Love him or hate him, the fact of the matter is that we’ll be seeing a whole lot more of Ralph Dibny AKA the Elongated Man in The Flash season 5 due to Hartley Sawyer signing on as a series regular. Though his stretchy powers may not translate all that well to live action and the character annoyed me for the longest time, he matured rather well near the end of the show’s fourth year, imparting the right words of wisdom at the right time.
Should you be familiar with his comic book counterpart, then you’re aware of how Ralph is actually one of the greatest detectives that the DC Universe has to offer. This is something the TV show has merely hinted at to this point, but it sounds like Mr. Dibny will get to show off his skills before long, as executive producers Todd Helbing had this to say while speaking with Newsarama:
“Ralph is going to be doing a lot more detecting this year than he did last season, and I think the description of Elongated Man was that he has the detective skills that rivals Batman’s.”
As the showrunner continued, he dropped something that should raise the eyebrows belonging to at least a few diehard geeks:
“We have a lot of investigative stories to tell; we obviously want to get to Sue Dibny at some point.”
Now, I may be going out on a limb here, but it’s hard not wondering whether Helbing and company may take some influence from Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis if indeed Sue is to be introduced – though that’d probably be far down the line. Who knows, the tale could be considered for a future crossover event.
The Flash returns for its fifth season on Tuesday, October 9 on The CW.
