'The Flash' Will Get a Future Flashback to Explain Nora-Thawne Connection

Only on The Flash can we get a legitimate flashback that’s also a flash-forward. Of all things, it’ll focus on the Reverse-Flash and the mysterious connection he has with Nora West-Allen.

“We want to do sort of a flash-forward, flashback episode, where you get the complete picture,” The Flash showrunner Todd Helbing revealed in an interview published Monday with TV Guide when asked about the shocking reveal from the mid-season finale that Nora was in cahoots with Barry’s greatest enemy, the Reverse-Flash.

In the episode’s final moments (featured above), Nora transmits data to someone in the future, proving that she’s hiding something from Team Flash in the present day. Then she time-travels to 2049 and confronts Thawne, who’s in some kind of prison cell.

“We get the dynamic pretty quickly,” Helbing confirmed. That dynamic is already starting to emerge in the trailer for the mid-season premiere, “The Flash and the Furious.”

“Have I not given you everything you wanted?” Thawne says to Nora in the trailer below. “A chance to go back and see your father, to run with the Flash?”

For three entire episodes earlier this season on The Flash, Nora was notoriously cold-hearted towards her mother Iris. In Episode 4, we learned its because in the future, Iris deliberately has a meta-human power dampening chip surgically implanted into Nora so that she never knew she was a speedster. (We don’t know why Future-Iris did this, but it’s easy to assume it was to protect Nora.)

As a result, Nora grew up powerless — until she learned the truth, removed the chip, and ran into the past to meet her father.

We’re willing to bet it’s Thawne that told her the truth.

“You sort of learn what their relationship is and how Thawne has helped her personally,” Helbing also said, “and then we go back to them quite a bit in the back half of the season so you’ll slowly start to get the full picture of how everything came to be.”

Nora clearly spent her childhood worshipping her father and studying his legacy as she visited the Flash Museum and learned everything she could. Eventually, her fascination probably led directly to Eobard Thawne’s prison cell. How and why one of the multiverse’s most dangerous criminals gets computer access while in prison is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear that by now, Nora is working with Thawne and sending him notes from the past.

To what end? Is Nora an unwilling pawn in Thawne’s schemes? Or will she actually wind up being a villain? One thing’s for sure: Nora’s presence at this point in the timeline is much more complicated than we all previously thought.

The Flash returns Tuesday, January 15 at 8 p.m. Eastern on The CW.

The 100th episode of The Flash was one of its best.*