The Flash: Hunter Zolomon in the show vs. the comics

On Tuesday’s episode of The Flash, there were finally some solid answers about the character of Zoom, but it also raised many more questions.

Note: This post deals with details from this week’s episode of The Flash, “Versus Zoom,” so Spoiler Alert.

It turns out that Jay Garrick was never really Jay Garrick. He was always Hunter Zolomon, an orphan serial killer from Earth-2 given the Speed Force when that Earth’s particle accelerator exploded. He takes on the name Zoom, but, Hunter Zolomon/Zoom in the show is much different from the character in the comics.

As a child, Hunter awoke in the middle of the night to his parents having a loud argument. He went downstairs and his father forced Hunter to watch as he killed his mother in front of him. Unlike Barry, who was taken in by the loving Wests, no relatives wanted to take in Hunter, so he grew up in a Dickensian orphanage.

He grew up to become a serial killer and was caught and locked up after murdering 23 people. During one of Hunter’s regular electroshock therapy sessions, the particle accelerator explosion happened and he was given the Speed Force, transforming into Zoom.

Zoom caught a glimpse of Earth-1 and the Flash, and that is when he devised his plan to steal the Flash’s speed. The reason for the Jay Garrick Flash charade? To give the people “hope” and then “rip it away from them.”

The “Jay Garrick” that was killed by Zoom? A time remnant of Hunter sent back to get close to the team and then get murdered to help the greater good of the plan. And Zoom succeeds in that plan as he kidnaps Wally to force Barry to give up his speed in order to save his newest family member.

In the comics, Hunter Zolomon is about to leave for college when his mother turns his father into the police for murdering six young girls. In a rage, his father murders his mother and Hunter becomes obsessed with understanding criminal behaviour.

He eventually gets a job in Keystone City as a profiler working for the police’s Department of Metahuman Hostilities. In this role, he works closely with the Flash — though at that time in the comics, Wally West is the Flash — and the two develop a great friendship.

When Gorilla Grodd stages a breakout at Iron Heights, Hunter is severely injured in the attack and left paralyzed from the waist down. He pleads with Wally to use the cosmic treadmill in the Flash Museum to go back in time to stop the attack and save his legs. Wally refuses to mess with the time stream, and Hunter takes it upon himself to break in and use the treadmill.

Instead of traveling to the past, Hunter sets off an explosion that gives him back the use of his legs but derails him from the timeline. This affects the way he can move through time, making it look like he has super-speed. But he is not a traditional speedster; he instead can manipulate time around him.

Hunter decides that the reason Wally refused to help him is because he had never known real tragedy in his life. He takes up the name Zoom and sets out to create tragedy in Wally’s life in the name of making Wally a better hero.

Zoom sets out to kill his former friend’s pregnant wife, Linda Park, but Wally is able to defeat Zoom by borrowing speed from other speedsters and using the time anomalies created by Zoom’s powers. The Flash forces Zoom into one of the rifts in the timeline, leaving Zoom comatose, though Linda has a miscarriage.

Zoom wakes up out of concern for his ex-wife after she is in a car accident, but Zoom decides to stay locked up until the events of the “Rogue War” storyline, where he is once again defeated by Wally’s Flash. He attempts again to kill Linda, but Wally is able to catch up to him and hit Zoom in the back, causing him to fall into a sonic boom created the first time Zoom tried to kill Linda. As Zoom is falling through time, his life flashes in front of him and he sees the errors of his ways, apologizing to Wally for all he had done. This also reversed the damage from the first encounter between Zoom and the Flash, causing Linda to have never had a miscarriage and still be pregnant with twins when Wally returns to the present … because comics.

The Hunter Zolomon version of Zoom rarely interacted with the Barry Allen version of the Flash, mostly being a villain while Wally West was the only Flash as Barry was briefly dead (again, comics!). He is also not tied to the Speed Force, so the plot of him wanting to steal speed would not happen in the comics. He is faster than the Flash because of the way that he can manipulate time around him.

The Flash has wrapped up one major mystery by answering many of the season’s biggest questions, but it still has many more to answer. Mostly, “Who is the real Jay Garrick?” and “Who is the man in the iron mask?”

There are five more episodes left this season to wrap everything up, with the season finale airing on May 24, on The CW at 8 pm ET.

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