Who is Zoom? My five choices (SPOILERS)

The biggest mystery of The Flash's second season is the identity of the main antagonist, Zoom. Who's under the mask? They haven't revealed his identity on the show yet, but apparently it's going to happen soon, so in the meantime, here's my five picks (four from Earth-2 and one who isn't) on who it might be.

Barry Allen

While our Barry's Earth-2 counterpart comes off as a total dork, he wouldn't be the first person to put on an act to hide an alter-ego. After all, one of the reasons why nobody suspects Clark Kent is Superman and Bruce Wayne is Batman is because they both put on acts that run counter to their superhero personas. Likewise, the Barry Allen of Earth-2 could easily be acting like a skittish dweeb to keep his double life as Zoom a secret.

It would also be dramatic as hell. Imagine The Flash coming face to face with himself. After all, they say that you are your own worst enemy.



Henry Allen

This would be purely for the shock value. Imagine Zoom pulling off his mask and it's Earth-2 Henry underneath! Imagine Barry having to spend the rest of the season wrestling with his emotions over having to fight and defeat a man who looks exactly like his father. Plus, it would be a nice shoutout to John Wesley Shipp's time as The Flash.

Of course there might be a tiny little problem with this. In "Welcome to Earth-2", Earth-1 Barry talks to his counterpart's mom on the phone and she mentions her and Barry's dad going on a trip to Atlantis for their anniversary. I'm assuming that its Henry she's going with, but on the other hand, what if it isn't? We don't know how different Nora and Henry Allen are on Earth-2, so they might not be married here and she was referring to a second husband.

Wally West

We haven't seen Wally's Earth-2 counterpart yet and that's what initially made me suspicious. Then I started thinking about it and realized that Wally and Zoom have something in common: Speed. They both want to go faster, so what if E-2 Wally's obsession with speed escalated? He became a speedster in the same accident that created the other metahumans or had gotten them later on. Either way, the speed gained still isn't enough and that's why he's trying to steal Barry's speed.

Hunter Zolomon

So this is one of the more interesting options. In the episode "Potential Energy", Caitlin discovers that Jay is slowly dying because of the loss of his speed. She comes up with a possible cure in the following episode, "The Reverse-Flash Returns" that involves replacing his damage cells with fresh ones from his Earth-1 counterpart, but unfortunately, can't find the counterpart and assumes Jay doesn't have one. Jay takes her to the park and shows that he does have one, but on this Earth his name is Hunter Zolomon, due to being adopted by a different family when his mother died.

Now, what's interesting here is that in the comics Hunter Zolomon is the name of...Zoom. Personally, I feel like this might be too on the nose and Zolomon is nothing more than a red herring meant to misdirect the comic book fans and people who google character names. Still, having a character who has the same name as the season's antagonist is something that can't simply be ignored. I'm also wondering if there's any significance to the book Zolomon is reading in the above picture. It's Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I've never read it, so I have no idea if there's a hidden clue there or not.

Jay Garrick

Oh yes, Jay is on the list, make no mistake about that. Why? For two reasons. Firstly, he has the same desire for speed as Zoom has. This led to him taking Velocity 6 in order to increase his speed. Secondly, he lied about how he lost his powers. He originally claimed that Zoom had stolen his powers the night that Jay was sucked into a breach and dumped on Earth-1. However, in "Welcome to Earth-2", he confessed to Caitlin that the loss of his powers was due to taking Velocity 6. It's a strange thing to lie about and caused Team Flash to focus on ways to make Barry faster in order to combat Zoom. Interestingly, Zoom wanted Barry to become faster before he'd take the Scarlet Speedster's speed for his own. Likewise, Jay was taking Velocity 6 because he wanted to be faster. That could easily just to have been from the desire to break the stalemate that existed between him and Zoom, but what if Jay became obsessed with truly being the Fastest Man Alive and when Velocity 6 didn't work out, decided to try other methods?

The question of course is how Jay knew about Earth-1 and Barry? In the season one finale, Barry experienced visions of future events while opening a breach to send Reverse-Flash back to his timeline. Did Jay have similar visions and saw E-1 Barry and how fast he was?

So who is Zoom? We'll just have to wait until he's unmasked to see if any of my choices are right. Hopefully they won't keep us waiting for much longer.

All pictures from the Arrowverse Wiki.