| “ | Yeah, I might be in the suit doing all the running... but when I'm out there helping people, making a difference... you're all out there with me. Finally realized something, we were all struck by that lightning. | „ |
| ~ Barry Allen/The Flash in Season One episode two. |
| “ | I think... part of being a hero is being able to see the good in people. So yeah, maybe someday in the future... even Thawne could change. Besides, if we don't believe in people, who will? | „ |
| ~ Barry to his daughter, Nora. |
Bartholomew Henry "Barry" Allen, also known as The Flash, is the overall deuteragonist of the CW's Arrowverse series. He is the main protagonist of the 2014 CW series, The Flash and He's a scientist as the Criminal and Forensic Science Division of the Central City Police Department.
He's also the legal owner of S.T.A.R. Labs and is the secret leader of his own vigilante team, Team Flash. He is the leader of The Heroes team that includes Oliver Queen and Kara Danvers. He also makes guest appearances in Arrow, Supergirl and DC's Legends of Tomorrow.
He is portrayed by Grant Gustin, who also portrays his evil time remnant Savitar. Logan Williams and Liam Hughes played the character younger.
Powers and Abilities
- Speed Force Connection/Meta-Human Physiology: Barry's powers come from a connection to the Speed Force, gained when struck by dark matter lightning and exposed to various chemicals. This altered and supercharged his DNA, cells, and neurotransmitters, augmenting his physiology. With his bones, joints, and tissue all enhanced, he obtained a lean-muscular frame well-beyond peak human condition to easily handle the rigors of his powers. This includes resisting high-level friction, inertia, air pressure, reduced oxygen, vectors and kinetic impact. After regaining his powers from inside the Speed Force, his connection to and understanding of it increased considerably. With a new-found instinctual control and efficiency, Barry can perform more advanced abilities and improved his natural performance for much longer unhindered. After six months in the Speed Force, all Barry's capacities developed to exceedingly potent levels, reaching the highest known performance.
- Accelerated Healing Factor: Barry's molecules move at accelerated rates, mending damage far quicker and more efficiently than normal humans. Without treatment, most damage heals in hours if not minutes with no lingering signs. Even normally permanent damage, like paraplegia, is completely repaired in days. His body can break down food more efficiently than a regular human and, as a result, expels very little waste products that he can exhale through his skin. He recovers from in seconds if not is immune to any illness or contaminant. He even has a greater resilience to radiation, only suffering minor burns. 2,000 milligrams of horse tranquilizer only momentarily slowed him down until his body burned through it. This also enhances his vitality, drastically reducing his aging process while extending his health and longevity; in a potential 2024, Barry looked exactly the same as when first became the Flash.
- Bodily Vibration: Barry can vibrate his body for various effects. This can mask his form from being clearly perceived or distort his vocal cords to disguise his voice. His vibrations can forcibly expel any toxins in him. He can also generate enough heat to recover and stay thermally insulated from extreme cold. Offensively, he can vibrate his limbs to seamlessly grind through highly solid targets, which he can use to harm or kill a person, as he was tempted to do to Zoom and the Reverse-Flash. Alternatively, he can use this as a weapon by passing his punch through a person's body, incapacitating them as he did against Solovar. During his final fight against Savitar, Barry's efficiency could simultaneously shift the time remnant out of his armor and encase himself in it. He can also pass through one target while simultaneously making harmless contact with another.
- Intangibility: By vibrating his molecules at the frequency of air, Barry can physically pass through solid matter, even highly complex matter like carbine while in a universe of a different vibrational nature. He do this with multiple targets, saving an entire moving train and hundreds of passengers. He can also harmlessly pass through living individuals as he did to escape Atom Smasher's grasp.
- Invisibility: Barry can vibrate his body so fast that that he can no longer be perceived by the human eye. When Clifford DeVoe trapped Barry in a force-field prison that prevented the latter from phasing through it, Barry did this in order to "trick" Clifford DeVoe into releasing him.
- Seismokinesis: By vibrating at varying frequencies and with different levels of force, Barry can create small tremors to induce extreme amounts of jolt on any target he touches, even disrupt the inter-molecular bonds and cause it to shatter. This can lead to many effects such as molecular combustion upon physical contact with the target. His vibrations can even shatter targets into fragments, as he did to Savitar's armor once inside it.
