Warning: MAJOR spoilers ahead for The Flash. Don't read any further if you do not already know Savitar's true identity!
Barry Allen has faced off against plenty of evil badasses over the course of the last three years, but Season 3 of his solo series is building to his most intense battle to date: a war against himself. The reveal of Savitar as a future version of Barry has clearly managed to catch The Flash's titular hero off-guard, and all eyes are on the final episodes of Season 3 to give us some intense action and drama. However, it sounds like we can also expect a seriously emotional arc once Savitar's true origins are revealed. The Flash co-creator Andrew Kreisberg explained:
Those scenes that are coming up over the next few episodes, as everyone gets a real glimpse of this person, it's this mixture of both horror and sadness. His visage is obviously very upsetting --- seeing the scar and the milky white eye, but also seeing the person that you love be so twisted. Barry Allen, who probably has the gentlest soul of all of the characters in the Arrow-verse, to just see how far he could fall, he's both terrifying, but it's also heartbreaking.
As you can probably glean from Andrew Kreisberg's recent comments to EW, future Barry Allen isn't going to be a one-note villain, and his backstory will be proof of that. Unlike other Arrow-verse heroes like the brooding and regretful Oliver Queen, Sara Lance, and even (to a certain extent) Kara Danvers, Barry has always felt uniquely incorruptible as a shining symbol of hope for the rest of the small screen DC universe. To see him fall to such a profoundly dark place (and to know what he ends up doing as a result of that corruption) isn't just a surprising turn of events; it's an utterly devastating dramatic shift for him. And one that Grant Gustin looks like he'll revel in, performance-wise.
Of course, as you probably already assumed, the members of Team Flash will all have very different and shocked responses to this reveal. They have searched high and low for Savitar's identity for months, but nothing has prepared them for this. Andrew Kreisberg elaborated on that idea, saying that the cast's performances have matched what was written on the page in terms of the giant difference between seeing Savitar's hulking suit and then actually seeing the human Barry-body embedded within.
In many ways, this feels like the most logical direction for The Flash to go with its Season 3 villain. Barry has already encountered so many speedster bad guys in his three years as Central City's protector, so it makes perfect sense for that concept to culminate in a war against the ultimate speedster: The Flash himself. We already know that Season 4 of The Flash will shift its conflict away from a war against another speedster to a new type of villain, so future Barry seems like an excellent way to cap off the show's junior year.
With the promise of such a deep and dark hole for Barry Allen to tumble down during the final stretch of The Flash's third season, we will just have to wait and see how bad things get before Savitar's reign of terror ends. The Scarlet Speedster's solo series airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m. EST on The CW. For more information related to this summer's most highly anticipated summer TV debuts, make sure to check out our comprehensive summer television premiere guide.
