Justice League: The Brave And The Bold Part Two

Screen Shots

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Episode Credits

Synopsis

Previously in Brave and the Bold Part One: Hidden in the African veldt is a city of intelligent gorillas who have lived in peace, isolated from humanity, for thousands of years. Solovar, the chief of security of “Gorilla City”, stopped an attempt by a power mad genius called Grodd to take control of the city, but Grodd fled with the City’s defence codes. Grodd made contact with a human scientist called Dr Sarah Corwin in Central City and involved her in his plans. Solovar discovered the connection between Grodd and Corwin and followed him to Central City. Green Lantern and the Flash became involved when Grodd’s mind-controlled minions attempted to steal a supply of radioactive isotopes. After some confusion they allied themselves with Solovar, but were unable to stop Grodd activating a device that appeared to erase Central City from the face of the Earth.

As Green Lantern, Solovar, and the Flash awake they find themselves still in Dr Corwin’s Riverbluffs Research Centre. Solovar puts a protective headband on the Flash, cutting Grodd’s mental control. Green Lantern tries contacting the Watchtower, but his com-link is offline. Solovar explains that Grodd has erected a force field, a Shield Wall, around Central City that is identical to the one that protects Gorilla City. It shields the interior from the outside world, nothing – light, sensors, radio, even physical force – can get in or out. Furthermore, Grodd has encased the Wall’s generator in a similar force field preventing Green Lantern from shutting it down.

Aboard the Justice League Watchtower, J’onn J’onzz alerts Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl to Central City’s disappearance. A worried Wonder Woman is unable to make radio contact with either Green Lantern or the Flash. They rush to its site in the Javelin, but they are unable see or otherwise detect is presence. The Javelin’s wing scrapes the edge of the invisible force field forcing it to crash-land in a nearby field. The damage to the Javelin’s wing is only evidence that there was something solid to hit. Wonder Woman is the first to find the edge of the Shield Wall, but J’onn is unable to phase through it and the Wall energetically resists Hawkgirl’s attempts to breach it with her mace. From the Batcave, the Batman analyses the energy signature of the force field and discovers the original field covering Gorilla City. He sends the coordinates to Wonder Woman and tells her that he’ll meet them in Africa.

The streets of Central City are deserted. The mind controlled populace have been drawn to a rally where they chant Grodd’s name. He addresses them, berating humanity attributes and proclaiming his intention to conquer Gorilla City and the rest of the world. The Flash heckles Grodd who then commands the crowd to destroy the heroes. Individually the mind control citizens of Central City are no match for Solovar, Flash, or Green Lantern, put the crowd is another matter. The heroes can’t fight back for fear of harming innocent civilians. Even the two women the Flash saved that morning are intent on destroying him. The confusion is enough for Grodd to once again escape.

Grodd uses his mind control helmet to make the staff at the local Military Base surrender control of their nuclear missiles to him. Grodd and Corwin then aim four nuclear missiles at Gorilla City. Back in Central City, the Flash hefts Solovar on to his shoulder and makes a hasty retreat as the crowd closes in. GL’s ring tracks the emissions from Grodd’s rocket bike to the Military Base and they arrive as Grodd’s missiles are launching. Green Lantern races after the missiles through a hole in the Shield Wall and leaves Solovar and the Flash to deal with Grodd.

The other heroes rendezvous with Batman in Africa, outside of the Gorilla City Shield Wall. However, Gorilla City’s guards notice their investigations. The Leaguers are stunned unconscious and then brought inside for interrogation. An angry, one-eyed Gorilla General demands to know who sent the humans. The General focuses his attention on Wonder Woman leaving Batman to work on picking his manacles. Batman surprises the General and then frees J’onn, Wonder Woman, and Hawkgirl. They break out into the city, but the Shield Wall blocks their escape. The Gorilla guards have the four heroes cornered against the Shield War when Grodd shuts it down remotely, leaving Gorilla City unprotected against his missiles.

Green Lantern eventually catches up with the rear missile and surgically disables its detonator system. Its rocket engine explodes and the nuclear warhead falls harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean. Green Lantern repeats the procedure on the second missile, but he’s knocked unconscious by debris from its exploding engine. He wakes moments before he would have hit the ground and restarts his pursuit of the missiles, but he’s too far behind them to catch up. Coming out from of Gorilla City, J’onn J’onzz phases through one of the missiles ripping out its detonator circuit. Hawkgirl takes a swing at the last missile causing the warhead to separate from the rocket engine, but its detonator circuit is still in place. Wonder Woman places herself under the warhead and slows it descent. It ploughs a long trench in the ground and pins her underneath, but does not explode. Batman calls out “Diana” and races to the crash site. He initially fears the worst, but she is unharmed. The gorilla’s cheer their new found saviours. Wonder Woman is touched by Batman’s concern for her and rewards him with a kiss on the cheek.