- Electrokinesis: Barry can produce yellow electricity, his Speed Force energy, from his body. It is commonly seen when running. While mostly used to boost his speed to higher levels, it can be used in other ways. The intensity of it can interfere with the surrounding electronics and overwhelm electric-absorption, as seen from Blackout. He can focus the energy into specific body parts to produce a strong static shock on contact with the target. Taught by Hunter Zolomon, Barry can harness this electricity to repeatedly hurl lightning bolts to stun or repel enemies, and also electrify a surface. Barry can also absorb electricity from other sources, giving simultaneously giving him an extra boost when running or throwing lightning.
- Speed Force Sharing: Barry can expand his Speed Force aura to protect others he carries while moving at super speed. Taught by Jay Garrick, Barry can also siphon the speed from another speedster by absorbing some of their energy to bolster his own speed. After escaping from the Speed Force, Barry gained a much greater a understanding of his power, able to use it in more passive means. By touching others, he can temporarily share his energy, letting them move, think, and heal as fast as himself, as this let Jesse recover immediately from a coma. By channeling enough energy, others can independently move as speedsters without exhausting or affecting their own powers, until they burn through the borrowed energy. Barry is currently the only speedster known able to do so.
- Enhanced Strength: Barry's physical strength has been heightened beyond peak human capacities, greatly belying his slim built, allowing him to be able to carry multiple people at once while speeding away with them. When charging his momentum, he could smash through machinery with his bare hands or send opponents flying through the air without first running. He can even stop a moving car unaided.
- Superhuman Agility: Barry has demonstrated flawless coordination, equilibrium and dexterity. He can change direction with immediate sharp turns without sliding or losing balance and instantly stop running on the spot. He can jump and run along falling debris and launch himself tremendous distances without build-up.
- Superhuman Durability: Barry possesses inhuman resilience, most commonly seen from being unaffected by momentum build-up. He can take attacks and exertion, even survive impacts that would easily kill normal humans. While not invulnerable nor immune to pain, he withstood powerful lightning bolts, concussive shockwaves, sonic blasts and inhumanly strong strikes, only being momentarily stunned. After regaining his powers, his resilience increased, quickly rebounding from zombie-Girder's blows, who previously seriously injured him in a single blow. During the Earth-X invasion, Barry blocked bullets with his arm and took no damage.
- Superhuman Mental Process: Barry's powers also make his system and thought processing able to take in and retain information just as fast and efficiently. Even while using his raw speed, he can clearly think, react to events, and perform actions long before normal humans can perceive them. This lets him learn in a small fraction of the normal time, able to read and familiarize himself with Earth Two science within seconds. After six months in the Speed Force, Barry's brain activity became over 5 times faster than before.
- Superhuman Perceptions: Barry's senses are also enhanced. This allows Barry to perceive the world as if it is nearly frozen. He can see and hear normally, even while moving at speeds faster than sound, where this would normally be impossible. Barry became able to easily perceive the attacks of other powerful speedsters. This heightened alertness enables him to instantly read and adapt to the situation. His perception of time, however, seems to vary by his emotional state, as in one instance, when he was waiting to check out from work, he described it as feeling as if it were hours away, while in real time it was merely minutes.
- Superhuman Reflexes: Barry's reaction time is augmented to superhuman levels, allowing him to react to danger and events far faster than normal humans. When shot in the neck on his blindside, Barry caught the bullet and minimized the damage before it could fully penetrate his skin. He also became able to easily react to the attacks of other speedsters.
- Superhuman Speed: Barry can move at such vast speeds; Eobard Thawne claims Barry's speed is potentially limitless. He can run across vertical structures and ceilings, over stretching seas, effortlessly catch speeding projectiles, complete his various daily activities in seconds, and even casual walking can go unnoticed by normal people. While reaching Mach 3.3 on his own and later Mach 13.2 from tachyons, since increasing connection to the Speed Force, Barry has continually grown faster. Even when weakened in the Flashpoint timeline, he was able to decisively beat the Rival. After six months trapped in the Speed Force, his speed reached levels far exceeding all other known super-fast beings, even going too fast for fellow speedster Wally to follow and only Reverse-Flash able to keep up.
