User blog:X9 The Android/PE Proposal: The Trickster (Arrowverse)

The Trickster, a clear Joker wannabe. Let's hope other Earths in the Arrowverse don't have to deal with this psycho.

Hello guys! Today, here's my sixtieth PE proposal, and it's about the Arrowverse incarnation of the Trickster, a member of Flash's rogues gallery in The CW television show The Flash. He's actually listed as PE, but I feel that it's necessary to have him officially approved.

WHO IS HE / WHAT HAS HE DONE?

The Trickster is a lunatic and psychotic criminal named James Jesse. When James was young, he dated a woman named Zoey Clark. After meeting Zoey, James became the Trickster, and Zoey decided to join him on his nefarious plans, becoming Prank, his accomplice. The Tricker then terrorized Central City during the 1980s, orchestrating a series of terrorist attacks which claimed the lives of ten civilians and two police officers. He even destroyed along with Prank the Gazooka Bubble-Gum Company. At some point afterwards, Zoey conceived a child with James and Axel Walker was born from their union in 1990. Nevertheless, James left Zoey and Axel to keep committing his crimes until the police eventually captured and arrested him in 1995, sending the Trickster to rot at the Iron Heights Prison. While in prison, James talked to an unknowing Axel through letters to prompt him into becoming his accomplice. Despite his incarceration, however, James Jesse was still able to cause senseless havoc, talking a criminal psychologist to kill herself at some point during 2010 and murdering most of the prison guards, leading Iron Heights' warden to isolate him in an special cell and give him cable television so he would kill no more guards.

In "Tricksters", after years of talking through letters with the original Trickster, in 2015, Axel takes up his father's mantle as the new Trickster and starts terrorizing Central City, though his debut is thankfully interrupted by the Flash, who saves everyone present. Detective Joe West, Barry Allen's adoptive father, suspects that maybe James knows about the new Trickster and they both pay him a visit at his cell in Iron Heights, giving him red liquorice so he will cooperate, but James denies any connection to Axel and angrily demands Axel to be killed so he will not ruin his reputation, suggesting Joe and Barry to go to his old lair and check it. However, Joe and Barry find nothing at the lair's vault, so they return to Jesse, who tells them about a giant bomb the new Trickster may use to blow up Central City. Barry is later forced as the Flash to search for Axel, who threatens to blow up the city, but it turns out to be a ruse from the young criminal, who helps his father to escape along with Henry Allen, Barry's father, as a hostage. Once at their lair, with Henry kidnapped, James reveals to Axel his true parentage (a la Darth Vader, ironically, maybe he saw that movie while in prison). That night, during a political event at the City Hall, both Tricksters pose as waiters and give a poisoned wine with Trimethylmercury 32 to kill all guests unless they are paid with the bank accounts of all guests. The Flash arrives to the scene, and despite James' attempt to kill Flash by strapping a kinetic bomb to his wrist to kill him if he stopped moving (he got the idea from the villain of Speed, no less), the Flash escapes his trap, saves the guests and both Tricksters are arrested and forced to give up Henry's location, leading Flash to run fast to where Henry is and save him from a trap James placed him in.

In "Running to Stand Still", six months after his capture, near Christmas, Mark Mardon frees Trickster and Leonard Snart and takes them to an abandoned factory, hoping that they can aid him to kill the Flash. Snart declines and leaves because Mardon doesn't explain him the plan, but James accepts due to his obsession with getting back at the speedster. Said and done, the Trickster gives Central City a broadcast declaring his plans to kill the Flash, leading Flash and Patty Spivot to go to his location and nearly be killed by a dreidel trap with C-4 bombs, but they luckily escape. As such, the Tricker later dresses as Santa Claus and hands out bomb-filled presents to all Central City children while Mardon tricked the Flash into going to the Trickster. With the Flash at their mercy, Mark and the Trickster threaten to detonate all the bombs and kill all those children and their families unless Flash allows them to torture and kill him. Flash is forced to accept, and Mark and Trickster laugh with glee at how Central City's hero is tortured with ice balls, wind blasts and lightnings that Mark causes before Mark asks Trickster to murder Flash. However, just as the Trickster prepares to gut Flash with a dagger, Cisco Ramon deactivates all bombs, allowing the Flash to tie up the Trickster with Christmas lights and defeat Mardon. Patty arrives shortly thereafter to kill Mardon to avenge her father, but desist at the Flash's insistence, leading Trickster to shed a tear due to the speech's beauty before being send back to jail along with Mark.

