THE FLASH Finally Reveals Savitar’s Identity

Like in its first two seasons, The Flash‘s biggest mystery this year has been the man behind the mask of the evil speedster Savitar. There have been a lot of fan theories surrounding his identity, as usual.

Plus, the show has really taken its time in building up to the reveal, which certainly tests the patience of its viewers. And last week’s cliffhanger, which saw Savitar reveal himself to Killer Frost (but not to us), only further increased the frustration.

But in this week’s episode – Episode 20 of the season, in fact – Savitar’s true identity is finally revealed. While fans may have seen this coming, it is truly a game-changing twist for the series, and you’re bound to have even more questions going forward.

[Warning: The Following Contains MAJOR SPOILERS From This Week’s Episode of The Flash.]

So, just as many fans had suspected, Savitar is none other than a future version of Barry Allen himself. Present-day Barry finally figured it out, and after approaching Savitar, the future Barry steps out of the suit. So he really is “the future Flash.”

Among the questions you may have is, why would any version of Barry want to kill Iris of all people? Executive producer Andrew Kreisberg tells Entertainment Weekly that we’ll learn this in next week’s episode, while the plan has always been to make Savitar a “heavily scarred” version of our hero. “The idea that the darkest villain we could come up with was actually a very damaged version of our hero was interesting and fresh to us. We’re not only competing with all the stuff that we’ve done on Flash, but we’re always competing with everything we’ve done on all the other shows. So to have our lead actor be both the hero and the villain isn’t something we’ve done before, so that was exciting for us as storytellers.”

Kreisberg goes on to tease how Barry’s dynamic with Savitar is different from Reverse-Flash and Zoom. Unlike those villains, Barry still feels a certain level of understanding and sympathy for Savitar, because…well, it’s the same person. “Usually the hero and the villain have the same backstory, just one took the pain and tragedy that they were subjected to and it girded them into wanting to do good and become a hero, and with the villain, it damaged them so badly [that] they wanted to make everybody hurt as badly as they did. Barry sees in Savitar that he could’ve gone down that path, too, but he had Iris, Joe, Cisco, Caitlin, his father, he had the memory of his mother – he had all of these things that helped mold him into the hero that he is. Savitar lost all that.”

For more from EW’s interview with Kreisberg, click HERE.

What did you think of The Flash‘s big Savitar reveal?