- Superhuman Momentum: Barry can generate great amounts of physical force through kinetic energy, simulating superhuman strength, even in a stationary position. Even little exertions from this build-up can generate tremendous, able to knock a person out. He can propel himself to jump tremendous heights and distances. He can also create substantial frictional force with any object he touches, and exert enough force to hurl people into the air. This seemingly negates the weight of his target, able to move about as if targets are frozen, even in mid-air. This also lets him propel and manipulate the targets' flight path, including launched bullet with no loss of force and hurl them through a powerful barrier, followed by a person. He can completely remove the physical force from massive tidal waves, stabilize a giant singularity, or dispel F3 tornadoes by running around them. He can also snap his fingers to ignite flammable gas with the friction. After escaping the Speed Force, Barry can generate enough force to break down the natural durability of a target, as he effortlessly shattered his way out of his meta-human cell.
- Aerokinesis: Barry can use his speed to generate air flows on various levels and for various effects. He can create vortexes to suffocate people or extinguish fires by forming it around them. He can create large and strong tornadoes, able to repel massive targets. Alternatively, he can use this skill to propel himself through the air as a pseudo-form of flying. Later, Iris taught Barry, from her own experience as a speedster, to use this build-up to gather and direct enough water into a tidal wave capable to disperse a giant fire cyclone of over 6000 degrees Fahrenheit. With enough momentum, he can generate a powerful sonic boom through his punch able to destroy a crashing satellite.
- Interdimensional Travel: Barry can move fast enough to break open portals between dimensions, allowing him to travel to different universes. If desired, Barry can also bring others with him as he did with Harry and Cisco to Earth Two. While originally he could not consciously control this, as his first solo use was done by accident and required assistance to return home, after greatly increasing his Speed Force connection, he can break open portals of his own accord and consciously chose his destination, even into the Speed Force itself.
- Speed Mirages: Barry can generate illusions of himself to make it appear as if he in many places at once, when in reality he is simply bouncing back and forth too fast for the human mind to perceive the difference. He can create dozens of after-images, allowing him to disorientate his enemies and then catch them off guard.
- Time Travel: Barry's speed can breach the temporal barriers, letting him enter different points in time. While originally only accessed by accident when under extreme stress, Barry learned to use it at will and arrive at a destination with pinpoint accuracy. He can do this in one of two ways; either enter timelines independent from himself and unaffected by his travels or perform a time do-over, wherein he "merges" with his temporal counterpart to be fully immerse in the timeline. Regardless of the changes he makes, Barry's powers allow him to retain all memories of the previous timeline in addition to the new timeline and differentiate between them. Even if Barry is not responsible for the time alterations, he can still remain somewhat unaffected by it; as he remembers that John Diggle and Lyla Michaels had a daughter instead of a son in the original timeline.
- Time Remnant Constructs: Barry is able to "create" a time remnant by traveling back to moments before his current-self time travels, hailing from a future that no longer exists. This allows Barry to be two places at once, enabling him to interact with the world for two separate actions simultaneously. If desired, Barry can create dozens of time remnants at once.
- Temporal Dilution: By generating enough energy, Barry can move so fast that time essentially slows down time relative to him, to a complete standstill (dubbed "Flashtime"). However, he must continuously concentrate on this action as losing such focus will gradually speed back up again before ultimately returning to its original flow. He can pull others into this state, however, non-speedsters will quickly tire from it as their bodies aren't accustomed to moving at such great speeds. Other speedsters can also remain unaffected by this even provided they retain enough stamina to expand their Speed Force energy.
- Superhuman Stamina: Barry can handle the stresses of extreme racing without noticeable distress, letting him function much longer than normal humans unhindered. His enhanced stamina is due to his augmented physiology, which builds up little to no lactic acid or fatigue toxins. Even after running from coast to coast of the country to pick up a pizza, Barry remained unfazed from the prolonged running. However, while his stamina is greater than most speedsters, Barry's reserves are not inexhaustible. Extreme and extended uses of his more advanced powers will eventually drain him.
Gallery
From the 2014 TV show The Flash, Barry Allen narrowly escapes after Plastique blows up his Flash suit
Funko pop.
Trivia
- Barry is the first character to discover that Oliver Queen is The Arrow.
- According to his Facebook profile, his favorite song is Lady Gaga's "Poker Face".