Spoilers below if you haven’t watched tonight’s episode of The Flash.As it goes with all comic book TV shows, certain names and images will pop up that fans instantly latch onto, though it’s almost never immediately clear if the reference is just a nice Easter egg or if it’s a major addition to the plot. That definitely happened during tonight’s episode of The Flash, “The Reverse-Flash Returns,” when Jay Garrick may have inadvertently led Caitlin to the secret identity of Zoom! Unless he didn’t! Let’s discuss things. Without his powers, Jay Garrick hasn’t exactly been an attention-grabbing presence here in Season 2, and his main revenge story boils down to a subtle kinship with Caitlin, who is now invested in saving Jay’s life. She takes it upon herself to try and track down Jay’s Earth 1 doppelgänger in the hopes of a DNA transfusion of some kind, but it turns out that wouldn’t help Jay much, since his DNA was mutated when he got his powers and wouldn’t be a match for a regular human’s DNA. But what if we’re not dealing with a regular human? As revealed in the episode, Jay’s Earth 1 double is a man named Hunter Zolomon, a name that comic fans know very well, since he’s Zoom in that medium. On the page, he was the son of a serial killer and a good friend to Kid Flash Wally West, though that relationship was destroyed after Zolomon was paralyzed in an attack and Wally refused to go back in time to avert the accident. Zolomon tried to do this himself using the Cosmic Treadmill, which resulted in him gaining his powers and turning evil. He was also the third incarnation of the Reverse-Flash, which makes his appearance in this episode all the more interesting, considering it also featured the show’s first incarnation, Eobard Thawne, arriving in Earth 1’s present for the first time.
