The Arrowverse has many characters on its roster, but they have managed to handle them well. Everyone has their moments where they stumble, like Arrow‘s Laurel Lance for, well, most of the time. The cast and writers know what they are doing and ensure to do justice to the characters. However, one such character who stumbles is The Flash‘s Wally West.
Introduced in the middle of Season 2, Wally was the son of Joe West and Francine who was brought into the fold of the West family. Despite misgivings between him, Joe and his sister Iris, he becomes a member of the West inner circle. When the reveal of Wally was announced, fans went wild over the possibilities of him on this show.
But Wally found himself in the role Iris had held for most of Season 1: Forever drawn into a loop that is Central City’s metahuman problem, though not enough to be a part of Team Flash, though he should be. If we go back to Season 2, it is astounding how often Wally straddles the line between being part of Team Flash and also not, even while he is dating the daughter of a guy from another universe. In Season 3, this status had continued, though he had gotten speed powers of his own due to Barry’s Flashpoint meddling.
Keiynan Lonsdale plays him well, but Wally is saddled with being not so fairly regarded by the show.
Even when Barry was stuck in Speed Force jail and Wally took over as top speedster at the start of Season 4, the situation barely lasted long enough for it to feel like a real change before Barry returned to don the red and yellow again. The bottom line is, you could cut Wally out of the series entirely and, sadly, not a lot would change. In battles, he’s always conveniently knocked out or conveniently beat down, so he’s out of commission. As a result, when Wally decides to leave the show for a few episodes in the first half of Season 4, his departure is nowhere nearly as interesting or earned as the writers seem to believe. Then, when he does come back, he’s immediately sidelined in both the Crisis crossover and the previous week’s episode.
In some ways, it’s understandable that the series didn’t just jump into giving Wally superpowers — part of the show’s deal (and the Arrowverse in general, to an extent) is that the characters gradually grow into themselves. Then, when they take on their superhero identities, they aren’t wrestling with old baggage. That worked with Oliver Queen when he went from “the Hood” to “the Arrow” to “Green Arrow,” Sara Lance’s Black Canary shift to White Canary, and so on. The problem with Wally is that he doesn’t get those moments where he wrestles with his baggage, at least not on screen. When you look at how much time Team Flash has spent working on evolving its characters, from Cisco and Caitlin’s slow burns into Vibe and Killer Frost, the ratio is off in comparison. Even the show itself doesn’t seem to care much about him, with his lack of appearance in the midseason finale explained by a simple line: “He’s in Cambodia.”
On the bright side, there is a way to solve the Wally problem: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The Flash/Arrow spinoff has become, whether the writers would admit it or not, a home for characters that the other shows don’t have a good idea of what to do with. It’s a home for the Arrowverse’s outcasts and misfits, something that Wally has to feel like at this point. The Legends can help him matter in a way that being the “other speedster” really doesn’t. Luckily, the seeds for this have been set; Legends‘ season opener gave us a very brief scene where he was fighting crime with Steel (Nick Zano), and it’s implied that the two of them had been doing it for months since the Legends were forced to disband. If nothing else, Steel would vouch for him and welcome him with open arms.
Not hurting matters is the fact that the Legends are down two people as of the latest episode. With Martin Stein dead and Jefferson Jackson left to discover who he is without being Firestorm, the team could use another weirdo or two to fill the vacancies. Sure, Constantine and Citizen Cold will be hanging around the Waverider, but both of them are very clearly not permanent residents on the team. The Legends will eventually need someone to work on the ship to keep it running, so Wally’s background in mechanics would be helpful on that front. They could do worse than adding a young speedster to their ranks, that’s for sure, and he would provide some youthful energy that the Legends cast lack. Seeing him with Rory or Zari would definitely lead to some good banter.
Wally is a big part of Flash history, which is what makes it so frustrating that the show has treated him as an afterthought. Painful as it is to say, he’s dead weight on The Flash, so the Arrowverse may as well throw him in the world of another cast of characters to see how things shake up. Even if Legends doesn’t fix him and he ends up being even worse off there, trying to improve him would be better than doing nothing at all. Lonsdale is very clearly game to do more with this character, so the show needs to find a solution, and fast.
