‘The Flash’: Elongated Man to Use His Detective Skills in Season 5

One of the newest members of Team Flash, Hartley Sawyer‘s Ralph Dibny/Elongated Man went on quite a journey last season. A disgraced cop turned private investigator with questionable values, Ralph ended up not just a newly minted hero but a valued member of the team. But Ralph’s journey isn’t over yet.

Now that Ralph’s survived being literally body snatched by The Thinker last season, according to series showrunner Todd Helbing the character’s more comic book accurate skills and traits will be explored in season five — especially his detective skills.

“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” Helbing told Newsarama. “So, we want to get him on his journey in that regard this season.”

Getting to see Ralph’s powers of investigations are something that The Flash is something that Helbing has talked about wanting to explore more fully previously as well. Speaking with ComicBook.com ahead of The Flash‘s season finale back in May, Helbing explained that he’s wanted to dig more into the character’s story from the moment they met Sawyer and that there are many stories requiring Ralph’s skills to tell.

“From day one, that was sort of the plan that we came up with,” Helbing said. “Ralph’s powers are so unique. In the comics, there’s a lot of things we haven’t done yet with Ralph Dibny. We have a lot of investigative stories to tell; we obviously want to get to Sue Dibny at some point. So, it just didn’t feel from the beginning that we could tell his story in one episode and we all fell in love with Hartley literally from the moment we met with him and we knew we wanted to have him part of the show moving forward.”

And the show will have plenty of opportunity to tell his story. It was announced in June that Sawyer had been promoted to series regular which means that we’ll be seeing a lot more the character, but there is one character that fans won’t be seeing quite as much in season five. Helbing explained to Newsarama that Wally West/Kid Flash will appear in only three episodes in the upcoming season as Keiynan Lonsdale opted to step down from series regular status on both The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow.

“You will see Wally in the first episode,” Helbing said. “He is in three episodes this season. We don’t have as much time with Kid Flash as everyone would like to see, but the story we have for him is really cool.”

Are you looking forward to seeing Ralph Dibny operate more as a detective next season? Let us know in the comments below.

The fifth season of The Flash will debut on Tuesday, October 9th, at 8/7c on The CW.