__Spoilers for __The Flash below**
In The Flash, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is willing to rewrite entire universes to bring his mother back to life and undo her murder—the event that spurred both his day job as a crime lab technician and his extracurricular heroism as The Flash. But for as much time as The Flash devotes to the emotionality of Barry’s relationship with his mother, the film totally glosses over who actually killed her. Barry’s mother is stabbed by an unknown assailant in the family kitchen, while a young Barry is upstairs, and right before his father returns home from an ill-fated trip to the grocery store. Barry’s father spends some twenty-odd years in prison, falsely accused, until the events of the climax allow Barry to definitively strengthen his father’s alibi. But we never find out who killed Nora Allen, or why, even. The event around which the entire plot orbits, the event that catalyzed Barry’s origin story, is left to be one gaping plot hole as big as the multiverse.
The film never once even pauses to cast suspicion on anyone around Barry—like his dickish co-worker Albert Demsond (Rudy Mancuso), who in the comics becomes Doctor Alchemy, a villain who wields the power of the Philosopher’s Stone to control the elements.
It didn’t have to be this way; there was an easy blueprint to follow. The death of Barry Allen’s mother is the basis of a seminal comic text, 2009’s Flash: Rebirth. Writer Geoff Johns had Nora die at the hands of Barry’s archnemesis, Eobard Thawne, aka Professor Zoom, aka Reverse Flash.
Thawne is a time-traveler from the 25th Century who is a legendary Flash hater—so much so that he wants to destroy everything Flash stands for. Naturally, that involves him trying to stop Barry from gaining powers, but since Thawne gains his powers from studying Barry’s biography (yes, that’s a real bit of comic lore), he’ll create a paradox. Instead, Thawne decides to murder Nora instead.
That arc was more or less adapted in the first season of the CW’s Flash series to much acclaim. Which, again, would theoretically only make it easier to run with on the big screen. This Ezra Miller Flash film has languished in development hell for nearly ten years, with a handful of directors and writers attached. It’s possible early drafts that had these elements were tossed out to make more room for a loose Flashpoint adaptation, and all the multiverse cameos that allowed, i.e. Michael Keaton.
If there were to be a sequel to The Flash, Thawne would be a great villain, and one that could’ve at the very least been foreshadowed here. But, considering James Gunn is about to usher in a new universe that likely won’t have any place for Miller’s Flash, a Snyderverse relic, it’s more likely that no one cared about planting seeds or fully fleshing out Barry’s origin in the final product. The future of this version of The Flash is probably done. But don’t rule another run at this particular storyline at some point further down the line. Until then, justice for Nora Allen.