The Flash Showrunner Teases Series Finale Is Inspired by Lost and The Office

The Flash is nearly coming to a close, as the show's series finale will be airing on The CW next week. As fans wait to see how the series — and parts of The CW's entire Arrowverse franchise — reach their peak, it sounds like the answer will draw from some surprising sources of inspiration. In a newly-published interview with Entertainment Weekly, The Flash showrunner Eric Wallace teased which other TV series finales he tried to emulate while writing the show's swan song.

"Before sitting down to even conceptualize and write this, I watched a whole bunch of series finales, and I'll tell you the ones I loved and used as inspiration: Lost, Angel, and The Office, ironically," Wallace explained. "I love the Lost finale so much because it was two hours and it's full of emotion. They cried and I cried and everybody cried. But the one that I went back to as being a perfect series finale in my opinion was Angel, the Buffy spin-off. Man, I still remember the feelings I had watching that Angel finale — it just blew me off the planet."

"I thought a lot about it, what's really good in this, and what do we need to pull out?" he says. "I'm not saying it's the same storyline — i's not even close to the same storyline, but it's all about the feelings. There's similar feelings in that series finale that I wanted to get across, and same thing with Lost."

"People think as I like horror movies and action that I don't like comedies, but The Office was a great series finale, and if you look at The Office series finale and our series finale, you might actually see some similarities in the strangest way," he says. "As a viewer who had been watching The Office for nine seasons religiously, I wanted so badly for [Steve Carell's] Michael Scott to come back to that show, and I recognized that feeling that I got when he showed up. I'm like, 'I have to deliver a similar feeling in our series finale.' That's when I decided there had to be a lot of faces from the past."

"[Angel] has a conclusion where there's no cliffhangers in that sense, but we threw in a little thing right at the end of the series finale," Wallace adds. "No spoilers here, but let's just say it directly hints at what the future of The Flash could be. And that's what I got out of that Angel finale: I wonder what happens next? And I can write my own story from there. I thought that was so clever, and we have something like that in our series finale."

What is The Flash series finale about?

"THE FINAL RUN – The Flash (Grant Gustin), the fastest man alive, is tasked with his greatest challenge yet, to save the timeline and save existence. Friends old and new gather for an epic battle to save Central City, one last time. The episode was written by Eric Wallace & Sam Chalsen and directed by Vanessa Parise."

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The Flash's final season airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.