Where Does The Flash Season 4 Finale Leave the Show?

This article comes from Den of Geek UK.

This article contains spoilers for The Flash season 4 episode 23 “We Are The Flash.”

Another season of The Flash has come to an end, with Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen once again working with his super friends to defeat the big bad of the year and save Central City from evil.

This season, it was Neil Sandilands’ Clifford DeVoe – aka The Thinker – who posed a threat to Team Flash. His plan, to reboot the minds of everyone on the planet so he could re-educate the world in his image, was one of the biggest villain plots we’ve ever seen in The CW’s Arrowverse.

The season finale was filled with twists and turns: some questions were answered, and whole lot of new ones were raised; some people re-joined the STAR Labs crew, while others said their goodbyes. And, of course, the final scene of the season gave us a huge tease of what is going to happen next year.

Mystery girl no more!

The biggest reveal of the episode came right at its end, when the mystery girlplayed by Jessica Parker Kennedy unveiled her identity. She arrived uninvited to Joe and Cecile’s party, before introducing herself as Nora West-Allen – the daughter of Barry and Iris. Her exact were words were, “I’m your daughter, Nora, from the future. And I think I made a big, big, mistake.”

The mystery girl being Barry and Iris’ daughter from the future was a popular fan theory, but it’s nice to have official confirmation now. We know who she is, at last, but that still doesn’t answer all of our questions. What is Nora doing in this time period? Why has she been popping up at random moments to interact with Team Flash? And what, above all, is the “big, big mistake” that has caused Nora to reach out to the modern day version of her future family?

Without very much info to go on, we’re inclined to assume that Nora’s big mistake has something to do with her time-travelling antics. By helping Barry to destroy that satellite in the final seconds of Devoe’s attack, has she caused some damage to the timeline? Was Barry not meant to survive that moment, perhaps? Is another ‘Flashpoint’ about to occur, with Nora’s changes to the timeline causing catastrophic effects?

We’ll just have to wait and watch to find out exactly what Nora has done, and how Team Flash can help with it. The CW’s writing team have been planning this story for a while, clearly, given that Nora first showed up in the ‘Crisis On Earth-X’ crossover event last year.

Harry is gone

Team Flash has always had something of a revolving door for its members, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Tom Cavanagh’s Harry Wells said his goodbyes in the finale.

Thanks to those repeated and self-inflicted doses of dark matter to the brain, Harry’s intelligence has mostly been lost, which has forced him to follow his heart rather than his head for a change. Because of this shift, he decided to hug goodbye to Team Flash and head back to Earth-2 to spend some more time with his daughter. This was a nice conclusion to the ‘head versus heart’ theme that recurred throughout the season.

Joining the team in Harry’s stead will be an entirely new version of Harrison Wells that we’ve never come across before. Showrunner Todd Helbing told TV Guide recently that they’ve decided on a new Wells for next season, who will be “pretty funny and unique, and I think it will give Tom a lot of meat to chew on.”

One plot thread was left dangling for Harry, though: while his intelligence was diminishing, he began scrawling sci-fi symbols on the white board (like the ones that Nora jotted down in Jitters that time, and that Barry drew after emerging from the Speed Force) and repeating nonsense phrases (like the ones that beardy Barry spewed in the season premiere). That felt like a tease of something to come, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see Harry popping up again at some point to help solve that puzzle.

Coming back into Team Flash in the finale of season 4 was Hartley Sawyer’s Elongated Man. Barry rescued Ralph from inside Devoe’s mind, and it seems safe to assume that Dibney will stick around in season 5, continuing to display a uniquely wacky approach to heroics. 

Joe and Cecile have a (possibly telepathic) baby

Nora wasn’t the only new member of the West family to show up in the season 4 finale, of course. Although the birth was delayed so that Cecile could keep her telepathic powers for a little while longer, Cecile did eventually give birth to her and Joe’s new baby – Jenna Marie West – towards the end of the season finale.

This, presumably, will give Jesse L. Martin and Danielle Nicolet some meaty emotional material to play with next year. Martin always shines when matters of fatherhood are worked into the scripts, and the chemistry between him and Nicolet is never anything less than delightful to watch.

It should be fun to see Candice Patton’s Iris and Keiynan Lonsdale’s Wally West interacting with their new half-sibling, as well, although it’s unclear how Wally will be splitting his time next year (given how well he slotted into Legends Of Tomorrow this season, we wouldn’t be surprised to see him less often in The Flash going forward). And let’s not forget that Cecile has a daughter named Joanie (played by Riley Jade Berglund), from a previous relationship, who we’ve met a few times on the show before. It’s unclear if she will come back, but it wouldn’t be a huge shock if she did.

