The Flash S04E04 Review: Gingold!

(Yep, that's Vibe)

The Flash, Season 4, Episode 4: Elongated Journey into the Night

I admit that I was far more excited about this episode than I should, simply because I really, really like Elongated Man from the comics. Ralph is a character that has criminally minimal exposure in DC's many animated attempts. He's had minor roles in two episodes of Justice League Unlimited, and extremely minor background roles in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Brave and the Bold gave far more attention to Plastic Man, who, while not a character I dislike, does mean that poor Ralph tended to be set aside.

Still, this is easily my favourite episode of the Flash this season, where both A-plot and B-plot worked amazingly well. One of the biggest things that I realize made the original heavily-lauded first season of Flash worked is that it served as a backdoor pilot to Firestorm, making the world feel so much bigger than 'Team Flash vs villains'. It's the sort of huge worldbuilding that all four of CW's DC shows have kind of squandered. On one hand, it would be criminal to discard characters after their introduction (looking at Legends of Tomorrow's slipshod, shitty treatment of Hourman, Dr. Mid-Nite and Stargirl) but I did love how we can get these characters into a pretty cool episode that sells them as potentially becoming superheroes of their own, something that hasn't happened in a really, really long time.

I'm not sure if Ralph will enter the group and replace Kid Flash and Draco Malfoy, but I certainly liked him. He's got a healthy dose of adaptational jackassery, and I did like Barry's episode-long feud with Ralph. They've butted heads before in the past prior to having superpowers, and they're both different flavours of good. In their past meeting, Ralph fakes some evidence to nail a murderer, but Barry exposes this, seeing Ralph's tampering as being a crime in and of itself. Both Barry and Ralph do have valid points, and especially since Barry has been enacting his own law-breaking-for-the-greater good as the Flash by throwing people into his own personal prison, and them butting heads is amazing.

The show also makes Ralph's sleaziness and dickassery ('Professional Detective' with the latter being crossed out and replaced with 'dick' is one of the funniest visual gags in the episode) prominent, while at the same time giving him many redeeming qualities. His unabashed rage as he screams at the holier-than-thou Barry "that murderer was going to get away! I was a good detective, I was a good cop!" is amazing, but at the same time Ralph did have to face his own demons, and how he's stooped as low as to blackmail the mayor to get money... something that, after the conversation with Barry, he regrets and attempts to rescind. 

By the climax of the episode, with the mayor capturing Joe and holding him hostage in a helicopter (and Ralph and Flash briefly tied up with Breacher, who we'll get to later on) Barry's decision to trust that Ralph can change, and to trust him with his secret identity, and the eventual team-up that allowed Flash to zip up Elongated Man's arm to the helicopter, is definitely well-done. 

At the end of the episode, Flash offers Dibny a place in Team Flash, after a brief bit of apologizing and calling him 'Plastic Man' (which Dibny hates). We also cleverly work this into the bit of foreshadowing with the Thinker plot that's going to run throughout the season, with Dibny giving Flash the name DeVoe, which Flash in turn recognizes from his meetings with Abra Kadabra and Savitar last season. As Dibny notes with that perfect nose-wiggle.... he smells a mystery.

In addition to being a pretty great Elongated Man debut episode (as much as his character is slightly changed) it's also a great visual episode with the visual gags of Ralph's legs stretching as he's held above a building, or Iris following Ralph's legs throughout STAR labs, or Ralph's face melting off when he sneezes... the CGI works, and it's delightfully silly. "Four years of seeing this stuff, I finally puked", Joe says, and oh god, Joe's just hilarious.

If that's not enough, we have a B-plot! It's probably not as necessary to interject the strange wildcard that is Breacher, but Machete's Danny Trejo is an amazingly hilarious actor. He's Gypsy's father, and he's none too pleased that some inferior creature is dating his daughter. Breacher is a bit of a caricature of a badass daddy throughout the episode, but both Carlos Valdes and Danny Trejo are so hilarious in their performance that I didn't care. Breacher randomly deciding that Elongated Man is a Plastoid from his own dimension and ends up fucking up the A-plot is also great. 