In "The Present", during his stay at Earth-3, the Flash meets up an Earth-3 version of the Trickster, who tries to kill Jay Garrick, the Flash of this universe, with a bomb after robbing a bank, but Barry Allens appears on the scene and rescues Jay before handing over the Trickster to the police. However, this Trickster only appears in this episode and doesn't bear too much resemblance to the Earth-1 version.

In "The Elongated Knight Rises", it's mentioned thay the Tricker somehow escaped from Iron Heights at some point during 2017, leaving obsessive Flash drawings and Axel behind. Despite this, Axel reunites with his mother and they try to pull off a big crime to make James proud, making an acid trap, but the Elongated Man appears on the scene and defeats the new Trickster and Prank, sending them to prison. While his drawings imply new plans to kill the Flash, the original Trickster has yet to resurface, so it's currently unknown when, if not if, James Jesse will return to face the Flash again.

WHAT'S THE WORK?

The Flash is a Flash live-action television show which airs since 2014. The show centers on Barry Allen/The Flah, a young man whose childhood suffered a turning point when his father Henry was unfairly arrested for supposedly killing his mother Nora. Adopted by the Detective Joe West, being in love with Joe's daughter Iris, Barry's adulthood suffers a turning point when he gets the power of super speed due to the explosion of a particle accelerator, becoming a meta-human superhero in the process. Throughout the show, Barry gathers many allies in his crusade against crime and defeats the bad buys to bring peace and order to Central City.

MORAL EVENT HORIZON

Although the Arrowverse has a high heinous standard due to the likes of threats like multiversal criminals such as the Anti-Monitor or Zoom, genocidal aliens such as Indigo or powerful mob bosses such as Konstantin Kovar, deranged serial psychopaths such as Lonnie Machin always leave a mark, and accordingly so, the Trickster manages to stand out in comparison to other members of Supergirl's rogues gallery given his lack of redeeming traits, his psychotic tendencies, his sadism and his passion to cause havoc and death wherever he goes just because he enjoys doing that. Every PE villain must have crossed the Moral Event Horizon to be PE, and the Trickster definitely crosses it when he manipulated his son Axel into becoming a mad murderer like himself and inviting him to try to kill many innocent people just to get money from them.

It should be noted, however, that the Trickster proposed here is the one from Earth-1, the Arrowverse's main Earth. I'm not proposing the one from Earth-3 due to his short screentime, his generic appearance and his lack of backstory.

HEINOUS STANDARDS

First of all, the mainstream Trickster is much less violent and even a friendly rogue of the Flash, unlike the Arrowverse depiction. Secondly, there should be a list to most of the Trickster's crimes that happen offscreen. Yeah, those are offscreen villainy, but analyzing them is a step to see how such a deranged psycho James Jesse truly is. Joe West mentions that he terrorized Central City, and the Trickster's killing spree validates this claim. The Trickster orchestrated many terrorist attacks which destroyed many buildings (including a factory) and killed at least ten civilians and two police officers. Even being incarcerated didn't stop him from committing bad deeds. At some point, the Trickster was assigned a criminal psychologist who, like all psychologists in that field, was tasked to understand his motivations, but somehow, the Trickster talked the psychologist to commit suicide despite her attempts to study his mind. This may remind some of you to how Lonnie Machin murdered a paramedic who was saving him. Really, what Machin and the Tricker could do if they teamed up would be surely bad. It's also mentioned that the warden of the prison where he was locked up gave him television cable, but not because of good behaviour, but so the Tricker would stop killing the guards who approached his cell (possibly to give him food or to to check him). How he did that inside his cell is beyond anyone's speculation, but anyway, all these offscreen villainy gives us an idea of how dangerous James Jesse is.

