Warning: Full spoilers for this week’s The Flash, “Back to Normal,” follow.

This week’s The Flash ended with Harrison (or “Harry”) Wells coming up with a bold way to give Barry Allen his powers back – causing another particle accelerator explosion.

Is the Particle Accelerator a Good Idea?

Andrew Kreisberg (Executive Producer): The next episode is about the efficacy of doing that. You know, Harry thinks that between his particle accelerator explosion and what he learned from what the Thawne version of Wells did, he can contain it and just get Barry his powers back. But it's complicated and dangerous, and everyone including Barry has to decide if this is the right way to go, considering the craziness that ensued last time. They're sort of faced with a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don't,’ because Zoom's about to unleash a reign of terror on the city.’



Part of what the next episode is about, is, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ [Laughs] ‘This is insanity, and we're trusting everything on Harry's say-so that it's all going to be fine.’ So I think that's part of what makes the next episode so exciting.

Grant Gustin in The Flash.

Father Figure

Andrew Kreisberg: John Wesley Shipp returns as Barry's dad in the next episode, so there's a great scene that's between Barry's three fathers, essentially. It's between Tom Cavanagh, John Wesley Shipp and Jesse Martin, where all three of them are sort of debating what their son should do. Not all of them have the take on it that you'd expect, and I think that's what makes for such an interesting scene.



Once Barry decides to do something, I don't think Joe thinks that he can be dissuaded from doing something. That's the Barry that Joe has come to know and love and respect. Given what they're up against, Joe, who's always been so protective of Barry, I think surprisingly is the one who says, ‘Maybe we should give this a shot.’



Barry reaches out to [Henry] that he's lost his speed, and he needs his dad. He needs his advice, because Barry's sort of at a crossroads as far as what he should do or shouldn't do, because he's being presented with a monumental decision that could not only affect him and possibly kill him but could kill everybody at STAR Labs or set off another chain reaction and affect everybody in the city. The last time they took matters into their own hands, they created this whole problem with blowing a hole in the universe and opening the breaches. So they're all of them a little bit gun shy. Their faith in themselves and their faith in their decision-making is a little bit lost, which is why for us it was such an interesting episode, because Harry is -- the effect of episode 19 on Harry is, ‘Nope, I know what I've got to do, and I'm going to f**king do it.’ Now he's sort of firmly on the team and firmly on, ‘We're going to get Barry's speed back, and this is the thing to do, and everybody should just listen to me,’ and everyone on the team is a little bit shaken and a little bit on their heels. ‘Maybe we should take a step back.’ So Barry reaches out to his dad for help and advice.

Hunter = Crazy

Kreisberg: You know, what we've always said is, we didn't feel like this season was a repeat of last season. We think that this season happened because of last season. They wanted to believe it. I mean, he basically told them everything, the way he talked about Zoom, the way he lost his powers -- they kind of took a lot of it on faith, and I think a lot of that was because they wanted to believe it. Barry lost his mentor when Wells turned out to not be who he said he was, and Barry was looking for that partner, and along comes Jay, who's willing to share secrets and teach him and give Barry all that back. Caitlin, for her part, had lost Ronnie, and here was this knight in shining armor coming along to sort of replace him. So I think he was able to do it because they let their guard down and wanted to believe it. Rather than get cynical and hardened and jaded by what happened last year, they -- because they are the sweet, nice people that they are -- they wanted what they had lost back. So they let this fox into this henhouse.



Todd Helbing (Executive Producer): In episode two, you know, Jay basically tells them what Zoom is capable of doing, what he will do to be the fastest person alive. If you go back and look at that scene, you can see there's a spark of the crazy there.



Kreisberg: He also has a line in the upcoming episode where he's like, ‘Do you have any idea how hard it was to be Jay?’ So I think hiding his crazy wasn't always the easiest thing in the world for him to do.

Killer Killed

Kreisberg: We loved what Danielle did with her, so when we were designing this episode and we had Zoom kidnap Caitlin, it just seemed like a fun thing to do to be able to have the two of them together and to have Caitlin actually experience time with her. It gave us an opportunity to sort of deepen both characters. But ultimately, she had to go. [Laughs] No, I mean, like even she said, the only reason he kept her alive, the only reason he had to keep her alive was she was a living remembrance of him caring about Caitlin.

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But Seriously, WHO is That?

Kreisberg: The answer is going to blow your mind. Honestly, the two things I'm probably most proud of this season are [introducing] Harry and the identity of the man in the mask.

The Flash’s executive producers weighed in on this turn of events and other plotlines, as the show nears the end of Season 2.There are a lot of good reasons to not cause a particle accelerator explosion, given what happened last time, but we were assured that those concerns are very much part of the storyline.As Barry debates what the right thing to do is, we’ll see all of his father figures weighing in.We got a bigger look at just how unhinged Hunter Zolomon/Zoom is this week, and the producers were asked how Hunter, posing as Jay Garrick, hid his true self from them for so long.“Back to Normal” also saw the return of Killer Frost as she came face to face with Caitlin… and then was killed by Zoom. The producers discussed that turn of events.The Flash’s big lingering mystery this season is who Zoom’s prisoner, the man in the iron mask, is. Asked if he could comment on that question, Kreisberg gave a short but notable answer.

Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman , IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman