‘The Flash’ spoilers: Emily Kinney of ‘The Walking Dead’ puts a twist on Bug-Eyed Bandit

The Walking Dead -Well, we definitely can chalk the following up as some casting news that we did not see coming, but couldn’t be more thrilled about!

Just a day after we saw a surprise appearance from Emily Kinney in a dream sequence on “The Walking Dead,” it has been confirmed that Emily Kinney is going to be making an appearance on the upcoming April 18 episode of “The Flash” that will be the crossover episode for Felicity Smoak and Ray Palmer. She will be playing Brie Larvan, who is the show’s version of Bertram Larvan a.k.a. the Bug-Eyed Bandit from the Atom comics. The character is a notorious foe of Palmer’s, and on the show she is an extremely skilled hacker who will face off primarily with Felicity.

Given the rise in popularity for Kinney over the past few months since (spoiler alert!) the death of her “Walking Dead” character, we have to think that this casting is a rather nice coup for The CW. It allows them to have a familiar face, especially within the world of genre TV, in a role that is definitely a surprise in many ways. We did not expect to see her coming aboard here, especially in a role that is so different than Beth. Then again, we also did not expect the show to swap genders for such a major character either. We’ve seen this happen a lot recently like on “Elementary” where Dr. Watson is now a woman and it even though it doesn’t always work, we are hopeful that it will with Brie Larvan.

We’re sure that the arrival of one Atom villain will fuel speculation about a spin-off show featuring Ray’s character, and we’d be all for it. Personally, our top preference here is to have a 13-episode summer series featuring Brandon Routh, and maybe have something similar with Robbie Amell and Firestorm. This allows the network to have a variety of great DC Comics series all across the year.

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