'The Flash' Promotes Jessica Parker Kennedy to Series Regular

Jessica Parker Kennedy will join the cast of The Flash as a series regular in season five, suggesting -- as many fans had assumed -- that the storyline teased for Barry and Iris's daughter in the season finale last month will be a major part of next season's story.

Introduced during "Crisis on Earth-X" in December of 2017, Kennedy appeared in a number of episodes as a mysterious girl who kept inserting herself into the lives of Team Flash. In the finale, she helped Barry stop The Thinker's master plan and win the day -- and later revealed herself as his daughter from the future.

"Everybody guessed right for the most part," executive producer Todd Helbing told ComicBook.com last month. "I think I've said this at one point that they haven't totally gotten it yet. It was basically right except for the name. They assumed that it was Dawn."

The "it" in question is the identity of the mysterious young woman who appeared at Barry and Iris's rehearsal dinner and quickly made fans suspicious of her identity and motives.

Most fans had leapt to the conclusion that the character, played by Kennedy, would be Dawn Allen, Barry and Iris's daughter in the comics and one-half of the "Tornado Twins" along with her brother Don.

"We always like to introduce characters and sort of highlight areas that come from the comics but we don't want to be beholden exactly to them so we can change the stories as we see fit and tell it for a television show," Helbing told said. "With [Nora], it's the time that she comes from and what she did. She makes this sort of big mistake at the end of the episode -- you see the concern of what she's done, and Barry certainly learned his lessons from time travel, so now it's going to be interesting to put him on the different side of the problem and see how he can help her fix it."

Barry's experience, of course, involved traveling back in time to save his mother from being murdered at the hands of Eobard Thawne, which created the paradoxical "Flashpoint" timeline and ultimately left lasting damage to the timstream long after Barry returned things to normal.

The exact nature of Nora's mistake will have to wait for fans to fully understand, but there is some symmetry to someone named after Barry's late mother, repeating his "Flashpoint" mistake.

The Flash airs on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. The series will return for its fifth season in October.