Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys S1E2: “Yes, We Still Have No Bananas”

Back in the present, Nebula's ship is still systematically clearing the forest-type-thing that Chuck is taking cover in with his Vorlon artifact. He breathlessly continues his story while fleeing further into the remaining cover (the voice actor does a good job at capturing this).

So, Rhesus-2 finds Chuck and his freshly uplifted crew in the hangar, and starts his no-secondary-brain-required shooting. He seems to be a relatively good shot, but they're all really, really good at dodging.

While they're evading his rapid-fire shots (interestingly, his pistols seem to have biological brain-like ammo cartridges that crawl in and out of the clip in a close mirror to his own secondary brain gimmick), Cuckball emerges from hiding and informs Chuck that this is Rhesus-2, Nebula's righthand creation. He can tell that this is Rhesus-2 and not the late Rhesus-1? I guess Rhesus-1 was actually killed much longer ago, and Nebula has kept his gory remains fresh and undecayed in the middle of the floor on his bridge as a warning for his other minions or something.

Eventually, Rhesus-2 gets tired of this and comes closer, while musing that they're remarkably agile for "fleshopods." I'm guessing that means purely organic life forms. Either he has a way of telling those suits aren't built-in, or just a lucky guess. When the wiseguy spider monkey asks him what the hell a fleshopod is, Rhesus-2 is surprised in seeing a talking, non-cybernetic monkey, and expresses a desire to dissect their brains and find out how this was accomplished. He knows what a monkey is, apparently. So, is he actually from Earth himself? Did Nebula just happen to snatch some terran wildlife to experiment on sometime in the past? Weird. Also, Rhesus-2 has his headbrain installed again. Not sure when he's supposed to have done that, but it only seems to take him a second so it easily could have happened offscreen.

In true Kirk fashion, Chuck attempts diplomacy before the battle can resume. Rhesus-2 appears to be of a related or at least remarkably analogous species to his own. Surely, they can negotiate? Rhesus-2 says that since they are interesting, and because Chuck asked nicely, he won't kill them. Instead, he'll just destroy their bodies and bring their brains back to Nebula for interrogation and possible recruitment.

Hmm. Are those modular brains he sometimes installs actually conscious entities on their own, stolen from other beings and forced to cooperate? In that case, do they basically act as advisors when he has them installed? That would actually fit pretty much everything. And would also mean that he just straight up murdered the guy who screwed up the weapon modifications in cold blood. Again, intense for a kid's show of its time if that's actually how this brain thing works.

Speaking of which, he then surprises Chuck by launching the brain he's currently using at him and having it strangle him with its mechadendrites. Chuck manages to pull it off and throw it back hard enough to knock Rhesus-2 over, but both he and (more surprisingly) the brain are undamaged by this, and it just crawls back into his head and waits for him to get moving again.

The brain-launching thing was spoiled in the OP, but still, it's fairly WTF.

If those brains actually are captives, then do they actually have control over what the metal bits are doing? Or are they just mounted on little combat drones that follow programming of their own and/or are slaved to Rhesus' primary thought center? I'm probably overthinking this, but given some of the concepts this show has indulged so far it's not something I can say with any certainty.

The monkeys make a fighting retreat, trying to lure Rhesus away from their ship so that they can double back and get in it. Monkey gun fights enable some pretty cool visuals, like this:

Again, I love how genuinely simian these characters all are.

The weapons they've been left are, unfortunately, not seeming to have any effect against Rhesus-2. Or against the wave of mass-produced biomechs he proceeds to unload from his ship as reinforcements. It turns out the Vorlon (or, as Chuck now calls them, the " _____." Which is kind of hilarious) guns have nothing but stun settings on them, due to them being too enlightened to be any use against the people trying to destroy the universe. So, as Rhesus' mooks start to press in, they're forced to get creative. The orangutan tears apart some electrical wiring and lures enemies into it. The half-uplifted gorilla panics and get scared at first, but seeing the spider monkey almost get killed by biomechs sets off his berserker mode. Which he seems to have no recollection of after the enemy is down. Talk about unstable brain augmentations. The golden monkey gets surrounded and held at gunpoint by Rhesus himself, but a lifetime of watching racist martial arts duels has made her into a close quarters fighter almost as effective as the gorilla.

Chuck tries to tell her how pleased he is to have another great CQC person on the team. She shrugs him off and says that the enemies were being "disrespectful" and that she doesn't consider herself part of anyone's team. Japanese flute music plays over this.

She's going to be like this for the entire goddamned show, isn't she?

