“A Girl Named Sue”
Original Airdate: February 18, 2020
After a few episodes of absence, Ralph Dibney has returned with a good chunk of storyline revolving around the episode-titular girl named Sue. The other story going on involves Iris — the real one, trapped in a mirror. We still don’t have a lot of clues about what the deal is with the split Irises, other than confirmation that the one who isn’t in the mirror has some nefarious plans brewing beneath the surface. Overall, this episode was pretty average in quality, but not terrible.
GO TO THE MIRROR!
Let’s talk a bit about Iris’s plot, which I wish we’d had more of (but wishing for more Iris isn’t exactly a new thing for me). We start the episode with Iris still yelling for Barry from the other side of the mirror. Her desperate but unheeded shouts for her husband to stop having cute moments with her doppelganger are interrupted by a woman, who asks if Iris is really real. It’s Eva McCulloch, who went missing six years previous — turns out, those six years had been spent in the completely empty mirror universe.
Look, I could be stepping out of bounds here by trying to tell someone what they should do with their solitary mirror-life, but if I were faced with six years alone in some place I’d probably... I don’t know, travel? Joy ride in a bunch of vehicles without repercussions? Move into a library and finagle a way to read when everything in the universe is printed backwards? I’m just saying, no wonder Eva’s slightly unhinged if she’s spent six years in the same location with zero variation in her daily life.
Mostly, it seems like Eva has spent her six years in her office, trying over 2,000 times to find a way out of the mirrorverse and pining after her beloved husband. Since Eva’s beloved husband looks to have a highly skilled team of assassins, kidnappers, and brainwashers at his beck and call, something about Eva’s devotion to this obviously evil man seems very off. I would normally say this indicates a potential turn to the dark side for Eva — especially since she’s a twist on Evan McCulloch, the comic book version of Mirror Master, a supervillain — but it’s hard to say. The show really plays fast and loose with the alignment chart of the characters they pull from the comics, so maybe Eva’s just an innocent victim of a manipulative dude out to get her fortune.
Eva is a version of Mirror Master, though. We know this because when Iris’s plan to freeze the mirror into allowing them through (it’s a bunch of technobabble nonsense; it’s not important) fails, Eva gets upset and starts moving the broken pieces of the mirror with her mind. Not quite the ability we saw from the Mirror Master featured on the show, nor anything like the comic version, but still clearly a variation of the character. Eva’s ability to move the mirror back into a solid form, plus the compounding pep talks and sheer determination to get back to Barry from Iris, revives a little hope.
Meanwhile, Mirror Iris has been trying to get her hands on the mirror gun STAR Labs has in its archives. Since Barry thinks the gun is too dangerous to be out in the open, he tells her he can’t help — so Iris goes to the labs to steal it. She’s interrupted by Nash Wells, who is still hallucinating Harrison Wells, as he’s swiping an old journal of the aforementioned Harrison Wells. Iris leaves empty handed, but Barry has a change of heart and retrieves the gun for her, making her smirk the smirky smirk of evil once she turns away.
SUPER SUE
Ralph hasn’t been in the show for a few episodes because he’s been chasing down Sue Dearbon, a woman who has come to represent his self-worth as a detective during the nine months he’s tried to find her. This is the episode where he finally does find her, and absolutely nothing goes as he thought it would: Sue is not a damsel in distress, she doesn’t want to return to her parents, and she’s the ex-girlfriend and current target of a crime boss named John Loring, who has enough connections to kill her and anyone associated with her.
Except none of that’s true either. Well, she’s definitely not a damsel in distress — instead, she’s a high-kicking, explosion-dodging super spy lady who isn’t after Loring because putting him behind bars will allow her to safely return to her loving family. She’s after him because he has a giant diamond that she wants and she’s avoiding her parents because her old life of not committing crimes was too boring for her.
Ralph doesn’t know any of this yet, though. First he has to develop a soft spot for Sue and her tenacity, which happens fairly easily. Ralph starts to trust Sue so much that he even reveals he’s the Elongated Man in order to save them both during a chase sequence. But, in the end, after Ralph and Sue have tracked down and gained access to Loring’s safety deposit box, Sue turns on Ralph so she can abscond with the giant diamond.
This absconding is interrupted by Loring and Ultraviolet, who have both come to stop Sue and Ralph from leaving with the diamond. Ralph manages to stretch his way through the sprinkler system in time to shield Sue from gunfire, but Sue still skedaddles out of there without much concern for Ralph’s safety when he gets blasted by Ultraviolet’s UV rays. She does a little switcheroo that means she leaves with the diamond, too.
Remember what I wrote earlier about this show playing fast and loose with character good/evil alignment? Sue’s a pretty prime example of how iffy that can be. Ralph and Sue have good chemistry in the episode and their banter is nice, especially when backed up by knowledge of how solid the Ralph/Sue relationship was in the comics, but that only makes Sue’s turn against Ralph at the end more disappointing. I don’t really want a morally grey Sue Dearbon, you know? And weirdly, I find myself wishing for things to work out for Ralph. Never would have expected that when he was first introduced, let me tell you.
But there’s a hint that Sue is still working on the side of good: the giant diamond she stole looks to be inscribed with stuff related to Black Hole, which might mean Sue is fighting against them as well.
Other Things:
- How does Ralph now get injured when people punch him? Every punch should just be like trying to hit a large slab of silly putty.
- The height difference between Cecile and Ralph whenever they have scenes together is still hilarious.
- Barry, literally only you and Iris would have known anything about the mirror gun if she investigated it. You two could have gone down there, inspected the gun, and it would have never left STAR Labs premises. Stop being silly for the sake of plot.
- So Ralph is hurt by a punch to the face but he can also stop bullets? All I ask for is consistency in my ridiculous superhero shows, people.
- Why does Eva’s mirror occasionally switch to viewing Iris and Barry’s apartment?
0 comments:
Post a Comment