Warning: spoilers ahead for Episode 3 of The Flash Season 4, called "Luck Be a Lady."
The Flash revealed in last week's episode that the new supervillain known as the Thinker has managed to create a batch of metahumans without the particle accelerator having any part to play. Metahumans in the Arrow-verse almost exclusively got their powers from the particle accelerator explosion that turned Barry into the Flash in the first place, but the Thinker found his own way to do it. "Luck Be a Lady" revealed how the Thinker pulled it off, and it's not how any of us probably expected.
The villain of "Luck Be a Lady" was Hazard, whose spectacularly bad luck turned into fabulously good luck after she gained meta abilities. She was able to do anything and win anything she wanted, but her good luck resulted in very bad luck for the people of Central City. Whenever something good happened for her, something even worse happened to somebody else. Team Flash couldn't figure out how she became a meta until they traced her signature to the exact spot in Central City where the portal to the Speed Force opened to bring Barry back in the Season 4 premiere.
Thanks to an assist from the Harrison Wells of Earth-2 (who dropped by to break up with Wally on Jesse's behalf), Team Flash figured out that Barry's explosive escape from the Speed Force resulted in a wave of energy that struck a bus carrying 12 people. The energy turned them all into metas, including Hazard this week and Kilgore last week. It seemed like Team Flash was at fault for the creation of all these metas, as Cisco and Co. used the Speed Force bazooka and Barry raced out of the Speed Force to freedom. The good guys really seemed responsible for making a batch of bad guys.
At the end of the episode, however, Wells explained that a sequence of events seems to have kicked off that went back further than Team Flash yanking Barry out of the Speed Force. The only reason Cisco felt the need to pull Barry out of the Speed Force the way he did was because the samuroid showed up in Central City to demand the Flash appear. If the samuroid hadn't turned up in Central City, Cisco and Co. would never have used the Speed Force bazooka in the maneuver that created 12 new metas. The person who sent the samuroid is the one responsible for the creation of the metas.
Barry and the rest of Team Flash don't know it yet, but the person who created the samuroid is none other than the Thinker. Although the Thinker discovered in "Luck Be a Lady" that Team Flash has more brainpower than he gave them credit for, he reminded his assistant that he's still smarter, and I have to agree with him. If not for Wells, Team Flash never would have realized that another power was in play that led to the 12 metas gaining their abilities on the bus. Instead of the instigators of the meta creation, they're just one piece of the Thinker's grand plan to make the metas happen.
There are still 10 metas unaccounted for out of the dozen created by the Thinker, so Team Flash might have their hands too full for a while to think about who sent the samuroid and kicked the sequence of events off. Still, we can probably expect them to start connecting the dots sooner or later. We'll have to wait and see.
New episodes of The Flash air on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. There are still big questions to be answered about Barry's time in the Speed Force ( and those weird doodles) as well as the Thinker. Elongated Man made his first (although very brief) appearance in "Luck Be a Lady," so we'll probably get more of him in the not-too-distant future.
