of the anomaly. Speedsters like the Flash and his loved ones are breaking reality, eventually causing the destabilization of the DC Universe and ultimately destroying the timeline.
How the Flash’s World Changed So Rapidly
The Flash has always been up for exploring the most bizarre parts of the DC Universe, but things got seriously weird during a fight with an upgraded Mirror Master. The Flash rogue used an atomic mirror to up his game and Wally West ran right through it to stop his now powerful foe. The crash caused Flash to see other dimensions that existed simultaneously with the DCU on different layers of reality. But Flash wasn’t just seeing these new realms, he was phasing into them.
Wally West developed his new power in
The Flash #800 (2023)
!
Around the same time as Flash began experiencing his new side-stepping power, West’s employer, Mister Terrific, began working with Inspector Pilgrim. Pilgrim pointed out that something was going wrong with the Speed Force and that the only way to save the universe was by potentially killing every speedster on the planet to survive. Pilgrim later appeared to Jai West and helped him get a better sense of his newly developed transportation powers. Meanwhile, the cosmic aberrations Flash encountered only continued to grow weirder.
Months after Wally’s new power developed, all hell broke loose when Flash discovered entities from the unseen layers of reality invading the topmost plane. Ghosts from the ‘spooky layer’ terrorized Wally’s children’s school while the monsters from the Blobsphere attacked people in London. Barry Allen teamed up with his former sidekick, but Barry was also under the influence of a strange cosmic phenomenon. Unbeknownst to the Scarlet Speedster, several Flash rogues were working with an unknown villain to unleash a terrifying weapon known as the Crown of Thawnes on the DC Universe.
How Inspector Pilgrim Stands Out from the Flash Family
The Flash Family is full of speedsters who have unconventional or odd twists to their powers. Wally’s son Jai was blessed with Speed Force-augmented strength, not to mention his recently developed ability to transport between speedsters. Some speedsters don’t even have natural powers but can access them through a scientific equation (namely Jesse Quick). Even Wally West has used his connection to the Speed Force to do things other than running fast, like create shields, clothing, and even bullets when the situation requires it.
While Inspector Pilgrim’s power isn’t a traditional speedster power, it helped him become aware of a serious problem facing the DCU.
But Inspector Pilgrim really stretches the idea of what being a ‘speedster’ means with his particular power. To his credit, he’s speaking more metaphorically, but it still works in a quantum sense. Flash can use his power to transport himself anywhere in a physical space. Inspector Pilgrim does the exact same thing, only through time rather than space. Not to mention, he’s got a considerable amount of time to work with (roughly two centuries). Or rather, he did before the DC Universe’s future was murdered.
While Inspector Pilgrim’s power isn’t a traditional speedster power, it helped him become aware of a serious problem facing the DCU. Something has gone seriously wrong in the timeline, almost certainly because of the Flash’s rogues and their Crown of Thawnes weapon. Had Inspector Pilgrim not nearly collided with the end of time, who knows how the Linear Bureau would have discovered the future destruction? The Flash might have god-level power at his fingertips, but Inspector Pilgrim’s power gave him insight that could ultimately save the DC Universe.
Can Inspector Pilgrim Work Together with the Flash?
Inspector Pilgrim’s ability to traverse his personal timeline has helped identify a key problem with the DCU. Unfortunately, he’s determined that speedsters are the problem and not the solution to the cosmic craziness going on. But despite his power and insight, Pilgrim is missing a key part, namely, the Flash’s rogues working with a greater power to destroy the timeline. While Inspector Pilgrim is dedicated to protecting history, his oversight is only going to do more harm than good. Hopefully, Flash and Inspector Pilgrim can find common ground and use their unique powers together to save the DC Universe.
The Flash #7 is available now from DC Comics.
|
The Flash #7 (2024) |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