When his son Axel takes over his mantle as the new Trickster, James shows at first an anger towards his "copycat" and demands Joe West and Barry Allen to kill the new Trickster for ruining his reputation. While this turns out to be a ruse as he was actually working with Alex as shown later on, it's highly possible that James would have still acted this way if the copycat hadn't been related to him (who knows what he would have made with the copycat then...), and his acting still showcases how proud he feels of his "achievements", even expressing his opinion that he would have wasted a day of his career if he didn't kill anyone, "mocking" that his copycat didn't really kill anyone. This highlighs, along with his offscreen crimes, his immense delight on killing people just because he enjoys doing so. He doesn't restrict himself from killing adults, but also shows a willingness to kill children, like when he delivers bomb-filled presents to kids in Christmas night to kill them all just in an attempt to kill the Flash. If that't not enough, the Trickster is also shown to be really sadistic, like when he and Mark Mardon gleefully torture the Flash by threatening him to blow up innocent kids and their families and then when the Trickster tries to gut Flash alive so he will be the "man who saved Central City", when in reality, no sane citizen living in Central City will remember him as a hero but as an insane loon who murdered the city's hero. This may suggest that he is self-delusional and arrogant to the point he sees himself as an "artist" rather than a criminal, something which is possibly backed up by the fact that he sees his crimes as "masterpieces".

He also has no problem in dragging his own family (as I will explain later on) to his life of crime, but just to help him into achieving his goals. While his girlfriend Prank did join him of her own accord, she later tried to change her ways by taking pills to surpress her psychopathic side so she could raise Axel decently, rightly resenting James for leaving them behind to continue his crime spree. However, from his cell, James slowly manipulated Axel to become the new Trickster and was released by him years later. However, he shows no concern for the families of others, like when he kidnaps Henry Allen as a hostage because of the connection of Henry's son with the Central City Police Department and places him in a trap for no apparent reason. A similar lack of concern for other families is when he gives bomb-filled presents to kids so they will blow them up with their families in Christmas night no less, which is a truly cruel idea.

In the end, the Trickster is nothing more than a deranged lunatic who just causes chaos and death for the sake of it, not even caring if he drags his family into his destructive plans as long Central City pays him attention for his "masterpieces", in addition to feel proud of being a sadistic madman who kills for little to no reason.

MITIGATING FACTORS?

The fact that the Trickster seems to have a good relationship with Axel, his own son, after talking him through letters over the years (despite not changing his ways to be a better father) due to his incarceration could look like if he cares for his son and loves him in spite of the love of both for committing terrorist acts. The fact that he also fell in love with Prank, his accomplice and Axel's mother, may also indicate that he genuinely loved her at some point. However, his care for Axel isn't genuine given that he goaded him since he was a teen (estimating Axel's age with that of his actor) into becoming a deranged psycho like him, so this means that he wanted Axel to follow in his footsteps, unlike Prank, who changed her last name to raise Axel properly instead of a criminal like his father. Even if the Trickster really cared for Axel, it's common for some Pure Evil parents to actually get along with their children if they are also crime-loving bad guys like them (even Pure Evil sometimes).

His lack of care for Axel, and even Prank (take into account that the Trickster quite resembles the Joker, so Prank resembles Harley Quinn a bit), is further noted when it's shown that despite escaping from prison, he didn't bother to free Axel or to contact Prank, which ultimately shows that overall, the Tricker doesn't really care for his family (acting like a dead-beat dad) and is willing to manipulate his wife and son to do his bidding, precluding them from having a normal life.

Another slightly redeeming trait is that in his second appearance, after Patty Spivot chooses to not execute Mark Mardon for killing her father at the Flash's insistence, the Trickster puts an emotional face and remarks that the speech was beautiful, meaning that he may have some deep love for familiar relationships. But as noted previously, he doesn't care a bit for his own family and this was likely done by the show's crew to make it a funny moment, giving the Trickster a single comedic trait. However, this single scene doesn't detract in any way his crimes, and his drawings seen in a later episode show that he's still obsessed with killing the Flash, so he hasn't really changed his way. In-universe, he may have done that to mock the Flash and Patty in a subtle way, though the two didn't seem to mind his "joke".

VERDICT

Taking all of this into account, I would say yes about considering Indigo to be officially approved as PE.