The Flash Season 5: What Does The Ending To 'Cause And XS' Really Mean?

2. Nora Is Trying To Save Barry From The Crisis

Ever since she showed up on the show, Nora West-Allen has been a hard character to read. While her love of her parents (especially Barry) has always been clear to see, her ambiguous actions and overall secrecy has raised our suspicions on more than one occasion, and this reached a whole new level when we discovered that she had been secretly working with Eobard Thawne to manipulate the timeline. The question was: Why?

The conclusion to 'Cause and XS' gave us the answers we had been looking for, as Eobard informed her that if she followed his advice, she could help Team Flash defeat Cicada and, more importantly, save her father. While we had assumed that she wanted to fix the timeline for a particular reason, this explanation from Thawne makes it all the more clear. She's not trying to save her father from Cicada's reign of terror, because he's merely a side-effect of her meddling. She's trying to save him from the Crisis of 2024.

Barry's disappearance in the Crisis left Nora without a father and, as we have seen throughout her tenure on the show, she has been desperate to know this present-day younger version of him. However, that desperation has driven her to his greatest enemy because he is the only one who can save The Flash from the Crisis, because he is the only one with the knowledge to manipulate the timeline without damaging it. Simply put: with Thawne's knowledge, the timeline is malleable.

Although we already believed in her, these closing moments confirm that Nora's intentions are indeed pure. But can the same be said about Eobard's?