The Flash Season 4 will speed your way on the CW in Fall of 2017, and they're going with a different kind of villain this time.
This article contains spoilers for the latest episode of The Flash.
The Flash Season 4 is already confirmed, and the CW is feeling good enough about it that they renewed it early in its season three run. The current season has been a marked improvement over the strange detours of season two, so confidence in The Flash Season 4 is pretty high around these parts.
Now, it might seem like it's still a little early to start throwing around The Flash Season 4 predictions, but a few months ago, we had our first clue about next year's big baddie. "Next season we're not going to have a speedster as the main bad guy,"executive producer Andrew Kreisberg told the crowd at Paley Fest in Los Angeles.
That's something of a relief. While, of course, season one's Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash was kind of the gold standard of speedster big bads, Zoom was a little more of a mixed bag during season two. The Savitar storyline continues to unfold during season three, but it's nice to see that they're looking to explore other options next year.
So who could that be? Well, in a recent episode, we got a major clue from a minor villain. As Abra Kadabra was being led off to face his fate, Barry tried to appeal to his better nature, begging for information about Savitar. While pointing out that nobody hurt Barry as badly as Savitar will, Kadabra rattled off the names of the villains who have most impacted Barry's life, including Thawne and Zoom. But there was another name.
"Devoe."
There's only one Devoe worth mentioning in Flash mythology, and that's Clifford Devoe, the Thinker. Devoe is traditionally known as more of a Jay Garrick villain, first appearing in All-Flash Comics #12 way back in 1943. He took on both Jay Garrick and the Justice Society numerous times, and he had a quaint (by modern standards) "thinking cap" which allowed him some amplified psionic abilities. But when his physical body died, he became a non-living artificial intelligence with even greater power. It's easy to imagine a kind of hybridized Clifford Devoe making trouble on the show next year, and if he's indeed the big baddie of The Flash Season 4, then I imagine the showrunners already have something interesting mapped out for him.
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One other thing has been teased a couple of times for later seasons, and it's the kind of storyline that only makes sense for the latter seasons of a show like this one. I wrote a little bit more about that here, but there are major potential spoilers involved, so go there at your own risk. I suspect this is more of a season five thing, though.
The Flash Season 4 Release Date
Expect The Flash Season 4 to arrive in early October, just like previous seasons. If we were to put money on it, I'd feel pretty good about October 3 or October 10, but the CW hasn't officially announced anything yet.
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