SPOILERS AHEAD!
There you have it folks! We can finally quash the silly theories of Harrison Wells being a future Barry Allen; Eobard Thawne has made his way on to 'The Flash'. Not only that, he murdered a tearful Cisco, who had spent the episode discovering Wells' Thawne's secret. And to top it all off, Barry has found himself stranded a few days in the past after running so fast, he travelled back in time! Variety sat down with producer Andrew Kreisberg, Tom Cavanagh (Harrison Wells/Reverse Flash) and Candice Patton (Iris West) to discuss what's next!
Of course, we can expect that Barry's trip back through time will have some sort of ripple effect, which will be explored in the next episode, with Barry having found himself back to the night before the Weather Wizard's attack on Central City. "The ramifications of this episode are the fun of Episode 16, and seeing exactly what happened in 15, how much of it still happens and how much of it might possibly change,” Kreisberg teased. “It’s sort of the advantage of having a show that dabbles in time travel; this episode allowed us to give people a tease and a taste and make some big reveals, because, as always, we try to not keep every secret all the time."
You can expect the show to further explore the concept of time travel, and probably in more ways than one. Most films or television shows often have their fixed set of rules, and the Flash seems to be sticking by what they've set up since the beginning, though the full scope will be revealed as events progress. "Like Wells said in a previous episode, there are different versions of time travel: there’s the fixed loop and there’s the version where time is more plastic and mutable and I think one of the fun things is discovering what’s a fixed point in time and what can’t be changed — what things always to happen and what things are changeable and mutable. It’s a mixture of both. None of us knows how time travel really works, but we’ve come up with what we feel are our rules and we try to stick by them. A lot of what we’re doing now is a lot of stuff that was set up in the pilot.”
Cisco's death was a major shock, but according to Kreisberg, it wasn't exactly something Thawne wanted to do, but was forced to in order to further his major goal. “There’s a genuine affection between them, like when we’re watching the movie. When Thawne is in the current time, he’s wholly invested and he truly cares about Cisco and is truly impressed with him… he sees some of him[self] in Cisco and there’s a protégé-mentor relationship and there’s a genuine relationship. When he says that line, ‘you’ve shown me what it’s like to have a son,’ he’s not saying that idly, he means it. At the same time, the guy’s gotta get home.”
Kreisberg reasoned, “If one of us was suddenly thrown back many centuries into the past and it took you 15 years to get home, you wouldn’t be sitting there by yourself; you’d meet people, you’d make friends. Even if, intellectually, you were understanding that all these people have been long dead and ‘it doesn’t really matter to me where I come from, every one of them could die and my home is still where it is,’ no man is an island … Eobard Thawne himself is not an evil man. He has a reason for doing what he’s doing and he has an agenda and he thinks of himself as the hero.
As for the Reverse Flash, it's all about getting back to the future...and killing Barry Allen when he gets the chance. Thawne admitted to Cisco that Barry was the real target on the night that Nora Allen died, and while his first priority is to get home by developing and using Barry's abilities, he won't hesitate to kill Barry if the opportunity arises. “He wants to get home. He wanted to kill Barry and he thought it was going to be a neat and easy thing, and instead he’s found himself trapped here for the last 15 years and all he wants to do is get back… Every day in this time is an assault on him… and if he can kill Barry in the process, then he’s two for two.”
What's next for Barry? Any thoughts or theories on the future of the Flash? Sound off in the comments! For more from Kreisberg, check out the full interview at the link below!