The season 3 finale of “The Flash” left fans with a massive cliffhanger when Barry Allen decided to sacrifice himself to the Speed Force to save Central City. Season 3 was easily the darkest season yet, and it had a pretty bleak ending, but it ended that way for a specific reason.
Related: New Photos From The Flash Season 4 Show Another Look At The New Flash Suit
When “The Flash” returns for season 4, the show will be aiming for a much lighter tone that’s more in line with season 1. Barry will actually enjoy being The Flash after he gets out of the Speed Force and he won’t be as gloomy as he has been.
According to showrunner Todd Helbing, one of the reasons they decided to have Barry sacrifice himself so that they could use his experience in the Speed Force as a way to shift the tone of the show.
“The second that we went to Infantino Street for the first time in season three and showed the audience Iris dying, it didn’t take us long to realize to keep up that tension was going to be a big thing and hard to do for a lot of reasons,” Helbing told Comicbook.com at New York Comic Con. “And simultaneously, we realized how dark the show was getting. So we made a conscious effort to change that, and that was one of the reason that we decided to have Barry go into the Speed Force at the end — because it’s a place where you know for the speedsters they can have varying experiences and we knew that we wanted to get back to a lighter tone, so we could explore what Barry’s experience was in a way that could help us shift the tone back to something more fun.”
Are you looking forward to a lighter tone in season 4? Sound off in the comments below.
“The Flash” season 4 will premiere on Tuesday, October 10.
Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) lived a normal life as a perpetually tardy C.S.I. in the Central City Police Department. Barry’s life changed forever when the S.T.A.R. Labs Particle Accelerator exploded, creating a dark-matter lightning storm that struck Barry, bestowing him with super-speed and making him the fastest man alive — The Flash. But when Barry used his extraordinary abilities to travel back in time and save his mother’s life, he inadvertently created an alternate timeline known as Flashpoint; a phenomenon that gave birth to the villainous speed god known as Savitar, and changed the lives of Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) and Wally West (Keiyan Lonsdale) forever.
With the help of his adoptive father, Joe West (Jesse L. Martin), his lifelong best friend and love interest Iris West (Candice Patton), and his friends at S.T.A.R. Labs — Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes), C.S.I Julian Albert (Tom Felton), and an Earth-19 novelist named H.R. Wells (Tom Cavanaugh) — Barry continues to protect the people of Central City from the meta-humans that threaten it.
Based on the characters from DC, THE FLASH is from Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (“Arrow,” “Supergirl”), Andrew Kreisberg (“Arrow,” “The Flash”), Sarah Schechter (“Arrow,” “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”) and Todd Helbing (“Black Sails”).
