‘The Flash’ Wally Finds an Ally and Barry Discovers Another Flashpoint Change

Spoiler alert! This post contains plot details for the November 29 episode of The Flash.

Team Flash did their best to protect Wally (Keiynan Lonsdale) from his emerging powers, much to his chagrin, but he did prove vital in The Flash‘s portion of The CW’s “Invasion!” crossover: Barry (Grant Gustin) and Oliver (Stephen Amell) were outnumbered in a fight against the rest of the team—who were brainwashed by the alien-invading Dominators—and Wally came in to save the day…and got injured.

Wally’s actions allowed for simultaneous growth in the crossover tale and his own metahuman journey. “They all kind of got over their, ‘Oh God, Wally is a speedster’ [concerns] within the course of this giant episode,” The Flash executive producer Andrew Kreisberg told reporters after a screening. “What was the point of making sure Wally stays out of danger if the world is going to be destroyed by aliens? Him stepping into the fray and getting a little taste of things felt like it was an opportunity rather than something that we had to service because the story was telling us to.”

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Ultimately, Wally was able to convince HR (Tom Cavanagh, as the show’s latest version of Harrison Wells) to secretly train him going forward. “It will not go well, as assumed,” laughed Kreisberg. “But…what I love about this version of Wells [is] he is a genius in his own way…he has the capacity to see other people’s talent and how to mine it and how to grow it. He sees that in Wally. Like he says in an upcoming episode, there’s nothing in it for him to help Wally, but he sees that Wally is special and that’s where he can shine: in helping other people discover their own value and helping other people develop their own gifts.”

Versions of Wells have played vital mentorship roles to Barry and Cisco (Carlos Valdes) in the show’s first two seasons, and HR will be that for Wally. “[He] may not be the world’s greatest teacher and yet every episode we find that moment for him to drop this wisdom bomb on everybody else that shocks them,” Kreisberg said. “And it’s kind of why they let him stay around when he’s not providing any actual true value to the team—he really does have this value in keeping the team together.”

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Barry, meanwhile, has another issue on his hands: his altering the timeline has changed the newspaper story (“Flash Missing, Vanishes in Crisis,” first seen in the series pilot) that Iris (Candice Patton) was supposed to have penned as his wife in the year 2024. Now, Barry realized, it was written by a stranger. Though Kreisberg declined to give specifics about that fallout, he teased, “It’s going to have further complications.”

The Flash, Tuesdays, 8/7c, The CW