The Flash has the only movie multiverse that makes real sense, and I can prove it

The flash may not have rebooted the DC multiverse, but there’s one thing for it. Of all the multiverse movies out there – the Spider-Verse, Everything Everywhere Everything at once, Avengers: endgame, Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness – only one uses the best version of the multiverse ever invented by comics.

And that is not faint praise. The idea of ​​superheroes has been intertwined with parallel Earths for over 60 years. That’s 60 years of countless writers, editors, and artists exploring every narrative nook and cranny of that combination, with a correspondingly large number of conflicting explanations of how it all works.

Can you or can’t you time travel to change the past? What is the difference between a parallel universe and an alternate timeline? What the hell even is a “pocket size”? When comics sit down and try to flesh out the rules, it’s almost always prescriptive. But The flash‘s version of the multiverse, ripped from the pages of some of the most nerdy comics ever created descriptive.

Instead of prescribing how a superhero multiverse should work in an ideal setting, it takes a realistic look at how superhero multiverses work Actually work 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 how the protagonists of stories 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 specific reason (see: Spider-Verse). But forget teasing the difference between “parallel earth” and “alternate timeline” – in superhero cosmology they are essentially interchangeable. The “what if?” question itself includes the concept of linear time, and changes in the past that have an effect on the present. “What if this one thing was different? What would have happened after that?”

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

But in The flash, the idea of ​​cause and effect is thrown right out the window when Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne throws a bunch of cooked spaghetti on the table. He does this to explain how a relatively isolated change – The Flash’s mother was never killed – could have created a timeline where Batman was an entirely different person.

Timelines split into moments when things could have gone one way or another, says Bruce. But like limp spaghetti strands, they can also bend towards each other. Altering the past, The Flash flipped his timeline around until he hit a bunch of different spaghetti strands. Strands where Superman never made it to Earth, and Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly.

And that’s Hypertime, baby!

What is Hypertime?

Image: Mark Waid, Mike Zeck/DC Comics

Hypertime is a concept credited to comic book creators Mark Waid and Grant Morrison that attempts to explain the many conflicting versions of the DC Universe’s story.

Classically, fictionalized time travel likes to imagine time as an endlessly branching tree, with a branch for each way events could have happened differently. But Hypertime assumes that time is like an endlessly dividing river. And the thing about rivers is that they can flow back to himself.

A hypertime river fork might contain one river where little super-villain Catman met his untimely end in the belly of a hyper-intelligent gorilla, and one river where the whole gorilla thing was actually a metaphor/bad dream. The former river is something that actually happened in DC Comics. And you could say that the rivers flowed together again when writer Gail Simone decided to use Catman in her first book. Secret Six anyway miniseries.

And if the death of a minor villain is a minor stream, then parallel Earths with their own full histories are mighty rivers, with tributaries splitting and flowing back as characters and events are remembered, forgotten, prioritized, and deprioritized. Do we really need an explanation for why Cyclops’ eye rays set things on fire in this story, while we all know that they are canonically not incendiary? Can we just say we get a little power from the stream where Cyclops’ eyes shoot lasers instead of “beams of sheer power”?

“But!” you cry. “If the details of the setting are allowed to change without explanation, the reader becomes confused or loses interest because events don’t seem to stick or matter.”

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

Image: Mark Waid, Mike Zeck/DC Comics

This is the zen of long-running comics universes, which, until the very recent advent of digital offerings such as Marvel Unlimited and a healthy market for collected expenses, was a decades-long running story that was simply impossible to continue reading. Here’s what I tell people who are afraid they don’t know enough comic book continuity: do not worry about the.

At times, Batman is a man with five former Robins and three former Batgirls, and he almost married Catwoman once. At times, Batman has only had two Robins and one Batgirl and has almost married the Phantasm once. Sometimes Batman is an old man coming out of retirement and he has a Robin, who is a girl. Sometimes Batman is an old man who mentors a teenager named Terry to become the new Batman. Sometimes Batman is a Lego guy. And I think it’s pretty obvious that we all think that’s cool!

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

It may be technically true that today’s Magneto is the same Magneto that once went back to being a baby and had to grow up again. It may be technically true that the Punisher served in Vietnam. It may technically be true that a cosmic creep once impregnated Captain Marvel with himself, made her give birth to him, grew up in one day, and then brainwashed her into falling in love with him.

But you won’t find any Captain Marvel comic about that these days, because it was a horrible story that everyone desperately wants to pretend didn’t happen. Hypertime is the perfect version of the multiverse because it doesn’t describe linear continuity at all. It describes how superhero universes actually work.

Image: Mark Waid, Mike Zeck/DC Comics

Deep down, beneath all the promises, comic book continuity is forged by creative people who choose to use the bits they like and ignore the bits they don’t. The fundamental forces of cause and effect in comic book universes are not subatomic; they are just creative decisions. That’s why Hypertime is particularly perfect for a ‘universe’ of superheroes that is so loosely connected that it has almost no connections at all – like the films in Warner Bros.’ DC Movies stable.

Can Jason Momoa’s Aquaman hang out with the Batman played by Ben Affleck? What about Michael Keaton? George Clooney? Robert Pattinson? What about who they choose to star in Batman and Robin? If the story is good…does it really matter? That is perhaps the most powerful of all The flash introduction of Hypertime just before Warner Bros. takes things in a completely different direction. It doesn’t matter how the studio’s new multiverse works – be it parallel earths, alternate timelines or Elseworlds.

Hypertime – and that’s why The flash – includes them all.