'The Flash' Season 5 Spoilers: How it Teases "Crisis on Infinite Earths"

The infamous “Crisis” scheduled to occur in the Arrowverse in 2024 has seemingly been confirmed as “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” the classic comic book storyline that almost destroyed the multiverse — and it also changed history to tease Batwoman.

The Flash Season 5 premiere aired Tuesday night, and in it, Barry’s daughter from the future Nora West-Allen drops tons of spoilers from her own time. She knows Lightning Lad and gives Barry a Flash Ring designed by Ryan Choi, but the most interesting spoiler arrives when Barry asks what happens to him in the future. His fate seems tied to how the Flash dies during “Crisis on Infinite Earths.”

Nora takes Barry into the time vault to bring up the newspaper from 2024 that’s appeared multiple times on the show before, and she compares it to one 25 years later commemorating the Flash’s disappearance.

So the Flash was missing, presumed dead, for almost of Nora’s life.

Nora’s newspaper clipping from 2049 offers many more details about the future, most importantly a mention of someone called Psycho-Pirate:

Research has focused on Roger Hayden, aka Psycho-Pirate, who claims to remember the night’s events.

He said upon his arrest, “Worlds lived, worlds died. Nothing will ever be the same.”

In DC Comics, the ultra-powerful Anti-Monitor gives Psycho-Pirate a portion of his power so that this minor villain could manipulate various heroes in the multiverse against each other. Later in the story, the Flash sacrifices himself to stop the Anti-Monitor’s anti-matter cannon and isn’t seen again in the comics for decades.

“Crisis on Infinite Earths” ends with Psycho-Pirate saying the exact words in that future newspaper article from inside his cell in Arkham Asylum after the war against the godlike Anti-Monitor merged the many Earths in the multiverse.

Conveniently, this newspaper clipping from the future also retcons many of the details from the original. In the early days of The Flash, the paper indicated that he fought alongside the Green Arrow, Hawkgirl, and the Atom. “But in the years following the crisis, accounts only grew more contradictory,” the new article reads. This rewrite omits Hawkgirl, who left the Arrowverse a long time ago on Legends of Tomorrow, to include details about how the Atom is a Legend now and how Supergirl is from another world:

“Some eyewitnesses remember dozens of other heroes present, including Green Arrow, Batwoman, and Elongated Man. Others remember heroes thought lost in time, like the Atom, or from other worlds, like Supergirl. Some even contend they saw Reverse-Flash leading an army of “shadow demons.”

Even “shadow demons” is a nod to “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” The Anti-Monitors army of shadow demons was instrumental in his war against the Monitor and the various heroes in the multiverse.

Also noteworthy in the future newspaper is the mention of Batwoman, indicating that unlike our previous theory, she exists in Earth-1’s version of Gotham City as opposed to an alternate Earth.

We’re starting to wonder how epic it would be if The Flash ran for five more seasons and the entire series ended on April 25, 2024 by launching into “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” including Barry’s death. It could function like the Avengers: Infinity War of the Arrowverse, resetting the universe for a new generation of heroes.

The Flash airs Tuesday nights on The CW at 8 p.m. Eastern.