Warning: major spoilers ahead for the Season 3 midseason premiere of The Flash.
The winter finale of The Flash ended on a tragic twist that showed a grim fate for Iris West. After depositing the Philosopher's Stone in the Speed Force to keep it out of supervillain clutches, Barry popped out of the Force months ahead of his own time to witness Savitar murdering Iris in front of a future version of himself. The midseason premiere has finally aired, and we found out just how Barry plans on saving Iris, and it's a doozy. With the help of Team Flash (sans Joe), Barry will try to change every major event over the next four months to tweak the timeline and save the woman he loves.
Once Barry recruited the help of his pals in trying to figure out how to change Iris' future, Cisco used his powers as Vibe to take them both to the night of Iris' murder. They discovered a news broadcast that happened to conveniently reveal the biggest events that happened over the previous four months. Team Flash came to the conclusion that if they can change every single one of the events that would make headlines come May, they could stop Savitar from ever murdering Iris.
The list of events provides a window into what we can expect from the rest of Season 3. According to the news broadcast, a man named Music Meister will get a six-figure book deal, Joe West will be honored at City Hall, Killer Frost will be at large, Star Labs Museum will close, and Central City will still be recovering from a gorilla attack. We already knew that Music Meister and Gorilla Grodd were on the way, and Caitlin's special Killer Frost-suppressing gizmos have been all but guaranteed to go on the fritz sometime before the end of the season. Joe will obviously do something worth honoring, and something will clearly happen to endanger the newly-opened Star Labs Museum.
All things considered, Team Flash's plan to save Iris isn't the wildest scheme that they've come up with over the years, but it's definitely one with the potential to backfire spectacularly. Barry has meddled with time off and on ever since Season 1, and the midseason premiere proved that he still hasn't really learned his lesson about changing timelines without considering the potential repercussions for the world at large. His plan to change events so large that they made headlines four months in the future will almost certainly have devastating consequences for somebody, whether Iris or another of the good guys or the civilians of Central City as a whole.
It's only natural that Barry wants to do everything in his power to save his lady love, but he's showing an alarming lack of restraint in his plan for how to do it. He certainly brushed off H.R.'s warnings about only changing certain events in certain ways as soon as he found a more proactive path to saving Iris. There are too many variables involved in the timeline with too many people involved for everything to go as planned. Hopefully Barry will be able to contain the craziness and find a way to save Iris without making another mess like Flashpoint.
The midseason premiere revealed that Iris' death is currently set to occur on May 23, 2017, so we can bet that the Flash Season 3 finale will take place on the same day. You can catch new episodes of The Flash on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. Don't forget to check out our midseason TV premiere schedule to see what else you can watch on the small screen in the coming weeks.
