Nora Allen, the speedster daughter of Iris and Barry, will play a major role in the next season of The Flash — mainly because, like father like daughter, she couldn’t help but meddle with time travel and explore her own past.
But while there is plenty of drama to be mined from that, at least one bit will be addressed head on: Nora’s relationship with Iris.
One thing made clear when Nora started popping up throughout Flash’s last season was that she was very distant when it came to Iris — while she’d be jovial to the rest of team Flash, she’d avoid being anywhere near the woman who would eventually be revealed as her future mother.
Talking to Newsarama about the upcoming season, Jessica Parker Kennedy, who plays Nora, said that the reason why Nora avoids her mother will be revealed early on in the season:
Something has obviously happened for me to feel much closer to my father than my mother. It’s something you’ll find out relatively early on in the season.
Kennedy went on to add that, in a lot of ways, Nora is very much like her father:
Personality-wise, I think she’s a lot like Barry. 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.
Plus, they both have history with messing up time travel for selfish reasons! They’re like peas in an alarmingly fast pod, really.
But it’s probably for the best that The Flash makes it clear just what happened between Nora and the Iris of the future early in the season. The show has never been too great at familial drama at the best of times — especially drama born out of time travel shenanigans. Keeping the “secret” of Nora and Iris’ past/future awkwardly secret for too long would just be a drag on the show’s storytelling.
While it remains to be seen if the secret is grave enough that it could cast a shadow over Iris and Nora’s arcs for the rest of the season, hopefully bringing it out into the open sooner rather than later actually helps Iris and Nora’s arc together this season, instead of masking it behind nebulous drama for the sake of stretching out a conflict. Oh god, what if it’s about Iris’ blogging?
The Flash returns this October. The series airs in Australia on FOX8.