They destroy enough drones that Rhesus is forced to retreat for now. As he does saw, he says that he'll "come back and destroy this whole planet" after his master gets the thing he's looking for, and that when he does he's going to pick them out of the rubble and enslave and/or dissect all their brains. Erm...isn't getting Nebula the thing a "game over?" Also, he's referring to the station as a planet, which is odd.

As he hops back in his shuttle and takes off, Cuckball comes out from wherever he's been hiding and tells them that while he's glad to be rid of "that psychotic subhuman" for the moment, he's probably about to resume the attack from another vector. That's a sort of...off...way of referring to Rhesus. Especially considering that he's talking to other uplifted monkeys and apes. Yeah. Well, that bit of weirdness aside, he tells them they'd best climb into the ship and go out-dogfight the baddies before they destroy "this whole planet."

It was explicitly referred to as a "facility" by the Vorlons before, but now their own robo-custodian is agreeing with Rhesus about it being a planet, so...IDK. Artificial planet, maybe? I didn't think it was that big, but maybe it is. Cut to Rhesus flying around shooting off chunks of the worldship's armor, while chanting "I'm singing in my brain." Both a really weird reference for the creators to be making here, and just really overplaying Rhesus' brain thing already.

Back to Chuck and Co. The golden monkey lady only comes aboard when Chuck bows and humbly requests the blessings of the goddess aboard. Groan. The ship interior was designed for human use, unfortunately, which means that a motley collection of primate species have trouble operating it. I guess the interior isn't as customizable as the outer hull decorations. Cuckball grumbles about how this shouldn't be too much of an issue as long as they follow his instructions, but then he fails to warn them about this thing not having any inertial dampeners and they all go flying as soon as the ships starts moving. Also, since they can barely control the damn thing, Rhesus starts battering them to hell and back as soon as they clear the hangar. Cuckball tells Chuck that he can tell his how to win this battle, but only if he asks nicely.

Vorlons why.

Chuck growls at the gorilla to grab that sassy cuckball and drag it back over here, but he ends up squeezing Cuckball too hard and damaging him to the point where he can't speak. Vorlons why. The orangutan starts trying to fix him and...oh okay this is something now.

Throughout the show until now, he acted really twitchy, sometimes abruptly changing mannerisms and doing weird voices and silly comments after saying something smart and sciencey. But, now the smart one with the pseudo-British accent and the goofy one with the redneck mannerisms are actually arguing with each other about how to fix Cuckball. So...he has some sort of schizoid personality thing, I guess?

...back in the zoo, he was fighting with himself over a banana. I wasn't sure how to read that scene until now, but...well, I guess he had this condition even before the uplift, then.

Regardless of whether or not this is a tasteful handling of mental illness (it's not), it got me wondering if other primates can actually have DID and similar disorders. I'm not sure I have the time and energy to research this right now, but it did make me curious about this.

While Orang tries to get that figured out, Chuck and Goldie try and figure out the ship's weapons on their own. Goldie, either through luck or through inexplicable racist pan-Asian divination powers, manages to get the ship to shoot out this forcefield projector thing that knocks Rhesus off course and sends him spiraling away when he comes in for another pass. She has her first moment of not being a total bitch when Chuck thanks her for that, which would be a nice character moment if it weren't for that goddamned flute music that plays whenever she does literally anything.

Unfortunately, that's when Nebula's main ship warps over and blasts them out of operation with a single salvo, sending them tumbling back into the worldship's gravity well.

My confusion about how big this "planet" is supposed to be only increases when they happen to come crashing through the ceiling of the portal chamber, where the thing Nebulon wants is. Wasn't that right by the hangar? Weren't they flying for a while and getting blasted around in random directions? Eh, whatever, I'm expecting way too much from this kids' show due to its choice of inspirations. They climb out of the ruined ship and find that Nebula has just projected himself into the room after them.

He orders them to give him the thingy, and die. Not sure what the alternative is supposed to be; something worse than death, I guess. Spider also catches his drift, so this seems to be how the creators meant it to be taken. I guess Nebula knows that they know that he's going to cause a big crunch as soon as he gets the thing, so no point in misrepresenting the situation.

After being rejected, Nebula's projection withdraws again, presumably to give them time to reconsider his generous offer. Chuck muses aloud what the artifact he actually wants could be, and it's only when Orang starts poking at the portal-making thingy and assesses its immense power over spacetime that Chuck realizes that this must be it. I could have sworn the Vorlons already explained that to him, but I guess maybe it was just obvious enough from the context that I misremembered it. He tells his crew that he's going to send them back to Earth, and they eagerly step through. Goldie - the last one through - is surprised at the end when Chuck says that he isn't coming with; instead, he's going to stay behind and destroy the device before Nebula can get it. Goldie expresses some real admiration for Chuck here, and tries to get him to reconsider, but he can't. She's less of a bitch now, but still racist. She reluctantly agrees, and thanks him for his sacrifice, leaving just him on the stationplanetworldship.

