If you are following my Did You Hear? series you know there’s been a lot of announcements about developments in the upcoming CW five part Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover which will air at the end of this year. In an effort to make sure our Spoilerites have the best viewing experience possible I’ll be doing a series of these recaps bringing you up-to-date on all the important events from the previous seasons which will hurtle us ever closer to Crisis.
Let’s review … The Flash!
The fifth season of The Flash had a lot to do with the daughter of Barry Allen (Grant Gustin), and Iris West-Allen (Candice Patton), who was teased for most of Season 4: Jessica Kennedy Parker’s Nora Allen. She’s one of the lesser known Allen offspring from the comic books and originally a member of The Legion of Super-Heroes known by the moniker “XS”. From jump we know that Nora has ruined the timeline and wants both the help and approval of her parents, to repair the damage she caused to the timeline, and to repair the lack of relationship she has with either of them.
It’s soon revealed that Nora is racing back-and-forth to the future (about the same 2049 timestamp as the Arrow flash forwards), to witness the counting down of Eobard Thawne’s (Tom Cavanagh), prison sentence. He’s a real breath of fresh air in a plotline that manages to be confusing despite the fact that it is only set on a single set. Thawne walks the delicate balance of wanting to preserve and destroy Barry Allen which comes to a head in the final moments of The Flash season 5.
Meanwhile, Cavanagh emerges as yet another version of Harrison Wells from across the multiverse – Sherloque. Sherloque Wells is a French-Canadian world’s greatest detective who borrows equal parts from his namesake and the many Wells which have come before. He spends most of the season unravelling the mystery of Nora Allen and subtly revealing to the cast the betrayal that has come at the hands of their weird daughter from the future. Sherloque teams up repeatedly with Ralph (Hartley Sawyer), an after many episodes viewers finally got to see Ralph achieve his full potential.
Meanwhile, Caitlin (Danielle Panabaker), and Cisco (Carlos Valdez), both seem less and less interested in being superheroes over the course of The Flash season 5. When they aren’t helping Barry and Iris clean up the messes Nora has made across time (like father, like daughter!), Caitlin struggles to separate her identity as the thoughtful scientist from that of Killer Frost. Her father is introduced and revealed to be the classic DC Comics villain Icicle (Kyle Secor). Following this discovery Caitlin’s origin is retconned and she’s no longer a straight forward metahuman, rather she’s a reincarnation of an ice goddess. For his part, Cisco takes The Flash equivalent of the Mutant Cure to suppress everything that makes him Vibe … except when the plot demands his powers come back.
In amidst all the interpersonal drama on season 5 of The Flash Chris Klein appears as Cicada. This season villain is a metahuman who hates metahumans and hates the Flash most of all. He blames Barry Allen for putting his niece in a coma. Luckily for Cicada he doesn’t make it to the end of the season in time to see his beloved niece display abilities of her own and become the villain he could never quite be. She colloquially became known as “Shecada”.
When Shacada presents a real threat Nora sacrifices it all to save the present – at least the present as the stars of the show know it to be. She evaporates from the timeline, the newspaper predicting the death of her father changes its date to coincide with 2019’s Crisis on Infinite Earths event and viewers are left wondering if we will ever see XS again.
The Flash season 6 will air on October 8th, 2019 on the CW.
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She/her. Canadian actress. Bi Queen. Canadian co-host of Geek History Lesson. Canadian comic book writer: Witchblade, Apollo IX, Jupiter Jet series, Science! The Elements of Dark Energy, Aurora and The Eagle. Award-losing: actor, writer, podcaster. https://linktr.ee/AshleyVRobinson