Now that The Flash has wrapped up what would have been the end of season 6 prior to the production shutdown, it’s wasting no time and launching straight into its new primary plotline. Indeed, several images from tomorrow’s episode “Central City Strong” have been released, teasing the return of grandstanding magician Abra Kadabra.
The character’s first (and until now only) appearance was in an eponymous season 3 outing as a thief from the future leaving a high level of collateral damage in his wake, and whose 64th century nanotech implants give him abilities that seem like magic, in keeping with sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim regarding sufficiently advanced technology. He styles himself with the histrionics of a performing magician, since apparently the pretentious theatrics of stage magic will go utterly unchanged over the course of the next four and a half millennia, and takes great delight in taunting his enemies with information he has and they want.
The villain’s familiar smug features and a dead body seemingly impaled by multiple playing cards both suggest that he hasn’t changed much in his absence, and it’s worth noting that the last anyone saw of him he was being taken to Earth-19 by Gypsy to be imprisoned for his crimes. As that world was not one of the ones folded into Earth-Prime, for him to reappear means that some further multiverse rejigging has to have gone on.
Exactly how and why he’s back is not clear, with the episode’s synopsis referencing only his having a score to settle. However, it most likely has something to do with the mysterious quartet of color-coded lightning blasts seen arcing across the sky at the end of “Mother” when the Speed Force was revived, and it now seems that even as one danger for the team of The Flash has been defeated, another is waiting right around the corner to blindside them.