'The Flash' Introduced A DC Villain You Never Thought You'd See On Screen
If you haven't caught up with last night's episode of The Flash, look away right now. There will be spoilers in the rest of this post and you may want to see this for yourself.
Still here? Okay. The latest episode of the well-liked CW series featured a brief cameo from a character that no one ever expected to see show up on a live-action TV series. It sounds too expensive and too weird. But hey, if there's one thing we've learned, it's that you don't bet against the most ambitious superhero show on television. Okay, enough beating around the bush. Hit the jump to see the craziest scene from last night's The Flash, and to see what the show producer had to say about it.
The exact circumstances of King Shark's appearance will fly right over the heads of anyone not watching the show (quick version: he is a henchman of the Earth-2 villain Zoom), but you really don't need to know anything at all to appreciate the clip below. Grant Gustin's Barry Allen comes face-to-face with a giant creature that is half-man, half-shark and it looks great.
See the Flash King Shark appearance for yourself below.
This isn't the first time The Flash has created an extremely impressive all-CGI villain on a television budget. Last season brought Gorilla Grodd, one of the Flash's most iconic villains, into the mix. While other superhero shows (and movies, for that matter) have the bad habit of reshaping preposterous characters into something easier to swallow, The Flash has been unafraid to just go "Hey, let's have our hero battle a giant shark guy and a hyper-intelligent gorilla!" That takes a lot of nerve and it looks like it's paying off. You don't see us writing morning-after posts about the fight scenes on Gotham and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., do you?
In an interview with Comic Book Resources, producer Andrew Kreisberg revealed that King Shark's cameo pushed against the boundaries of what the series can afford to do, so don't expect to see an entire episode dedicated to the character. Still, it's fun to watch a series refuse to rest on its laurels:
We actually put him in the comic book adaptation because we said, 'No one is ever going to let us do this and we're never going to be able to do this' since we weren't going to be using the Squad anymore. We were talking about it and it was really Todd Helbing who was like, 'Let's do it!' It was a very expensive 30 seconds of the show but our visual effects team are the best and they love challenges like this.
It was just fun for us. Obviously we can't afford to do an entire King Shark episode so the idea was that he was one of Zoom's minions and just the latest in the line. Which does mean that there is a King Shark on Earth-1.
Originally introduced in the pages of Superboy in 1994, King Shark is a mystical shark god or a mutant freak of nature, depending on whose story you believe. In recent years, he's been a regular member of the Suicide Squad, going on top secret missions for the government to earn a chance at freedom. He has a bad habit of eating his teammates, but what are you gonna' do? Those dangers come with the territory when you work alongside a guy named King Shark.
King Shark will also appear in David Ayer's upcoming Suicide Squad movie, where he will be played by Raymond Olubawale. The exact nature of his role is unknown, but it's expected to be little more than a cameo. Still, the fact that we're seeing a character as weird and obscure as King Shark show up twice in the space of a year is nuts. Time travel back a decade and tell your younger self. They will not believe you.