Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 1, Episode 18: Come the Conqueror
So instead of the Chitauri invasion being the huge "OMG aliens have invaded us!" event that shook the Marvel Cinematic Universe during 2012's Avengers, in the EMH continuity it's Kang's invasion with his weird self-regenerating scarab robots that is the big global crisis that the Avengers end up saving the Earth from. And while the focus is still on the Avengers team in New York (because, y'know, this is a cartoon based on American comic books) we do get a brief glimpse of Kang's weird scarab ships floating over different countries and we do get a neat cameo from some British knight superhero with a goddamn flying horse and a sword.
And while the SHIELD Helicarrier tries its damn best to fight off the endless swarm of giant golden UFOs and the weird scarab robots it shoots out, the Avengers are, of course, the biggest cause of damage against Kang's troops. It's just a bit of a shame that some of the animation end up sort of faltering noticeably in parts of the action scenes. We do get a fair bit of fun moments, though, like Hulk and Hawkeye ribbing each other, or Wasp's search for 'bigger stingers'. There's also a neat bit that, while regrettable since it removes Black Panther from the rest of this mid-season finale, is very realistic and true to T'Challa's character as he leaves and grabs a jet to Wakanda to protect his home from the same invasion. It's a pretty well-done moment.
And while a good chunk of the episode involves Iron Man being stuck out of the action and just racking his brains as he tries to figure out where the hell Kang is, it honestly feels a little dumb for him to not realize that, y'know, the dude that attacks Earth with flying spaceships is on a spaceship outside of Earth. It does sort of dull the impact of revelation when it's a pretty obvious connection to make.
The Avengers get slowly overwhelmed and worn down by the regenerating, unstoppable scarab drones until Ant-Man gets the idea to fight fire with fire. He returns to their prison in the Negative Zone to find his own army, and reprograms the Ultron drones to act as their own personal army. He probably shouldn't have gone all overdramatic and talk about how it's "introducing the concept of violence", though, and change the Ultron's blue face-and-jaw eyes from blue to red. That's just asking for trouble. For the moment, though, the Ultrons are on the good guys' side, and seeing as the Ultrons act as a legion of peacekeeping robots fighting against the scarabs is pretty dang cool. As repetitive as robot-smashing gets, the Ultron army's dramatic entry is pretty damn well-executed.
Ant-Man and Iron Man also manage to figure out that apparently Kang's fleet is anchored to this time period with some "time anchor" equivalent, and we get a neat sequence of scenes as Wasp, Hulk, Thor and the Ultrons start to go for the master ships and rip off the time anchors and send the fleet back to the 41st century. And as Kang's fleet is quite literally sent back to the future and Iron Man locates Kang's ship, we end the second episode. It's easily the weakest part of the Kang saga, lacking many of the stronger character moments of its precursor and successor. Ant-Man does get a lot of neat moments in this episode, though, and the Ultron buildup is a slightly unexpected but definitely welcome addition, tying Ultron's presumed-future-villainy to a big event. The episode ends up being a bit repetitive, especially in its first part, but superheroes fighting a faceless army in a city is always fun to watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment