Posted in: DC Universe, TV | Tagged: cw, entertainment, Fiddler, flash, HRL, Subject 9, television, Virtuoso

The Flash Season 4: Who is Subject 9?

Published Wed, 07 Feb 2018 14:35:10 -0600

While we won't get a new episode of the Flash until February 27th thanks to the Olympics, we did get a trailer and the title: 'Subject 9'. It's a pretty safe bet that the title refers to the ninth person on the bus when Barry (Grant Gustin) returned from the Speed Force, causing a Dark Matter event and giving powers to everyone on the bus — as Clifford DeVoe (Neil Sandilands) had planned. Now that Team Flash knows that DeVoe is killing the metas and taking their powers, it's become more important that they discover the last four and protect the ones remaining.

But the question becomes, who is Subject 9? We see that she's a musician, playing a fiddle or violin, and it appears she has the ability to hypnotize people. That pretty much screams out the Fiddler, a Flash villain created by Robert Kanigher and Lee Elias in All-Flash #32 (1948).

In the comics, the Fiddler is Isaac Bowin, who learned the ability to hypnotize through music from a Hindu fakir while imprisoned in India for theft. Once he learned enough, he killed his teacher, escaped prison, and went back to the United States to commit crime. He was around for years, eventually ending up on the Secret Six, where he was killed by Mockingbird and replaced by Catman. He would later be resurrected for a short time by a Black Lantern ring.

They could easily do a gender swap on the character, make the hypnosis a meta power instead of a learned ability, and we'd have our ninth bus meta.

Or… they could follow the fiddle and see that in the comics, his violin fell into the position of a new villain who called herself Virtuoso. She was created by Gail Simone and Dale Eaglesham in Villains United #5 (2005). The character's real name and background have not been revealed. Kind of a blank slate.

There is no official synopsis for the episode yet because of the two weeks off, so it's all guesswork at this point. But it seems that the writers could just choose either one of the names and be good. And while Virtuoso is already female and they did go with another Simone-created character with Dwarfstar, the Fiddler is a Flash villain and with what appears to be a country western theme to the episode… Fiddler makes more sense.

We'll find out in three weeks.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!