After nine seasons of thundering though time, wrangling alternate dimensions, and propelling villains into the wings of justice the last echo of the Arrowverse will be heard on May 24. “I knew I was going to keep one thing, but I didn’t know that it was going to be the ring,” Grant Gustin said about the lightning bolt ring he kept from CW’s The Flash at an interview with Entertainment Weekly. The four-part series-finale which began pulsing across screens on May 3 will guest star Keiynan Lonsdale (Love, Simon) as Kid Flash, David Ramsey (Arrow) as Spartan, Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heros) as Bloodwork, Teddy Sears (Chicago Fire) as Zoom, Karan Oberoi (Roswell, New Mexico) as Godspeed, Andy Mientus (Smash) as Pied Piper, Max Adler (Scrambled) as The Hotness, Damion Poitier (Captain America: Civil War) as Goldface, Matt Letscher (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow) as Reverse-Flash, Jessica Parker Kennedy (See for Me) as Nora West-Allen, Rick Cosnett (Shoulder Dance) as Eddie Thawne, Javicia Leslie (God Friended Me) as Batwoman, Nicole Maines (Yellowjackets) as Dreamer, and Tom Cavanagh (Corrective Measures) as Reverse-Flash in one last tug of the Arrowverse.

“Right as we were finishing, I was like, ‘This is going to stay in my pocket.’ Now it’s in a drawer at home with all of my important jewelry. I put it on, actually, the other day,” Gustin told EW, “[but] I have fat knuckles and skinny fingers.”

Eric Wallace, The Flash’s showrunner since 2017, commented, “My initial reaction to finding out that it would be not only the last season but a shortened last season was bittersweet and a lot of disappointment. But we are the lucky ones — we got a year of knowing this is the end, so let’s make this the greatest end we possibly can.”

The EW reported that although Wallace (Teen Wolf), wanted to spark a tenth season, the rest of the brood in the cast and crew, while echoing Wallace’s disappointment, supported Gustin’s decision to end the show. With an etch a sketch that would have ended on season 10, episode 200, under Gustin’s swift feet, Wallace was forced to clear the frame on episode 184 instead.

Gustin was relieved that the great CW in the sky struck the show from its line up instead of running without the footprints of The Flash’s original Barry Allen indicated the EW. “I just knew it was time for me to step away, have more time with my family, and just enter this next chapter of my life,” he said. “But I think I would’ve really questioned my decision if they had done a season 10 — if I knew the whole family was still together and I was somewhere else — so I’m glad we all finished at the same time. I’m not really a FOMO person, but I would’ve for sure had FOMO about that.”

“I laughed at him, because that was not the first time that Grant had told me that he was done with the show,” Danielle Panabaker (Shark) said about a conversation she had with Gustin. Panabaker, along with Patton and Gustin, have been the only three cast members who have played all nine seasons of the DC Comics superhero show. “Many times over the last nine years, he’s gone so far as to make phone calls and tell people that he was ready to be done. I really believed season 8 was going to be his last year, so I’ve heard this song and dance before. When it broke in the press, I texted him and I said, ‘Okay, I believe you this time,'” Panabaker a.k.a. Caitlin Snow a.k.a. Frost a.k.a. Khione said.

Candice Patton (The Game), who plays Iris West-Allen, pulled an Uno reverse flash on Gustin (Rescued by Ruby) saying, “I knew it was going to be my last year too, whether the show continued or not.” Gustin only found out that Patton planned to leave The Flash at the end of season 9 after he announced that he was leaving the show. “So I was definitely relieved that Grant was on the same page about ending the show. I definitely didn’t want to leave before everyone else, so I was just really glad,” said Patton.

On and off the set Gustin is strumming the same notes. “It is poignant that it finishes as Barry and I are both starting a family,” he said about Iris who was hit with the arrow of labor during the second of the final four chapters. “I got married [to trainer and physical therapist Andrea LA Thoma while shooting] season 5. I had a kid [Juniper Grace Louise] during season 7 — so obviously you start thinking about life changes at that point. Plus, Arrow had ended with season 8, so I thought, ‘Let’s end with season 8.'”

The ninth season of The Flash will not only end the show but topple the rest of the Arrowverse along with it. “It just felt like time,” Gustin explained. “A lot of people wanted us to get to 10 seasons, but in my mind we did 10 years — it was 2013 when I was cast as Barry Allen, and we finished in 2023. We had done everything we needed to do, the characters were in a good place, and we had reached the conclusion.”

“Now I’m going into this next chapter in my life where I don’t know what’s going to happen professionally,” said Gustin. “And I’ve said for years, this may very well be the pinnacle of my career — and how cool, if it is, that I got to do this. But I get to now go into the unknown with my family. Now I’m just husband, and dad, and not the Flash anymore.”

