Meet the jerkiest hero of them all.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
The Flash seems to be in decent shape right now. It’s lighter and sillier than it’s been in a while and finally breaking the mold with its main, season-long villain. But I wish I could muster up a better adjective than “decent.” There’s just something missing with the show’s current direction, and nothing about this guest star-driven episode did much to change that.
“Elongated Journey Into Night” introduced two new characters to the Arrowverse, one of whom seems like a fun but forgettable one-off guest star and the other who promises to play a big role in the unfolding Thinker conflict. The former is Gypsy’s superhumanly cranky father, Breacher (Machete’s Danny Trejo). The latter is Ralph Dibny (The Young and the Restless’ Hartley Sawyer).
I honestly wonder how well Breacher’s presence in this episode would have gone over if the casting wasn’t so inspired. The stereotypical “overprotective father torments his daughter’s boyfriend” routine was a little much. Not to mention that the Cisco/Breacher storyline felt pretty divorced from the rest of the episode for most of its run-time, only to crudely and abruptly intersect with the Elongated Man storyline near the end. The writers didn’t do a particularly great job of linking the two plotlines this week.
But again, it’s a lot easier to ignore those storytelling flaws when you have someone like Trejo bringing the character to life. He brought a nice scenery-chewing sense of menace and gravitas to this episode. The fact that Trejo played the part in such an utterly deadpan fashion wound up making the character that much funnier as a result.
Sawyer seems equally well-cast as Ralph Dibny, a character whom the show reimagines as a disgraced, down-on-his-luck private eye. Ralph definitely has a darker edge to him than he does in the comics, but one that works well enough. This episode included a number of great nods to the source material, from the bottle of Gingold soda to the Plastic Man namedrop to Ralph’s favorite catchphrase - “I smell a mystery.” Ralph’s debut did play a little fast and loose with Arrowverse continuity by ignoring the reference made to his “death” in the pilot, but obviously plans change over the course of three years.
In some ways, Ralph’s presence seems aimed at filling the hole left by Julian from last season. Once again, you have a colleague of Barry’s (former colleague, in this case) who shares a very antagonistic relationship with him. Whether that hole actually needed filling remains to be seen. Team Flash doesn’t have a burning need for a designated jerk character now that Harry is back in play. And with Wally being rudely booted out of the picture and Caitlin rapidly fading into the background, the group doesn’t necessarily need another recurring member. Still, the Barry/Ralph rivalry proved entertaining, and Ralph’s general redemptive arc was handled well.
If anything, “Elongated Journey Into Night” felt like it could have been a backdoor pilot for an Elongated Man spinoff, at least until the point where the writers tied his emergence into the Thinker storyline. Hopefully that will finally get the gears turning a little more quickly and prevent the series from falling into the “villain of the week” formula it’s been flirting with so far.
If Elongated Man is going to be a regular member of Team Flash, though, the special effects team may need to work on his stretching powers. The CG used for those scenes seemed unusually poor given how well the series handles speedsters, dimension-jumpers, robotic samurai and the various other metahuman weirdness afoot. But “Elongated Journey Into Night” was fairly disappointing on the action front in general. Even the one scene that did showcase Barry’s speed in a fun way - as he turned the tables on the mayor’s two henchmen - played a little too much like the iconic Quicksilver scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Again, this episode was entertaining enough as it introduced a pair of new DC characters, but it didn’t do enough to build on this season’s sluggish sense of momentum. Elongated Man may help accelerate the Thinker conflict, but what exactly did Breacher’s guest appearance accomplish in the rad scheme of things? With both Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow in top form this week, The Flash is lagging behind by playing things safe and straightforward. We need to see something more from Season 4’s ongoing narrative.
The Verdict
The Flash is having no trouble keeping viewers entertained this season, with this week's episode introducing a memorable pair of DC characters into the mix. That said, the two halves of this episode never quite connected to form a proper hole. And with the series struggling to do justice to every member of its regular cast, perhaps adding another new face to Tea, Flash isn't the best idea at the moment.
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