Well, seeing how I'm zero for whatever on my predictions for Flash this season, now that I've watched the mid-season finale I may as well make some more probably-very-wrong predictions for the back half of the season. Who knows, if I keep taking wild swings, one of them might land eventually ...

These involve spoilers for the mid-season finale and also for the one thing I know about future episodes, which was mentioned in past entries.

(I'll probably do this for Legends of Tomorrow after their mid-season finale too, because why not??)

(Random side note about the mid-season finale: best use of ice powers ever, y/y?)

So, predictions. Obviously I don't think Iris is going to die. Plus, why did no one make the obvious connection between Barry visiting the future and Cisco seeing the future? In both cases, it's either not written in stone, or it's not precisely what it looks like -- as with Vibe and Killer Frost's fight. There are about a zillion possibilities for what could be going on in that scene, including a fake fight similar to the one with Doctor Light last season. idk, Barry, if you'd just TALK TO PEOPLE ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS, maybe someone would suggest some of these things. Or have Cisco vibe you, or something.

Now that we know Harry's coming back for at least one or two episodes, I have a completely offbeat prediction/worry about him, which is that he's going to follow in the footsteps of his comics version in some way. He doesn't really exist in the comics as such, but if he's viewed as an analog for Jesse Quick's dad in the comics, then as per Wikipedia spoilers, Johnny Quick dies fighting Savitar IN MORE OR LESS EXACTLY THE WAY THEY GOT RID OF THE BOX THIS EPISODE. And he dies saving Jesse, and that is TOTALLY something Harry would do. So, yeah. Nervous. I am going to stay optimistic and assume he lives, but regardless of how things go, I do think there's a reasonably good chance Harry is somehow going to science himself some speed powers this season. They managed to get most of the way to injectable speed last season already ...!

Regarding the "someone's going to die and someone's going to betray them" prophesy ... well, first of all, I don't think the traitor is going to be anyone obvious, i.e. one of the new characters. (Of course, this is also what I said about Julian -- he's too obvious to be Alchemy! -- and then he WAS Alchemy, so ...) But technically, the whole team betrayed Barry in the season finale last year, and I think this is going to be something along those lines -- someone acting for the greater good who ends up betraying the others because they think they have a better plan. I mean, at this point most of the characters have done something along those lines anyway, so it's not unprecedented ...

The character death, though ... I DO think someone's going to die. However, so far, this show -- unlike a lot of SF shows -- has been unusually consistent about not killing off their female/PoC characters. Minor character deaths like Dante and Reverb aside, the show's big end-of-season character deaths have all been white guys. And I kinda suspect they aren't going to break that trend. The most likely characters to die, imho, are Julian, HR, or Harry. (Or more than one of these.) I've been thinking from the time HR showed up that there was a reasonably good chance he was going to have some kind of Big Damn Hero moment at the end of the season that resulted in his death. I'm kinda thinking it even more now, at least if Harry lives -- I don't think it's especially likely they'd kill off BOTH Wellses, as opposed to killing one. In any case, I do think one of the above three is more likely than, say, Iris or Joe or Caitlin. Which is really unusual, so, let me pat you on the back, show. You're doin' good there. At least so far.

About HR ... Savitar's "fake Wells" comment spawned a brand new prediction, which is that he's not his Earth's Harrison Wells; he's Randolf Morgan instead. (Possibly using a face masker, or possibly he really looks like that -- we've seen with Earth-3 Jay Garrick that people can look the same on different Earths without being the same people, or fill the same role, i.e. Flash, without being the same.) Since we know from what Jay said that Savitar can travel between Earths, HR wouldn't be "fake" to him unless he's not really Wells. It's hard for me to see any other way of reading that comment, especially with HR's reaction to it.

One thing I don't think anymore is that HR's overly-friendly personality is fake. I did at first, but I don't think so now; I think Joe was right on the money when he said that HR is desperate to make people like him, and that's what's making him come off slightly false-seeming. I also think the story he told them about his backstory was basically accurate; it's just that he flipped the roles. I no longer think he's conning them for some sinister/shady purpose; the only thing he's lying about is who he is. I think he's doing what he told Wally to do, and seizing an opportunity: he always admired Harrison and wanted to be Harrison, and then he got an opportunity to go to an Earth where no one knows he's not really Harrison Wells and pretend to be him. So I'm guessing that HR really *is* his name, but it's not Harrison R-something Wells; it's H-something Randolf Morgan.

So those are my predictions thus far ... which are probably exactly as accurate as my earlier predictions. I'm just crossing my fingers that they don't kill off anyone I'm terribly attached to, which is basically all of the main cast at this point. (SO worried for Cisco when he picked up the box in this episode, omg. There may have been squeaking.)