The Season 4 finale of The Flash finally saw the resolution to the mystery of who that Mystery Girl really was and why she was dropping in on all the members of Team Flash, aside from her mother Iris. The finale also left fans on a giant cliffhanger without revealing exactly what Nora West-Allen had done that required her to run back from the future, meet her dad and his friends, get a haircut, and finally 'fess up that she did something very bad. The trailer for Season 5 indicates that Team Flash will have some work to do, and Nora won't be going away any time soon. Check out the new San Diego Comic-Con footage for The Flash!
Will this family never learn not to mess with time? It clearly hasn't gone that well for all involved, with Barry's impulsive decisions kinda ruining things every so often. But now, at least, he's got another speedster by his side that he's connected to like no other. And it turns out getting helped out by your daughter from the future has its advantages, with one coming in the form of The Flash's costume ring from the comics. ("A fan favorite.") Barry is worried that Nora will suddenly whisk herself out of existence with her time-traveling shenanigans, a risk he knows all too well. And it probably doesn't help that she is apparently hiding something else from Barry and the rest of Team Flash, which he starts questioning her about.
What we really want to know, though, is whether Nora's big mistake has anything to do with the brand new Season 5 villain, who appears in the lengthy capper at the tail end of the trailer. While he wasn't namechecked in that moment, comic fans may have figured out who they were looking at due to the way he used his own lightning powers to electrify a lightning-shaped dagger. That's right, The Flash is introducing Cicada (and presumably the Cicada cult) to TV audiences.
It also wasn't immediately obvious during the trailer who would be seen beneath Cicada's hood, but it was confirmed during The Flash's panel that American Pie franchise vet Chris Klein was cast to bring a completely different kind of danger to Central City. In the comics, Cicada made it his life's mission to murder anyone the Scarlet Speedster ever saved, using the very daggers we see in the trailer. And we should expect something fairly close to that from the TV show, but here's the villain's official description.
A grizzled, blue-collar everyman whose family has been torn apart by metahumans, Cicada now seeks to exterminate the epidemic --- one metahuman at a time.
Team Flash will already have a lot to take in when Season 5 gets here -- especially if he's also getting worried about Oliver Queen's prison stint over in Star City --thanks to Nora's hijinks. But I don't know if they're ready for anyone who gets down with Earth-1 murder so wholeheartedly. I mean, The Thinker at least had Marlize to keep his conscience buoyed. Cicada is just going to have more people around him who also want to destroy Barry Allen's entire world, which is not a positive influence, to say the least.
The Flash is back on The CW with the Season 5 premiere on Tuesday, October 9, at 8:00 p.m., and unlike other Arrow-verse shows, it will not switch days or time slots. If you need some ways to kill the time during the rest of hiatus, stop by our summer TV premiere schedule and our 2018 Netflix premiere guide.
