The Flash’s Elongated Man will briefly stretch into season 7

Actor Hartley Sawyer was fired from The Flash earlier this year after inappropriate tweets surfaced. But his character will still appear in season 7…

The Flash was at the center of some controversy a couple months ago when racist, misogynistic tweets made by Hartley Sawyer (Ralph Dibny/Elongated Man) began making the rounds. Sawyer was fired, leaving fans to wonder how the story of the Elongated Man would be handled going into the seventh season.

If the past is any indication, this situation could go a couple of ways. Some wondered if Sawyer’s case would turn out like James Gunn’s. Marvel severed tied with the Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn after some of his offensive tweets came to light, but the Guardians cast came out in his defense, and after a cooling off period, he was hired back to direct Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

It look like The CW is standing by its decision to let Sawyer go, but it does have a plan as to what to do without him.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Eric Wallace shared exactly how they are going to tackle the Ralph Dibny/Sue Dearbon storyline in The Flash season 7:

"Ralph is a guy who can change faces and his appearance in many ways. Without giving any spoilers away, there are a couple of ways that we can have Elongated Man still appear in at least one episode this season to wrap that storyline up, that gets us what we need and still allows fans to say goodbye to the character, at least for the indefinite future."

It sounds like the show is planning to have Ralph use his abilities to appear different, perhaps morphing into one of the characters we already know. He could literally be anyone; I could see him morphing into someone Barry needs to see at that moment, someone who could give him the strength to tackle whatever comes next. But that’s just a guess.

As for Sue Dearbon, Ralph’s exit opens up some possibilities for her:

"Now we can expand her character and give her more backstory and more growth in ways that we hadn’t initially planned. [It’s] really exciting to see how she’s going to interact more with Team Flash once her name has been cleared — because we are going to clear her name obviously. But then what’s the reason for her to come back to Central City? And that’s going to be a bit of her story this season.You try to take lemons and make lemonade, and suddenly, now Sue’s possibilities are wide open. And we have a particular storyline that she’s going to help us out with, [specifically] with one of our villains this season that we would have never gotten to had not the circumstances changed. So it is going to be, I think, fun and unexpected for the audience, as much as it was for us to write."

In case you’ve forgotten why Sue needs her name cleared, in the season 6 finale, she was framed by the Mirror Mistress for Carver’s murder. Ugh, that Mirror Mistress is the worst.

We’ll have to wait until 2021 to find out exactly what happens next, as production delays have pushed everything back. But we did get a look at the season 7 premiere during last weekend’s DC FanDome event:

Yah, I was shocked too.

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h/t SYFY Wire