It has been confirmed that The Flash star Tom Cavanagh will be playing the part of Pariah in the upcoming Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event - but who is he? This is a doubly fitting piece of casting considering Cavanagh's key role in defining the Arrowverse and the history of the mysterious man from the original Crisis on Infinite Earths comics, whose arrival heralds disaster.
Cavanagh has been a linchpin of the Arrowverse since The Flash season 1. He was originally cast as STAR Labs founder Harrison Wells, who was responsible for building the malfunctioning particle accelerator that triggered the superpowers of many people, including Flash. However, it was revealed over the course of season 1 that the man mentoring Barry Allen in the use of his superspeed was truly Eobard Thawne - a scientist from the future, who had assumed Wells' identity and likeness, and had transformed himself into Barry Allen's equal opposite, the Reverse-Flash.
Cavanagh remained part of the cast of The Flash after season 1, continuing to play Eobard Thawne in Wells' form, as well as different versions of Harrison Wells from different Earths, after the existence of a multiverse was confirmed in season 2. These included romance novelist H.R. Wells of Earth-19, a wizard known as Wells the Grey, the multiverse's greatest detective Sherloque Wells, and every member of the reality spanning Council of Wells. It seems that one more version of Harrison Wells is destined to become the Arrowverse's version of Pariah.
First appearing in Crisis On Infinite Earths #1 in April 1985, the man who became known as Pariah was once a scientist on his version of Earth. Obsessed with his work to the point of neglecting his wife and children, Pariah was acknowledged as the greatest scientist of his time, developing weather-control technology and curing all diseases. It was his final and greatest achievement, proving the existence of the multiverse and an anti-matter universe, which would prove to be his undoing.
Pariah's experiments using a portal made of anti-matter, as a means of viewing past events, seemingly led to a wave of anti-matter destroying his universe. Rescued from destruction by The Monitor, it was he who revealed that Pariah's portal had gained the attention of the Monitor's evil counterpart, the Anti-Monitor, who took advantage of the situation to start a chain-reaction that was slowly eating away at the positive-matter multiverse. The resulting energy wave gave Pariah a unique ability to teleport between realities, somehow arriving at whatever world the Anti-Monitor was about to attack next. The Monitor gave Pariah the powers of immortality and invulnerability (though Pariah viewed these "gifts" as curses) and used him as a means of tracking the Anti-Monitor, while the Monitor assembled an army of heroes from across the multiverse who would be capable of stopping the Anti-Monitor and saving all of existence.
Given that various versions of Harrison Wells across the Arrowverse have been depicted as scientists who were more concerned with their work than their families, casting Cavanagh as Pariah is a brilliant conceit. It's also a fitting tribute to the central role Harrison Wells seemingly has in the multiverse that was started on The Flash, with seemingly every infinite Earth having its own version of Harrison Wells. Presumably we may see even more versions of Harrison Wells before the coming Crisis on Infinite Earths is over.