Hi folks! Welcome back to our weekly recap of The Flash. After two long weeks without our favorite speedster, our heroes are back with “King Shark vs. Gorilla Grodd”, a bombastic and thoughtful? Episode. Let’s dive right in.
1. Joe’s Return
Finally! Jesse L. Martin is back in the show, this time he wasn’t part of the main action, but I liked what they did with his character today. Nora is −rightly− scared of coming back to her office, so Joe takes her to a boxing gym, where she punches out her frustrations, and have a moment of true with his dad.
He left Central City with fear of Cicada attacking him on his house, he went to Tibet to heal, both his body and his mind, even his spirit. The lesson here is that you can be scared, con might fear going back to the place where you felt vulnerable, but the important thing is to be stronger than that fear, conquer it, in order to go back to your regular life.
Welcome back Joe West!
2. The conflict with the meta cure
This has been cooking up for a while, Cisco on one side wants to ask every meta to take the cure voluntarily; Barry, on the other side is willing to impose the cure on dangerous individuals.
This happens when they offer the cure to King Shark, at first he flees, and in their second encounter, he almost kills Vibe, Barry decides to inject him the cure even without Shark’s approval.
This is important, because the members of the team have a different vision of their mission, thankfully, after King Shark is willing to give up the cure, in order to help in the fight against Grodd, Barry has a change of hearts, and he choices to stop with his idea of curing Cicada against his will, and they are going to ask him if he wants to take the cure voluntarily.
3. The girl and the fish
Well, the girl loves her little sharkey, there’s not much else to talk here.
It was a weird choice to take time to explain King Shark’s love life, and make a sub-plot out of it. Tanya Lamden is scared of loving the same man but from another earth, and Sherloque takes the recurrent joke of him having the same ex on different earths, tells her, in all seriousness that “the heart wants what the heart wants”, and if you love a shark, go for it girl!
I mean, they must have a motivation for King Shark, and having a love interest might be the easiest way, but it still is weird, even for a show about people that run fast.
4. The fight
All the setup of this episode was just an excuse to see Shark and Grodd fight, Barry and Nora try to fight against the bad monkey, but they end up on the floor, I mean, why didn’t they just get up and helped Lamden?
Well, it doesn’t really matter, because what matters is that King Shark and Grodd exchanged blows in a variety of places, and I loved every moment of it. It was a dynamic brawl, with great stakes and a compelling reason to exist. I love how the team respected the difference of size between the two beasts.
I also loved the moment where they explain with science how to save King Shark of being, this is true, upside down! That electric charge even helped him finally defeat Grodd in an incredible scene, in which he takes his “crown” back. I LOVED EVERY SECOND OF IT.
5. The effects
Finally, I want to talk about the CGI of this episode, it is rare to see a show that invested in the special effects, willing to spend big buck on good animation. I was going to say “this might be one of the greatest, most innovative effects ever put on television” but then I remembered that other show everybody loves, how is it called? Playing with Chairs? I hate it.
Well, let’s get back to The Flash, you can tell they took their time to render the animated characters, they even deliberately took two weeks to do the best possible effects on a mainstream, 23-episodes-per-season series. You can even see the progress in their wounds! Maybe this two are practical choices, but the fight took place at night, with rain! All that extra effort is just amazing, they deserve all our respect and admiration for the hard work they did.
And that’s it for this episode, it was a great episode with a lot of action and conflicts between our heroes, I just love the wacky and dummy premises of this show, I mean, who wouldn’t love watching a gorilla and a shark fight? I love it. What did you think of this episode? Leave your comments below and join us next week for our take on episode 516, “Failure Is an Orphan”.
