The chief villain of the second half of The Flash season 6 is a new adaptation of the Mirror Master; one of the most powerful members of the Rogues Gallery from the comics. However, it is still an open question if Eva McCulloch (Efrat Doris) is as dangerous or as powerful as her comic book counterpart Evan McCulloch.
The original Mirror Master in the comics was a career criminal named Sam Scudder who accidentally stumbled on a way of making special mirrors that could achieve a number of amazing effects. His Arrowverse counterpart was nowhere near as brilliant, being a sharp-dressed thug who developed the metahuman ability to teleport between reflective surfaces. Fans of the Mirror Master from the comics were disappointed, and Sam Scudder hasn't been seen since, apart from one brief appearance in an alternate future in "The Once And Future Flash."
Still, The Flash has teased the Mirror Master of the comics, with Harry Wells (Tom Cavanagh) mentioning that Earth-2 had a criminal called the Mirror Master, a man named Evan McCulloch who employed a specialized mirror gun. The mirror gun itself made an appearance in season 5 of The Flash and was said to have been developed by a local firm, McCulloch Technologies. This culminated in the recent introduction of Dr. Eva McCulloch, the founder of McCulloch Technologies and apparently, the new Mirror Master of the Arrowverse.
Evan McCulloch, The Second Mirror Master
Evan McCulloch's first comics appearance was in Animal Man #8 in February 1989, and the character was created by writer Grant Morrison and artist Chaz Truog. A native of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, little was known about McCulloch beyond his being an orphan and that he had somehow acquired Sam Scudder's costume and equipment. It would be 15 years before McCulloch would be given a full backstory (written by Geoff Johns) in The Flash #212.
Young Evan discovered that he had a taste and talent for killing early in life, after murdering an older boy who molested the younger children in the orphanage where he grew up. Never adopted, Evan left the orphanage upon turning 16, taking only two things with him besides the clothes on his back: a picture of the parents who had given him up and the surname of the matronly woman who'd raised him, Miss McCulloch. Making his way to Glasgow, Evan fell into a life of crime, eventually finding his way into the lucrative position of an assassin. Within a few years, McCulloch became one of the United Kingdom's foremost professional killers.
Years later, the FBI caught McCulloch, but he was surprised to learn that they didn't want to bring him to justice; they wanted to offer him a job. The FBI had acquired the costume and equipment of the original Mirror Master, Sam Scudder, and they wanted an inside man in the world of costumed criminals. The FBI figured that McCulloch's proven reputation would allow him to integrate into supervillain society and help the FBI catch the truly dangerous metahumans. They proved to be half-right. Unfortunately, McCulloch was too daring, and the idea of being a supervillain was too appealing for him to truly go straight. He worked for the FBI just long enough to learn how Sam Scudder's technology worked before trapping his bosses in a mirror dimension and striking out as a supervillain mercenary in earnest.
McCulloch literally went Rogue, falling in with The Rogues Gallery, a group of tech-powered, science-savvy supervillains who regularly menaced The Flash. While he still worked as an independent agent, McCulloch did enjoy being a part of a team of like-minded criminals who followed a crude code of honor. For all his many sins, Evan McCulloch still anonymously sent a percentage of every job he pulled to the orphanage in Kirkcaldy, in memory of the kindly old woman who gave him a name.
The Mirror Master's Powers In The Comics
While possessing no metahuman powers of his own, Evan McCulloch is one of the most versatile and dangerous of The Flash's enemies when armed with the Mirror Master technology. Most of the Mirror Master's power is based around the manipulation of light through the Mirror World, an extra-dimensional space that connects every reflective surface on Earth. Mirror Master is an expert illusionist and maker of mirages, able to disguise himself as anyone by copying their reflection. He can become intangible or invisible by refracting the light around him or transforming himself into a hologram. He can also fashion holograms of hard-light, copying himself into infinity, and focus the light around him into laser beams.
What truly makes McCulloch dangerous, however, is how the Mirror World enables him to go anywhere he wants, including other realities. Apart from being almost impossible to track, McCulloch can also use the Mirror World to spy on anyone who is within view of a mirror or trap them inside a pocket dimension within that mirror. McCulloch also possesses a crude form of clairvoyance and can see any past event that occurred within view of a reflective surface. Yet for all of his power, McCulloch is dependent on ambient light and is completely powerless in a dark room.
Dr. Eva McCulloch - The Flash's Season 6 Mirror Master
Though she was mentioned in earlier episodes, Dr. Eva McCulloch didn't physically appear on The Flash, until the season 6 episode "A Girl Named Sue." It was here that Iris West-Allen (Candice Patton) met Dr. McCulloch after falling into a mirror while exploring a locked-up office inside the McCulloch Technologies' headquarters in Central City. Seemingly crazed from years of solitude, Dr. McCulloch told Iris that she had become trapped in what she called the Mirror Dimension - "a mirror-version of Central City. Same city, same buildings, just empty." It soon became apparent, however, that Dr. McCulloch was playing dumb and had some kind of agenda, though she honestly was trapped in the Mirror Dimension and couldn't attempt to leave it without burning herself.
The Flash's Dr. McCulloch has some kind of connection to the mirror in her office, telekinetically controlling the shards of the mirror to reform it after it broke. She can use the mirror to spy on people in the real world through other mirrors, and she helped Iris to check in on Barry (Grant Gustin) using this ability, after telling Iris how she watched her husband, Dr. Joseph Carver (Eric Nenninger), move on to a new life without her. Eva also has the ability to create and control mirror duplicates of other people in the Mirror Dimension. She used this ability to create a copy of Iris and later, Iris' employee Kamilla Hwang (Victoria Park).
It is unclear what Dr. McCulloch's ultimate goals are beyond using her mirror duplicates to get her the equipment she needs to finish building a device that should enable her to safely return to the real world. Whatever consequences come of Mirror Master's schemes on The Flash, however, it seems that it has finally got a version worthy of the name. Given her variable powers and casual attitude to manipulating people to get what she wants, Dr. Eva McCulloch easily equals the villainy of Evan McCulloch in the comics. At the very least, she reflects well upon the Mirror Master legacy.