THE FLASH Season 6 Episode 12 Review: A Girl Named Sue


After being absent for several weeks, Ralph returned to our screens just in time to have a massive breakthrough regarding the Sue Dearbon missing persons case — namely, his being able to take the word “missing” out of the equation. While Ralph’s presence has been pretty inconsistent for the first half of this season, the frequent reminders about his ongoing search for Sue Dearbon, who many comic book fans will have recognized as his eventual wife, suggested there was still actual arc planned for him this year, in stark contrast to the aimlessness plaguing his character last year. The quality over quantity approach has worked well for the cast since new showrunner Eric Wallace took over, and Ralph in particular is much more palatable in the occasional detective noir story rather than as the background funny guy who is in every episode but gets a line or two at most. 

Sue (Natalie Dreyfuss) is also a character right at home in the mystery genre, as it turns out she's not a kidnapped debutante but a fast-talking con artist with a femme fatale flair who leads Ralph on a wild goose chase across the city. It's quite the departure from her traditional depiction as a socialite, but frankly the source material needed some updating. In the comics, Sue suffered under her fair share sexist storylines, most notably in the infamous series Identity Crisis — she was raped, mindwiped, and finally burned to death, all to provide drama for her husband Ralph to deal with. Reimagining her as a more active character like a master thief gives her some more agency and will hopefully make her less likely to be fridged (although given the grim fate Cynthia met earlier this season, this might be an overly optimistic take). 

In keeping with the noir vibe the episode is going for, Sue and Ralph have a classic old school Hollywood romance, with lots of quick-paced banter and flirtatious sniping. It’s very reminiscent of the cat-and-mouse relationship Golden Glider and Cisco had back in the early days off the show, all things, but given how tragically short the Rogues’ time on the series was, it makes sense the series would circle back around to the mostly untapped potential of a hero/villain romance on the show. Ralph’s hardly an upstanding citizen, so pairing him with a morally dubious character isn't much of a stretch (no pun intended), and her wisecracking and constant doublecrossing make her a memorable character in a season that's already introduced a lot of new faces. 

One of the other new faces is the Mirror Master herself, Eva McCulloch (Efrat Dor). While Eva will presumably grow more villainous as the season goes on, here she purely reads as a scared woman resigned to living the rest of her life alone in her pocket dimension. Her manic, out-of- touch way of speaking seems pitiful now as opposed to threatening, but I'm interested to see how they evolve that trait over the rest of the season. 

I'm still pretty disappointed at how this mirror-verse storyline has played out with Barry and Iris; it seems incredible to me that to me that even after all the brainwashing and alternate universes they've encountered, Barry would still shrug off the giant red flag of Iris suddenly asking for a classified weapon. Has he really learned nothing from his constant string of betrayals? Nevertheless, I’m pleased by the idea that Iris could be the character who has the defining dynamic with big bad. Most of the main villains have had a vendetta against the Flash, it'd be refreshing to see another character like Iris get the focus. 

It would certainly soften the blow of it being a fake Iris pretending to have an arc about asserting herself if the real deal got to show her moxie by going toe to toe with the big bad over the rest of the season. No matter what happens with Barry and Mirror Master, I don't think you can really top the dramatic connection that comes with being the only two people in the universe; and why waste that set up after going to all the trouble to trap Iris?

Written by Kaitlin Roberts, THE FLASH Beat Writer

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