This post will contain spoilers for the previous season of CW’s The Flash. If you’ve already read ahead and are now pissed off, try to run really fast so that you can maybe travel back in time and take more heed of this disclaimer.
When The Fast Running Guy Show wrapped up its second season back in May, a very angsty Barry Allen had just (once again) zipped through spacetime in order arrive at the point and place of his mother’s murder. Unlike the last time he did this, however, he opted to step in and save her life. Though he had the best of intentions, his actions had some pretty unpleasant consequences, not the least of which was (kind of) making himself vanish, Marty McFly-style, from existence. And that was where things left off.
Since we’ve all been traveling forward through time at a rate of one second per second, we’re quickly approaching the show’s third season premiere on October 4, in which we’ll get to see how Allen runs really fast out of the time-travel-related predicament he’s created for himself. Based upon this very short teaser trailer, it looks like the show will be flirting with DC Comics’ 2011 “Flashpoint” story arc, in which The Flash fiddles with the fabric time and inadvertently creates a new universe for the future. In this adaptation, it looks like the dystopian timeline features a very rich and unhelpful Cisco and completely transparent writing surfaces.