The Flash will soon return to air the back half of Season 5, and showrunner Todd Helbing just confirmed fans won't have to wait long to see what's going on with Reverse-Flash and Nora. Helbing stated that details about the characters' unnatural partnership will be revealed pretty early on, and The CW series intends to give viewers a full breakdown of how this situation came to be.
We get the dynamic pretty quickly. You sort of learn what their relationship is and how Thawne has helped her personally, 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. We want to do sort of a flash-forward, flashback episode, where you get the complete picture.
Arrow may have conditioned superhero TV fans to cringe at the thought of constant flashbacks in episodes, but doing this particular kind of installment on The Flash is definitely appreciated under these circumstances. Of course, the reason it's a "flash-forward flashback" is due to Nora and Thawne meeting in the future (presumably) and establishing their partnership before she went back to reveal herself to Team Flash. So it's a flashback for Nora that functions as an episodic flash-forward.
The great news in all of this is fans won't have long to wait before learning whether Team Flash can actually keep trusting Nora, who will apparently be working out whether or not it was a good idea to listen to her father's arch-rival all this time. Nora's still a little rattled by the news that Thawne killed her grandmother, and Todd Helbing told TVGuide the news definitely has an effect her relationship with the villainous speedster.
Yeah, it shifts a lot. We deal with that in Episode 10. I think even Thawne's a little shocked that she didn't know that that was the case. It definitely puts a dent in their relationship in a big way.
Todd Helbing added that the news hasn't only affected her relationship with Reverse-Flash, but that it will also make her more fearful about Team Flash discovering she's been working with the villain. Unfortunately, the showrunner also teased that Sherloque is just as suspicious of Nora as he was when he first questioned her about whose idea it was to interfere with destroying The Thinker's satellite. Should more clues come his way, it's possible Sherloque will go public what's happening before Nora can even confess.
If that happens, it's hard to imagine it will matter to Team Flash whether Nora's intentions were pure or not. Even if she is Barry and Iris' daughter, it isn't hard to imagine Nora getting booted from the team and forced to return to her own timeline. With that said, will kicking Nora out of the group at that point have major consequences, or will Reverse-Flash's plans already be in full motion?
The Flash is back on The CW on Tuesday, January 15, at 8:00 p.m. ET. Keep tabs on all shows returning or making a premiere in the first half of 2019 by visiting our midseason premiere guide.