He takes the thingy into a dinky little backup fighter that the Vorlons had laying around, intending to fly the device into the nearest star. All that godtech, and the Vorlons didn't have anything strong enough to destroy it onboard the worldship themselves? Well, I guess with Cuckball out of commission Chuck might just not know where the omni-incinerator is or how to use it, so he's still stuck with the heroic sacrifice flight. He takes off, pursued by Nebula's ship, which catches us back up to the present.

Nebula has destroyed most of the cover by now, and Chuck finishes his recording in the hopes that his radio signals will still be decodable by the time they reach earth and that the universe won't be eaten centuries (or maybe just decades ) before then. He runs out of the cover and tries to make a break for it, with Nebula's ship looming after him. On the bridge, Rhesus-2 gets Chuck in his sights, and gets the gravity beam ready to suck him up intact; I guess there's a downside to using the disintegrator beam near the Vorlon thingy afterall, though they were willing to take the chance up until now.

It really looks like Rhesus is playing a videogame.​

Suddenly, another, more weird looking hyperspace portal opens up, and out comes...the Vorlon ship that they already crashed before everyone went home. It descends on Nebula's ship and lands a vicious salvo that has the larger vessel losing antigrave and falling to the planet's surface. The smaller ship swoops down, and Gory the gorilla leans out the airlock in a space suit to grab Chuck and pull him aboard before he wins the Prometheus Darwin Award from the oncoming crash.

What just happened? Was some part of the previous events a simulation? Did the Vorlons come back and use time travel bullshit?

Chuck is brought to the ship's bridge, which they've apparently redesigned into something more simian-friendly.

Okay, yeah, I'm starting to think that this was all some sort of Kobayashi Maru test, and that the Vorlons are about to end the simulation and tell Chuck how well he did in a scenario where they appeared to have abandoned him and let everything go to shit. But then Orang and Goldie start talking and...oh.

Okay, so, what happened is that due to their inexpert use of the doohickey, they accidentally sent themselves back to earth several decades in the past. They set up a secret base, took as many years as Orang's scientist persona needed to fix the little white cuckball (did they have him with them when they went through the portal? Maybe they did, I didn't see), and then used his guidance to build a new ship of the same general design. Either they bought or stole the materials to do this, or they just conquered Earth and exacted them as tribute; it's unspecified, but I think you all know how I'm choosing to fill in the blank here. They also got over all of their personality issues with one another and have learned to operate the ship like a well oiled machine.

Offscreen.

They literally just had the characters tell us that they all went through massive personal development and teambuilding arcs offscreen.

...

You know, if the monkeys were already a dream team that the Vorlons had assembled and Captain Simian was just the last addition to the crew they'd been waiting for, them already being like this could have been fine. But showing them to us long enough for us to somewhat get to know them as characters, setting up these personality conflicts and technical insufficiencies, and THEN wiping them away between cuts is just...well, bad. Really bad.

As it is, it also really raises questions about why they still consider Chuck to be their captain when they return. When he asks them why they came back for him, they say "because you're our captain." But. Um. He really isn't anymore, is he? They knew him for a few hours at best before spending many years together without him, and Goldie seems to have grown into the leader role quite well in his absence (she's the one calling the shots on the ship until Chuck comes back). He should be the odd one out now, and the one with the least knowledge and experience on how to run this ship that everyone except him helped build.

Them still coming back to rescue him still makes sense. Both because they don't want Nebula to get the thing and eat the universe, and because he saved their lives and allowed them to do all this stuff in the first place so they owe it to him. But...why is he still captain?

Still, that's really a much more minor issue than the problem of all this character development having happened offscreen. That's something I would expect from the Street Sharks tier of children's animation.

...

Well, so, that happened. Nebula's ship autorepairs quickly though, and soon he's in pursuit again. They don't know how to outfight him when they don't have the element of surprise, so they'll have to use something other than direct combat.

Orang says that he has an idea involving a disco ball that they picked up in the 1970's. He whispers the plan in Chuck's ear, and Chuck just looks at him disbelievingly before saying "Well, a stupid idea is better than no idea." Oh dear, what now?

They set course for this solar system's sun, with Nebula slowly gaining on them. Orang hides some kind of high tech thingy inside of the disco ball. Then, they each run to a different part of the ship, and it separates into five smaller vessels. Three little fighters, a gunship type deal made from the command module, and a weird blocky ship made from the back part.