I did think that Harry Wells' minimal involvement when interacting with Cisco felt a bit shoehorned in, but eh, the dude's actor directing the top-notch episode, so cut him some slack. There was a C-plot with Joe struggling to tell anyone that Cecile's pregnant, which would be dumb, but Jesse L. Martin is consistently one of the best actors in the show, and his absolutely perfect blurting out of "cecileispregnant" after Barry saves him is just amazing.  

(Harry has an amazingly funny background moment of shaking his fist at Cisco and he talks about how he's the owner of STAR Labs.)

So yeah. Easily my favourite episode of the season, an excellent mix of handling DC's own vast history and cast, comedy, action, serialization and general superhero storytelling. Certainly hope to see more Ralph Dibny for the rest of the season.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Elongated Man: Elongated Man is one of DC's most classic characters, introduced in the Silver Age. Elongated Man developed his powers by creating a serum of concentrated Gingo fruit after learning that contortionists like to drink a popular soda called 'Gingold', giving him elastic powers. In Elongated Man's first appearance in the comics, he would butt heads with the Flash, who assumed that he was a villain behind several crimes. Elongated Man would be one of the longest-running members of the Justice League of America, staying through multiple incarnations, and would be one of the few DC superheroes to reveal his secret identity to the public and to marry his love interest Sue.
• While Iris and Barry are looking through Ralph's office, Iris finds a bottle of Gingold and holds it up briefly -- Gingold is, of course, the brand of soda with the stretchy qualities that gave comics!Elongated Man his powers.
• Ralph says his comic book catchphrase twice: "I smell a mystery!" at the end of the episode, and earlier when Joe and Barry arrives at his office. In addition to being super-stretchy, Ralph is always noted to be one of the JLA's best detectives (other than, y'know, Batman) and is shown being a PI here. 
• Ralph's nose twitches at the end when he says that, which is a trademark quirk he has in the comics whenever he, y'know, smells a mystery.
• Barry suggests the name 'Plastic Man' to Ralph, and this incarnation of Ralph's past role as being somewhat shady does resemble Plastic Man somewhat. Ralph dismissing the nickname and calling it stupid is probably a reference to how Elongated and Plastic Man don't really get along at all in the comics. 
• Breacher: Breacher (real name Quell Mordeth in the comics, 'Josh' in this incarnation) is the name of an antagonist in Vibe's newer comics, and other than having powers similar to Vibe, he's also Gypsy's father in the post-reboot comics.
• In a reference to actor Danny Trejo's role in the Machete movies, Cisco briefly pulls out a machete from the tools in Harry's lab when talking about how to beat Breacher.
• Cisco also compares Breacher to a Predator, and Danny Trejo plays a character in Predators. 
• Mayor Anthony Bellows: Mayor Bellows is played by Vito D'Ambrosio, the actor who played officer Bellows in the 1990's Flash TV show. This was lampshaded by Bellows, who noted that he was a cop before he became a mayor.
• Ralph Dibny is actually mentioned by season one's Harrison/Eobard as being one of the casualties of the Particle Accelerator explosion, and it's painfully clear here that Ralph only got his powers from the Dark Matter portal... but it might just be Eobard being a bit too dramatic, as well as, y'know, the whole Flashpoint alternate-reality thing.
• In a hilarious nod to an MCU-related actor, Ralph giving himself abs with his powers is noted to him looking like 'a Hemsworth'. 
• Continuity nods!
• Cisco re-uses the Reverse-Flash trap from season one to trick Breacher, and also uses a hologram, similar to Reverse-Flash.
• Breacher notes that Harry "looks like someone I once sent my daughter to kill", referencing how Gypsy's first appearance last season is to hunt down H.R.
• Coffee is extinct on Earth-19, something Gypsy told us in her first appearance.
• As the flashbacks helpfully reminds us, last season Abra Kadabra and Savitar both mention 'DeVoe', the mysterious person who's pulling strings behind this mysterious bus incident.