Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 1, Episode 21: Hail Hydra
Well, this is certainly an interesting episode! After the last episode being more of a filler and a respite to heavier episodes, this one goes straight into addressing two of the plotlines that have ran across the first season of Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Black Widow's ping-ponging allegiance, as well as Hydra as an organization. And with the main plotlines that we seem to be building up to being either Kree/Skrull space war stuff or mystical Asgardian science, it's neat that we do get an episode to tie up all the loose ends regarding Hydra. The episode starts off with the reintroduction of the Black Widow -- an unpredictable many-enemy for our heroes, but one that the audience knows is probably on the side of the angels. And the Black Widow tells our heroes that, yes, she is a deep-cover double agent, and that she can't contact Nick Fury, the only person who knows about her mission. It's kind of convenient, of course, but at the same time she did save Hawkeye's life a couple of episodes ago.
And the reason she's coming to the Avengers is that apparently Hydra and AIM are fighting over the Cosmic Cube -- a device that can apparently rewrite reality to be transformed as its wielder wishes? Just... just how did MODOK manage to do that, and why hasn't he used it to wipe Hydra before they can bother him? We'll just brush it aside, I suppose, because the Cosmic Cube's really just a plot device to be fought over, and we are treated to a fun bit where Hydra's giant skull-tentacle robots are fighting against AIM and their black hole cannons. The Avengers swoop in and join as a third faction, with some really fun action scenes here and there. MODOK is always fun, in any case.
The complicated situation ends up being even more complicated when SHIELD shows up, with Maria Hill being the far-more-unreasonable SHIELD director that replaces Nick Fury, basically trying to arrest the Avengers for no real reason other than to be antagonistic. As Iron Man points out -- it's pretty goddamn stupid of her to do so right in the middle of the Avengers trying to stop two terrorist organizations shooting weapons of mass destruction at each other. The concept of Maria Hill being far more no-nonsense and not having time for superheroes is definitely great, but the execution turns her into feeling needlessly antagonistic and also pretty stupid, and I'm not the biggest fan of her portrayal in this episode -- especially after multiple times of Iron Man trying to offer friendship and SHIELD clearly being insanely outgunned. I mean, yeah, we're getting some obvious "registration" stuff which may be building to a more comics-faithful Civil War storyline, but the way it's handled here is actually pretty clumsy.
And, of course, Hawkeye ends up doing a pretty damn cool trick-shot, shooting Ant-Man on an arrow from halfway across the city so he can reach the location of the Cosmic Cube, resulting in a pretty badass moment where Ant-Man socks Baron Strucker as he's reaching out for the Cube. We get a pretty cool battle between Captain America and Baron Strucker, and just like the battle between Captain and Zemo, the weight of history can be felt between these two. Black Widow gets a brief moment of "I quit" defiance against Strucker, but it's mostly the Captain America show, and the two of them end up touching the Cube at the same time, seemingly nothing happens.
With SHIELD towing away MODOK, Strucker and all of Hydra and AIM, we get one last parting shot between Maria Hill and Stark, which, again... not very well-delivered and making Maria Hill come off as a gigantic moron considering how very close SHIELD actually came to fucking everything up. We get a neat bit of farewell between Hawkeye and Black Widow. The two of them have put their little spat behind them once everything's cleared out, but now Black Widow isn't trusted by SHIELD with Fury missing, leading to a bittersweet farewell as Black Widow goes on the run. It's a great ending for the Black Widow/Hawkeye story, if nothing else.
Oh, and apparently the whole point of introducing such an insane gamebreaking plot device like the Cosmic Cube? It's just so that Captain America can touch it, seemingly wish that nothing has changed, but apparently it reached out to 1945 and rewrote history that Bucky survived the goddamn crash. I feel that there is a far, far better way to incorporate either a reality-warping plot device or Bucky's survival, but eh. It doesn't really bother me all that much, and other than the two quibbles about Maria Hill and the Cosmic Cube, it's a pretty damn fine episode, really.
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