First off, sorry this review is going up a little later than usual. Even The Flash has to play second fiddle to Hamilton tickets.

After four years of various ups and downs, one thing that’s never really changed with this series is the haphazard handling of its villains. The major, season-dominating villains tend to fare well, but the smaller “monster of the week” foes are generally underdeveloped plot devices more than fully realized characters. Occasionally the show breaks that trend with an especially flamboyant or ambitious villain like Gorilla Grodd or Trickster, but that’s rarely the case.

The hope is that Rag Doll would be one of those rare exceptions to the rule. All the right ingredients are there. In the contemporary Secret Six comics, he’s a character with a generally creepy vibe, a disgusting power set and an eccentric yet lovable personality. This episode captured those first two qualities well enough, but it really whiffed the ball on that last part.

It’s a shame the writers didn’t draw more heavily from the Secret Six comics here. There was a fun nod to writer Gail Simone and artist Dale Eaglesham (who created the modern incarnation of Rag Doll back in 2005’s Villains United), but this interpretation didn’t capture enough of what makes that character such a blast. The deranged sense of humor wasn’t really there. Other than the odd moment or two, like when Rag Doll briefly admired himself in the mirror, we never really got a sense of the kooky, socially awkward oddball beneath that mask. He was played in a far more earnest and straightforward manner, which really doesn’t suit a villain as weird as Rag Doll. Even the decision to treat him as a legitimate metahuman rather than just a really, really talented contortionist seemed like a pointless change.

Worse, the conflict never took full advantage of his metahuman status. The climax seemed to be setting up a major showdown of stretchy powers between Rag Doll and Elongated Man. But instead that battle wrapped up entirely off screen. I’m guessing the VFX budget had already been blown on Ralph’s Spider-Man homage. That anticlimactic finish is just one more example of how this episode failed to take advantage of a very unique DC villain. Here’s hoping that Secret Six TV series can do a better job on the Rag Doll front.

Ultimately, Rag Doll became just another in a long line of villains who drive the plot without doing enough to stand out on their own merits. At best, he became a useful tool in terms of allowing Barry and Iris to team up on a husband/wife adventure. And there, at least, this episode proved successful. It was a fun change of pace seeing the two act as a Dynamic Duo and relying on Iris’ society connections as much as Barry’s powers to battle this particular foe. Plus, Iris throwing herself off a building to save Barry is probably the single most badass thing she’s done on the series. Rarely has the chemistry between Grant Gustin and Candice Patton been this strong.

It was nice to see Iris asserting herself and taking a more active role in Barry’s adventures even as Nora finally came to terms with the gulf between the Iris she knows and the one she’s butting heads with in 2018. The Nora/Cecile subplot made for a charming little counterpoint to the main Rag Doll story. It’s the best use this series has made of Cecile in quite a while. It’s telling that she stands out more in a straightforward grandmotherly role than she did when the emphasis was on her psychic powers.

Unfortunately, the Caitlin subplot continues to be a drag on the series. This mystery simply isn’t compelling, and not just because The CW already revealed the identity of her wayward father. None of this soul-searching and puzzle-solving is doing anything to provide course-correction for a character who’s basically been lost since the beginning of Season 4. All this nonsense about Norse goddesses and secret Tannhauser Labs black sites is just muddying the waters further. The hope is that the payoff next week when Caitlin finally comes face to face with her father will justify all this plodding build-up, but that seems like a slim hope at this point. Better that the series returns its focus to the Cicada conflict and stops trying to salvage Caitlin’s time as Killer Frost.