Neil Sandilands cast as The Thinker in Flash S4

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After three seasons I think it’s fair to say that The Flash may have done all it can do with evil speedsters.  That’s not a slam against the show by any means- Reverse Flash was a really fun season 1 antagonists buoyed by the incomparable Tom Cavanagh, Zoom was a cool and menacing super speed Bane for S2’s Knightfall riff, and Savitar worked well as a super speed Apocalypse for S3’s X-Men riff.  

So it makes sense that season 4 would adopt a non-super speed bad guy as the new series antagonist, though it raises some interesting questions about who that will be.  A lot of Flash’s biggest antagonists are already on the show in more relegated roles like the Top, Captain Cold, and even Gorilla Grodd.  That doesn’t leave a terribly deep bench to draw from but The Flash season 4 has dug deep into the Flash’s history and pulled out a whopper of a bad guy- The Thinker, played by Neil Sandilands. 

What’s more startling about this Thinker twist is that the Thinker isn’t even actually a Flash villain or rather he’s not a Barry Allen villain.  The original Thinker was a bad guy from the 1940s who plagued Jay Garrick, the original fastest man alive.  Since then there’ve been 3 additional Thinkers and though The Flash is using the original Thinker’s civilian alias as Clifford DeVoe I wouldn’t be surprised if their character was a synthesis of all four criminals. 

Clever fans will remember that the Thinker’s identity DeVoe was referenced twice in season 3, specifically by characters with knowledge of the future.  They’ve clearly had DeVoe in the pipeline since the middle of season 3, which I’m pretty glad about.  Fluidity is definitely a major tool for good superhero fiction but planning for what comes next is never a bad idea so I’m glad we’re working from a roadmap here. 

So, the original Thinker was a failed lawyer who, in his bitterness, decided to become the ultimate genius villain to prove to all the petty crooks he got off the hook what true brain power could accomplish.  To do this he developed something called a Thinking Cap, a high tech helmet that boosted his brainpower and could project “mental force.”  He’s a goofy character but a pretty interesting foil for the Flash as he’s the kind of bad guy you usually can’t just punch into submission. 

He’s most similar to the Riddler in that regard; someone the hero matches wits with rather than feats of ability.  The formula really worked as the Thinker became a major re-occurring bad guy of the Golden Age and even joined the Injustice Society, one of the only supervillain teams of the era.  Eventually, his Thinking Cap gave him brain cancer and he died peacefully after serving his time in prison, which sounds a lot like a plot point to keep in mind for The Flash season 4. 

Aside from the Flash, the Thinker has also been seriously tied up with the Suicide Squad on multiple occasions.  Aside from the original Thinker, his successor Cliff Carmichael also had a post with the team.  Cliff is a sociopathic hacker type who stumbled upon DeVoe's Thinking Cap and used it to become a Firestorm villain.  That’s something that DC’s always been weirdly keen about, glomming together its various weird science heroes into the same stable of characters- Flash, Firestorm, Cyborg, they all tend to swap villains.  Cliff didn’t really last as a bad guy and I dare say his most significant action was betraying Amanda Waller and the Suicide Squad only to end up getting shot in the head for his troubles. 

There was third human Thinker but he’s barely appeared in the comics so forget him- the really important one is Thinker, the living AI.  When the Justice Society of America reformed in the early 2000s Mr. Terrific programmed their brownstone headquarters with an AI, modeled off his own thoughts and created using Thinking Cap tech.  The AI became self-aware, as these things do, declared itself the new Thinker and betrayed the team almost immediately.  The AI bedeviled heroes for about 5 years before Mr. Terrific was eventually able to reform it.  After that Thinker became part of the government organization Checkmate, basically DC’s answer to SHIELD prior to ARGUS, and actually did a lot of good for the heroes. 

Between all three of these characters, I think The Flash’s Thinker will be a synthesis of the first Thinker and the AI Thinker.  My theory is that DeVoe will be introduced at first as a super villain using his Thinking Cap to bring the city to its knees and threaten team Flash.  However, as the season goes on it’ll probably be revealed he’s developed a brain tumor from using the Cap but, unlike in the comics where DeVoe passed away, this version will upload his consciousness to a mainframe and become the AI Thinker. 

That’d be a clever way to up the stakes on his villainy and compress the best aspects of this character without having to bring in Arrow’s Mr. Terrific.  This would probably be the best way to help Thinker standout as a villain as it’d avoid a lot of the tropes and tricks of the previous 3 bad guys.  There’d no longer be any mystery about the villain's identity, no need to track him down cause he could be anywhere, and he’d threaten the Flash in a way other than just racing all over the city at high speed.  Additionally, it’d be a cool way to focus on Flash’s super speed thinking, an idea that tends to get overlooked in his collection of powers.   

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