Flash Facts – “Grodd Lives”
My Friend: Grodd’s not that tough…
Me: He’s a ****ING 1000-pound gorilla with psychic powers!
My Friend: Oh yeeeeeaaaaahhhh…
Grodd Lives delivers on what we’ve been waiting for ever since we saw a certain busted cage in the pilot and that’s Gorilla Grodd and all manner of monkey business is occurring in this episode!
I’ll get this out of the way early doors because I HATE Iris right now. She’s every distaff character who was kept out of the cool secret in sister-show Arrow rolled into one. She’s Season 1 Laurel and I want to put my foot through the TV because I’ve seen this shit! I think this is the one problem to arise from being related to Arrow, every episode has a god damn heart-felt/emotional scene between hero and love interest and it’s BORING. The one thing that saved Arrow recently was Felicity’s fun relationship with Ray until it was FUCKED UP FOR EVERYONE. Oy vey… It’s probably gonna get worse when Eddie gets rescued and dumps her because of his knowledge of the future.
Teenage high school angst aside, this episode was pretty damn cool! Grodd is the puppeteer of Wade Eiling, who has been missing for 3 months in-universe. Is it just me or is the masked identity Grodd gives Eiling Goldface? He’s robbing gold shipments and his mask is gold-ish? That’s kind of weird, but maybe someone else will use the costume in the future and we can have a proper Goldface! Clancy Brown kills it as usual, even as a meat puppet for Grodd.
Grodd himself is pretty damn cool! The CGI looks solid and the voice actor is bang on point! David Sobolov has voiced some fantastic characters in the past, including Drax The Destroyer in every animated incarnation this side of 2013, Lobo in Young Justice, Shockwave in Transformers: Prime and, my favourite, Depth Charge in Beast Wars! That’s so damned cool!
Wells is only in a couple scenes but he’s basically here to torment Eddie, tinker with some machinery and then reveal his ultimate goal. This side of Wells is still impish but is a massive dick and it’s still entertaining to watch. The stinger reveals that his secret lair has been underneath the pipeline of STAR Labs this entire time as the device he was working on activates the tunnel.
What a fantastic episode (barring the scenes with Iris) and we’ve still got hypeness to come when some old friends (and old enemies) come to visit in Rogue Air.