DC Comics loves intelligent gorilla villains. Some of the best episodes of The Flash featured Gorilla Grodd, Stargirl wrapped up its third season with the Ultra Humanite, and Doom Patrol made good use of Monsieur Mallah. Jimmy Olsen ran into a gorilla in the forest at the tail end of last week's episode--which sinister scientific simian did he stumble upon? Beware spoilers for My Adventures with Superman Episode 6, "My Adventures with Mad Science."
"My Adventures with Mad Science"
The thread that goes through so many DC properties hitting big and small screens these days is a rethinking of existing characters and ideas that we're used to from these stories. While Adventures' portrayal of Superman is pretty classic, their take on Deathstroke is anything but. The same goes for Monsieur Mallah. He is, as usual, an intelligent gorilla scientist, but he's hardly a villain here.
Lois and Clark bicker about truth and lies while they search for Jimmy, and Jimmy wakes up strapped to a table, looking up at Mallah and the Brain. Of course, Jimmy being the goofball he is, he's more excited to realize that yet more of his conspiracy theories have proven true than he is scared to be captured by a talking ape and a brain in a jar.
Lois and Clark struggle to communicate as they both talk about the wound in their relationship and not the feelings behind it. Clark wants to be seen as normal and to protect those close to him, making it hard to tell people his secret. Lois' worldview requires brutal honesty at any cost. A lie is a lie is a lie (unless she's telling the lie in pursuit of the truth, of course).
While this is going on, Jimmy talks his way out of his captivity and ends up getting a tour of the Cadmus base from Monsieur Mallah--which the Brain protests. The two characters have a somewhat more tragic origin, having fallen in love with the Brain still had a body, which was then lost in an experiment gone wrong.
There's a lot going on here. Jimmy is a goofball, but when everyone is being honest, he reveals that he's known about Clark's powers since basically the first day they met when he accidentally pulled a doorknob off of their door and tried to play it like it was shoddy construction. Both Jimmy and Lois feel hurt by Clark's reticence to tell them about his identity, but he's able to speak from an honest place about his fears and worries.
It feels genuine and real in a way that these situations often don't in comics. They don't try to give Clark an out to fake everything, and they don't contrive circumstances that make Lois and Jimmy look stupid. Despite how adorable this show is, this more emotionally grounded rethinking of Superman and his friends is a big part of what is making it stick. It also, importantly, opens the door to do far more interesting things than have Superman work overtime to protect his identity from people he's close to--something DC has spent way too many pages, too many minutes doing over the years.
Monsieur Mallah and the Brain are not typical Superman villains any more than Deathstroke; usually, when we see these villains, they're focused on the Doom Patrol or the Teen Titans. It seems like that gave the writers a little bit of freedom to treat them as more three-dimensional characters who aren't just interested in destroying a guy just for the sake of it. They have their own agenda and, in this case, the Daily Planet trio doesn't interfere with it, so the possibility of them being villains is never even raised.
Pretty much every aspect of Adventures has been fun, but the dynamic between the three main characters is what's holding everything down and making it all work. They all have real motivations, and they communicate and listen to work through them in a way that feels both real and true to the character, instead of made up to stick to an outdated idea about a character. Every episode, this included, has me excited to see what comes next.
