Character Profile: Thaddeus Thawne (Inertia)
In my last character profile, I talked about Match, Conner Kent’s evil clone. Today I’m going to talk about Inertia, Bart Allen’s evil clone, because it feels neatly symmetrical and also because I ship it. So here we go!
Wookit his evil little face!
To explain Thad, I have to delve into the history of the Flash Family quite a bit, which I will…attempt to make both succinct and coherent. It starts with Barry Allen’s long-lost twin brother. Due to convoluted circumstances, he was given to a couple called Thawne at birth, who named him Malcolm, and the Allens were told he was stillborn. The Thawnes turned out to be abusive criminals and Malcolm had a miserable childhood, so when he eventually learned that a) he was adopted and b) his twin brother had a charmed life and was a superhero, he was pretty pissed. He became the villain Cobalt Blue, fought Barry all of one time, and went away forever. He sucked.
But! This kicked off a full millennium of generations of Thawnes hating all Flashes, a tradition which would of course peak in the 25th century with Barry’s greatest enemy: Eobard Thawne, a.k.a. Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash (who somehow doesn’t know he’s biologically related to Barry, but whatever). The hate was still going strong by the 30th century, when Barry and Iris relocated to live there for even more convoluted reasons I’m not going to get into.
When Barry died during Crisis on Infinite Earths, Iris was already pregnant with twins, who she named Don and Dawn because she’s a monster. They inherited their father’s super speed and grew up to become the heroic Tornado Twins…and Don fell in love with a woman named Meloni Thawne, the first non-asshole Thawne ever. They got married.
Meloni’s dad wasn’t too happy about this and also happened to be President of Earthgov, so he was able to use his influence to send Don and Dawn on a mission that got them killed. But now Meloni was pregnant, and she eventually gave birth to Bart, who also inherited super speed. However, he couldn’t turn off the speed, and thus was aging at an accelerated rate. He was placed in virtual reality while scientists looked for a cure, but eventually his Grandma Iris realized that said scientists, who worked for Thawne, were just studying him for funsies and would let him die of old age before curing him. So she kidnapped Bart, brought him back to the 1990s for Wally West to fix, and that’s how we get Impulse.
But! Grandpa President Thawne still had copies of Bart’s DNA. Of course he was gonna make an evil clone!
