You don’t suppose that’s the key to all of this, do you? That she’s going to use the power of Doing A Really Great Impression Of DeVoe so our heroes can get an inside line on the guy? “Fooools! You’d NEVER guess that my password is Zinc182!”
Frigging finally…an Earth-1 meta whose powers don’t come from a mass empowering event. (Probably.)
I think there was one other Earth-1 metahuman who wasn’t caught in the particle accelerator explosion nor part of the later bus event. Ah, yes, Deathbolt who originally appeared on Arrow.
And of course there were all the metas in the 1940’s JSA who couldn’t have been in the particle accelerator explosion.
Should we count Trajectory?
If we count Trajectory, we should also count the Soviet Firestorm. For that matter, Wally West and Jesse Quick were caught in a particle accelerator explosion, just not the particle accelerator explosion.
Hey, by that metric, Thawne, too, right?
Canonically, Eobard Thawne gained his powers by recreating the conditions that gave Barry Allen his powers, i.e., chemicals combined with a lightning strike. Barry’s original Flash suit may or may not have been involved. I don’t think they ever explained how TV-Thawne got his speed.
Barry just blurted out the names Kara, Oliver, and Wally in front of a known Super Villain. Granted, she was already offering her help to take down the Big Bad, and probably already knew about them and their secret identities. But those identities aren’t Barry’s to simply give away.
As season finales go, this one was rather lackluster. When they said he going into Devoe’s mind I was expecting an Inception-style fight. (Cisco even name-dropped Inception.) Instead we got a Matrix-style burly brawl. I wasn’t terribly impressed by the fight between Neo and multiple Agent Smiths on the big screen, and I wasn’t too impressed by Barry+Ralph vs multiple Devoes on the small screen.
I’m glad Ralph is back, though. Is he going to be a regular next season? Maybe he can finally find his Sue.
So the mystery of the Mystery Girl has finally been revealed. To no one’s surprise, she’s a speedster and she’s Barry and Iris’s daughter. Although her name is Nora and not Dawn. (Is this to indicate that we shouldn’t expect her to have a twin brother named Don?) I see that she’s inherited her father’s proclivity to mess with the timeline.
I’m glad for that…the whole Don/Dawn thing was a terrible choice, and naming her for his mother (who had a much larger, if more tragic, effect on Barry’s life in this universe than in the one where Dawn originated) is a Very Barry thing to do. I don’t know that we can count out her having a twin… I wouldn’t lay money on his existing or his not existing, but I WOULD wager that if she does have a brother, he’s named Henry. (Probably Henry Joseph, to be precise.)
I liked the fight with DeVoe, personally…it was a good literalization of what would be going on - Ralph and Barry weren’t in control, and DeVoe wouldn’t get fancy, because he wouldn’t feel the need - he’s that much smarter than them he could just bombard them…or so he’d think. He is an arrogant fucker.
I didn’t like Barry and Nora getting rid of the satellite by punching it - they should be smart enough to know that would not improve things much, if at all…getting creative with the Speed Force to drain its momentum would have been much more sensible. But harder to do while still pushing off the reveal of her identity, I suppose.
(Speaking of the reveal…they sure seemed to be trying hard to make us think she was Joe and Cecile’s kid in this episode…to the point that it did a better job of making it an obvious red herring than actually leading one down that path.)
The Kara identity doesn’t matter much - she’s from another universe.
Barry swinging Ralph around to knock down the DeVoes seemed very much like a comicbook-fight strategy - which worked for me.
One thing I can appreciate about the finale is that this time they didn’t have Barry disappearing into a wormhole (season 1) or the Speedforce (season 3) or running back in time to create Flashpoint (season 2). Just everyone (including Wally!) gathering together to greet the new addition to the West household. And then Mystery Girl shows up.
After some internet digging, I found out that Nora Allen is Barry’s daughter in the Justice League: Legacy timeline. She’s not the daughter of Iris West though. Her mother is Jessica Cruz, who is a Green Lantern.
Huh…I missed that arc…man, I liked Jessica/Barry, but that ship lasted for, like, 5 minutes…
My guess is that in Nora’s original timeline, Barry died somehow destroying the satellite. (Iris was already pregnant with Nora.) Nobody told Nora she could time travel because they didn’t want her to repeat the Flashpoint disaster, but she time traveled accidentally (as Barry first did) or found information on the computer or (and this is probably it) Thawne told her. Not knowing about Flashpoint, she “fixed” the problem, only to go “back to the future” and Thawne’s in charge, or something equally disastrous.
And what was that weird thing Cecile said to Caitlin? Something about “Tom was always like that” or “Tom was like that all along”? Whatever it was, Caitlin lied when she said she didn’t know what it was about. Maybe Tom was her dad? It’s another cliffhanger, anyway.
Mmm…Nora seems an unlikely choice of names if she was born after Barry died - Nora was Barry’s mother, and while Joe and Iris knew her, I’m not sure she’d be Iris’s first choice for a namesake. (Barry seems more likely, but I can’t think of a feminine form of Bartholomew. Perhaps ‘Beryl’ as ‘close enough’ to Barry.)
Also, that would mean Barry had to die, in order to prevent it from clashing with the prior time travel stories hard enough to create gamma radiation.
Perhaps in the original timeline, Barry was injured, taking him out of the action for a while and other heroes (Ralph, Cisco, and Caitlin, frex) stepped up to fill in for him, thus gaining skills/confidence/reputation that they use at some point in the future. (This is not much different than your suggestion, of course.) If it’s as yet unknown heroes, this suggests an overarching plot for the next season of finding and inspiring them (sort of like this season, but less likely to result in all of them dying).
Conversely, Nora was conceived while he was convalescing.
Or Barry was never hurt and she just wanted to fight alongside him in his prime, and didn’t think that adding her power to the punch would cause the debris to land in different places, causing different damage to the city/different injuries so that a villain who wouldn’t have showed up before does (because he was now injured or had his property destroyed), or someone destined to be a hero doesn’t (because where she would have gotten powers no longer exists)…or she was never conceived because where Barry and Iris went on the night they made her didn’t exist any more.
Just remembered that when they went to Earth 2, the first Killer Frost said she’d had a brother who died. (I don’t remember his name.) Caitlin denied ever having a brother. Maybe she did, and that’s Tom. And maybe he’s still alive, and (if so) a super villain.
Barry being killed by the satellite doesn’t work. We know Barry survives until at least 2024, due to the future newspaper headline “Flash Missing - Vanishes in Crisis”. Unless you’re saying that in Nora’s timeline, Barry was killed and what we’re watching is an alternate timeline for her. Which would be, what, the tenth timeline that we know about?
ETA: Not to mention all the historical meddling that the Legends have done. But I consider that separate from the meddling done by speedsters.
and I wouldn’t have this headache if it were’nt for those meddling kids.
All Praise Bebo!
All hail His Furry Blueness!
I think I was in a bad mood because of a cold but that finale was kind of lame. The set up for next season did interest me though.