The Flash showrunner says series finale is similar to The Office, Lost, and Angel finales

Crafting a series finale is no joke. And when that episode is meant to wrap up not only 10 years of history for an iconic, beloved character, but also an entire interconnected TV universe along with it, all in a satisfying way for diehard fans? The words "daunting" and "downright impossible" come to mind. But that's exactly what showrunner Eric Wallace faced when developing the finale of The Flash, so he turned to his favorite series-ending hours for ideas.

"Before sitting down to even conceptualize and write this, I watched a whole bunch of series finales, and I'll tell you the ones I loved and used as inspiration: Lost, Angel, and The Office, ironically," Wallace tells EW in our latest cover story (speaking prior to the writers' strike). "I love the Lost finale so much because it was two hours and it's full of emotion. They cried and I cried and everybody cried. But the one that I went back to as being a perfect series finale in my opinion was Angel, the Buffy spin-off. Man, I still remember the feelings I had watching that Angel finale — it just blew me off the planet."

Justine Yeung/The CW Grant Gustin on 'The Flash'

Wallace knows those series may not have much in common with The Flash, but he's not talking about the plot. "I thought a lot about it, what's really good in this, and what do we need to pull out?" he says. "I'm not saying it's the same storyline — i's not even close to the same storyline, but it's all about the feelings. There's similar feelings in that series finale that I wanted to get across, and same thing with Lost."

And though he knows it sounds even more bizarre, he reveals that The Office series finale is a major inspiration for The Flash's ending as well. "People think as I like horror movies and action that I don't like comedies, but The Office was a great series finale, and if you look at The Office series finale and our series finale, you might actually see some similarities in the strangest way," he says. "As a viewer who had been watching The Office for nine seasons religiously, I wanted so badly for [Steve Carell's] Michael Scott to come back to that show, and I recognized that feeling that I got when he showed up. I'm like, 'I have to deliver a similar feeling in our series finale.' That's when I decided there had to be a lot of faces from the past."

Wallace knows that loving the Lost series finale is quite a hot take, but he stands by it — and is proud of how he emulated The Flash finale after it. "All my friends, they yelled at me about that, but I had a very emotional experience with those characters over six seasons, and to me, it was pay off for the emotion," he says. "To me that's more important than paying off a particular plot strand."

As for Angel, which ended on a cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers as the surviving characters rush into a battle with a demonic army that they likely won't win, Wallace considered ending The Flash the same way. "I could end it with them mid-battle, and some of them are going to die," he says. "That worked really well for the tone of Angel. I don't think it would work very well for The Flash, but how do we get that same feeling? And so, I did a little twist on it."

The showrunner still promises that he did end the series "properly" in the finale. "It has a conclusion where there's no cliffhangers in that sense, but we threw in a little thing right at the end of the series finale," Wallace adds. "No spoilers here, but let's just say it directly hints at what the future of The Flash could be. And that's what I got out of that Angel finale: I wonder what happens next? And I can write my own story from there. I thought that was so clever, and we have something like that in our series finale."

The Flash series finale airs Wednesday, May 24, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on the CW.

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