Last installment, our ape heroes had fearlessly entered the hallucination-inducing cave in the mysterious isolated town where they were trying to barter for supplies for Ape City and discovered some kind of weird zombie looking chimps. That was a nice little cliffhanger at the end of last issue, with the reveal of what had been causing the town to seem so weird. In this installment, we get a more literal expression of the cliffhanger trope as the chimps throw our heroes over the side of a cliff into a pit full of skeletons and bones.
I guess it’s not a literal version of the “cliffhanger” expression. If it were literal, they would have been hanging from the cliff at the end of last issue, instead of getting tossed over the side at the beginning of this one. But the point is that when you have a cliffhanger ending, the opening scene of the following installment must show one of two things: (1) the heroes pull themselves off the cliff or (2) they go over the cliff, thus getting into even more trouble.
So, proving once again that the writers understand the craft of story telling, they literally start us off with the resolution to the cliffhanger by throwing them off the cliff. Our heroes painfully cast about to figure out where they are, using their brilliant anthropological training and deductive ape-reasoning to analyze the bones that fill the pit into which they have been cast. They decide the diseased had not been killed or eaten (just perhaps starved to death or something), and reason the zombie chimp creatures just threw them here to let them waste away. So, they start climbing out of the pit.
Meanwhile, the town chimps are pissed that part of Milo’s team went wandering off at night to uncover whatever strange secrets are held in the hallucinogenic cave. So, they go after poor Milo, who, of course, was sleeping innocently in bed and had no idea anyone was doing anything besides getting a little shut-eye.
Meanwhile, back at Ape City, Zaius is wrestling with the idea that the truth will set you free. Actually, the idea is that the truth will cause everyone to realize they have a common enemy and rally together like never before to form a truly united society that will rebuild Ape City even better than before the flood.
Of course, there is the question of whether people will believe that there are super brainiac mind-controlling mutated humans. And if it is revealed that gorillas were shooting chimps, will people believe it was the mutated humans controlling them? If they do believe it, will that just make them scared instead of uniting them? Also, gorillas are big bully idiots to begin with, so why are we surprised they are going around shooting chimpanzees?
So, Zaius has some pros and cons to work out.
Meanwhile (I’ll just keep using “meanwhile.” This comic jumps around so much I’m getting exhausted trying to come up with clever little segues. So I’ll just go ahead and be redundant), in the hills above Ape City, Cadmus and Prisca are trying to come to terms with what they saw (gorillas shooting apes. They don’t know about the mutated humans) and maybe even trying to unify the chimps against the gorillas. But we’ll have to wait to find out if that last bit is part of the plan because there’s a curfew. A gorilla patrol comes along and breaks up the meeting and arrests Cadmus. I have an idea where this is going, but instead of going out on a limb and making a prediction, I’ll just be mysterious and let it play out.
Meanwhile, our heroes have climbed out of the pit. They stumble across a settlement of the zombie looking chimps. Actually, they aren’t zombie chimps. They’re just messed up looking chimps. Or they could be half chimp half human freaks of nature. It’s hard to tell at this point. But they definitely have the mind control ability of the other mutants (the human ones) because they make our heroes fight each other. The townsmen arrive in time to distract the freak zombie-looking but not actually zombie chimps. But they aren’t there for a rescue. They want to kill our heroes for what they have seen. So, our heroes run, and it looks like they’ll get away. But we’ll have to wait until the next issue to see how this new cliffhanger ends.
Rating: 3.5 / 5 Stars
