The Big Bang Theory returned to television this year with the spinoff Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, whose big selling point is the series’ spin on the multiverse. Being a Warner Bros. show, it’s not surprising that Stuart threw in a DC universe cameo, but what is surprising who got chosen.
In the latest episode, Stuart and friends are trapped inside a comic book set in Gotham City that’s being terrorized by Batman villain Mr. Freeze. While trying to find a way out, they get chased around by Freeze, only to be rescued by Jay Garrick’s Flash (played here by Andy Ridings), complete with a metal hat. And in case the title “Spoiler: We Couldn’t Green Lantern” didn’t give it away, the Golden Age speedster wasn’t who the writers originally wanted.
Co-creator Zak Penn told Deadline the team planned for a Lantern to save the day, but DC put a stop to that since hey, a show about them starring Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler was on the horizon. Ask any Arrowverse fan, and they’ll tell you how famously restrictive DC can be about what characters were set up to appear in those shows. The rejection stung co-creator Chuck Lorre a bit, but Penn and fellow co-creator saw in Flash a blessing in disguise.
“We pointed out to [Chuck] that Flash is actually perfect,” explained Penn. “If we needed something going from dimension to dimension, he was even better than Green Lantern.” As for why they picked Garrick specifically, Penn called it “half opportunity, half what they encouraged us. Golden Age Flash appealed to us a lot, just because, and no offense to Golden Age Flash fans, he’s kind of silly.”
That same embrace of silliness is why Penn’s enjoyed working on Stuart Fails to Save the Universe: as a writer on the X-Men films, he knows making superhero movies require you to be “rigorous about the consistency of the reality.” But on a comedy like this, it’s fair game to “purposely break things and [let] characters notice that the multiverse doesn’t work as well as it should,” hence the characters point out that Freeze doesn’t entirely fit here.
Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is already greenlit for season two, and Penn teased the writers would soon convene and “start talking about” bringing in some other DC characters. So if this threw you by surprise on social media over the weekend, be prepared to be surprised again in the next year or so.
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