We’re hoping that baby Jenna doesn’t become a target for any super villains during The Flash season 5, and that she keeps the telepathic superpowers that were linked to her mother’s pregnancy. A baby that can read its parents minds seems like a fun story to delve into, doesn’t it?

Killer Frost: origins

This storyline took a back seat in the finale, but the penultimate episode of the season included a hefty revelation about Caitlin: she has had her Killer Frost powers since a young age, meaning that it wasn’t the particle accelerator explosion in season 1 that turned her into a Metahuman. Caitlin, with help from Cisco’s Vibe powers, uncovered a repressed childhood memory in which Killer Frost emerged after a young Caitlin was hit by a car.

Caitlin’s past will presumably provide a major storyline in The Flash season 5, which is promising news for fans of the talented Danielle Panabaker, who sometimes feels a bit wasted on this show. In her on-going quest to coax Killer Frost back into action, it seems likely that Caitlin will look to her childhood to uncover the truth about her icy alter-ego’s origins.

It seems likely that Susan Walters will reprise her role as Carla Tannhauser, Caitlin’s mother, at some point in The Flash season 5. Does Carla already know that Caitlin had superpowers as a child? Did she, being a scientist, conduct tests/experiments on her daughter? And what does any of this have to do with Carla’s husband/Caitlin’s dad, who died of multiple sclerosis?

One possibility is that Carla conducted experiments on Caitlin while trying to find a cure for her husband’s illness, and accidently created Killer Frost in the process. That’s just speculation, but we look forward to finding out if it’s close to the truth during Caitlin’s The Flash season 5 subplot.

A new big bad

With DeVoe defeated and the mysteries of the bus metas laid to rest, The Flash season 5 will need a new big bad to drive the plot forward and provide new threats. As of yet, no official information has been released with regards to the main villain for next season, but there is a big rumour doing the rounds.

This time last year, That Hashtag Show correctly foretold that The Thinker and Elongated Man would appear in The Flash season 4. And now, they claim to have seen a casting call for The Flash season 5’s main villain. According to THS, The CW is currently holding a casting call for a character named Desmond Paull.

Desmond is described as “an open ethnicity role for a man in his 40s. Desmond is a Metahuman who, after a mysterious interaction with dark matter, was given not only immortality but also the gift to disable other meta-human powers. He blames metas for everything that has gone wrong in his life and because of that, his mission is to wipe Central City free of them in order to silence his own anguish.”

THS goes on to speculate that Desmond Paull is a placeholder name, and that this villain is actually someone from the comics. THS believes that ‘Desmond’ is really David Hersch, aka Cicada, a villain from the comics who was struck by lighting and endowed with powers during a suicide attempt. In the comics, Cicanda is able to extend his own life by absorbing the ‘life-force’ of other people. He is also obsessed with bringing his wife back from the dead. And he’s a cult leader.

Whether or not Desmond does turn out to be Cicada, he sounds like a major inconvenience for our heroes. An immortal villain who can disable other Metahuman’s abilities won’t be easy to defeat.

Could the DeVoes come back?

DeVoe may have been defeated and his Enlightenment avoided, but The Flash season 4 finale didn’t neatly wrap up every aspect of The Thinker’s reign of terror.

For one thing, shortly after he lost control of Ralph’s physical form, DeVoe reappeared as a hologram, explaining that this “technological reincarnation” was another use of Kilgore’s powers. Marlize pulled the plug on the hologram, but that seemed a little too easy as a way to defeat the dastardly DeVoe.

If he is capable of living as a hologram, isn’t it possible that DeVoe has a digital version of his consciousness saved on a secure server somewhere? Given that he plans meticulously for every eventuality, we wouldn’t rule it out. And if he does have a contingency plan, perhaps it will play out in a future season.

Kim Engelbrecht’s Marlize DeVoe still seems to be a piece on the board, as well. She has turned back to the light and vowed to use technology for good, and although she turned down a spot on Team Flash, we wouldn’t be surprised to see her pop up for a guest role – helping our heroes out of a tough technological spot, perhaps – at some point in the future.

Also, it’s worth remembering that DeVoe collected all of those superpowers before plonking his mind into Ralph’s body. Now that Ralph has taken back control of said body, does he get all of those superpowers? Or can he bring the other bus metas back to life somehow? It feels like there’s a loose end there just waiting to be tied up, if The Flash season 5 has space for it.

With Barry and Iris’s daughter on the scene, a new Harrison Wells being introduced, the mysteries of Caitlin’s continuing to unravel, a new baddie emerging, and a possibly-telepathic infant being brought up, one thing is for sure: Team Flash will be pretty busy next year, and it should be a whole lot of fun to watch them struggle with it all…