Original 'Flash' star will reprise her role on the new CW series

It’s been almost a quarter century since the CBS aired The Flash, a shortlived but fondly-remembered(-by-a-couple-people)(-including-yours-truly) attempt to tell an ongoing superhero saga on the small screen. In recent years, superpowered dramas have become quite common on television–to the point that DC Entertainment has a new Flash show launching this season on the CW, alongside network sibling Arrow and Fox’s Batman-minus-Batman prequel Gotham.

Although the new Flash is constructed as a completely new story about superspeedster Barry Allen, the show will honor the character’s TV past. We already knew that CBS-Flash John Wesley Shipp would appear as Barry Allen’s father on the new series. Now, EW has confirmed that original series star Amanda Pays will appear on the CW’s Flash–and in an intriguing twist, she’ll be playing Dr. Tina McGee, the same character she played on the 1990 series.

On the original series, Tina was the Flash’s sidekick–and over the course of the single season, Tina and Barry developed a kind of will-they-won’t-they relationship. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tina will appear on the new Flash as an employee of a rival Very Big Science Company.

It’s unclear if Shipp’s character will ever interact with Pays, although presumably if they do interact, it would cause some kind of continuum-bursting TV-canon-rebooting Crisis event that would somehow involve Adam West’s Batman teaching the Batusi to Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman and Stephen Amell’s Oliver Queen.

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Got any geeky thoughts or questions? Email them to me at darren_franich@ew.com, and I’ll respond in a future edition of my Entertainment Geekly column.