The Suicide Squad trailer demonstrated the genius-level intellect of Savant — mirroring a scene that emphasized Barry Allen's own enhanced intelligence in The Flash season 7. Taking over the director's chair from David Ayer, the next Task Force X adventure was crafted by James Gunn. Much like he did for the MCU, Gunn will explore a plethora of new avenues within the DCEU. With free rein, the journey was confirmed to be full of bloodsoaked, R-rated action. Equally, a fair amount of heart, humor, and an eclectic soundtrack was promised to be woven in amid all the gore, violence, and deranged behavior of its titular antiheroes.
All of these things were on full display in the first trailer for The Suicide Squad. Already highly-anticipated, the new footage served to hype the movie up even more. The overall plot was still kept firmly under wraps; however, it served up a wealth of exciting elements — including confirmation of Starro the Conquerer. The trailer also spotlighted each member of the movie's sprawling cast. That included Michael Rooker's Brian Dulin (a.k.a. Savant). Described as a vigilante computer hacker, he was shown being put through the induction process and introduced to the team. As it happened, though, one of his scenes served as a reflection of a recent moment from The Flash season 7.
Sat in an outdoor cell, Savant passed the time by playing with a ball. After bouncing it on the ground, he ultimately tossed it against one of the walls. It immediately rebounded around him a few times before he caught it perfectly. However, there was nothing ordinary about the way it bounced or the catch. Firstly, the ball squarely hit a bunch of Xs that were taped to the walls. Secondly, Savant caught it without looking. As it ricocheted off the wall behind him, he didn't so much as turn his head. He simply held up his hand and the ball went perfectly into it. On the surface, the Xs could reference Task Force X (a.k.a."The famous Suicide Squad") he would soon (and perhaps wanted to) join. Looking deeper, though, they formed a subtle nod to the genius that Savant possesses in both the comics and the movie — with him able to calculate and mark the ball's trajectory — and then catch it with seemingly-precognizant accuracy.
Grant Gustin's Barry Allen had a similar experience in The Flash season 7, episode 2, "The Speed of Thought." Now powered by the Artificial Speed Force, Barry gained super-speed thinking. The move briefly served to fix one of Team Flash's biggest Arrowverse problems. Able to process data at a rate that even quantum computers weren't able to keep up with, Barry could formulate the outcome of any given situation. This notion was put to the test by Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) with the help of his Quantum Ball ("trademark pending"). Amplifying kinetic energy, the ball, once thrown, was made to move in the most unpredictable of ways. However, with his new power, Barry was able to plot its trajectory, list the items it would hit, and equally catch the ball without looking as it bounced up to him from behind.
Obviously, the near-identical moments were strictly coincidental from a production standpoint. Still, it's an amusing wrinkle to contemplate. After all, following Ezra Miller's cameo in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the DCEU movies and The CW shows have multiversal links — at least from the Arrowverse's point of view. Though Barry Allen and his friends have remained unaware that the parallel Earths were reconstituted, those links still remained. As such, in terms of story, it could be amusingly imagined that the overlap between The Suicide Squad and The Flash was a multiversal echo and a demonstration of the kind of symmetry that can take place on disparate yet intrinsically connected worlds.
