Spoilers for The Flash season finale are below.
Do you guys remember when The Flash finale ended on Tuesday and Barry jumped in bed and fell asleep peacefully until morning? Oh yeah, that’s not what happened. It ended with Barry heading back in time to the night his mom died and successfully stopping Reverse-Flash from killing her, which will have presumably huge reverberations in the timeline. Not just for Barry’s loved ones, either, but for his one-time idol Harrison Wells. Those afraid that the science whiz would be absent from Season 3 can breathe easier, as actor Tom Cavanagh has been confirmed as a series regular for the next batch of episodes. But the trick now is trying to figure out just who he will actually be playing.
The Flash can almost count as a sketch series, since just about all of the main cast members have played different roles by this point. Through the first two seasons, Tom Cavanagh played three different versions of Harrison Wells. There was his extended time as the secret baddie Reverse-Flash, the very short time when he was shown as his original self before having his body taken over by Eobard Thawne, and then in Earth-2 form for Season 2. So how is this going to happen?
If we assume that Barry’s decision to reboot his life sticks for at least a short amount of time in Season 3, that would mean Barry was never half-orphaned and wouldn’t necessarily head down the same path as before, meaning he might not become The Flash, meaning Reverse-Flash would have never gone back in time to destroy him. And no Future-Thawne means O.G. Harrison Wells never would have had his body and personality usurped, so we could potentially get to see the Harrison Wells that created The Flash in the first place. That’s something we haven’t really seen yet, since Thawne impatiently set up the accelerator explosion years ahead of the original time. I’d love to spend a good afternoon with the Earth-1 brainiac without his mind and impulses taken over by next-century supervillains.
Since Cavanagh is a regular, we don’t anticipate him entering the story for only a temporary basis, so perhaps another likely scenario will turn him into yet another Harrison Wells from a different Earth that we haven’t been to yet. Or maybe Supergirl’s world. Now that Barry and Cisco can get a fix on other worlds anytime they please, there are probably tons of other Harrys that can be found elsewhere in the universe and brought to this world to….do whatever. Or maybe Earth-2 Harry forgot his contacts and he comes back with Jesse.
Tom Cavanagh is such an integral part of this superheroic ensemble that the possibility of him stepping away for a season would probably be enough to get a number of viewers to stop tuning in. (Possibly just the actor’s family and friends, but still.) It’s good that the creative minds behind The Flash know and understand talent when they see it and when it steps out of its wheelchair and sticks a vibrating hand into their temporarily still-beating hearts.
News about Cavanagh’s definitely inclusion in Season 3 came from EWEW, where it’s pointed out just how secretive The CW is currently being about next season’s details. (Considering how many twists there were in Season 2, that’s totally understandable.) The finale paid off on mysteries we’d wondered about for months, as well as other twists that could pay off later on, and on other series, too. Here’s hoping the first steps into the next chapter are smooth and not as heartbreaking as those that ended Season 2.
The Flash Season 3 will debut this October on The CW. To see what’s debuting and returning this summer, check out our TV premiere schedule.
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