I noticed a lot of you seem to want Savitar to come back. I don’t. Not because he wasn’t a great villain, but because he *was* – and because bringing him back from the dead would cheapen that death and the sacrifice Wally almost made. Likewise, bringing back Barry or Zoom permanently would cheapen Barry’s sacrifice and the tragedy of Zoom’s death (and all the grief Barry went through during his trial). I don’t know how many of you read The Titans currently, but I remember an issue where Starfire is showing Damage and Argent around their HQ and shows them the gallery of fallen Titans – Jericho, Kole, Golden Eagle, etc. “They all came back, right?” one of them (prob. Argent) asks. “I mean they *were* Titans…” And Starfire says, “You *do* know that when people die, they usually don’t come back, right?”
When someone comes back within one story, it makes sense. Terminal Velocity was like that. As someone said on another board, you start with the warning that “no one has ever gone into the Cave of Death and come back alive!” and you know instantly the story has to be about the one person who does come back. It ends up being like Orpheus’ descent into the underworld and his return. Or to pick a more modern example, Sheridan’s death on Z’ha’dum in Babylon 5. But Orpheus only went to the Underworld once, and Sheridan never returned to Z’ha’dum. Wally’s been “lost in the speed force” 3 times so far, and he’s come back every time. He even dove into it to rescue Linda during the Black Flash story. The threat’s gone. I didn’t even take it seriously this last time, at the end of Chain Lightning.
To go back to the Titans for a bit, they were formed to battle Trigon the Terrible, the demonic conqueror of another dimension who had set his sights on ours and who was Raven’s father. They barely defeated him once, and then in the second storyline he was “destroyed forever” by the spirits of the Azarathians. Great story, great conclusion, and we move on. 80 issues later, they do the Dark Raven storyline, and by the end of the series, Trigon is back just long enough to be “destroyed forever” AGAIN. How many times can you destroy someone forever? It makes the original victory hollow.
Resurrection only works for a limited pool of characters (Resurrection Man, Ras al Ghul, maybe a few others), and even then it has to have serious consequences (such as the death of Morpheus the Sandman and his replacement with Daniel – another facet of Dream, but a different persona from the one we’d come to know.)