Stargirl: SPOILER Returns in Series Finale

The season three finale of Stargirl aired on The CW on Wednesday night, bringing an end (for now) to the fan-favorite DC-inspired series. Across its run, the show had an incredibly unique and reverential approach to building out the Justice Society of America and its team members, leading to a lot of cameos and guest stars across the show’s run. That ethos was true all the way through the finale’s final moments, which brought back a beloved character from the DCTV landscape. Obviously, major spoilers for Stargirl‘s latest episode below! Only look if you want to know!

In a surprise twist, the final scene of the episode jumped a decade into the future, showing The Shade (Jonathan Cake) giving a tour of the JSA’s headquarters. After recounting all of the team’s successful adventures, the JSA’s iconic meeting table was broken in half by the arrival of Jay Garrick (John Wesley Shipp), who had arrived to recruit Shade on the team’s newest mission.

This marks the latest in an ever-growing stretch of appearances from Shipp, who starred in the title role of the 1990s The Flash television show, and has played both Henry Allen and Jay Garrick on the current The Flash show. Shipp began reprising that latter role on Stargirl last season, and was very excited about the prospect of doing so.

“Nobody writes Jay Garrick better than Geoff Johns,” Shipp told ComicBook.com in an interview last year. “I knew, when he asked me to do it, that it was going to be something really special. And then I read it and I thought, ‘Oh, I get exactly what my role is supposed to be.’ I have to say, walking into my own society instead of hanging around what would be the Justice League in the CW, it was a different feeling, knowing that even though we didn’t work on that set with the table, that the iconic table, that the justice hall, the Hall, that it was there.”

He continued, “Playing with these iconic characters. Wildcat. Starman. Hourman. It was a different feeling. I felt that I was playing a classical version of Jay Garrick. Plus, it’s his society, so he walks in… Yeah, the first time we see Jay Garrick on Flash, he snatches Barry out of the Speed Force and he’s like, ‘This is my Speed Force. What are you doing here? Who are you?’ But we get to actually see Jay operating within his own society and his own seat of authority and I held myself, I found, I didn’t consciously do it, but I found that I was holding and carrying myself, when I saw it, with an authority, quiet authority that I don’t always get to use on CW Flash, because Stargirl, and one thing I love about it, even the construct being built around a teenage heroine, there’s so much for her to learn, which means we’re going to get into so much legacy and legacy is so important to comic book audiences and in the comic book world to understand what’s going on.”