The Flash Post-Credit Scene & Ending Explained: What Actually Happened?

This article contains heavy spoilers for the movie!

The Flash movie starts with a pretty simple premise – Barry Allen going back in time to save his mum’s life and prevent his innocent father from being convicted of her murder. This is as simple as moving a can of tomato sauce on a supermarket shelf so that his father doesn’t need to return to the store leaving his mother home alone on the day she was killed.

Things get complicated as the time vortex used – known as a chronobowl – is not linear. It holds infinite moments in time, and each time history changes, rather than replacing events, a different reality continues from that moment.

After saving his mother, Barry is pushed into the chronobowl by Dark Flash and finds himself 10 years back in time - before he got his powers. He meets young Barry who he takes to the lab to create the conditions for his powers to be adopted. But things go awry. The superpowers are transferred from older Barry to younger Barry. And older Barry also loses a tooth which he superglues back into place.

Zod then arrives on the scene in the aftermath of the Battle of Metropolis. The two Barrys get together with Batman (Michael Keaton) and Kara Zor-El to defeat Zod. In doing so, both Batman and Kara die.

So, Barry and Barry go back to change things. After two failed attempts, older Barry realises this is a fixed point that can’t be altered. But young Barry won’t accept it. He keeps going back into the chronobowl, but just keeps failing to save Kara and Batman.

However, each time he does so he becomes impaled with shards of fuselage. And we learn that these repeated attempts to go back and change the unchangeable turned young Barry into Dark Flash who kicked off this reality by pushing Barry back 10 years.

Now, the way your brain feels right now is a metaphor for the chronobowl, which begins to rupture, revealing a mass of similar spheres colliding with one another.

What comes next is a series of cameos that confirms the existence of multiple timelines but, ultimately is a trip down memory lane. Young Barry then kills Dark Flash but sacrifices himself. This stops the various spheres colliding with each other and settles things down.

So, what does Barry do? He goes back to that grocery store and moves the can again, placing it higher. This is so that when his dad reaches for it, his face is clearly visible on CCTV – proving he can’t have committed the murder because he wasn’t in the house.

After his dad’s trial, Barry gets a call from Bruce Wayne. Nothing too surprising there. But this Bruce is none other than George Clooney. As the pair meet Barry’s superglued tooth comes loose – showing that this Barry has landed, not in the Ben Affleck as Batman universe, but in a different reality.