Though Berlanti previously convinced Gustin to keep crusading as the Flash, two weeks after season 8 finished filming, he called Mark Pedowitz (The Crazy Ones), the CW president at the time, Channing Dungey (Queen of the Damned), the TV CEO at Warner Bros, Berlanti, and Wallace to tell them episode 184 would be the last time Barry Allen would use him as a compass. ”The last thing we shot is the last shot you see of the series, which was cool,” Allen’s alter ego revealed.

His wife and daughter were invited to watch his final dash across set. “As I was finishing taking the suit off, I handed my wife my phone and was like, ‘Film me hanging this up,’ because it was just a moment I knew that I’d want to have.”

“We didn’t know it was the last take until it was over,” said Kayla Compton (King’s Faith), who radiates on screen as Ultraviolet. “They called cut, and then all of these people just started to walk on set, and that’s when it hit us, ‘Oh, we’re done. This is it. We’re being clapped out.’ I just started crying.”

“There were just so many tears, and I just had a good long cry in my trailer afterwards,” Patton reportedly said in a phone call to the EW. “I don’t know that there’s a way that you can prepare for a day like that because it doesn’t feel real.”

Subzero actor Jon Cor (The Way to the Heart), in a freeze frame from Chillblaine, confessed that even his ice melted when The Flash’s timeline was mopped up. “The only meltdown that I had was privately, and nobody knew. I couldn’t stop, but I had never been happier.”

“The last day I did, there was blood and glass and destruction and things blowing up — it’s a good way to go out,” said Cavanagh, who left his cape behind in season 6, but has orbited back every season since as a guest star. “It seems appropriate.”

Danielle Nicolet (Naruto: Shippuden), on the docket as metahuman D.A. Cecile Horton, explained one onset ritual saying, “Normally on a set, when it’s the last take of the day, someone calls out ‘martini. Well, no one called ‘martini.’ As soon as they started clapping us all out, my Flash life flashed, pun intended, before my eyes.”

Also, joining the count down is John Wesley Shipp (Dawson’s Creek), who plays Barry’s father, Henry Allen, and was the original Barry Allen of CBS’ 1990 series The Flash. “I never would’ve anticipated in 1991, when I swore I’d never get into another superhero suit,” Shipp began, “that I would have it end that way, in the last season, saying goodbye to Henry Allen and then Jay Garrick, both in and out of the suit. I tried,” he continued, “to thank Grant, but then my voice cracked. And that’s when he came over and gave me a big hug. And that said everything that needed to be said.” Shipp also played older versions of Gustin on the show.

Carlos Valdes (Gaslit), the metahuman interface for Cisco Ramon, couldn’t escape from his own timeline to plug into the finale stating, “Honestly, there was no way to make it happen,” he said, “which was really heartbreaking to me because I thought, if I decided to step away from the show, at the very least I have to be there for the finale to round this thing out.” Valdes was busy filming the lovesick Hulu musical series Up Here.

Helbing (Spartacus), The Flash’s showrunner for seasons 2-5 doesn’t know if Superman & Lois will soar back into the Arrowverse or if his series will land a season 4 under the new CW owner, Nexstar. “I will say this, it sure is a lot easier now that the other shows aren’t on the air, people’s schedules are a lot easier to work around, so… maybe,” he said. “I would love to bring Grant on, and I think it would be a lot of fun to have Candice, to have Iris with [Elizabeth Tulloch’s] Lois Lane. So we’ll see.”

“When it came to the greater Arrowverse, the scale of it was something that was really lost on me for the majority of the run,” Gustin said. The Arrowverse includes two web series, Vixen and Freedom Fighters: The Ray, six shows including Batwoman, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning, Supergirl, Arrow, and The Flash, and ten major metaverse crossovers including Flash vs. Arrow (2014), Heroes Join Forces (2015), World’s Finest (2016), Invasion! (2016), Crisis on Earth-X (2017), Duet (2017), Elseworlds (2018), Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019), Armageddon (2021), and It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To (2023). The anatomy of the Arrowverse is one of the most organically mutated fortresses of superheros on television. “It’s something I won’t fully understand or appreciate for years and years and years, to see what the impact that Greg Berlanti and [executive producer] Marc Guggenheim and all of these guys were able to have on the TV landscape,” said Gustin. “It was unlike anything that had ever been attempted in television.”

Berlanti also couldn’t anticipate what would sprout from the petri dish when he unleashed Barry Allen amidst Arrow’s second season. “We all loved these characters so much, and as we began working on [Arrow], more characters would come up and other possibilities opened up to us creatively,” Berlanti reportedly said in an email to the EW. “I had always loved Barry Allen as a kid — and I guess in the back of my mind, the hope was to include him in some way in Arrow, but obviously we knew that would take our show into the realm of superpowers. We had to find a way to do it that worked in our creative reality, and in [the] time and the budget of a TV show.”

Even though the Arrowverse had grown exponentially, the tectonic plates began to shift when Stephen Amell left Arrow in the graveyard back in 2020. In 2021, Black Lightning and Supergirl were replaced by the static and swallowed up into the vortex. Batwoman and Legends of Tomorrow were the next wings to be cut in 2022, while at the end of season 2 Superman & Lois flew to an alternate version of Earth that no longer exists within the Arrowverse. The Flash then became the last remaining arrow in the Arrowverse’s quiver.

