Plot summary: The Flash and Green Lantern find themselves teaming up to investigate stolen nuclear material… and a big talking ape.
For background on the creation of Justice League and info about how I’ll be covering it, check out the Series Primer.
Notes and Trivia
Episode: 14 (S1.E14)
Original Air Date: March 10th, 2002
Directed: Dan Riba (7)
Written: Paul Dini (1) & Rich Fogel (4) (story) and Dwayne McDuffie (1) (teleplay)
Animation: Koko Enterprise Co., LTD (14)
Music: Michael McCuistion (4)
While the episode title has come to be associated more with Batman than DC at large, it was in fact the team-up comic that debuted the Justice League in the first place.
The late Dwayne McDuffie gets his first script credit on Justice League after his work on Static Shock. Paul Dini injured his hand so physically could not complete the script. McDuffie would become an enormously important figure for the ongoing DCAU.
Bill Duke’s casting as a detective grilling Flash is a reference to his identical role in Menace II Society.
Flash’s hallucination sequence not only contains references to various Flash comics from across the decades… it also complicates the whole ‘Is this Barry or Wally?’ confusion. We later find out that this is 100% Wally, but the origin story depicted in this sequence belongs to Barry.
Recap
An archeological dig is interrupted by talking gorillas riding hover-bikes and wielding laser guns, warning them off. Cartoons, man.
In Central City, The Flash speeds after a truck causing mayhem, with Green Lantern arriving to help after following a lead about stolen radioactive isotopes. You’ll never guess what’s in the truck…
The thieves have no memory of the incident, so Flash and GL investigate the lab where they work. Their boss, Dr. Corwin remains secretive about the work they do, but it appears to involve… primates.
Oh and wouldn’t you know it, a hyper intelligent albino gorilla is on the run! Flash corners it, but is so stunned to hear it speak he doesn’t notice Corwin fire a comically huge laser at him, causing him to trip balls for a few hours.
Waking up in a police station, he learns that during his hallucinations he used his powers to re-steal the isotopes. John bails him out and they go looking for the gorilla again.
Solovar introduces himself as chief of security to Gorilla City, a hidden technologically advanced utopia. He pursued the criminal Grodd, who attempted to take over the city with mind control, bringing him here.
Flash races back to the lab before Solovar can give him a protective headband, so quickly finds himself under Grodd’s mind control and fighting Green Lantern.
John is able to take Wally down, but the distraction is sufficient for Grodd to trigger some kind of device and then escape as the entirety of Central City is caught in a giant energy wave… and disappears!
To Be Continued…
Best Performance
David Ogden Stiers, I guess? It’s really not that much in terms of a performance, but I did get a kick out of the timing and delivery of “He’s very fast.” when Flash sprints away mid-sentence. He does a decent job with the Planet of the Apes riff too, but even with those fun lines, him winning is more of an indictment on the rest of the cast of this episode.
Michael Rosenbaum and Phil LaMarr slip back into their dynamic from when we first met them, with Flash being class clown and Green Lantern despising him and seemingly everyone else. They have none of the other series regulars or any big sexy guest stars to contend with, really. Their inability to rise above that total lack of challenge really sucks. I think both are very capable, but the character treatments and dialogue they’re given do them absolutely no favours.
Powers Boothe could probably have won it if he had more lines, as he’s got a kind of smarmy charisma as Grodd…. but Powers Boothe is a scab, so fuck him.
Episode Ranking
Up to this point in the show Green Lantern and Flash have been my two least favourite characters, so giving them a team-up focus episode with none of the rest of the team in sight was never going to go well for me. Flash hasn’t been egregiously bad so far, just a combination of surprisingly ineffectual and drawing the role of comic relief. John Stewart was briefly interesting in his previous focus episodes, and had his moments here and there after that, but writing him as a fucking cop is never going to endear him to me. Sure enough, one of his first actions in this episode is to use his ring to functionally pickpocket two dudes so he can ID them despite holding no judicial powers of any kind. Which fucking sucks. All the behaviour of a cop without actually being one? The worst of both worlds.
God, and then they do a bit where John bails Wally out of jail (which is fine), only to reason “If he were really guilty do you think you could have held him here with a pair of handcuffs?” as Wally uses his powers to wriggle free. Like… fucking WHAT?! There’s video evidence of Wally committing the crime! And as soon as they leave the station John makes it clear he believes Wally did it!!! So that makes it all the exact opposite of the message he sent in ‘In Blackest Night‘, where he preached about them needing to be kept accountable, and gracefully accepting his punishment when he believed he was guilty. Terrible, terrible writing decision by a guy with a legacy as one of the DCAU’s finest writers.
Plus what a rollercoaster for Flash too! We open with his standard sex-pest routine where the objects of his affections want him to leave, then when he actually does they’re sad because he’s hot now he saved them. Kinda funny. But then he goes from not being able to catch up with a normal-ass truck going quite fast… to being able to run in circles SO fast that he creates a tornado with enough fine control to safely deposit falling rubble across the street. Like… what?! This guy was racing Superman around the world in STAS, and now he’s not fast enough to see a punch from John coming??? Similar to Superman, Wally is going to get easily taken down over and over again in this show, but it’s always the same method: people just aim where he’s going to be and he runs straight into their attack. Shouldn’t he have lighting-fast reaction times while he’s using the speed force? Or are we saying his body is too fast for his own mind? Would kind of make his speed functionally useless if so!
Beyond these shitty character choices, it’s just a really bad piece of writing all around. Whether it’s something small like the jarringly fast cold open, or something big like the total lack of explanation as to what Grodd is even doing at the end, there’s really not any part of this script I can defend. Even something completely trivial like Solovar evading a city-wide search… by hiding under a bridge in a public park for hours. He was in a car the last time Flash saw him, and even if it was totalled, he demonstrated how much ground he can cover in a short space of time, so not only does he suddenly become much worse at fleeing, the search party look powerfully inept. They don’t even come running when the big ape roars and gets into a brief scuffle with Green Lantern.
This episode is just 20 minutes of poor decisions of all shapes and sizes. It’s not particularly interesting to see the two heroes fight for a minute. There’s a lot of repetition with them twice going after Solovar and twice going to Dr. Corwin’s lab. And Grodd is introduced very late and in somewhat inelegant fashion. I’m not asking for a full explanation of everything as it’s only the first half of the story, but there’s simply nothing to latch onto.
Even the little Flash hallucination montage with tributes to various comic moments ends up serving no real purpose. Like okay, it’s the only visually engaging sequence in the episode, but it takes up a decent chunk of time when the script is already overly busy. If you’re going to do something like this at the expense of structure and story then I simply can’t give you any praise.
What is it with the DCAU and bad episodes involving apes???
- Injustice For All
- Paradise Lost
- In Blackest Night
- The Enemy Below
- Secret Origins
- War World
- The Bold and the Brave (NEW ENTRY)
Rogues Roundup
Gorilla Grodd (Powers Boothe) (first appearance)
What’s to say, really? Solovar gives us lightning-fast exposition that he briefly conquered Gorilla City with mind control, got driven out, and is now plotting his revenge with Dr. Corwin. We have no idea what that revenge actually entails, and end on a nebulous vanishing city cliffhanger. Powers Boothe gives him some sense of charm, but he arrives so late into the episode it’s impossible to feel anything about him.
- Lex Luthor
- The Joker
- The Imperium
- Hades
- Draaga
- The Injustice Gang
- Deadshot
- Orm
- Felix Faust
- The Manhunters
- Kanjar-Ro
- Mongul
- Gorilla Grodd (NEW ENTRY)
The Matt Signal 
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