'The Flash': SPOILER Dies in "Lose Yourself"

The Flash's fight against The Thinker reached an interesting peak in tonight's episode -- with a surprising end result.

Spoilers for tonight's episode of The Flash, "Lose Yourself", below!

Tonight's episode saw Clifford DeVoe/The Thinker (Neil Sandilands) closing in on Team Flash, leading the group of superheroes on a last-ditch effort to protect themselves. Part of this involved tracking down the twelfth bus meta -- Edwin Gauss (Arturo Del Puerto), an off-the-grid hippy with the ability to create and travel between pocket dimensions.

Team Flash planned on using Edwin's abilities to track down DeVoe in his secret lab, but the plan quickly backfired. DeVoe and Marlize DeVoe/The Mechanic (Kim Engelbrecht) arrived at STAR Labs, and attacked the remainder of the team.

DeVoe quickly got to Edwin and absorbed his abilities, but Ralph Dibny/Elongated Man (Hartley Sawyer) was able to capture him. But in an emotional standoff between DeVoe, Ralph, and Barry Allen/The Flash (Grant Gustin), DeVoe absorbed Ralph's powers, taking over his body and essentially killing him.

DeVoe then took on Ralph's persona, returning to his lab. As he and Marlize celebrated the occasion, he used Ralph's powers to morph his appearance back to his original facade.

While the promotional material for this episode -- and even the title, to an extent -- hinted at something ominous for Ralph, his death is pretty surprising. Granted, there's no telling how the rest of the season will play out, and if Team Flash could eventually find a way to remove Ralph from DeVoe's consciousness. But for now, this end result is a little bit heartbreaking, especially considering the arc that Ralph has gone on all season.

"He deals with [being a hero] in different ways and it gave us a lot of opportunity to develop him with when this threat comes in, and he realizes the severity of it," Sawyer explained to ComicBook.com earlier this year. "How does he handle it? He doesn't handle it, at least at first, in this 'I'm a hero I can take it' way....I think it's great because it gave us the opportunity to explore different sides of him and he'll get some one on one time with some different characters and reveal some more about himself and why he is the way that he is. That he is struggling with it and wants to do the right thing but it's not the easiest thing in the world."

"I don't think he really believed in other people and therefore didn't believe in himself," Sawyer added. "This journey is him finding, I think, some pieces of himself that were there in the past before we ever saw him on The Flash."

What do you think of this heartbreaking Flash twist? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.