Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for The Flash season 9.Mysteries and unanswered questions abound as The Flash season 9 races towards the series finale. This is not that surprising, as the final season of a long-running television show is often devoted to tying up whatever loose ends remain among the series’ subplots. The Flash is notable, however, in that all of its remaining mysteries are tied to new storylines introduced within the past year.
The unifying theme of The Flash season 9 has been change and how people adapt to it. From Joe West leaving Central City to Chester and Allegra finally realizing they belong together, every storyline in The Flash season 9 has centered around major life changes for the ensemble and the problems that come with failing to deal with them. However, despite the show resolving many long-running storylines, such as Barry and Iris preparing to become parents, there are still three major mysteries the show has yet to address as The Flash season 9 heads into its final run of episodes.
The Flash Season 8 Cliffhanger
The final episode of The Flash season 8 ended with Barry and Iris musing upon their latest battle with the Reverse-Flash Eobard Thawne and wondering what the future held for them. The scene held an ominous tone, with Iris noting that the Negative Speed Force was bound to choose a new avatar to replace Thawne and counter Barry. As Barry and Iris discussed this, the episode concluded with images from a laboratory in the year 2049, where experiments were being conducted on a blue crystal.
Readers of The Flash comics theorized that this was setting up the villain Cobalt Blue, who used a similar crystal to steal the powers of his enemies. Cobalt Blue would certainly be an ideal recruit to serve as the new Negative Speed Force avatar, boasting impressive powers on top of whatever the Negative Forces might give him. However, apart from Barry Allen operating under the mistaken assumption that Red Death was the new Negative Speed Force avatar, nothing in The Flash season 9 has addressed the cliffhanger ending of The Flash season 8.
What Are Khione’s Powers?
First appearing in The Flash season 9 premiere, Khione was accidentally born of Dr. Caitlin Snow’s efforts to resurrect her sister, Frost. An entirely new personality taking over Caitlin’s body, Khione has been a figure of mystery since her introduction. Chief among these mysteries is the precise nature of Khione’s powers.
Khione has shown a wide variety of abilities over the course of The Flash season 9. Most of her superpowers seem to be sensory in nature and tied to life energy, as Khione somehow knew that Iris was pregnant in The Flash season 9, episode 5, “The Mask of the Red Death, Part 2.” She also predicted an early spring in The Flash season 9, episode 6, “The Good, The Bad, and The Lucky,” though she couldn’t say how she knew that.
Khione was somehow able to heal the critically injured Chillblaine by kissing him. This caused Khione to feel chills, though Chillblaine said he felt oddly warm as he woke from his coma. She also seemed to cause it to snow inside STAR Labs. This led Chillblaine to push Khione to recreate Frost’s powers as part of a misguided effort to turn Khione into Frost. He was indirectly successful, as his bittersweet parting of ways with Khione caused her to flash-freeze the meal she was about to share with the rest of Team Flash before Chillblaine came to say goodbye in The Flash season 9, episode 7, “Wildest Dreams.”
The one constant to Khione’s powers is that they seem to vary based on her emotional state. When she is happy, she seems receptive of the world around her and can see that which is hidden. When she is sad, she seems to manipulate energy, either draining it from the environment around her or transferring her own energy to others. It’s possible her abilities are empathic in nature, but little has been done to explore the exact nature of Khione’s superpowers in The Flash season 9.
What IS Khione?
Another mystery involving Danielle Panabaker’s new character Khione was born of the last effort to determine what powers Khione had in The Flash season 9, episode 6, “The Good, The Bad, and The Lucky.” After spending most of the episode running various tests, Chester and Chillblaine determined that Khione’s DNA lacked any dark matter or cold fusion traces. This meant that Khione could not be a metahuman like Frost.
At the same time, Khione’s genetic code was missing 55 of the 56 common biometric signatures found in human DNA. This meant that she couldn’t be human either. The episode ended with Khione asking the two scientists just what she was if she wasn’t human or metahuman. For some reason, this cliffhanger mystery was ignored in all the episodes of The Flash season 9 which followed, leaving the question of just what Khione is unanswered for now.
The Flash season 9 returns on April 26.
Key Release Dates
