Normally, when we spend months upon months pondering the identity of somebody on The Flash, it’s usually the villain. But this time around, we had a more direct big bad to contend with in the form of Clifford DeVoe, so the producers decided to let speculation swirl around the Mystery Girl first introduced in last fall’s Crisis on Earth-X crossover event.
Like many of you, we theorized that she’d be revealed as the future self of Barry and Iris’ daughter, but we kept our options open. Really, in the case of a sci-fi show such as this, we couldn’t discount the possibility of her being Joe and Cecile’s daughter, or even another iteration of the Reverse-Flash!
In fact, Joe and Cecile’s baby girl, Jenna, was finally birthed, but the arrival of the Mystery Girl soon afterward answered our questions (for now).
You see, in addition to providing the Scarlet Speedster with assistance when saving Central City from a crashing satellite earlier in the episode, the young woman revealed herself to be his daughter, Nora Allen. That’s right, she’s named for Barry’s late mother.
While speaking with ComicBook.com, executive producer Todd Helbing confirmed that pretty much everybody was right, save for one minor alteration from the comics:
“Everybody guessed right for the most part. I think I’ve said this at one point that they haven’t totally gotten it yet. It was basically right except for the name. They assumed that it was Dawn.”
Obviously, this affords the show’s writers a sense of freedom to explore Jessica Parker Kennedy’s character, which Helbing continued to hint at:
“We always like to introduce characters and sort of highlight areas that come from the comics but we don’t want to be beholden exactly to them so we can change the stories as we see fit and tell it for a television show.”
Of course, Nora’s cryptic remark stating she screwed with the timeline (like father, like daughter) will leave us scratching our heads for the summer, which was something else the showrunner touched on:
“With [Nora], it’s the time that she comes from and what she did. She makes this sort of big mistake at the end of the episode — you see the concern of what she’s done, and Barry certainly learned his lessons from time travel, so now it’s going to be interesting to put him on the different side of the problem and see how he can help her fix it.”
Without a doubt, The Flash season 5 is already shaping up to be an intriguing affair. I guess it’ll be a little while longer before we learn of whomever the main villain will be, so let’s keep our ears to the ground once San Diego Comic-Con rolls around in July.