Spoilers ahead for the long-awaited Season 2 premiere of Stargirl on The CW.
Stargirl has been missing from primetime for a full year, but the superhero series returned for its second season with an episode that already dropped some big hints about what's on the way. Not only did it get off to a much more horrifying start than Season 1, but it also introduced a Green Lantern (sort of) and proved that Courtney and Co. will have to reenter the fight sooner rather than later. But one moment that may have gone unnoticed compared to everything else was an exchange between Courtney and Pat that set up how Stargirl will connect to the Arrowverse via a Flash.
News broke over the summer that The Flash's John Wesley Shipp will reprise his role as The Flash for Stargirl Season 2, effectively bringing Stargirl into the Arrowverse, even if Grant Gustin's Barry Allen is the main Flash of the Arrowverse. Shipp's Flash is Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash and member of Earth-2's Justice Society of America. He got a fleeting mention in Stargirl's Season 2 premiere, when Courtney asked Pat who the villain Per Degaton is, and Pat answered:
The Flash banished him to an alternate timeline.
That isn't a whole lot on its own, as Stargirl has been dropping references to big DC Comics names throughout its run so far, but Courtney wasn't done with the subject just because Pat tried to close the book on it and send her to study. In a later conversation with Yolanda in the cafeteria on what was supposed to be the last day of school, Courtney explained that she's been researching time travel, saying:
I spent all morning doing research on time travel. I figure this JSA villain Per Degaton, he could still be a threat now even though the JSA technically stopped him years ago... Paradoxes!
Yolanda wasn't convinced, and it really did come across as Courtney trying to find an excuse to pick up her staff and get down to some heroics more than anything else, but would Stargirl really have mentioned Per Degaton not once but twice in the Season 2 premiere, along with a mention of The Flash, if the two aren't going to be connected?
John Wesley Shipp isn't slated to appear in Stargirl until Episode 9, but it's never too early to set the stage for something as major as the first connection between Stargirl and the Arrowverse, other than the cameo in the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover. Heck, the Arrowverse was arguably foreshadowing "Crisis" all the way back in the series premiere of The Flash, so Stargirl planning ahead would make sense.
Per Degaton is a supervillain from the pages of DC Comics and one of the six original members of the Injustice Society, going back to 1947. In the comics, he favors time travel for his villainy, and in certain storylines is one of few who remember the pre-Crisis multiverse. If Stargirl introduces Per Degaton and includes that element of his comic backstory, then he would really be the ideal bad guy to bridge realities along with Jay Garrick.
Only time will tell if Per Degaton will debut and open the door for John Wesley Shipp to make his Stargirl debut as Jay Garrick, so be sure to keep checking out new episodes of Stargirl on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET, ahead of new episodes of Superman & Lois as the fall TV season approaches.
