Who Is XS? The Flash's Newest Speedster, Explained

Season 4 of The Flash ended on the cliffhanger reveal that the mystery girl who kept popping up in the lives of the STAR Labs crew was actually Nora West-Allen, Barry and Iris’ daughter from the future who had come back in time and made a big mistake along the way that needed fixing. With the character and actress Jessica Parker Kennedy taking on a regular role in the upcoming Flash Season 5, it was revealed in a teaser trailer dropped during Comic-Con International that Nora will be taking a familiar Flash Family codename, XS.

However, Nora West-Allen is a bit of an amalgamation of a number of different future speedsters that exist within the Flash’s possible future and while she may be XS in name, there’s a few other character’s she shares similarities with which may give us a clue as to her role in the new season of The Flash.

XS Marks The Spot

XS was created by Tom McCraw, Mark Waid and Jeffrey Moy, debuting in 1994’s Legionnaires #0, which kicked off a whole new backstory for DC’s teen heroes from the 30th century. As a result of the events of Zero Hour, the Legion of Super-Heroes’ future was rewritten and a new, younger incarnation of the team debuted with updated codenames and a number of new members, including a young speedster named Jenni Ognats, codenamed XS.

Jenni was the granddaughter of Barry Allen and Iris West, who spent several years in the 30th century in between “The Trial of the Flash” and Barry’s death in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and during that time the couple had twins, whom they named Don and Dawn Allen, the latter of whom would go on to have a child of her own with a man named Jeven Ognats, whom they named Jenni.

Originally, Jenni didn’t display any signs of metahuman abilities or connection to the Speed Force, but the Dominators — knowing her family history — abducted her family and jump-started her abilities by forcing her to watch them torture her father. With her newfound powers she was able to escape the Dominators with her father and after mastering her superspeed abilities, Jenni joined the Legion of Super-Heroes as XS, filling a role previous incarnations of the team had severely lacked.

It was later revealed that Jenni and her family were not native to the dimension she called home, and the future of her grandfather’s timeline featured a very different incarnation of the Legion of Super-Heroes. She learned that due to an attack on the Allen siblings and their families by Eobard Thawne forced them to attempt to escape into Hypertime via the Cosmic Treadmill and ended up stranded on Earth-247, home of the post-Zero Hour “reboot” Legion.

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Runs In The Family

While she may be called XS, the big difference between The Flash’s Nora West-Allen and the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Jenni Ognats — aside from their civillian names — is that the latter is Barry and Iris’ granddaughter, while the former is their daughter. This puts the Arrowverse incarnation of XS closer to Dawn Allen than Jenni Ognats, but before she gave birth to Jenni, Dawn was a superhero in her own right as one-half of the Tornado Twins.

Growing up in the 30th century, both Don and Dawn Allen grew up not knowing their father but having each inherited half of his super-speed powers, though they were discouraged from using them by their mother due to Earthgov’s exploitation of metahumans. It was a visit from their cousin Wally West which inspired them to take up the mantle of costumed heroes and become the Tornado Twins, which helped kickstart the resurgence of costumed superheroes in the future.

It should also be noted that while Nora West-Allen shares a codename with Jenni Ognats and a backstory similar to Dawn Allen, there’s another possible future daughter of The Flash that she shares a civilian name with; Nora Allen aka Cruise. Introduced as part of the recently “Legacy” storyline in Bryan Hitch and Fernando Pasarin’s Justice League, Cruise is the daughter of Barry Allen and Jessica Cruz, and sister to Jason and Jenny Allen, who inherited their mother’s connection to the emotional spectrum. It’s less likely that the Nora we see on TV has a connection the Nora of comics, and more likely that they both follow the naming convention of character’s naming their children after their own parents.

It’ll be interesting to see how much we learn of Nora Allen’s future, especially as it seems to be disconnected from the Legion of Super-Heroes lore which is being explored in Supergirl. As they’ve moved XS up a generation to be Barry and Iris’ daughter, could we possible see the debut of Bart Allen aka Impulse, who in the comics is XS’ cousin but could possibly be her brother in this new interpretation of the canon? Whatever happens, XS is stranded in the twenty-first century after making a big time-travel related mistake, so we know she’s definitely Barry’s kid, but what role she has to play in Season Five of The Flash remains to be seen.