‘The Flash’ season 3, episode 13 review: Gorilla City showdown; is Julian, Caitlin the show’s best new ‘ship?
They came, they saw, and Grodd conquered.
Who knew that a telepathic gorilla would make such an epic part of the CW – DC Universe? “Attack on Gorilla City” on Tuesday kicked off an epic two-part “The Flash” crossover event, one where Barry Allen, with the help of Cisco, Caitlin, and Julian (who mostly just wanted to experience inter-dimensional travel) traveled over to Earth-2 with one key mission in mind — trying to save Harrison Wells (of this dimension) from a deadly fate. Jesse Quick came over with the mission, but ended up staying behind in order to properly protect Central City.
What Grodd wanted – Effectively, our telepathic ape made it clear that he wanted to use Barry in order to stop a war between the humans and gorillas. He claimed that Solovar, the leader of the city, was interested in going over to Earth-1 and destroying everyone. With that, he wanted Barry to take him on in a duel and defeat him. In doing so, he would be able to instill peace in Gorilla City and ensure that he and the people of his world were spared an impending war.
It was awesome to see Grodd again; meanwhile, it was also awesome to see Harry being used as a vessel for many of Grodd’s speeches on this world. (We also figure that it was a lot cheaper than having to put a CGI gorilla on the screen for a long period of time.) The biggest issue creatively with this story is that it felt painfully obvious that this was Grodd’s endgame. We’re talking here about a vile, vicious gorilla who time and time again has shown very little mercy or desire to calm down his desire to kill. Solovar never cared about going after Central City on Earth-1; however, once Barry defeated him, Grodd was able to convince his fellow apes that the best thing for them to do was to go and kill before all of the humans killed him in return.
The escape plan – Given that Grodd and company had locked the team up behind bars, they didn’t have much of a hope as to how to get out. Grodd had used a dampener in order to keep their powers at bay. and it looked briefly like the only solution that was present here was going to be killing Cisco. If they did that, they would ensure that there was no way for the gorilla army to ever make it to Earth-1 in the first place.
Eventually, the escape plan that the team came up with was to use Killer Frost to fake Barry’s death, and then have him free the rest of his friends. He was able to take them out of the city far enough so that Cisco could open a breach, and eventually get them back home before Grodd could stop him. Or … did he?
Back on Earth-1 – We had a bit of a “Romeo & Juliet” story play out, of course minus the part in which there were people killing themselves. Wally wanted to be with her, but Jesse was having problems with him not reaching out on a regular basis. Then, he wanted her to stay, and she wasn’t sure that she could do this.
Following this, we got to the point where she was offered up some advice from … H.R.? This was funny, mostly because it’s entertaining to see her communicate with a different version of her father. He is a genius with matters of the heart, after all, just like Harry is a genius with everything else.
“Fear me, Julian” – Yep, Caitlin DID say that to him, but it didn’t seem to work! Maybe this isn’t a full-fledged romance, but there are some sparks.
Your cliffhanger – Remember what we said about Grodd not being gone for good? Well, the closing minutes all but confirmed that. Grodd had Gypsy, and it looked as though he would use her in order to open the breach.
Overall – “Attack on Gorilla City” probably took a little too long to get going, mostly because you could feel that the show was dealing with some budgetary restrictions. Also, it was hard to buy that Barry would ever trust Grodd to trust him in the first place.
Once you get past that, this was a worthy introduction to a major Grodd arc that is coming up. It was entertaining, it featured various characters in crisis, and it’a always nice to have a “Flash” villain this iconic turn turn. Grade: B.