WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Flash #768, by Jeremy Adams, Brandon Peterson, Marco Santucci, David Lafuente, Mike Atiyeh, Arif Prianto, Luis Guerrero and Steve Wands, on sale now.
Wally West has had a rough go of things lately, ever since the start of the DC Rebirth era in 2016. Reeling from the loss of his past life, including the apparent erasure of his marriage to Linda Park and the loss of their two young children, an out-of-control Wally lashed out during the 2018 crossover event Heroes in Crisis.
And as Wally attempts to put his superhero career behind him at the start of the Infinite Frontier era and hang up his running shoes for good, his attempts at an early retirement leads to a cosmic adventure that feels reminiscent of the fan-favorite science fiction television series Quantum Leap.
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In order to retire, Wally and his longtime friend and mentor Barry Allen decide to embark on one last race, causing the Speed Force to open up and Barry to cut off Wally’s connection to the extra-dimensional source of his powers permanently. While the race begins according to plan, things quickly go off the rails as the Speed Force opens up between the two speedster superheroes, sending Wally hurtling through time and space, apparently in the prehistoric, filled with voracious dinosaurs and fiery volcanoes while Barry has been stripped of his powers back in present-day and unable to save his old protege.
As Wally acclimates to his paleontological surroundings, he discovers he hasn’t just been transported millions of years into the DC Universe’s past but that he has evidently possessed the body of a caveman native to the era with his own connection to the Speed Force. It’s unclear if this caveman had a connection to the Speed Force before Wally rode the lightning into prehistory, especially with a raptor similarly imbued with super-speed pursuing him, but the plot thickens as Wally runs so fast that he flings himself forward into time…only to find himself in the DCU’s far-future and in the body of his own protege Bart Allen, the speedster superhero Impulse.
Running for five seasons, Quantum Leap starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a theoretical physicist that developed a time machine prototype that catapulted him through time and space into random people’s bodies as he hoped that the would eventually be transported back to his own body in present-day. For Wally, his own “quantum leaps” appear to be linked to those connected to the Speed Force through time, able to trigger another jump by running headfirst into the Speed Force, finding himself in a different speedster as the heroes in present-day attempt to find a way to bring Wally back to them.
With the rest of the speedster superhero community robbed of their connection to the Speed Force, Wally’s adventures through time and space largely leave him alone on his own cosmic odyssey. But, in an added twist, this ordeal isn’t a simple matter of Wally in his own body traveling across time but possessing those in each time period he arrives in. And with Barry able to communicate with Wally through a device devised by Mister Terrific, Wally gets his own long-distance buddy in his time-travel adventures, not unlike Sam Beckett and Admiral Al Calavicci communicating with him through a hologram. Wally West wanted to get out of the superhero game but his retirement attempt sent him hurtling through time. And unlike Dr. Sam Beckett, hopefully, Wally will find a way to return home.
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