Main cast: Indira Varma (The Bride), Sean Gunn (GI Robot, Weasel), Alan Tudyk (Dr Phosphorus), Zoe Chao (Nina Mazursky), David Harbour (Eric Frankenstein), and Frank Grillo (Rick Flag Sr)
Director: Matt Peters
People, this very special episode features close-ups of a fish woman’s rear end and chest.
If you’re still thirsty for a fix after The Shape of Water, A Very Funny Monster is as close to a spiritual moment as you can find outside of the creepy online corners of the fan art world. Tumblr is probably having a field day. DeviantArt has likely crashed from the sheer volume of uploads. God help us all.
So, we come to the very final episode of the season, which opens with the origin story of Nina Mazursky, fish woman assassin with a tragic past and a heart of gold and gills and… well, it doesn’t matter because she dies in this episode.
Who knows what the whole point of learning her backstory was, aside from padding the runtime and giving the writers another opportunity to deliver a tragic flashback sequence set to melancholy music.
Then again, she could come back in the next season anyway — death is more of a suggestion than a rule in superhero shows — so who really knows. Maybe she’ll return as a ghost fish. Or a zombie fish. Or Fish Jesus.
Yes, there is a next season, even though the viewership numbers were low enough to warrant the axe under any other circumstances. Funnily enough, you don’t get cancelled when you’re the show written and created by the same person who runs the entire DCU. Funny how that works.
In this episode, the Bride finally figures out that Circe was right all along and Princess Ilana is the true villain. How does she reach this earth-shattering conclusion? The power of female intuition, naturally. Not evidence, not investigation, not careful analysis of the facts — just good old-fashioned gut feeling. Very compelling.
By that point, it’s too late. The dedicated fish woman assassin is fatally shanked by the princess, who up until this precise moment has demonstrated absolutely zero martial or combat ability whatsoever. To be fair, Nina does try to assassinate her first, so one could argue it’s self-defense, but the princess dispatches a trained killer with such ease that one wonders why she even needed protection in the first place.
The Bride immediately kills Ilana in revenge, declaring that the princess murdered her only friend. Which bodes extraordinarily well for what seems to be the new leader of this Copycat Squad in the next season, as she’s certainly going to let her emotions cloud her judgment and compromise her objectives at every turn.
Oh, and the Bride also kills Eric Frankenstein in a dramatic confrontation… except he’s not actually dead and he’s still going after her in the next season because apparently death means nothing in this universe and narrative stakes are for suckers.
So basically, barring Nina’s possibly-permanent-but-probably-not death and Flag Senior likely being shoved out of the picture next season for being, ew, white with the wrong chromosome configuration, this first season manages to accomplish three things: introduce backstories that eat up screentime to compensate for a paper-thin plot that could have been told in three episodes instead of eight, establish Amanda Waller as a complete idiot who believes the first person who shows her a scary vision, and waste everyone’s time just so that James Gunn can do the same thing he always does until the heat death of the universe. Oh, and help Sean Gunn pay his rent. Can’t forget that crucial objective.
Someone please take over the reviewing next season. Please.
