The Flash S03E14 Review: King Kong

The Flash, Season 3, Episode 14: Battle for Central City

A bit of a shame that last episode's huge gorilla army shots and big Flash-vs-Solovar rumble seems to have eaten the entirety of the show's budget for CGI gorillas, because Grodd and his army sits out a majority of the episode. We did get a very sweet building-jumping brawl between Solovar and Grodd, and a pretty cool action sequence involving Kid Flash, Jesse Quick and the Flash zipping around the gorilla army, but for the most part the promised Dawn of the Planet of the Apes style 'intelligent apes wreak havoc' in a city bit doesn't really deliver.

Well, I'm not that greedy, really. This season's main villain is a CGI monster, we had an alien invasion storyline and last episode already featured the big gorilla showdown I wanted, and I was actually surprised that the follow-up to Grodd taking over Gorilla City was going to happen now instead of later in the show's life. So yeah, the first half of the episode deals with a pretty standard 'superhero has to stop a nuke' storyline, with a brainwashed Gypsy attacking Team Flash in their headquarters to fill your superhero action quota.

Though it really makes you wonder... why the fuck did Grodd even send Gypsy there? He's already shooting a nuke at Central City, thereby killing Team Flash in the process. Why even risk the chance of warning them that the gorilla army is already in Earth-1? For a two-parter that focuses mostly on Grodd's intelligence and genre savviness, it's a bit of a glaring plot point.

A good chunk of the episode is devoted to interpersonal conflicts between the cast. Jesse and Wally want to stay on Earth-One, and Harry Wells makes up this story to Wally about how he's dying and he just wants Jesse to be happy without a fuss -- a story that Wally (and me) buys into, but Jesse calls out as bullshit. We... still don't really know if it's fake, mind you. We also have a bit of a conflict between 'useful' Harry and 'useless' H.R., really showing off the sheer depths of Tom Cavanagh's acting chops as he literally has a conversation with himself in one of the best scenes ever. Dude needs to get an award for this, regardless of the pretty spotty quality Flash has been having since season two. We also get some Barry/Iris and Cisco/Gypsy romance moments but neither really felt particularly as strong as the Wells-es.

Barry's big conflict this episode is whether he should just murder Grodd, something that everyone from Iris to Joe to pragmatic Harry Wells tells him is a bad idea because it'll compromise the hope-bringer that Barry Allen, the Flash, truly is. It's a valid question considering Flash's sister show Arrow is dealing with the titular hero taking up killing again when it's necessary, and Barry does have a point -- when will Grodd stop? He's burned all his chances of being good, and a telepathic gorilla isn't a very good thing to have running around. Of course, I felt the argument really rang hollow because, well, Barry's directly killed at least three villains on purpose by my count -- Atom Smasher, Zoom and Sand Demon -- so to me personally it's a bit of a moot point. And I distinctly remember him being absolutely nonchalant at Sand Demon's death. So that, as well as the rather repetitive arguments about Flash being a beacon of hope, ends up sounding pretty hollow. Still, he's pretty adamant at taking the no-killing stance, which is definitely something I can respect from my superheroes.

Of course, even three speedsters don't really last that long against an army of gorillas in armour, and we get another chilling view of Grodd's telepathic powers as he very nearly gets Joe West to headshot himself in a pretty awesome slo-mo rescue moment.

Still, while all of this is fun, the battle between Gypsy and Team Flash, as well as the speedsters arrayed against the gorilla army, and especially the huge brawl between Solovar and Grodd, are extremely well done. There are many questions -- like the Earth-17's version of the Flash interacting with Gypsy (the Accelerated Man!), whether Iris will say yes to Barry's marriage proposal (okay, I don't particularly care about this one) and Savitar's sudden appearance in front of Wally. If nothing else, next episode we'll be ramping up the Savitar main plot, which is definitely something good.

Overall, after sitting down to think about it, I surprisingly like this episode a lot more, with so much that worked in its favour than against it. So yeah, score one for the gorilla-centric episodes.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Earth-19 version of the Flash, with the goggles and the cowboy-Vigilante-style mouth cover, is based on the pretty obscure DC character, the Accelerated Man. He's the Flash equivalent in Earth-19 in the comics, itself a pretty obscure part of the multiverse. I've refrained from looking up too much information about him... not that there's much to go on. 
• Lisa Snart/Golden Glider and King Shark are both mentioned at different points during the episode. 
• Luke Starkiller is mentioned by Jesse as being the protagonist of Earth-2's version of Star Wars, and while it sounds like a cute mis-step from Luke Skywalker, 'Luke Starkiller' is the original name for Luke Skywalker in the early drafts, a fact homaged in The Force Unleashed games by having the protagonist's codename be Starkiller, as well as the Starkiller weapon in the Force Awakens movie.