‘The Flash’ Will Use “Flashbacks” to Explain Nora’s Alliance with Thawne

Reality may have been restored at the end of the Arrowverse’s “Elseworlds” crossover this week, but just because things are back to status quo for Barry Allen doesn’t mean things are going to be “normal” on The Flash anytime soon. The midseason finale revealed Nora to be working with her father’s worst enemy, and while that came as a massive surprise to fans it seems like there will be an explanation for it — thanks to flash-forward flashbacks.

According to showrunner Todd Helbing, fans will get to see how Nora (Jessica Parker Kennedy) came to work with Eobard Thawne (Tom Cavanagh) and it’s something he described as being fun. Helbing told TV Line that a “flash-forward flashback episode” would explain “how all that came to be, which will be a lot of fun.”

“You’ll slowly start to get the pieces of info that you need, but there will probably be one episode where we explain how that all happened to get her to come back [in time],” Helbing said.

That explanation is one that fans of The CW series will be very glad to get. The return of Thawne is one that stunned fans at the end of the series’ 100th episode. In it, Nora was surprised to learn that Thawne had murdered her grandmother when Barry (Grant Gustin) was a child and raced to the future to confront Thawne who appeared to be in some sort of prison cell. The episode ended with a little bit of a cliffhanger about the situation, though a preview for the show’s return in January reveals that Nora may have bitten off a bit more than she can chew in aligning herself with Thawne.

While Helbing doesn’t reveal what exactly happens to get Nora to come back to what is the show’s “present” day — fans will have to tune in to find that out — it’s likely that it will have something to do with “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. The event is one that has been teased by The Flash since its series premiere revealed that the Flash (Grant Gustin) disappears in a mysterious crisis in 2024, but it was confirmed at the end of “Elseworlds” that the crisis is coming, at least for viewers, well before then in Fall 2019.

With Thawne having been born in 2151, he comes from a post-Crisis world. It’s possible that Thawne may know quite a bit about the event that he has not shared with Barry, Nora, or anyone, opening the door for the possibility that the show’s original Big Bad to be attempting to help. After all, without the Flash who else is Thawne going to torment?

“It is really fulfilling” to see some of the Crisis stuff play out, Gustin told ComicBook.com. “I hope we can stick around long enough to see what’s going on with that newspaper article. We’d have to make it four more seasons, five more seasons. It’s cool, though. It feels like it’s earned. Me and Stephen had that conversation a lot during the crossover, actually. There’s a lot of even just comedic moments that we have that are funny because they’re earned — because of the history of the characters and the journey they’ve been on. It is one of the best parts of doing these as a series versus a film — people have been with us. I’ve met kids who have gone through all of high school watching this show. To have that kind of stamp on people’s lives is pretty special.”

The Flash returns on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 at 8/7c on The CW.