The Flash Season 3: Barry Saved His Mom! — What Happens Next?

“Mom” was the word as Season 2 of The CW’s The Flash came to a close. But was traveling back in time to save Nora a bit of a “parent trap” for Barry, who likely has significantly altered his fate? Is the new word, heading into Season 3, “Flashpoint”?

For the uninitiated — and I will simplify this greatly, while omitting a few spoilers —Flashpoint was a massive DC Comics library “reboot” facilitated by Barry’s trip back in time to save his mother. After doing so, he wakes up back in Central City, confused by the changes to the world that he gradually lays witness to. For one, Barry doesn’t have his powers, since there was no tragic past/wrongful incarceration of his dad to steer him in the direction of forensic science and thus land him in his lab with those chemicals at the time of the fateful lightning strike.

Also in Barry’s immediate orbit, in the absence of The Flash a different hero protected Central City — Citizen Cold. (Is that a reason why Legends of Tomorrow‘s Wentworth Miller was switched to a series regular “across all Greg Berlanti superhero shows”? Because they knew he’d be needed on The Flash?) On the flip side, Reverse-Flash/Eobard Thawne is alive and well, which could account for Tom Cavanagh maintaining his series regular status, even though Harry just returned home to Earth-Two.

In Flashpoint, Barry eventually decides he must undo what he undid. And yet he’s powerless. So, with help from Batman, he recreates the circumstances through which he became a speedster — extremely akin to the final episodes of The Flash‘s own Season 2, so if the TV show goes that route, it will be interesting to see how they avoid treading identical ground.

All of which is a 200-word way of saying that when The Flash Season 3 opens, Barry is very likely in for a huge shock (will he have even ever met the Wests?), and he may be powerless to make things right once he realizes all that went wrong. The easiest question to thus pose to you is: How long will The Flash take to serve up its spin on this major comic-book arc? Especially with the epic four-way crossover with Arrow, Legends and Supergirl on the calendar for December? (Unless Barry from the original timeline takes part in that event, though such a workaround would be super-confusing and dramatically unsatisfying.)