The Flash Showrunner Hints How Departed Characters Could Return

FLASH FACT: This article contains SPOILERS for the Season 2 premiere of The Flash.

The Season 2 premiere of The Flash caught up with Team Flash months after the near cataclysm of the previous season's finale. While the Central City was preparing to celebrate "Flash Day," Barry Allen couldn't stop thinking about the person he felt was the real hero that day.

Ronnie Raymond, one half of Firestorm, sacrificed himself to close the black hole opening above Central City. Ronnie is presumed dead, but executive producer Andrew Kreisberg says that doesn't necessarily mean it's that last we've seen of him, or any other of the show's other dearly departed characters.

"Yeah, that's part of the fun of Earth-2 and introducing the concept of Doppelgangers and that's part of what we'll be exploring this season," Kreisberg tells Variety. "We were really conscious of not wanting to repeat ourselves and last year was obviously all about time-travel. I think that whether people realized it or not, the whole series was about time-travel from the beginning… Looking back, you realize that there was a lot more time-travel in the pilot than you might've realized at first, and we wanted to do something different in season two, especially with "Legends" co-opting the time-travel concept. So obviously, the multiverse is a huge part of the DC Comics universe and it felt right to tackle it. And as we always do with "Arrow" and "Flash," we laid the seeds of season two towards the end of season one, so creating the singularity and the breach and seeing Jay Garrick's helmet were all portents of what was to come, and we've been having a lot of fun with it.

"Getting to see who's over there and who's not, and getting to see some of our actors getting to portray different versions of their characters, that's really the fun of when you look at the great sci-fi shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who, when they go into the mirror world. Not everybody will have a sharp Van Dyke to signify that they're evil. [Laughs.] But that has been part of the fun of the show. Unfortunately our imaginations are far grander than the pile of money we have, because we would be going the whole hog on some of these things, but so far it's been really great, we've had a lot of fun exploiting the idea. And the other great thing is that while we're solely focusing on Earth-2 for the time being, there's an Earth-3 and Earth-4 and Earth-5 and so on, and there's definitely room to explore all of that, certainly over the life of the series."

The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.