The latest episode of The Flash has been building up to a "Crisis on Infinite Earths" event since the 2014 pilot episode, which featured a glimpse of a newspaper article from the future that revealed the Flash was destined to disappear, on a day when the skies themselves turned red.
Eobard Thawne aka Reverse-Flash, and that particular decision will haunt her.
This week's episode, "Godspeed", explored Nora's timeline in detail when Team Flash decided they couldn't afford her keeping any more secrets. It told her entire origin story and, in so doing, dropped a major "Crisis on Infinite Earths" reveal. In one crucial scene, Nora went to see Gideon, the artificial intelligence that resides in STAR Labs. Gideon dropped the bombshell that Barry Allen, Nora's long-missing dad, was actually the Flash - and then played Nora Barry's last message for her. It's a hand-held recording, and it clearly shows red skies in the background. The sounds of a battle rage around the Flash; Stephen Amell's Oliver Queen can be heard shouting indistinctly, and there's repeated gunfire. At one point, something off-screen flashes and causes Barry to flinch.
"Nora, I don't have much time," Barry tells his daughter in his final message. "If you're watching this, it means you're like me. You have powers! It also means I wasn't there to help you learn how to use them. I wasn't there for a lot of things. , my sweet Nora, always : I love you. I always will." This footage is important because it confirms the newspaper reports from the future, all of which claimed the Flash disappeared after a mysterious event involving red skies, with a whole host of superheroes ing in the battle. The red skies, of course, tease a straightforward adaptation of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries, which was foreshadowed in last year's "Elseworlds" crossover.
But it's important to that the timeline has changed, possibly as a result of Nora's own actions. She's traveled back in time, meaning her dad knows full well that she's destined to have superpowers - and would no doubt record a very different last message. What's more, in the original timeline the Flash disappeared in 2024, but "Crisis on Infinite Earths" has already been confirmed as this year's Arrowverse crossover event and thus surely now takes place five years earlier.
So while this recording shows Flash during "Crisis on Infinite Earths", it's the version in Nora's own timeline: things are going to play out very differently in The Flash.