Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes S01E20 Review: Nilfheimr Cometh

Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 1, Episode 20: The Casket of Ancient Winters

We return to a rather interesting episode. A good chunk of these last few episodes of Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes are actually very Thor/Asgard-mythology-centric, with the final season one arc being basically about the nine realms of Nordic mythology. But we start off the post-Kang episodes with a story that's basically kind of a filler, but is also a neat little buffer between the heavier Kang three-parter and a bunch of other heavier Hydra/Ultron/Asgard centric episodes after this, so having a relatively lighter-hearted adventure is definitely neat. 

The episode starts off with two recurring enemies, the Enchantress and the Executioner, uncovering a mystical artifact known as the Casket of Ancient Winters (featured in the first Thor movie!) which was apparently buried on Earth because Midgard is an insignificant realm for the gods of Asgard. Their ally in this venture? The dark elf Malekith, and this episode is released two solid years before Thor: The Dark World. And I think I've gone on record on saying that Malekith is easily the absolute worst of Marvel movie villains in that he's wholly unmemorable at all beyond the fact that he's kinda shite. 

Not so for this Malekith, which presumably is inspired more by his comic-book counterpart. We learn that not only is Malekith a dark elf, he was previously imprisoned in the realm of the dead, Niflheim, because, hey, he's straight-up dead. And Malekith is, well, for all intents and purposes, a dark elf zombie, but this manifests in half of him having the dark elves' black skin, and half of him being icy-cold like a corpse. Pretty cool! And while the Enchantress brings him along for... for reasons (there's no real reason why the Enchantress himself can't open the Casket) Malekith double-crosses Enchantress and Executioner, leaves them frozen, and unleashes eternal winter upon Earth. 

And then we cut to the hilarious sunny day in New York, where Hawkeye and Wasp are just hanging out in their swimsuits, taking a break after all the Kang stuff. Absolutely love the tan lines on Hawkeye thanks to his asymmetric costume, as well as the sight of Hulk breast-stroking in the pool. Meanwhile, the rest of the team battles against the Radioactive Man. Iron Man and Thor have the conflict-of-the-episode, with Thor bemoaning human science for creating a monster like the Radioactive Man, while Iron Man defends science for providing the methods to defeat said monster.

And their argument continues when eternal winter is unleashed upon the world, albeit with the roles reversed and with a healthy dose of "magic is just unexplained science" on Tony Stark's part. The episode focuses mostly on Iron Man, Thor and Black Panther, with the latter getting a pretty subtle role of coming from a country where mysticism and science are treated as two facets of the same coin, and ends up being the bridge between the two.

The rest of the team? After Hulk gets angry for being left frozen in the pool, they have a goddamn crossover with the Fantastic Four. Well, the Thing and the Human Torch, at least, and this isn't just non-speaking cameos either -- we've got a "clobberin' time!" from the Thing, even! Yeah, considering how the Fantastic Four have been sort of not been particularly seen in a lot of Marvel secondary media, it's neat to see them fighting alongside the Avengers. 

The Iron Man/Thor argument that runs throughout the episode gets tiresome, and of course it ends with the predictable "we must combine our strengths to defeat this foe!" moment. Malekith himself also never elevates himself beyond being a cool design with a cool backstory... although that's genuinely a lot more than the underwhelming live-action counterpart he got in the MCU. Malekith's plan to make Midgard into a new home for the dark elves is neat, and we do see his dark elf minions manifest as dark shadows battling the Avengers left in New York. We get some neat action scenes with Iron Man's new armour, a neat combination of using Thor's lightning to super-charge Iron Man's armour, and some ominous foreshadowing for the season's climax -- Thor is barred from Asgard, while the Enchantress escapes once more. Still, that's for much later, and for the moment, it's just a nice little self-contained episode with a fair amount of fanservice, a lot of fun gags, a solid building of the internal mythology and a fun little theme running throughout the episode. Can't complain about this one.