The Flash‘s season 5 trailer revealed that the mystery girl is Nora West-Allen, aka XS. XS is a character from the DC Comics, but her origins are a bit different from her television counterpart.
Nora first appeared in the big Arrowverse crossover, Crisis on Earth-X, as a waiter at Barry and Iris’ ill-fated wedding. She then sporadically popped up in Central City, interacting with various members of Team Flash in oddly familiar ways.
We discovered toward the end of the season that she is a speedster whose lightning mixes the colors of Barry and Iris. When another speedster helped Barry stop the satellite that was falling toward Central City, it was apparent this was her.
She finally showed up at the West house during the Flash season 4 finale. Wearing the jacket Iris had worn while temporarily a speedster, she revealed herself to be Barry and Iris’ daughter from the future. She claimed she had made a terrible mistake and needed help.
According to actress Jessica Parker Kennedy, Nora is a lot like her parents, particularly her father. “Personality-wise, I think she’s a lot like Barry,” she tells Newsrama.
“Certainly, the way Barry was early on. She’s finding her footing. She’s goofy, she’s dorky, she’s very young spirited. She is prone to making mistakes and other people needing to clean them up. That’s just sort of where she’s at right now. She’s in the experimental phase of her life.”
However, Kennedy teases a rift between Nora and Iris. “Something has obviously happened for me to feel much closer to my father than my mother,” Kennedy previews. “It’s something you’ll find out relatively early on in the season.”
Candice Patton elaborates, “Iris is very, very excited and eager to get to know her daughter who’s back from the future. And I think that, as we hinted in the finale last season, that’s kind of met with some coldness from Nora. Which we’ll get into later in the season, why there’s some distance in between the two of them.
“But it’s been really interesting to play this dynamic of Iris really wanting to enjoy this time with her daughter, and figuring out why Nora’s kind of not into that,” she tells EW.
In the trailer from SDCC, she says Barry gave her the nickname XS. This is interesting, as in the DC Comics, XS is another figure entirely.
In the comics, XS is Jenni Ognats. First appearing in 1994’s Legionnaires #0, she is the granddaughter of Barry and Iris. She is from the 30th century, as that is where Iris is originally from in the comics. Her mother is Dawn Allen, Barry and Iris’s daughter (one of the Tornado Twins).
Though she did not exhibit super speed from a young age, the trauma of being kidnapped by the Dominators and seeing her father tortured due to her Allen heritage triggered her powers. Once she learned to control them, she became a member of the Legion of Superheroes.
(Her costume in the comics is echoed nicely by Iris’ speedster jacket on The Flash.)
XS does quite a bit of time traveling in the comics, and she visits the twentieth century; during the Dead Heat storyline, XS teams up with other twentieth-century speedsters, including her cousin Bart Allen (Impulse), to take on Savitar.
She also learns in Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds that she was born on New Earth but grew up on Earth-247. Because Professor Zoom was after her family, they fled to Earth-247.
Though Zoom was defeated, XS and her family were stuck on Earth-247. Her mother and uncle, Dawn and Don, would sacrifice themselves to protect Earth from the Dominators. Earth-247 was later destroyed and she lost her father, so she decided to stay on New Earth.
It remains to be seen how much of XS’s comic history The Flash will borrow, but it is interesting that the writers chose to introduce XS as the West-Allen child rather than the Tornado Twins, their children from the comics.
“We always like to introduce characters and sort of highlight areas that come from the comics but we don’t want to be beholden exactly to them so we can change the stories as we see fit and tell it for a television show,” executive producer Todd Helbing tells ComicBook.com.
With Kennedy as a series regular in The Flash season 5, it seems like we’ll have plenty of time to get to know her.
The Flash season 5 premieres Tuesday, October 9 at 8:00 p.m. ET on The CW.
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