How does The Flash fit into Warner Bros.? DC continuity? that’s not the case

The Lightning may not have restarted the DC Multiverse, but it does have one thing in common. Of all the multiverse movies out there – the Spider-Verse, Everything everywhere at once, Avengers: Endgame, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – There’s only one that uses the best version of the multiverse ever invented by comics.

And that’s no faint praise. The idea of ​​superheroes has been linked to the parallel earth for over 60 years. That’s 60 years, during which countless writers, editors, and artists have explored every narrative angle of this combination, with a correspondingly large number of conflicting explanations of how it all works.

Can you time travel or not to change the past? What is the difference between a parallel universe and an alternate timeline? What the heck is a “pocket dimension” anyway? When comic artists sit down and try to work out the rules, it’s almost always a rule. But The Lightningis the version of the multiverse pulled from the pages of some of the nerdiest comics of all time descriptive.

Rather than prescribing how a superhero multiverse should function in an ideal setting, it takes a realistic look at how superhero multiverses work Strictly speaking works in practice and adapts to it.

And it’s called Hypertime.

Wait don’t go, I promise Hypertime is cool

If you’ve read this far, you probably have an idea of ​​how the superhero multiverse works. A multiverse is a collection of universes, all of which are at least slightly different and never interact with each other. (Except for how the stories’ protagonists constantly interact with them.)

Some worlds are different because of something that happened in their past (see: Loki on Disney Plus). Some worlds are just different for no particular reason (see: Spider-Verse). Forget about working out the difference between “parallel earth” and “alternate timeline” though – in superhero cosmology they are essentially interchangeable. The “What if?” question itself involves the concept of linear time and the changes in the past affecting the present. “What if this one thing were different? What would have happened next?”

[Ed. note: The rest of this piece contains some minor spoilers for The Flash.]

But in The Lightning, the notion of cause and effect is thrown right out of whack when Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne throws a pile of cooked spaghetti onto a table. He does this to explain how a relatively isolated change – The Flash’s mother was never murdered – could have created a timeline where Batman was a completely different person.

Timelines split at moments where things could have gone either way, Bruce says. But like slack strings of spaghetti, they can also bend toward each other. Altering the past, The Flash spun his timeline around until it touched a series of different strands of spaghetti. Strands where Superman never made it to Earth and Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly.

And that’s hypertime, baby!

What is hypertime?

Hypertime is a concept credited to comics creators Mark Waid and Grant Morrison, intended to provide an explanation for the many conflicting versions of the DC Universe’s history.

Classically, fictionalized time travel likes to think of time as an endlessly branching tree, with a branch for each way events could have unfolded differently. But Hypertime assumes that time is like an endlessly branching river. And the great thing about rivers is that they can flow back in itself.

A hypertime river bifurcation might contain a river where little supervillain Catman met his untimely end in the belly of a hyper-intelligent gorilla, and a river where the whole gorilla thing was actually a metaphor/bad dream. The former river is a thing that really happened in DC Comics. And you could say that the rivers met again when author Gail Simone decided to use Catman in her first novel Secret Six Anyway, a miniseries.

And if a petty villain’s death is a minor stream, then parallel earths with their own complete histories are mighty rivers, tributaries forking and rejoining as characters and events are remembered, forgotten, prioritized, and downgraded. Do we really need an explanation as to why Cyclops’ eye rays set things on fire in this story when we all do knowledge that they are not canonically incendiary? Can we just say we get a little river out of the creek where Cyclops’ eyes fire lasers instead of “rays of pure power”?

“But!” you cry. “When the details of the setting are allowed to change without explanation, the reader will be confused or lose interest because the events may not seem to stick or matter.”

And I look down and whisper, “No. They won’t. Because you just described the experience of reading superhero comics.”

This is the zen of long-lived comic universes that it was until the recent advent of digital offerings Marvel Unlimited and a healthy market for collectiblesIt was a decade-long story that just couldn’t be read. Here’s what I say to people who fear they don’t know enough about comics continuity: Do not worry about it.

Sometimes Batman is a guy with five ex-Robins and three ex-Batgirls, and once he almost married Catwoman. Sometimes Batman only had two Robins and a Batgirl and once he almost married the Phantasm. Sometimes Batman is an old man coming out of retirement and has a Robin who is a girl. Sometimes Batman is an old man who helps a teenager named Terry become the new Batman. Sometimes Batman is a Lego guy. And I think it’s pretty clear that we’re okay with all of that!

Even if we’re just talking about the main DC Comics universe, Batman consisted of at least three different Batmans with three slightly different stories. And before Marvel Comics fans jump in here and tell me that Marvel doesn’t because Marvel doesn’t have reboots, Marvel’s lack of reboots arguably makes Hypertime an even better explanation of its continuity than DC’s.

Technically, it may be true that today’s Magneto is the same Magneto that was once regressed into a baby and had to grow up again. Technically, it may be true that the Punisher served in Vietnam. Technically, it may be true that a cosmic creep once got Captain Marvel pregnant with himself, let her give birth to him, grew up in a single day, and then brainwashed her into falling in love with him.

But these days not a single Captain Marvel comic will talk about it because it was a horrifying story that everyone is dying to pretend didn’t happen. Hypertime is the perfect version of the multiverse as it describes no linear continuity at all. It describes how superhero universes actually work.

Image: Mark Waid, Mike Zeck/DC Comics

Deep down, behind all the promises, comic book continuity is cemented by creative people choosing to use the bits they like and ignore the bits they don’t. The fundamental forces of cause and effect in comic universes are not subatomic; They’re just creative choices. Because of this, Hypertime lends itself particularly well to a superhero “universe” so loosely connected that there are almost no connections at all — like the Warner Bros. DC Films movies stable.

Can Jason Momoa’s Aquaman hang out with Ben Affleck’s Batman? What about Michael Keaton? George Clooney? Robert Pattinson? What about whoever they’re starring with? Batman and Robin? If the story is good… does it really matter? That’s perhaps the most powerful thing about it The Lightning The introduction of Hypertime just before Warner Bros. goes in a completely different direction. It doesn’t matter how the studio’s new multiverse works – whether it has parallel earths, alternate timelines, or other worlds.

Hypertime – and with it The Lightning – embraces them all.