Remember how last time I reviewed an episode of this show, I mentioned that they couldn’t just jump straight into formula because they still had a tiny bit of world-building left to do? Well, that’s over. From now on, we’ll be moving directly from Emperor Guillotine announcing a plan to his guys kidnapping the scientist/stealing the thing they need to do it. I would criticize them for not having these plans in motion before the opening credits, but the indestructible robot that keeps explody-punching their plans WAS the plan. Good on you, Gargoyle Gang. Think outside the box.
This week’s mayhem is courtesy of Professor Botanus, another of Guillotine’s lieutenants. ProfBot is a Destro-headed smooth criminal from the Outer Planet, but the effect is somewhat lessened by the fact that the makeup people can never quite get the silver paint all the way into his ear. He’s an expert on space plants, and he knows of a certain organism called Gargoyle Vine which he believes will destroy Giant Robot. Satisfied, Guillotine places his Gang under Botanus’ command.
Our new friend can apparently teleport, as he suddenly appears in the home of Dr. Dorian, Earth’s foremost expert on space plants. He needs Dorian’s help to grow the Vine, which is all kinds of hilarious. Personally, if I had to wager which of these guys knew more about astrobotany, I would go with the guy with a silver head and BOTANY IN HIS NAME, but I guess he padded the shit out of his resume and Guillotine called his bluff. Dr. Dorian is pretty surprised to find a pewter-pated freak in a gold lamé rodeo shirt hanging from his ceiling, and he declined to help. Botanus kidnaps him instead, stuffing him into a waiting sedan filled with Gargoyle Gangsters.
It’s kind of hilarious how hard Commander Spider is side-eyeing Botanus here. He clearly knows how incompetent his new boss is and he resents the shit out of him for it. He even has a minor tantrum about it later, but for now he settles for staring at Botanus like he’s a crying baby on an airplane as he goes on and on about his unstoppable plan.
Hey, at least they have a headquarters above ground now, even if it is a scale model of Epcot that’s clearly visible in an open field. Inside, Dorian still refuses to help, and Botanus shrugs, saying they’ll merely have to adjust his brain. Dorian doesn’t seem thrilled, probably because we cut immediately to our villains preparing to slice into the guy’s skull with a buzz saw.
Meanwhile, Dorian’s granddaughter is reporting him missing to a policeman. He helpfully explains tells her that’s he’s very sorry to hear that her grandfather has gone missing, and to come and find him again if the guy doesn’t come back in a couple hours. He then calmly watches her wander into traffic, where she’s almost run over by Jerry Mano. Man, I know the 60’s were a different time and people left their doors unlocked and whatever, but waving gaily to an unsupervised child as she walks into the path of a speeding car like its the end of the Beverly fucking Hillbillies just seems like bad police work. You know, on a fundamental level.
Dr. Dorian wakes up, his brain apparently adjusted, with a totally bloodless bandage on his head; I guess Botanus is familiar with Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr’s patented cranial screw top method. Dorian hops to his feet and immediately begins mixing Kool-Aids of various colors and pouring them all over the seed. It’s amazing how the Gargoyles had literally all the supplies and apparatuses to cultivate the thing, but they need some schmuck earthling to actually man the pipettes. Worse, Botanus notes that the SURGERY HE PERFORMED WITH A POWER TOOL is temporary, and Dorian will come to his senses in a couple hours. Botanus is seriously the worst at this, and this is just more proof that he’s an Econ major that bluffed the shit out of his interview. I’m officially joining the Commander Spider side-eye brigade.
As Johnny and Jerry console the little girl about her missing grandpa, headquarters gets ahold of them to tell them that they’ve gotten word from Unicorn Canada that Dr. Botanus is in town; I guess he landed in Saskatchewan and hitchhiked to the bottom of the Pacific. The Chief orders them to abandon their current mission of babysitting the little girl they nearly killed, but Johnny suspects that the Canadian alien invasion and the missing grandpa might be related.
The seed hatches into a hand puppet, which is then delivered to a hotel lobby by Commander Spider and his goons disguised as plant delivery men, complete with lime chiffon neckerchiefs! The desk clerk suspiciously notes that they’re not the usual plant delivery men, but Spider counters that the regular guy has the flu before escaping. Outside on the curb he has a little meltdown that he, a commander, is reduced to delivering plants. I sympathize, but he’s a commander in a criminal syndicate headed by Cthulu. It’s not like he went to officer school or something.
Literally seconds after the villains drive away, the hand puppet matures into the kaiju of the week, Gargoyle Vine. It’s nice to see giant monsters that aren’t mammalian, reptilian or insectoid. I mean, Jesus, we had a battleship-sized Protozoa (1964’s Dogora, the Space Monster) before the city-smashing set had a representative from the order Plantae. So points for creativity, but it’s soon apparent why plants do not make ideal monsters. Most problematically, Gargoyle Vine looks like a palm tree wearing high-waisted pants. That or a cash-strapped Exeggutor cosplayer. Anyway he’s no Biollante.
Incidentally, in Japan his name is Satan Rose, which is a fantastic name for a plant monster or a black metal drummer. Ultimately, I think the name change is a good move, though, because the lackluster monster design stings a little bit less without an awesomely evocative name behind it to get our hopes up. This is the butt vampire all over again.
Despite the fact that his opponent this week is a pair of guttapercha chinos, Giant Robot fares really badly here. Apparently they tested him for every weakness except “weakly flailing vines”, because he keeps hemming and hawing about getting in close until a vine wraps around him and leaves him lying face-down in the street. It’s pretty embarrassing.
I really don’t remember how this happened, but somehow Dorian gets shot with a Coma Ray or something and Unicorn finds him. He wakes up just in time to see Robot getting schooled by a literal office office decoration, and confides that Plant Pants has only one weakness: electricity! That wouldn’t fly in a Pokémon battle, but maybe in Japan you don’t have to show all 8 gym badges to become a biologist. Wait, it’s Japan, you definitely do.
Robot stretches out his toe and touches a nearby substation which immediately causes Vine to explode into fiery chunks. For those keeping score, we’re three episodes in and we’ve seen one monster killed to death with missiles, one hurled into an exploding mountain and another violently fried with high voltage electricity. Johnny is killing these things with the élan of a developmentally delayed drowning victim slaughtering camp counselors. Tune in next week to see Johnny stumble across two monsters humping and command Giant Robot to run them both through with an inexplicably gigantic pitchfork.
Comentarios