The Flash S05E05 Review: RAGDOLL

The Flash, Season 5, Episode 5: All Doll'd Up

One of the biggest factors of The Flash that it has lost from its first season is compelling, recurring villains. From season two onwards, most villains tended to be forgettable or disposable although last season at least tried to make some of them more human. See, most of the time The Flash is just so caught up with the villain-of-the-week trope that they just slap an easily-animated power onto a random obscure villain and call it a day.

See, one of the easiest ways to make a villain memorable without spending the time to develop them too much is to just make them awesome, or creepy, in some way. That was why everyone remembers Grodd from the first season! And this episode does that marvellously with Ragdoll, who is given horrifying contortionist powers. And also he's a complete psychopath wearing a creepy mask throughout all his scenes. Sure, his motivations might not be particularly deep, and I'm not 100% sure why he suddenly changes target from his mother to Iris halfway through the episode, but the visual effects of Ragdoll spinning around his head and body, crab-walking all over the place (played by a real contortionist, Troy James) and doing some creepy movements and delivering the odd chilling serial killer line or two... yeah, that's definitely enough to land Ragdoll as one of Flash's more memorable villains.

(Being a huge fan of Ragdoll's appearances in the pages of Secret Six also helps out a whole bit, but since most of CW's adaptations are pretty rough adaptations anyway... eh?)

Ragdoll's motivations in this episode is pretty simple, just being a serial killer that gets into places he shouldn't get via ventilation shafts and creepy gift boxes, and he just wants to make people suffer by taking away what they love the most, because his mother was pretty horrible to him. It's meant to evoke a bit of a parallel to Iris's own struggles with her own parenting efforts, but I really didn't feel that it was explored particularly well.

Barry, interestingly, gets whacked by Ragdoll and taken hostage with metahuman cuffs, causing Iris and a stretch-slinging Elongated Man to show up to rescue Ragdoll. Sadly, the Elongated Man/Ragdoll stretchy-stretch fight takes place entirely offscreen, which is a huge shame! At least Ralph gets a badass dramatic entrance moment, and does manage to be competent while looking comical at the same time. Never change, Ralph. Iris jumps off the building to free Barry from his locks, which is apparently the catalyst that Nora needs to see that her mom's kinda cool. Okay, then. It's a decently well-scripted and acted scene, but I didn't really feel the scene to be all that dramatic.

I do really like the fact that Barry is trying to make their joint investigation on Ragdoll as kind of a 'date' while also trying to get Iris to try to open up on her struggles at parenting, but as I mentioned last week... it is a pretty shitty thing for Barry and Iris to say and refuse to apologize for what they did because of some vague, unknown reason.

Thankfully, Mama Cecile is here to save the day! Cecile's attempts to tell Nora how awesome Iris is by not being condescending and baiting her with stories about that time the Flash fought the Time-Lost Golden Giants (which is a real thing in the comics!), before telling Nora that all the stories are about Iris all along, is actually a very well-done and charming bit, and definitely feels far more conducive into getting Nora to try and at least attempt to bond with present-day Iris than... than anything Iris and Barry did. Although at least Iris manages to get her head out of her ass and acknowledge that she can't justify or know what her future self would do.

The B-plot surrounding Cisco, Caitlin, Ralph and Sherloque doing investigations on Thomas Snow is... it's a bit less interesting due to how roundabout it is, but the random connection to Martin Stein is surprising and welcome, and while it's just ultimately just another trail of breadcrumbs that lead to another clue, the main emotional heft from this subplot was the fact that Cisco, hiding his injuries suffered during his fight with Cicada, continues to force himself to Vibe things to help Caitlin get closer to Thomas.

It's an amazingly done scene, and Cisco's heartfelt desperation at noting how everyone's fighting and he's not going to let a little injury get in the way of him helping his best friend, and Caitlin telling Cisco that it's Cisco Ramon that's the superhero and not Vibe (and she's speaking from personal experience, having lost Killer Frost)... that's the sort of healthy "aww, both of you are sweet" cheesy warm fuzzy feelings that feel well-written, and not like the pretty eye-rolling Nora/Iris/Barry bit. Ultimately, the episode would've been a huge flop if Ragdoll, Cecile, Caitlin and Cisco hadn't delivered such amazing performances.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Ragdoll, (sometimes Rag Doll) a.k.a. Peter Merkel Jr, is based primarily on the second version of the character, who himself is the son of the original Ragdoll -- also named Peter Merkel, and an enemy of Jay Garrick's Flash.
• In both appearance and his clear sociopathy, as well as a huge, huge anger towards his parents, this Ragdoll certainly has a lot of the traits that define Ragdoll II pretty well. In the comics, Peter Merkel Jr went through a huge amount of body modifications and mutilations in order to be able to emulate his father's triple-jointedness, and as a result Ragdoll ends up being able to twist all the joints of his body in whatever way he chooses to. He was made particularly popular as a main character in the Secret Six titles. 
• Cecile's talk about Barry travelling to the past and fighting golden giants is a reference to volume #120 of the original Golden Age run of the Flash comics, which is well-remembered for the first formal debut of Kid Flash as Flash's sidekick. As Cecile notes, the titular Golden Giants there are called Grodans.
• One of Ragdoll's victims casually mentions Gotham City Skyline. Lots of Gotham City references in the CW series this week, huh? It's like they have the permission to include Batman characters in an upcoming crossover or something...
• The Gotham dude that Ragdoll's victim was calling is called Novick, who is named after Batman artist Irv Novick.