Nebula decides to send fighters of his own to take them out. Why doesn't he just use his main ship's weapons to cripple them one by one? It seemed to do a pretty good job against little fightercraft earlier. IDK. Anyway, Rhesus-2 leads a swarm of drone fighters after them as they keep moving toward the sun, and dogfighting happens.

One thing I'll see for this show is that the villain's quirky minion guy isn't comedically incompetent like usual. Rhesus-2 makes mistakes, sure, but he doesn't make them constantly, and they're often fairly reasonable ones by cartoon standards. He also, both in the boarding sequence earlier and in this dogfighting battle, proves himself a pretty dangerous combatant. He uses a consistent strategy of sending waves of low-performance, high-disposability drones to keep the enemy busy, while he swoops across the battlefield to land near-killing blows that the distracted monkeys just barely avoid. So, that's nice to see.

Interestingly, the different monkey sub-ships have some interesting traits as well. The three fighter-things piloted by Orang, Spider, and Goldie are all maneuverable, nimble little ships. The bridge module flown by Chuck has more firepower and speed. The aft module piloted by Gory seems to house their onboard industry, and can tractor beam enemy fighters in and just grind them up into components. Good way to make the battles more tactically interesting.

While the others distract the fighters, Chuck takes the command ship toward the star. As they expected, Rhesus brings his own souped-up fighter after him to block him off. As this happens, he fires the disco ball out into the star in what appears to be a desperate, last-ditch hope of destroying it. Rhesus speeds up and picks it up from right in front of him. Chuck orders everyone to retreat, they've failed, the enemy has the package.

That's awfully suspicious behavior from someone who knows that letting Nebula get the thing means that they all die anyway. Maybe I'll have to take back what I said before about the villains in this show not being dumb.

It is sort of clever that the good guys took advantage of Nebula and Co not knowing exactly what the thing they're after looks like. Notably, when Nebula was projecting his face into the portal chamber to issue his demands, he didn't particularly look at the device in question. So, they stuffed some other high-powered Vorlon artifact (a bomb? I'll bet they just gave Rhesus a bomb) into the disco ball and let Rhesus come to the obvious conclusion based on the sensor readings.

Rhesus brings the ball back to Nebula, telling him that now he can Big Crunch the universe and become a god. Nebula corrects him: not A god. THE god. Triple-O (well, if the third O is "omnipresent" rather than "omnibenevolent." He might consider himself to be the latter, but I doubt many others would agree).

And we're right back to high concept science fiction. Whiplash much?

He engulfs the sphere, and the device inside of it activates. Apparently, it's some sort of singularity-farming device, because when it comes online it starts sucking up Nebula's proto-blackhole form and with it all the matter and energy he's absorbed up until now. Forcing him to revert to something closer to his original class-2 organic intelligence form.

Not for long though. It turns out he was also keeping the ship together with his integrated presence, and it subsequently explodes.

Huh. I was expecting Nebula and Rhesus to be the main villains throughout the show. But, no, we see the reassembled monkey ship flying back through the debris cloud to make sure. No signs of life, organic or otherwise.

So, with Nebula taken care of and the actual doohickey still safely aboard, next order of business is to start heading home. That's a very long way away, apparently, so it's going to be a long trip. I guess it was also a long trip getting here in the first place, then? Did they leave Earth 5-10 years beforehand in order to make it on time? I guess so.

Last thing. Chuck asks them if they happened to bring any bananas back from earth with them. They did, but unfortunately they weren't able to control themselves, and ate all of them by the time their ship made it back here.

So, it's off on a Voyager plot to return to Earth for the rest of the show, I guess. The end.


This could have been the best kids' cartoon ever if it just wasn't so lazy about certain things.

The low-hanging fruit (no pun intended) that most of the comedy bits went to was usually just lame, with really clever gags - while extant - being few and far between. The laziest and cringiest of all of these, of course, were the "isn't it funny that we're racist?" bits, which were much worse than just unfunny.

But the "we learned to be a functional crew offscreen without the protagonist having any part to play in it" was just so incredibly lazy that it knocks this two-part pilot off of its pedastal just by itself. Without that, I'd say that this was a great and criminally underappreciated show even with the cringey racist humor. With it, unfortunately, it's just "better than average for its time."

The things I liked about this pilot, I still really like. The art (sorry about the bad quality; I couldn't find the second part in high res) is distinctive and nicely detailed. The animation - especially of the monkeys in motion, doing monkey things with their legs and tails and so forth - was really smooth. And, again, playing with high concept scifi ideas like multi-singularity transhumanism and artificial big bang/crunch events in this kind of show is worthy of praise even if the execution faltered at times.

So, interesting show, and one with greatness in it. Taken as a whole though, its quality is only good, not exceptional.