'The Flash' Season 4 Finale Spoilers: Why You Can Compare It to 'Inception'

In every past season finale of The Flash, Barry Allen had to run faster than ever before to beat some kind of speedster villain. There was Reverse-Flash, then Zoom, and then Barry’s evil time remnant Savitar. So how does Team Flash defeat the Thinker, who’s amassed a powerset that made him the most powerful being in the Arrowverse? Apparently, you incept him, altering his subconscious to make him choose the undo everything.

Spoilers follow for The Flash Season 4 finale “We Are The Flash.”

A new behind-the-scenes video from The CW released on Tuesday ahead of the finale confirms exactly how DeVoe achieves his Enlightenment. He successfully hacks Gideon inside the S.T.A.R. Labs Time Vault, which is seemingly the final step in executing his grand plan. Some purple energy activates and emits from the remaining satellites, which causes technology to fail seemingly around the world. In an interview also published Tuesday with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Todd Helbing dubbed it “an Inception-inspired episode.” He explained that Team Flash gets help from Marlize DeVoe, who “comes up with this idea that the only way that they can take him down is to go into his mind and find the good part that’s left in him and appeal to whatever good is left of DeVoe.” And of course Cisco directly mentions Inception during the episode.

Much like in the excellent episode from earlier this season, “Enter Flashtime,” the disaster they’re all trying to avert has already happened, and they’re pretty much out of time. So their insane plan transcends time and space by sending Barry inside DeVoe’s mind. Visually, the episode looks like similar to past adventures into the Speed Force like “The Runaway Dinosaur” in that it will explore normal settings with dream-like alterations. Unlike in Inception or other genre stories that ape it, DeVoe himself seems fully aware that Barry’s inside his mind, which probably won’t be good for the Scarlet Speedster.

Helbin does tease that “when [Barry] gets in [DeVoe’s mind], things aren’t quite as he thinks things are gonna be,” without divulging anything else.

Judging from the poster for the finale, Barry’s going to get pretty jacked up while inside of DeVoe’s mind:

So if this is really the team’s only option to stop DeVoe, then does that mean they’ll succeed and he’ll become a “good” guy? Or is there some other explanation that will end this conflict? There are still plenty of questions that The Flash Season 4 needs to answer.

In the EW interview, Helbing also confirms yet again that we’ll find out exactly who the Mystery Girl is and how she sets up the big bad for Season 5. But he also notes that the birth of Joe and Cecile’s child “plays a massive factor in the finale,” which almost makes it seem like these things could all be related somehow. No matter what, “We Are The Flash” looks like it’ll be one exciting hour of The Flash.

The Season 4 finale of The Flash airs May 22 at 8 p.m. Eastern only on The CW.