How about that reveal, y'all?

The Flash's season two finale gave us an answer we've been craving for at least half of the season—among many, many other things—who, exactly, the Man in the Iron Mask was. In true Flash fashion, it turned out to be mind-blowing in the most wonderful of ways.

Although we had to say goodbye to Henry Allen after a truly tragic death (dammit, Zoom!), that's not the end of John Wesley Shipp on the show. It turns out that the man Zoom was holding prisoner in his lair on Earth-2 had a very familiar face. Like many suspected, it was the real Jay Garrick—but with two extra special twists: he's from Earth-3, and he's played by Shipp (who played The Flash in the '90s TV show)!

E! News caught up with Shipp to talk all about the big reveal, and where Henry Allen's death stacks up against the other gone-too-soon TV dad he played, Dawson's Creek's Mitch Leery.

E! News: Did you know all along that you'd be playing the Man in the Iron Mask?

Shipp: I went up there to film the last four episodes knowing that it would be Henry Allen's death. I had no idea that it was going to morph into my ending up playing the role that The Flash audience wanted me to play from the very beginning. I had a long conversation with Greg [Berlanti, executive producer] and then I had a conversation with Andrew [Kreisberg, EP] and I expressed my reservations 25 years later putting on a super hero costume—he sort of allayed my fears about that.