The Flash explains for ending season 6 early

The producers of The Flash apologises for cutting three episodes of The Flash season 6, and there is a good reason why they did. The season was cut down by three episodes as the director shut down the production due to coronavirus pandemic.

It ended with episode 19 'Success is Assured', which left fans unsure of Iris West-Allen's fate.

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Showrunner Eric Wallace has revealed that the season finale was meant to give fans more closure.

"This was never supposed to be a season finale," he said. "They would have found out what happened to her "Iris West-Allen" in a week."

Episode 20 was "90% shot," according to Wallace, and the following two episodes had already been written. But despite this, the showrunner added that nothing is definite for season seven.

"I wouldn't say they're locked," Wallace said. "There might be a wee bit of tinkering."

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This "tinkering" is likely to be due to new coronavirus-related restrictions that could be put in place when filming resumes.

"Some things need to change because we don't know what COVID-19 restrictions there will be on shooting, what protocols might come up," he explained.

"For instance, as in all of the Flash finales, we would have seen substantial crowd scenes, but I think that all has to change. We have to go in and change things based on what we can and cannot do when production resumes.

The Flash star Grant Gustin has revealed that the pandemic has disrupted negotiation of two more seasons. In January there were rumours that we have season 7, but the actor is ready for the eighth and ninth seasons.

"The conversations actually had started already for adding a potential eighth and ninth [season], but then this pandemic happened, and everything has stopped," he said.

Elsewhere in the podcast, Gustin opened up about missing out on other work due to his commitment to The Flash.

"I had faith really early on that the show would be on for a while," he said. "There are plenty of things I feel I missed out on.

"The Flash has been so amazing, but we're six years in now and the past four [summer] hiatuses I have had a project that has fallen through because of Flash. There are a lot of opportunities that have gone away because of schedule conflicts. You can't have everything."

The showrunner never decided the episode 19 was going to be finale until the pandemic. When the production was shut, everybody started working remotely from home, not only the writers. So it became a mad dash of "How many episodes can we complete and get on the air before this is shut down?" So it was not guaranteed that episode 19 was going to be completed in time. There was a world where 17, "Liberation" or 18, "Pay the Piper" could have been suddenly a season finale, which is tough. Eric Wallace feels lucky the crew and staff were able to complete episode 19.

Given that, every season of The Flash is like a movie in three acts. 619 was always intended to be the end of Act 2 of the movie, where the heroes are at their lowest point, and it has a big cliffhanger. I knew if we could finish post through 19, we might have a chance of at least having an episode that felt sort of like, "Oh, that it is a big cliffhanger. Okay, that's a good pause point."

It hasn't changed how the producer is going to wrap up the end, because of the three episodes that are remaining — which are now the first three episodes of season 7 — episode 620, which soon becomes episode 701. Ninety per cent of that footage is in the completed. That only leaves what we always intended as our two-part season finale of season 6 to follow in episode 702 and 703, which is wrapping up Eva's story.