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The Flash Season 6 Villain Explained: Who Is Bloodwork?

The Flash Season 6 has a new villain. But who is Bloodwork and what are his powers?

By Jim Dandeneau | October 9, 2019 | | 0

One of the interesting things about The Flash is how often the show has looked to recent comics for inspiration. Godspeed showed up as a villain in 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. The villain, played by Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes), has some slight differences to his comic book counterpart. You can read our review of his debut in the first episode of the new season right here.

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.

But on the show, Ramamurthy’s character is a research oncologist and not a sicko coroner, this time motivated by the death of his mother to fight the inevitability of death by cancer.

“He is an acquaintance of Caitlin Snow,” The Flash showrunner Eric Wallace told a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, “however their old reunion goes very very south and when he joins Team Flash he ends up going down the path to mad science and ends up becoming the most terrifying foe that Team Flash has ever faced.”

As for how he will be different than previous big bads…

“The other villains played by the rules a lot of times,” Wallace said. “There’s a unique relationship between Doctor Rosso and Barry himself they’re both facing something horrible as Crisis on Infinite Earths approaches, and that is what is going to make the relationship between our villain this season and our hero this season very different than what we’ve seen in the past.”