Spoilers below for the most recent episodes of The Flash, so be sure to get all caught up before reading on.
While many Flash fans might have expected Chris Klein's Cicada to remain the Season 5 big bad from the beginning to the end, the power dynamic shifted sharply when it was revealed Orlin's niece Grace Gibbons was taking over as the temporarily unstoppable villain. Though her uncle attempted to sway her to accept Flash's help, dropping his gruff voice and everything, she straight-up killed him. Does that mean she's already 100% irredeemable, though?
That line of questioning is what makes Grace's super-powerful Cicada so fun and unpredictable, according to her portrayer Sarah Carter. Sharing that Grace will still show signs of humanism, here's what else Carter said about Grace's moral balance.
There's a mystery to this character that's been really fun to play with. You don't know how she's going to kill, when she's going to kill. You don't know how ruthless she's going to be, whether she really loves her uncle. Or is her mission to kill every meta-human more of a motive?
For all that Orlin Dwyer was an odious and murderous sumbitch, he at least never went macro with his lethal revenge tactics by putting random innocent civilians in his crosshairs. He was a simple guy with a simple plan: kill all the metahumans, but only the metahumans, regardless of if they were partly responsible for the satellite shrapnel's dark matter injuring his niece. The whole "kill them before they're proven guilty" angle wasn't necessarily his strong suit, but he never wavered from his mission.
Future Grace, meanwhile, initially appeared as if she might just be a dutiful and similarly motivated follow-up for Orlin's Cicada. But considering she killed the one person (beyond the doctor) that actually kept her alive and well and out of any kind of foster care, Grace may be cut from an entirely different kind of material than Orlin was.
As Nora Allen has shown us time and again, being from the future has a way of degrading people's talents for making good decisions, with her entire time-travel mission being a con game set up by Reverse-Flash. There are differences between Nora and Grace's reasonings, of course, since Nora's grief over not having Barry around seemingly outweighed her loathing for Iris, while Grace appears to have just been pissed off for her entire life after she regained consciousness.
Will Grace's anger stay as strong through the rest of the season, or will it get tempered by a few of Barry's impulsive speeches? Your guess is as good as mine for the moment. Speaking with TV Guide, here's how Sarah Carter put it.
This character has already been set up for the audience as a wounded child. We know her younger self already, and we understand why she grew up to be this angry. It's just wild and unpredictable to know if she's going to be centered in that wounded heart or if she's just going to be this untouchable killer.
Now that Team Flash knows how hyperbolically harsh Grace's Cicada is, everyone will need to figure out how to stop her with the quickness. One might think that giving the cure to the hospitalized Grace would be the easiest fix, but The Flash might have ways to circumvent that solution. Perhaps Adult Grace will find a way to kidnap her younger self so that no one can even find her to give her the cure. If she decides to jump back into the future to hide her, we might have a time-spanning game of tag going. (Add Killer Frost to make it freeze tag.)
The Flash normally airs every Tuesday night on The CW, but it's taking a short spring hiatus and won't be back on the midseason schedule until April 16. That's two weeks after Legends of Tomorrow will finally return to close out the back half of Season 4, which hits on Monday, April 1.
