Is The Flash About to Undo Season 5's Greatest Tragedy? | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Flash Season 7, Episode 15, "Enemy at the Gates," which aired Tuesday on The CW.

Ever since the first season of The Flash, Barry Allen has learned the cruel price that comes with defending Central City as the Scarlet Speedster. Losing both parents to supervillains that struck especially close to home and facing the grave consequences of tampering with the timeline for his own ends, Barry has suffered and endured much across all seven seasons of the popular Arrowverse series. However, as The Flash Season 7 races into its final stretch of episodes, the show may be poised to undo one of the most bitter losses in Barry's life: The erasure of his time-displaced daughter Nora West-Allen, the speedster superhero XS.

After quietly appearing in her civilian guise throughout Season 4 as an unassuming, if overeager, young woman, the Season 4 finale revealed that the woman that semi-regularly crossed paths with Team Flash was actually Barry and Iris' daughter Nora who had traveled back from her native timeline in the Central City of 2049. After her own latent connection to the Speed Force is activated by an encounter with the supervillain Godspeed, Nora creates the superhero persona of XS and traveled back in time to help her father defeat the supervillain Cicada while tacitly taking advice from an imprisoned Eobard Thawne in 2049. While Cicada was defeated and Nora rejected the corrosive influence of the Negative Speed Force that she gained from Thawne, changes to the timeline caused Nora to be erased from reality before her horrified parents' eyes.

While the erasure of Nora caused Barry and Iris to have serious second thoughts about following through and having children, their experiences in the first half of Season 7 led them to decide to give the prospect a solid chance. As the couple begin to attempt to conceive a child together, Barry receives a vision of Nora, appearing just as she did before she was abruptly erased from the fabric of reality. This vision convinces Barry that Iris is pregnant though his suspicions are eventually disproven by multiple pregnancy tests taken by his wife.

Nora is indeed expected to race back to Central City later in Season 7, alongside Barry and Iris' time-displaced grandson Bart Allen, who runs under the superhero alter ego Impulse. The impending family reunion stands to undo a tragedy that haunted Barry and Iris ever since the Season 5 finale, shaking the two to their core and making them rethink their future together and the possibility of ever having a family of their own while quietly eliminating the emotional consequences of Season 5's overarching conflict.

From teases about Barry sacrificing his life to save the Arrowverse in the prophesied "Crisis on Infinite Earths" to the erasure of Barry and Iris' daughter, The Flash has never really been a show that promised a happy ending for the Scarlet Speedster. With Nora set to make her triumphant return, and Barry and Iris reaffirming their decision to have children, the West-Allen family may actually get the happy ending that they've deserved all along as Team Flash welcomes back more of Barry and Iris' time-traveling descendants as they face a familiar foe from the future targeting the Flash once again.

The Flash stars Grant Gustin, Candice Patton, Jesse L. Martin, Danielle Panabaker, Carlos Valdes and Tom Cavanagh. New episodes air Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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