WMG / Best Friends Whenever

The man in the suit that we see in the lab in the Bad Future is really Barry

By this point in the future Barry simply is old enough and successful enough to have a proper lab and its him whose going to experiment on his friends. Meaning two possibilities:

• A: Its a lot less scary than it looks, its simply a harmless and perfectly consensual examination. At some point in the future both Shelby and Cyd agree to let Barry examine them to try and find out the secrets of how they can time travel. And the reason they are strapped down isn't to imprison them, its to stop them falling off their tables when he puts them under aesthetic. Explaining why someone who knows they can time travel (and thus presumably knows they need physical contact for it to work) would not strap down there arms and put there beds so close.
• B: At some point in the future they either have a major falling out, or Barry turns evil, consumed with his For Science! ideals, so much he's willing to cut them open to figure out there secret (he pretty much admitted he would do it if he had the resources back in episode 2).
  • That would mean Naldo died of unspecified circumstances. Since Naldo was Barry's conscience who prevented him from becoming evil in The Butterscotch Effect, Naldo would no longer be around to keep Barry from falling off the deep end.
• C: there's a third possibility, that Barry is in fact not the one who imprisoned them, and is instead there to rescue Shelby and Cyd.
• D: it is a scary future, but not for the reasons Shelby and Cyd currently think. In the future they get lost in time, but enough is known how to pull them back. But so far the wrong versions are getting pulled to that point in time.
• Barry is definitely involved, since the logo from the lab was seen on his computer in "Shake Your Booty".
• Don't forget Janet Smythe. She's very much in charge of said experiments.
  • And Barry expressed a desire to work for her to.
• Confirmed in "Diesel Gets Lost In Time". However, the question is why?

The person in the mask is always there no matter how much Cyd and Shelby change timelines, but the person in the mask changes each time Shelby and Cyd alter the timeline

• given the butterscotch effect episode, this is entirely possible.
• Unfortunately, that is the case, because a Stable Time Loop of attempting to stop that future actually created it. However, it's not the guy in the mask they have to worry about, it's Janet Smythe. By finding their tachyon particles, it's only a matter of times before Janet finds the girls, and that's gonna happen one way or another.

Barry's mom dresses and styles him, possibly with help from Naldo.

He's reasonably put-together looking for being the designated geek boy in a Disney Channel show, more Ordinary High-School Student than nerd.

Barry is involved in the experiments on Cyd and Shelby, but not of his own free will.

• The end of "Shake Your Booty" implies that he's involved, yet every time they find themselves in the lab, their hands are left free, allowing them to use their powers to escape. Someone as intimately familiar with their powers as Barry would surely know better than to make that mistake; he left their hands free on purpose so they could escape.
  • In "Diesel Gets Lost In Time", the guy in the suit was Barry all along. However, "Cyd and Shelby Strikes Back" shows that even Barry wouldn't approve of what Janet wants to them, so there's reason to doubt that Barry is even a volunteer in all this. If that's the case, the one possible way Janet could ever involve him is hold someone he cares about, such as Marci and/or Naldo hostage to get him to cooperate.

There will be a Very Special Episode revealing Barry as having an official autism-spectrum diagnosis.

Girl Meets World feinted in that direction but went with a side character instead. Maybe they were "saving" ASD-in-a-main-character for BFW and Barry.

Chet and Bret are clones.

Specifically, of that guard at Globo-Digityne who looks a lot like a grown-up version of them. Given Globo-Digityne's variety of projects in development, it's a definite possibility. They looked enough like him that he thought they meant him when they said they were looking for their dad and that he worked there.

The end of "Back to the Future Lab" marks the beginning of a Stable Time Loop.

• Now that Shelby's dad is involved in the Experimental Projects Division and Golbo-Digityne, he'll eventually discover Cyd and Shelby's secret, leading to the events we see in the future, which will turn out to have been caused by Cyd and Shelby's meddling with history.
  • Although it actually could help them if their dad knows. I mean I doubt he would experiment on the girls .If so, that would be almost like Parental Abuse, something I don't think Disney would encourage representing that.
  • True, but this could lead to that future without him actually being involved in the experiment. For example, consider this scenario: Janet Smythe, the Big Bad and CEO of Globo-Digidyne, threatens to fire Norm unless Cyd and Shelby participate in her experiments. Not wanting to see him lose his job on their account, they agree. All springing out of the events of that episode.

one of the purpose of the Liv and Maddie cross-over is to introduce a new suspect

• A bit of a far out guess, but remember Parker trying to build a refrigerator time machine in Champ-A-Rooney? Maybe he could be the one in the mask and in another cross-over with Liv and Maddie (or just by himself) we find out that is it.
  • not to mention Parker does have the brains for that. Parker is a sixth grader taking a high-school robotics class.

The Future Lab will turn out to not be evil.

• And that's why their hands are free. Maybe their time travel abilities have become dangerous to others and they're trying to find a cure for the problem. That's why almost everyone is in full lab suits. And Janet Smythe is an unpleasant person in general, so the shin whacking is no indication of malicious intent.
  • Surprisingly Close. Said "cure" is that Cyd and Shelby wanted to sacrifice their time traveling abilities to prevent Janet from abusing space and time to change history so that she invented everything.

Janet will get killed in the Season 1 finale

• Judging by the premise of the Season 1 finale, and how dark the show has gotten with the Future Lab Arc, Janet will get killed by being overloaded with tachyon particles because they backfire, and blow her into a million pieces.
  • Jossed. Janet's fate was being captured by Future Cyd and Shelby (who got to the present by going through the time vortex that was accidentally made by Present Cyd and Shelby) and being put in the prison of Future Cyd and Shelby's timeline… however, no one in the present (except for Cyd and Shelby, though they told Barry and Naldo everything that happened) knows what happened to Janet, especially since the timeline resets after the vortex closed. For all they know, Janet just mysteriously disappeared. After a while, people will assume that she is dead. Heck, she'll probably be declared dead in absentia after being absent for several years. Even though she is still alive in the distant future, she can, and most likely will, be dead by law.

The Big Bad for season two will be Drake

Seeing as in the Bad Future Janet rules he's her Dragon and shows no problem with Freezing those who disobey her, it's most likely that since her defeat he might become a Semi-Dragon Ascendant. Shelby breaking up with him might be his start of darkness. Alternatively, since the future Cyd and Shelby said that they were just "one possibility" multiple timelines might exist simultaneously, meaning the ominous figure coming from a time rift in season ones final episode could be drake from Janet Smythes bad future.