Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 1, Episode 5: Hulk vs the World
Another interesting episode that make the prequel-spotlight format kind of work pretty well. After the previous Thor-centric episode taking place mostly off-world in Asgard, we return back to terra firma and follow scrawny old Bruce Banner on the run (it will take me some time getting used to skinny Bruce Banner instead of him looking more like Mark Ruffalo) from a group of dudes in weird robot tanks, a task force called the Hulkbusters, led by General "Thunderbolt" Ross. Hulk is perhaps one of the characters that's the most alien and unappealing to me among the main Avengers cast outside of the live-action movies, so it's definitely interesting to see him explored a bit more.
This version of Banner/Hulk clearly have gone past their first rodeos, and are more acclimatized to each other sharing a body. Banner goes around trying to help out other victims of gamma radiation experiments, in a scene of "I understand how it feels to have powers and be hunted" that feels like it comes straight out of an X-Men comic book. In this case, though, as Banner walks into a diner, he talks with fellow gamma metahuman Carl Creel, the Absorbing Man. (Who has a really weirdly shaped head that looks like a rugby ball) Sadly, Creel isn't keen on being peaceful or coming quietly with Banner, and a fight breaks out in the diner. After Agents of SHIELD and its more anti-villain take on the Absorbing Man, it's definitely interesting to see him being presumably more true to text and being a villainous thug.
After a bit of a fun fighting scene with Absorbing Man ("I can turn into ROCK!" must be one of the more unintentionally stupid-sounding boasts in superhero cartoon history), the Hulk faces off against the Hulkbusters... and SHIELD agents Hawkeye and Black Widow swoop in. This fills in a lot of holes that "Breakout" got me confused, which is, well, just why Hawkeye is imprisoned in the Vault with other metahuman villains.
The cartoon stretches the capabilities of the Hulk a bit longer than I would've liked, though, because apparently a bunch of trick arrows and Black Widow's weird arm-stingers do far, far more damage to slow the Hulk down than a bunch of helicopters and tanks, but I'm assuming the Hulk in this continuity has more control and is actively trying not to kill the squishy little humans even as he taunts them. What's not ambiguous is that when Ross orders his minions to fire a missile to take out Hulk and the SHIELD agents, Hulk ends up protecting SHIELD instead of escaping, causing him to be captured.
And as Hulk is sent to the Cube, we get our first chronological meeting between Samson and Banner, the latter telling Samson to beware of just why SHIELD is gathering so many gamma-irradiated metahumans in one place. And apparently, they're gathering all the blood of the gamma metahumans, presumably for sinister experimentation. This neatly sets up the Cube (we also get a lot of cameos from other villains like the Leader, Abomination, Radioactive Man and a bunch of others I don't recognize but look pretty cool) as one of the prisons in the breakout... and something else.
The last seven minutes of this episode drops the Hulk entirely and focuses on Black Widow and Hawkeye. Again, these two are relatively familiar characters to anyone who's watched The Avengers (which is, at this point, basically the entire world) so it's a bit of a question as to why Widow isn't part of the Avengers lineup, and Hawkeye's considered a villain. Apparently, in this continuity, Black Widow is straight-up dealing with Hydra, and Hawkeye, going on a personal mission to figure out what's wrong with Widow, ends up catching her red-handed as she hands over Banner's blood to a bunch of Hydra agents. The manner that Black Widow ends up framing Hawkeye feels a bit sloppy, though -- the writers could've really made it far more blatant that Black Widow is outsmarting Hawkeye beyond shouting really loud that "hey guys Hawkeye is a bad guy, arrest him!" Of course, this show probably isn't going to market one of the main characters seen in the super-successful Avengers movie as a villain, so I'm sure she'll turn out to be a double agent or something, but it's still a fun twist for the time being. It's an interesting twist, though, and, again, while the plotline is ultimately not that complex, it's delivered relatively well by the show that I don't really mind it at all. Good stuff.
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