Spoilers below for the penultimate episode of The Flash Season 3.
As The Flash brings Season 3 to a close, viewers' memory banks are filled with streaks of the truly bizarre storytelling that post-Flashpoint Barry Allen has been at the center of. The last episode alone featured HR getting kissy, King Shark respawning a limb-fin, Iris supposedly dying (due to a plot hole?), and more. The Flash often matches predictions on the bigger notes like villain reveals, but this show has a strong track record for thwarting expectations on so many other levels. And here, executive producer Andrew Kreisberg explains why the season finale won't be what we're ready for.
There will be an ultimate showdown with Savitar in the finale, but their [battle] isn't probably quite what you're expecting. Just because [Savitar] is a version of Barry, it doesn't play out exactly as people would expect.
Andrew Kreisberg is really throwing me for a loop there, because I have no idea what he thinks people are expecting from The Flash's finale. I don't even quite know what i'm expecting, although I know it will make me cackle at one point, and it will make me want to set my TV on fire at another point. (Another Barry ballad would do both.)
"Realistically," let's talk Barry vs. Savitar, keeping Andrew Kreisberg's tease to EW in mind. The ground zero expectation here is that this third speedster battle would lay down the zippy gauntlets as past seasons have, with Flash and Savitar racing towards some arbitrary finish line. But we wouldn't really be expecting that this time, since it's happened twice already.
So from Savitar's point of view, I figure he can't just beat the life out of Barry, lest he disrupt his own existence in some way. So then I would expect the mecha-villain to continue tormenting Barry, picking off his other loved ones, until the present-day speedster snaps. I mean, if Savitar was a villain an R-rated movie, rather than a CW superhero show, that's what would go down. But then, Barry has indeed seen quite a few of his loved ones murdered in front of him already, so even that falls under "expected."
As far as what Barry could do to defy expectations, he could -- oh, I don't know -- choose not to fix a problem by going back in time to change things. (Although at this point, the surest way that Flash can guarantee a different future is by attempting to fix something that already happened.) Maybe Barry will make a deal with a Time Wraith and a Black Flash to come and put Savitar out of everyone's misery. Or maybe all this will be revealed to be Savitar's Flashpoint universe, which he reverts back to some original timeline where he's just a mopey dude and not actually messing around with calcified fragments of the Speed Force. Maybe it's one of Earth-43 Joe West's pizza nightmares.
Since time travel isn't real, don't forget to tune into The CW next Tuesday night at 8:00 p.m. ET to see The Flash cap off its bonkers third season. Keep current with all the upcoming TV finales with our rundown, and to see what will be hitting the small screen once all the Arrow-verse shows are on haitus, head to our summer TV schedule.
