THE FLASH Season 5 Episode 15 Review: King Shark VS Gorilla Grodd

One of the very first teases for season five that dropped during last summer’s San Diego Comic Con was that this year we wouldn’t just be seeing the return of Grodd- we’d get to see him go up against an equally titanic foe, King Shark. And now, months later, we’ve finally see this promise come to fruition with a good, old-fashioned monster brawl. While the fight itself doesn’t produce any spectacular or jaw-dropping results, it is a proper battle, not just an oversold two minute skirmish. Considering the obvious budget limitations, I found that fact alone impressive. Seeing these two larger than life characters next to each other is enough to provide the necessary excitement, and even if their confrontation isn’t one for the books, I think most fans will be satisfied both Grodd and King Shark were given a fair shake in terms of screentime and fighting ability. 

The episode was also the first time the series really tried to develop Shark’s human persona. His sacrificial lamb arc is fairly predictable, but it did manage to turn him into an actual character rather than a simple monster, which made his fight with Grodd all the more entertaining. His presence also sparked a feud amongst the team about when it’s appropriate to use the cure on a metahuman and if explicit permission is always a moral necessity. 

The truth of the matter is that consent, to put it mildly, is a little more layered than The Flash has the time or inclination to explore. You don’t have to dig too deep into the show’s archives to find examples of metahumans whose dark matter seriously impaired their ability to make an informed decision, and it feels a little unreasonable that Barry stopping a meta from committing a murder with his powers is gets interpreted as a willingness to force the cure on any meta by Cisco and Caitlin. The ensuing debate ends up being rather juvenile and surface level because of this lack of nuance, which makes it hard to take seriously. 

Thankfully, they don’t beleaguer the point too much and the matter seems to be wrapped up by the end of the episode. I’m not sure how exactly it inspired Barry’s harebrained scheme to offer the cure to Cicada, but this around the midseason point where the team comes up with increasingly outlandish plots to defeat the big bad, so it all feels par for the course anyways. 

The team also gets to finally welcome back Joe West, as Jesse L Martin makes his long awaited return to the series. As soon as Martin is onscreen again, it’s clear how much of a difference his absence caused. His easy charm and fatherly mentorship made every scene of his feel much more grounded, with more natural sounding dialogue and less of a sense of that the plot was driving the characters instead of characters driving the plot. It was a much needed a breath of fresh air after the mostly charmless episodes we’ve had since the midseason finale. I wish the writers hadn’t been quite so heavy handed with Joe repeatedly going out of his way to retroactively trying to explain why he took a sudden vacation; it’s like the writers were afraid we’d think there was some offscreen feud between he and his family and wanted to make sure everyone knew he had Cecile’s blessing to go and cleared it with everyone before leaving. The time is better spent focusing on what Joe’s future holds and bringing the focus back on the family aspect that helped successfully drive the first half of the season.

Written by Kaitlin Roberts, THE FLASH Beat Writer

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