The Flash Season 8's STAR Labs Change Creates A Central City Plot Hole - Screen Rant

Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for The Flash season 8, episode 2, "Armageddon, Part 2."

A new Central City law that shut down STAR Labs during The Flash season 8 Armageddon event also opens a plot hole. The Public Safety Act reportedly gives the government of Central City considerable legal authority in all matters where the public's safety has been compromised. However, the PSA's existence raises questions regarding why it was never evoked whenever Central City had been endangered in the last four years.

The main storyline of The Flash season 8 crossover event Armageddon found an alien named Despero traveling back in time from 2231, claiming that The Flash of his time had gone insane after one bad day and destroyed the Earth. This warning came just before Barry Allen was fired from his job as a crime scene investigator pending a federal investigation that uncovered evidence that he was part of the Black Hole crime syndicate. Later that day, Barry was summoned to STAR Labs, where an organization called the CCDBS was in the process of searching the building for a radiation leak. When the CCDBS leader, Director Hacksaw, discovered that STAR Labs' radiation detectors were horribly corroded and that their power core was leaking a lethal dose of radiation, he ordered the facility to be shut down and encased in concrete immediately.

When Barry protested the decision, Director Hacksaw evoked the Public Safety Act, which gave him the authority to "do whatever we have to do for the greater good." He also noted that the PSA had been passed four years earlier, after "the meta fallout nearly took out the city." (This seems to be a reference to the second wave of new metahumans and meta-tech created by the Thinker's schemes in The Flash season 4.) While it makes sense that Central City would have such a law on the books, it is strange that the local authorities had never looked at STAR Labs before now, raising serious questions about their actions.

The Flash Season 8 CCDBS Workers Shut Down STAR Labs

Most of the odd events that occur in Central City could be tied to STAR Labs, even ignoring the particle accelerator explosion in December 2013 that originally empowered The Flash. Over the past four years, there have been a number of dimensional rifts, energy explosions, visible forcefields and other weird scientific phenomena that could visibly have been tracked to STAR Labs' headquarters in Central City. Perhaps the most notable of these is the creation of the Still, Sage and Strength Forces in The Flash season 7, which came about as a side effect of Team Flash's efforts to create an artificial Speed Force, following a massive lightning storm with four colors of lighting shooting out of the roof of STAR Labs.

The obvious explanation is that Captain Joe West and Cisco Ramon were able to keep other agencies away from STAR Labs in the past, using their authority as the head of the CCPD Metahuman Taskforce and STAR Labs' police consultant respectively. With Joe West apparently having passed on and Cisco Ramon having moved on to a new job with ARGUS, there was nobody there to deflect the CCDBS from investigating a radiation leak at STAR Labs. It seems likely, however, that the investigation is part of a new Eobard Thawne plot against The Flash and that the Reverse-Flash is Armageddon's real villain.

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Matt Morrison (1722 Articles Published)

Matt Morrison has been writing about comics since before the word "blogging" was coined. He got his start writing for the legendary DC Comics digital fanzine Fanzing, before receiving his own column, The Mount. Since then he has gone on to write for over a dozen websites, including 411 Mania, Comics Nexus and The Cult of Nobody. He holds both an MS in Information Science from the University of North Texas and a BFA from the University of Texas at Arlington. Known as a font of comic book history trivia, he has delivered lectures on the history of American Comic Books, Japanese Manga, Doctor Who, and Cosplay at over a dozen conventions and served as an Expert In-Residence for a course on Graphic Novels for Librarians at the University of North Texas. In addition to his work for Screen Rant, Matt is currently the Editor In Chief of Kabooooom.com and writes reviews for No Flying, No Tights – a graphic literature and anime review site aimed at teachers and librarians. He also maintains a personal blog – My Geeky Geeky Ways – which hosts his extensive episode guide for the television series making up The Arrowverse as well as his comedic Let’s Play videos. What little spare time he has is devoted towards acting, role-playing, movie-riffing and sarcasm. You can follow his adventures on Twitter, @GeekyGeekyWays.