Grodd lounges in the missile command room happily waiting for the missiles to reach their target, but his fun is cut short when the Corwin announces that his missiles are being deactivated one by one. The Flash and Solovar arrive. Grodd knocks Solovar down, but the Flash jumps on his back and pushes Grodd’s mind control helmet down over his eyes. The Flash uses his superspeed to dodge Grodd’s lunges. He taunts Grodd that he’ll throw away his protective headband if Grodd throws away his mind control helmet. The Flash then makes a show of removing his headband. Grodd tries to control the Flash, but his helmet sparks and crackles leaving Grodd catatonic – the Flash had rewired it at superspeed whilst he was pounding on Grodd’s head.

Corwin is horrified at Grodd’s fate and reveals that he did not need to mind control her as in love with him. The now mindless supervillain is returned to Gorilla City. The authorities lock him in a zoo like cage (complete with swinging tyre and banana). Solovar swears that Grodd will receive the best of care, but Grodd’s rage may be too strong to contain for long.

Commentary

Wonder Woman kissing Batman.

In one of the Season One DVD features the producers state that they deliberately avoided the usual cliché of Superman and Wonder Woman as a potential item and instead decided to go with the idea of the Hawkgirl and Green Lantern as their romantic subplot. There was, however, another “romantic” subplot in the show – the interplay between Wonder Woman and Batman. It never really mounts to much, but there is a definite romantic tension between the two characters that eventually gets commented upon by their team mates in later episodes (“Kid’s Stuff”). The idea of Wonder Woman and Batman as an item was picked up by Joe Kelly in his run on the JLA comic book, but that ended with them both acknowledging that any idea of a serious romantic relationship between them was destined to end hideously.

Nuclear Missiles

Your traditional fission bomb and nuclear power station produce energy because radioactive elements like plutonium and uranium split apart producing energy and a shower of particles called neutrons. Those neutrons slam into other atoms making them split apart. This produces more energy and more neutrons that go on to hit even more atoms. For small amounts of plutonium and uranium this cascade will produce a steady release of heat. Once the mass of the sample gets above a critical level, the so-called “critical mass”, the neutron cascade is so great that it accelerates exponentially releasing all the energy stored in the sample in a single instance. This is the difference between a fission power station and a nuclear bomb.

The basic science behind nuclear bombs isn’t really a secret or even a challenge to understand. The real secret is an engineering one – how to turn the theoretical physics into a working weapon. The trick is to work out a way for the bomb not to explode before you want it to. The instant you have a critical mass of material in one place it’ll explode. So a bomb will contains several sub-critical masses of material that are held separate until a conventional explosion smashes them together with enough force to create a single blob whose mass is above the critical mass – that’s when the atomic explosion occurs. If you prevent the conventional explosion you prevent the sub-critical masses coming together.

The conventional explosion can be triggered by a normal electrical detonator and command circuit. That’s the part the Justice League heroes were removing from the missiles as they raced towards Gorilla City. However, the League must undergo some very specialised training. They each knew exactly which circuit was the detonator control.

References

Flash: “Monkey boy, why don’t you go climb a sky scraper!” – An ape climbing a sky scraper is of course a reference to King Kong’s assent of the Empire State Building.

Flash: “How much do you weigh?” – I can’t help be reminded of the scene from Batman: The Movie where Batman helps Vicky Vale escape from the Joker’s Goons by send her ascending to the roof tops while he drops down into the ally.

Flash “You want a piece of me Chuckles?” – I’m not sure about any one trademarked character called Chuckles, but it does seem a rather generic name for chimpanzees. You can buy various unrelated Chuckles soft toys, theme bicycles, etc. It is also the name of the mascot of a UK based chain of theme parks.

How did they get through this story without a reference to Magilla Gorilla?

Misc

• Batman designed the Javelin
• J’onn describes the Shield Wall as “an asynchronous dimensional interface”.
• Superman does not appear in this episode

Opinion

Highlights

Green Lantern: “Flash, don’t heckle the super-villain!”

Oddities

The location of the missiles on the missile room map bears little or no relation to where those missiles are depicted when the heroes destroy them.

My Thoughts

When I started these reviews I thought about doing both parts of each story together, but as I go along I see more and more how the individual parts work on their own. This story is a particularly strong example of that. The first part is a mystery story about the Green Lantern and Flash’s investigation into Dr Corwin’s lab and the escaped gorilla (Solovar). It barely features the super-villain and is really just a straight Green Lantern and Flash team-up. By contrast the second part features all of the League (baring Superman) in wall-to-wall action. Solovar’s part is greatly reduced and Flash and Green Lantern are separated. Opening on the Watchtower really underlines that this is a second episode and not merely the second part of a single episode.