The Flash: Attack on Gorilla City

February 22, 2017 4:50 PM - Season 3, Episode 13

Barry and his team travel to Earth-2 to rescue Harry from Gorilla City, but are captured and brought to Grodd, who tells them he needs their help to stop Solovar, the leader of Gorilla City, from invading Earth-1.

AV Club recap - The Flash visits Gorilla City, because that’s what we’ve been waiting for

Den of Geek review - "Attack on Gorilla City" is a lot of fun if you don’t look too close.

CBR recap - Barry Enters the Gladiator Ring Against Solovar

posted by oh yeah! (6 comments total)

I think they did pretty good with the limited tv budget. I loved Grodd when I read the comic as a kid. I imagine there's 11 year olds out there that were blown away by this episode. I think they treated Grodd better in this episode then they did when they introduced him, even if the cgi was shakey.
posted by Catblack at 6:49 PM on February 22, 2017

I loved that Cavanaugh got to play yet another Wells variant - Grodd-puppet-Wells. Like, clearly it was partly just a production decision motivated by the need to save CGI-Grodd for the action scenes, but, still, delightful.

The Wally/Jesse stuff was a mess. The programming guide blurb ended with "Meanwhile, Jesse and Kid Flash hit the streets to stop a metahuman who can control gravity", so, I don't know maybe they had a bigger B-plot in this episode originally which was edited for time, leaving the remaining scenes disjointed?
posted by oh yeah! at 7:19 PM on February 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

As a comics reader, it was hard to buy the danger the team was in because of what we know about Solovar's character. Actually as a viewer of this show, it was hard to buy what Grodd was selling because he's Grodd. Of course he was lying and manipulating.

Having the gang (via Cisco) feed Barry suggestions on how to fight was pointless, but I guess they needed to do something so the actors could earn their pay.

This really was the episode that needed to happen, only because they've been pretty much teasing it since day one. I'll give them credit for going for it.
posted by sardonyx at 7:20 PM on February 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Jesse and Wally's relationship never makes sense to me, since they seem to spend most of their time together coming up with weird reasons why they shouldn't date. Compare to Iris and Barry, who date even though they're siblings.

I liked this episode well enough (Julian is a drag, though), but this was about as low budget as I can imagine Gorilla City being and still (kind of) working. It felt more like a bottle episode set in jail than it did the epic one might have hoped for. I won't lie -- I was a little disappointed, and really bummed by how underdeveloped Gorilla City was.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:50 PM on February 22, 2017

I hated Tom Cavanaugh's Grodd voice but I loved having acerbic Wells interact with dippy H.R.
posted by cooker girl at 6:34 PM on February 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

I loved having acerbic Wells interact with dippy H.R.

I liked puppet-Cavanaugh, (Tom Cavanaugh is the only reason I stuck out S2), but amen to this. I want a Council of Wellses before the end of the show's run.

As for the rest: this was mostly fun. I prefer The Flash when they go for the goofy Silver Age shenanigans, especially over them trying to write relationships. (I mean seriously, I wonder if anybody writing for the show has ever even met a human, when they start in on those subplots.)
posted by mordax at 10:00 AM on February 25, 2017 [1 favorite]