Regardless of where the arrows may fall, the Arrowverse will end with The Flash’s series finale on Wednesday, May 24, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. “I’ve wrapped up a lot of things in the series finale, and it ends on a very hopeful note that shows you how the future of the Arrowverse could continue in some way, shape, or form,” said Wallace. “I’m very proud of the last episode. It’s a love letter to the audience. It hopefully gives people closure, but also some hope for the future, because otherwise, it’s very sad to think that there won’t be an Arrowverse after May 24.”

“I had a lot of figuring things out to do over the course of the nine years, and same for Barry,” Gustin explained. “None of us knew what we were getting into when this started or how big it was going to be, and I’m just proud of the way we all grew together and always continued to show up for the show and do the best we could. I think we really finished on a high note.”

“I thought it would be more complicated for me, emotionally. I thought I’d have more of a struggle,” Gustin said, opening the channel on how he felt while filming the last scene of The Flash. “And I wasn’t emotional. I was almost feeling guilty, like, ‘Why am I not crying more every day like everybody is?’ And I know Stephen was that way too when Arrow was ending. I’m a very sensitive person and very honest about my emotions, but I think it just spoke to how it was time for it to end and I was ready.”

When Gustin tunes into fans asking if he’s the Flash, he lunges with a renewed velocity. “My response has been, ‘I used to be,’ which is weird to say, but true,” Gustin said. He then added, “And it also kind of feels good. I think maybe it’ll also hit me more and more as I watch this final season. It’s not over for me yet.”

Now that Gustin has scrubbed his fingerprints from Barry Allen’s timeline, he plans to dive into the fan conventions that he previously could not participate in due to his hectic schedule. “We’re still talking Flash, I’m still going to get to meet The Flash fans, and it’s a new chapter of The Flash era now, so I don’t think it’s ever really going to end,” said Gustin. “The filming chapter is closed, but I still get to be the Flash. So I shouldn’t say I used to be the Flash. I should just say yes when people ask me if I’m the Flash.”

Gustin admitted that, even though he’ll miss flooding the screen in scarlet lightning, it wasn’t always easy to lace up his boots as the Flash. In season 1 he recalled how he was forced to eat meals and take naps with his cowl glued directly to his face. “The suit is tough to work in, but it was never lost on me that a superhero suit was made for me to put on, and I got to go to work and do that,” he said. “Knowing it was the last season, just putting the boots on and zipping it, I knew that I was running out of time. I knew one of these times, it’s going to be the last time I take it off.”

Gustin also got lost in the catacombs of COVID-19 while shooting the series finale. “I didn’t get COVID for three years, and we were six days away from finishing and I somehow got COVID,” he said. “And God bless them, they somehow made it work and shifted some things around on the schedule. We shut down for a day. I was so close to the finish line and ended up having to do the full 10-day quarantine because I was still testing positive. And I felt fine! I just had to sit at home and wait to do my last few days for a while.”

“There was some creative filming that had to be done and they were going to have to add him in later on green screen,” Panabaker said about Gustin’s 10 day quarantine. An extra day was added to complete filming the finale. “It felt like they were trying to keep me here,” Gustin joked. “We just prolonged the end.”

Wallace sifted through the photons signaling that Barry Allen has “leveled up” to “his full comic book potential, to almost godlike status” in the series conclusion.

“He’s not the same person who got struck by lightning way back in 2014,” Wallace said.

Barry Allen first carved a chunk out of the Arrowverse as the Scarlet Speedster in the second season of Arrow. Cradling the embryo that would become CW’s comic book titan, the Arrowverse, Andrew Kreisberg (DC’s Legends of Tomorrow), Geoff Johns (Aquaman), and Berlanti (Riverdale) created a spinoff series for Barry Allen. “Look at what he’s become over nine years, which is a message to the audience: Look at what you all can become. Everybody can fulfill their full potential if you just take a heroic path.”

Stephen Amell (Heels), the retractable blade of the Green Arrow, said, “This was right after the first season [of Arrow]. Greg Berlanti called me into his office and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to be introducing Barry Allen. He’s the Flash. We want to spend the next bit of time building the Justice League on TV.’ And that’s precisely what they did. I mean, I think DC gets a lot of s— for not building this interconnected [film] universe, but I just think people need to look at what they did on TV.” Amell added that, “Crossovers had been done before, they’ll be done again, but the scale to which we did it was unprecedented.”

“I still am hopeful that the Arrowverse is not over,” Wallace said. “I’ve approached it as The Flash is over and I want to make the best Flash series finale as possible. I’m going to have lunch with [Superman & Lois showrunner] Todd [Helbing] in the next couple weeks. And I’m going to tell him, ‘If you get a fourth season, you’ve got to sneak some Arrowverse in there. You are now carrying the torch.’”