All of this sharing in the conception of bad ideas related to super-speed might have been useful as a bonding-exercise for the team*, but unfortunately it created an opening for their opponent to launch its own counter-attack.
Not that our heroes have much to blame themselves for, here – the monster would have gotten a chance to counter-attack under any circumstances, no matter what the heroes did. The match would have been a bit one-sided without that, wouldn’t it? And such one-sided squash-matches never happen in the favor of the protagonists. Antagonists might get them, in the earlier part of a story, to bolster their status and perceived threat-level, but for protagonists there are no situations were such a thing would look good.
And, as Snuka points out in the final panel, antagonists get preferential treatment in other aspects, as well. Protagonists don’t get entirely around addressing the most obvious flaws in any course of action they’re considering. In a B-movie, they get around addressing many of those flaws, but still not the most obvious of them. In the case of heroes, the elephants in the room need to be addressed – A-movies might even address the hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses, as well, while B-movies might already plaster over those. The villains have got it better – their deliberation process nearly always takes place off-screen, if it takes place at all. This lets them pull off the most implausible stunts without having to address on what they based their (usually complete and always justified) confidence of success.
Anyway, seems like the sloth-monster has managed to even the numerical odds between itself and the party. The question is only, will it stop there?
More on Monday.
*Which seems hardly necessary, given how long they’ve been together already – but such bonding moments are an obligatory part of the default plot structure, and you really can’t expect a b-movie scriptwriter to take a close look at whether the specific circumstances call for a deviation from the default. I’ve already pointed out the payment/time issue behind that.