(Photo by: The CW)

The Flash will end its nine-season run on The CW on Wednesday night, and writing the superhero series finale was a big task for showrunner Eric Wallace. Before writing the final episode, he sat down and watched several series finales from other shows and took some inspiration from three of them – Lost, Angel, and The Office.

Starring Grant Gustin (above), Candice Patton, Danielle Panabaker, Danielle Nicolet, Kayla Compton, Brandon McKnight, and Jon Cor, the series follows the fastest man alive and his team of superheroes as they key the planet safe from metahumans who use their powers to hurt others.

Wallace said the following about crafting the finale of The Flash, per EW:

“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.  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.

I thought a lot about it, what’s really good in this, and what do we need to pull out? 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.

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.”

SPOILER ALERT: While several key cast members from the past returned, Carlos Valdes did not. He left the series at the end of season seven and wanted to return for the finale, but a scheduling issue made his return impossible.

The actor said the following, per EW:

“Honestly, there was no way to make it happen with regards to my schedule and just all the different creative ventures and life circumstances that I was trying to juggle at that time.

I couldn’t really make it work, which was really heartbreaking to me because I thought, if I decided to step away from the show, at the very least I have to be there for the finale to round this thing out and to really honor the full circle-ness of it. It was really heartbreaking to not be able to make it work.”

What do you think? Are you looking forward to watching the series finale? Will you be sad to see The Flash end later this week?