The Flash Review: The Elongated Knight Rises (Season 4 Episode 11)
With Barry Allen officially in jail, Ralph Dibny’s Elongated Man takes center stage in an uneven, largely forgettable episode of The Flash that doesn’t really move the story forward in any significant way.
“The Elongated Knight Rises” is certainly full of comedy and wacky superhero hijinks. If you’re looking for humor or just straight silliness, this is probably the episode for you.
However, if you find yourself rolling your eyes at The Flash’s campier moments, or if you just don’t care much about new character Ralph Dibny, then you’re not going to like it much.
Why? Honestly, it’s not clear whether we need another Ralph-focused episode at this point in the season, especially given everything else (i.e., DeVoe’s as-yet-unknown evil plot) going on.
“When Harry Met Harry” was just five episodes ago, after all, and it’s still not clear that The Flash has figured out what it wants to do with this character. Ralph is charming and goofy, selfish and downright scuzzy by turns, and it’s hard to know how to really feel about him.

Last week’s The Flash Season 4 Episode 10, “The Trial of the Flash,” used Ralph a bit more effectively, allowing his darker experiences to provide needed perspective for a desperate Joe. However, in “The Elongated Knight Rises,” Ralph’s behavior often reads as more selfish and whiny than genuinely conflicted.
The fact that Ralph’s first real supervillain face-off is against Trickster and his mother Prank doesn’t help matters much either. Elongated Man is already such a campy, over-the-top hero that pitting him against what are essentially two carnival clowns is just way too much for one 42 minute installment.
Even the CGI — normally such a strength of The Flash, which has managed to create giant gorillas and sharks with little to no problem — can’t help Ralph. His randomly inflating body parts and gelatinous limbs feel too slapstick and childish. It’s hard to take any of it seriously and, honestly, it looks cheap. (Guys, they made a gorilla army. This should not be hard!)
This combination of characters, plot, and setting makes everything feel way too goofy and wacky, especially after several episodes emphasizing the real-life stakes of Barry’s superhero lifestyle. There’s a way to tell this story that offers a flavor of that same seriousness, which this episode hints at briefly, thanks to Axel’s obsession with impressing his absent father.

Unfortunately, “The Elongated Knight Rises” doesn’t achieve any sort of balance between the silly and the serious. Instead, it’s all just Super Soakers filled with hot pink acid and maniacal laughter and pointless stakes. (What even happened to those two original hostages, anyway?)
The episode’s overt focus on Ralph also raises an uncomfortable question: Why?
With Barry in jail and the Flash subsequently out of commission, sure, someone else needs to step up as a leader and a hero. But did any of us really want that person to be the Elongated Man?
Ralph is a relatively new addition to the team. As such, we don’t really know him very well and he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of a purpose as yet. Actor Hartley Sawyer throws himself into the role with gusto, yet is frequently hampered by poor writing and characterization that generally lacks depth.
It also forces us to ask: Why is Ralph the new de facto face of Team Flash? It’s not like the group doesn’t have several other superhero types on the roster, who struggle to get any significant screen time as it is. Where is Wally, for instance?
While we as viewers know that the reason for Kid Flash’s absence is the fact that Keiynan Lonsdale is heading to Legends of Tomorrow, within the world of the show it makes zero sense that no one’s even mentioned reaching out to the other powerful speedster that they know.
There’s also Cisco and Caitlin, both of whom have access to fairly powerful metahuman abilities. (The scene in which Prank and Trickster easily took them both out is laughably bad, by the way.)
Why is this not a story about allowing Cisco to step into a leadership role? Or one in which Killer Frost gets the “why being a hero matters” lesson of the week?

Any of those options seem far more compelling than another episode in which Ralph Dibny learns again that helping people is important.
On the bright side, the episode’s Barry-in-prison subplot is better than expected. Of course, it still makes no sense that Barry Allen, a man who basically tells strangers on the street that he’s the Flash, is in jail for refusing to give up his secret identity. And we all know he was never in any real danger on the inside.
Yet, Barry’s budding friendship with Big Sir — and their pre-existing connection through Henry — is intriguing, and oddly sweet. Here’s hoping that particular relationship goes somewhere interesting, as we watch Barry give pep talks to the rest of the team from prison and repeatedly explain to others why he can’t just zoom out of jail, catch some bad guys, and return with no one the wiser.
(The fact that he’s not doing this actually doesn’t make a ton of sense either, but whatever. There are bigger problems here.)
Ultimately, despite the fact that I personally find the addition of Big Sir charming, much of Barry’s Shawshank-style prison plot feels like The Flash is treading water.
To what end is, as yet, unclear. Maybe we’ll get back to that next week.
Stray Thoughts and Observations:
- How awesome is it to see Corinne Bohrer become the latest person to reprise her role from the 90s Flash series here? Please bring her and Mark Hamill together again at some point, show!
- I guess another big season-long mystery is the identity of that girl scribbling strange symbols in her notebook at Jitters. (She showed up in one of the “Crisis on Earth-X” episodes as well.) The obvious answer seems dimension-jumper or time traveler of some type, but who?
- Ralph’s new Elongated Man costume looks like a bad Firestorm prototype. Yes, it’s definitely an improvement over that blue horror, but this version is so dull and uninteresting.
- The fact that The Flash specifically chooses to lampshade what a ridiculous superhero name “The Elongated Man” is = absolutely perfect.
- I say this so often I should probably just put it in my bio somewhere, but man, I love Earth-2 Harrison Wells.
What did you think of this episode of The Flash? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
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The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
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