Be sure to catch up with The Flash Season 5, for there are spoilers below for the most recent episodes.
The Flash started off quite strong in Season 5, fully bringing the foible-friendly Nora West-Allen into the S.T.A.R. Labs team and introducing its metahuman-murdering villain Cicada. Along the way, the show's writers threw various twists and turns that kept the characters and viewers guessing, and it now looks like the show's endgame will involve stopping Grace Gibbons' Cicada 2.0 and fully unraveling the partnership between Nora and Reverse-Flash in 2049.
Of course, The Flash could very well flip the script and throw those two assumptions out the window. Keeping that in mind, here are five more big twists that I want to see The Flash pull off before Season 5 gives way to the Crisis on Infinite Earths build-up in Season 6. (I didn't add it, but "King Shark Revealed As Cicada 3.0" would have been a worthy sixth entry.)
This Has All Been One Of Nora's Flashpoint Universes
Time travel has almost always been one of The Flash's most interesting topics of conversation, even if its main speedsters are pretty immature and unprofessional about using it. Now, consider that Nora monumentally changed the future by saving Barry's life by helping destroy the satellite, and also remember that she later admitted to making no less than 52 trips back in time to save Team Flash in "Cause and XS."
With those things in mind, isn't it hypothetically possible that just about everything we've seen in Season 5 (presumably minus flashbacks) has been within a disparate Flashpoint universe similar to the one that Barry set up for himself in the Season 3 premiere? The original Earth-1 timeline has been disrupted beyond belief, so I've no clue what it even looks like these days. But wouldn't it be interesting to get a gander at the host of different timelines that Nora left behind to see how things differed?
2049 Reverse-Flash Is Actually Eddie Thawne
This one doesn't really need an explanation, since the idea of Rick Cosnett's Eddie Thawne somehow living on to become a Reverse-Flash is just a fun and interesting idea to theorize about. But let's first take into account the fact that 2049's Reverse-Flash looks different from the evil time-traveler that has destroyed Barry Allen's life time and again. By that, I mean he looks different from both Harrison Wells and Matt Letscher's Eobard.
It's mostly the hair, to be sure, with Tom Cavanagh rocking blonde highlights like he's fronting a pop-punk band in 1997. Sayyyy, didn't a certain CCPD detective in the Thawne bloodline also rock a frosted brunette head back in Season 1, and didn't that detective also not like Barry very much? Sure, it's a stretch to theorize that Eddie went evil and trapped himself in the future, but if the foundation is that we've been watching a Flashpoint universe all along, it could happen.
Sherloque Wells Is Actually Reverse-Flash
Back in Season 1, it was a true shock when viewers learned Barry's idol Harrison Wells was actually his worst enemy Eobard Thawne. But beyond an occasional trip to the past to reconnect with S1 Wells, as well as H.R.'s whole face-swapping tech gimmick, The Flash has largely stayed away from making any further big reveals and twists connecting the Wells characters to Eobard's Reverse-Flash.
Knowing that Reverse-Flash has been responsible for guiding Nora's actions from the future, wouldn't it be a wild surprise to learn that Sherloque Wells' key deductions weren't brilliant so much as partially informed by the fact that he's a time-traveler who already has a general grasp on the timeline? It would play into why Sherloque has been a more distant Team Flash member than Harry and H.R. were, although I'm not so sure Eobard Thawne was ever that much of a ladies man.
The Flash Is "Missing" In Future Because Barry Takes The Cure
Is it a coincidence that The Flash developed a somewhat miraculous metahuman "cure" less than a full season before the Arrow-verse brings its adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths that will forever change the multiverse? Doubtful. I'm also not thinking it's coincidental that the cure was introduced around the same time the show concretely canonized the idea that timelines are malleable. So it's feasible, at least in my head, that Season 5 would end with Barry losing his powers to the cure.
It would likely take a complicated explanation to connect his current-timeline cure to his future headline-making disappearance, possibly involving someone having to travel back to the past – mid-Crisis – in order to cure him (and Reverse-Flash), but The Flash hasn't shied away from reality-bending explanations previously. Even if the writers don't make direct correlations to the Crisis disappearance, I would be intrigued to see The Flash kick Season 6 off with Barry as a non-meta.
Iris Gets Pregnant With Dawn West-Allen
One of the bigger questions surrounding Nora West-Allen's existence is one that The Flash hasn't addressed very often: when will Iris get pregnant? So far, there haven't been any big signs that Barry and Iris will soon be adding a newborn to the family, but assuming Nora will need to return to her timeline by the end of Season 5, The Flash will likely find a way to go full-circle by having Iris discover that she's expecting right around the time Nora leaves. Not much of a twist, admittedly.
The narrative spin, however, would be the reveal that Iris is actually pregnant with Dawn West-Allen, whose own existence was revealed by Reverse-Flash in "What's Past Is Prologue." Perhaps something Nora does inevitably wipes her out of all the timelines, leaving only Dawn as the proper West-Allen offspring. My alternate pitch here would be for Iris to be pregnant with twins, lending more mystery to why only Nora was around in the future.
For what it's worth, I would also love to see some kind of a twisty reveal involving Cecile and Joe's baby Jenna, since Cecile has been using her mind-reading powers with some regularity in recent episodes. (Not exactly in the most legal of situations, either.) Is Jenna a hero meta or a villain meta, and where did the powers come from? Let's hope answers are coming.
The Flash airs Tuesday nights on The CW at 8:00 p.m. ET, with the big season finale airing on May 14.
