The Flash showrunner reveals why they chose Bloodwork to be this season’s big bad

The Season 6 premiere of The CW’s Flash dropped a whole lot of bombshells this week, but it also set-up the season’s latest big bad in Bloodwork (Heroes alum Sendhil Ramamurthy). So why was the time right to introduce Bloodwork to the Arrowverse?

Showrunner Eric Wallace told Entertainment Weekly they wanted to find a villain who could reflect exactly what Barry will be going through this season with the Crisis on Infinite Earths looming, specially a ticking clock on how long he has to live. As fans learned in the season premiere, Bloodwork is suffering from a deadly disease, which he tries to cure with dark matter. Barry also learns he’s on a ticking clock now that the Crisis timeline has moved up. So, they’re both staring down the barrel of a gun. Just, you know, very different guns.

“For the first time in the show’s history, we have a villain and a protagonist who are going through the same thing,” Wallace told EW. “It’s the reason Bloodwork was chosen as a villain this season. It was very deliberate, because they’re going to learn about halfway through this season, ‘Maybe we’re not so different,’ and what does that mean? ‘Crisis’ is about grief and about death and about the end of all worlds. So you have [in] Bloodwork a villain who was facing his own end of his own world. So from his point of view, ‘Who cares about crisis? I might die before.’”

As for that pesky Crisis, Wallace noted it will still loom large over the first half of the season, even while Team Flash is trying to deal with Bloodwork. He teased we’ll see the impact of Barry’s possible pending death on his relationship with Iris, and his approach to life in general.

“It turns the dial up to 10, and it makes you think, ‘Is every moment together our last? What can we do? Should we fight this? Is it inevitable?’ These are all the things that they’re grappling with for these next seven episodes, because 8 ends and it’s ‘Crisis’ time, and it’s time to go off to literally cosmic war,” he said. “So the relationship is strained, but it’s also going to bring them closer together than ever before because that’s what tragedy does.”

The Flash airs Tuesday nights on The CW.

What’d you think of the premiere? Have some theories on the Crisis?