One of the interesting things about The Flash is how often the show has looked to recent comics for inspiration. Godspeed was the main villain of season 5 and he is less than four years old in the comics, introduced at the beginning of Joshua Williamson’s brilliant run.
The show is doing it again for season six. The CW announced at SDCC 2019 that the main villain for the first half of the season will be Bloodwork. Based on the trailer, the villain, played by Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes), has some slight differences to his comic book counterpart.
Bloodwork was introduced by Williamson and Neil Googe in The Flash #30 in 2017. He is Dr. Ramsey Rosso, a hemophiliac coroner using blood that should be evidence to research how to cure his hemophilia. After running some experiments with metahuman blood (i.e. injecting other people’s blood into himself, which I know we do with donor blood all the time, but still, JESUS DUDE), he eventually gains the power to control blood itself – stop it from flowing in other people, congeal it, make it burn, shape it around himself, and so on. Basically, a blood bender.
His weakness is that his power is, like blood, moved through his heart. The more worked up he gets, the more out of control his power is. Eventually, his power is so ramped up that he turns into a giant screaming blood monster. The Flash shuts him down by jolting his chest with negative speed force, briefly stopping his heart and shutting down his powers for a short period of time.
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We already know from the trailer that Ramamurthy’s character is a research oncologist and not a sicko coroner. How much more different Ramamurthy’s Bloodwork is to the comics remains to be seen in season six, but I can definitely see a scenario where he’s using metahuman blood for unsanctioned gene therapy and something goes wrong.
More on The Flash season 6 as we learn it.
Read and download the Den of Geek SDCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!