SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for "Godspeed," the latest episode of The Flash.
XS wasn't built in a day. In "Godspeed," the latest episode of The Flash, a flash-forward sequence revealed how Nora West-Allen discovered her powers and her speedster heritage.
Nora's journey of self-discovery began with the arrival of Godspeed. As a CI, Nora landed a robbery case where only certain chemicals were stolen. She and her partner Lia quickly put together that they were dealing with a speedster thief. Lia contacted her former professor for some help, and they went to visit him at his lab. This led to a fateful encounter with Godspeed, who showed up to rob the lab.
Godspeed didn't take kindly to the intrusion. When he saw the women, he hurled Speed Force lightning at them. Nora knocked Lia out of the way and took the full brunt of it; the force knocked her into a shelf, critically injuring her. As a result, Nora ended up in the hospital.
When she got to the hospital, Nora went into cardiac arrest. As the paramedics restarted her heart, they discovered the power-dampening chip in her shoulder and removed it, believing it to be part of the shelf she had crashed into. Lia explained all this as soon as Nora woke up. As Lia gesticulated, she accidentally dropped the chip, causing Nora to inadvertently use her speed to catch it.
For a time, both Nora and Lia believed the Speed Force lightning gave Nora her powers. However, upon a closer examination, Lia discovered Nora had been a speedster all along; the chip that dampened her powers had simply fried when she was struck. Worse, it had been created by STAR Labs, meaning that Nora's mother and her friends had been involved in making it. This sparked the grudge Nora held when she first encountered Iris in The Flash's present-day timeline.
Worse, Nora had to learn her true heritage from someone else. When Reverse-Flash pointed her towards the Time Vault, the A.I. Gideon greeted her by name. "You know who I am?" Nora asked, to which Gideon replied, "Of course. Nora West-Allen, daughter of Iris West and Barry Allen, also known as The Flash." This staggered Nora, but perhaps not as much as the video message her father left her before he disappeared.
Airing Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, The Flash stars Grant Gustin, Candice Patton, Carlos Valdes, Danielle Panabaker, Tom Cavanaugh, Jesse L. Martin, Danielle Nicolet, Hartley Sawyer and Jessica Parker Kennedy.