As The Flash gears up for its final episode this Wednesday, showrunner Eric Wallace (Teen Wolf, Z Nation) spoke with Comicbook about where he drew his inspiration for the end of the show. Wallace has served as the showrunner and executive producer of the superhero series since 2017 for over 100 episodes.

Wallace pointed out three finales of other shows he watched in preparation for writing his own ending for the CW’s Barry Allen. “Before sitting down to even conceptualize and write this, I watched a whole bunch of series finales, and I’ll tell you the ones I loved and used as inspiration: Lost, Angel, and The Office, ironically,” he said. “I love the Lost finale so much because it was two hours and it’s full of emotion. They cried and I cried and everybody cried. But the one that I went back to as being a perfect series finale in my opinion was Angel, the Buffy spin-off. Man, I still remember the feelings I had watching that Angel finale — it just blew me off the planet.”

Wallace explained further: “I thought a lot about it, what’s really good in this, and what do we need to pull out? I’m not saying it’s the same storyline — it’s not even close to the same storyline, but it’s all about the feelings. There’s similar feelings in that series finale that I wanted to get across, and same thing with Lost.”

“People think as I like horror movies and action that I don’t like comedies, but The Office was a great series finale, and if you look at The Office series finale and our series finale, you might actually see some similarities in the strangest way. As a viewer who had been watching The Office for nine seasons religiously, I wanted so badly for [Steve Carell’s] Michael Scott to come back to that show, and I recognized that feeling that I got when he showed up. I’m like, ‘I have to deliver a similar feeling in our series finale.’ That’s when I decided there had to be a lot of faces from the past.”

Wallace’s ideas have proven to be true throughout the season. Several major characters from previous seasons and other shows in the Arrowverse have returned to reprise their roles. This includes Jessica Parker Kennedy (The Secret Circle, Another Cinderella Story), Rick Cosnett (I Miss You, Skybound), Matt Letscher (Super Sucker, The Teacher of the Year), and Sendhil Ramamurthy (The Slammin’ Salmon, Covert Affairs), who portrayed Nora West-Allen, Eddie Thawne, Reverse Flash, and Ramsey Rosso, respectively. Arrow  — the show that started it all — and Legends of Tomorrow alums David Ramsey (Arrow, Pay It Forward) and Keiynan Lonsdale (Insurgent, Love, Simon) also returned to reprise their roles as John Diggle and Wally West, along with the Green Arrow himself, Stephen Amell (Code 8, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows).

Wallace ended with one final teaser — “[Angel] has a conclusion where there’s no cliffhangers in that sense, but we threw in a little thing right at the end of the series finale. No spoilers here, but let’s just say it directly hints at what the future of The Flash could be. And that’s what I got out of that Angel finale: I wonder what happens next? And I can write my own story from there. I thought that was so clever, and we have something like that in our series finale.”

The season nine finale of The Flash will premiere this Wednesday, May 24, on the CW. Seasons one through eight are currently available on Netflix.