Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes S02E01 Review: Bow Before Doom

Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 1: The Private War of Dr. Doom

Welcome to our coverage of the second season of Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes! I covered the first season a couple of months back, and it's time for the second season... and boy, what a pretty huge episode to start off, huh? Living in a time where some parts of the live-action Marvel universe are semi-exorcised from each other, it's genuinely easy for me to forget that the Fantastic Four -- and their infamous nemesis, Dr. Doom -- were once the headliners of the Marvel Universe. Right now they're just sort of famous for having pretty bad live-action adaptations. But my first real exposure to the larger world of the Marvel comics (outside of Spider-Man and the X-Men) is the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance video game, and that's a video game that starred a whole lot of Dr. Doom. And he was gloriously hammy as all get-out. As much as I don't really care that much about the Fantastic Four, I was a huge, huge fan of Dr. Doom. He's a dude in a suit of armour and a hood! He's the ruler of a country! His design is pretty damn badass, and his name is legally Victor von Doom. Yeah, that's the sort of name that makes you obliged to speak in the third person, isn't it?

With that little fanboying session out of the way, though, this episode is pretty neat. It serves as a bit of a re-introduction to the Avengers, and also notes that two Avengesr are absent -- Thor's stayed behind in Asgard, which is pretty understandable, but apparently no one's heard from Ant-Man in weeks. The rest of the team doesn't seem to mind, though. Hawkeye, Hulk, Black Panther and Captain America are happy to just play poker with the Thing and Human Torch. And, yes, we do get a pretty damn cool guest-star episode which involves a significant portion of the cast just playing cards. Oh, and lest we forget, Captain America is now a Skrull -- he's swapped his costume for a more modernized version (the "Ultimate" version, I believe, is the proper term?) with more muted colours, and he's trying to cover by 'forgetting' some aspects of the other superheroes.

Meanwhile, Iron Man and the Wasp head over to the Baxter Building where Tony flirts with the Invisible Woman before having a fairly long talk about science with Reed Richards, who is as distracted and distant as ever, but ends up delivering some of the episode's best snarky lines. It's also fun to see Wasp and Invisible Woman sort of trade some girl talk before the inevitable supervillain attack happens. 

Dr. Doom's Doombots attack both Avengers Mansion and the Baxter Building, but practically everyone realizes that it's nothing but a distraction. We do get some pretty fun superhero smashy-smash, including a fun sequence of Reed using his elongated body to crush some Doombots, and Hulk using the Thing as a bludgeon to beat up some robots. And as the Doombots turn into bombs that threaten to blow up the city, Dr. Doom's lieutenant Lucia von Bardas (who showed up in season one's premiere!) kidnaps Wasp and Invisible Woman. 

After averting the crisis of the city-bomb, we then have a fun little discussion between the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, showing just how different the tone of both superhero teams are. Human Torch and Thing just wants to charge in and grab their allies back, because the Fantastic Four is a family first and a superhero team second. The Avengers? They have a bit of a cold feet thanks to the whole "we'll attack another sovereign nation and cause a war" deal. Of course our superheroes attack anyway -- Avengers EMH isn't that dark that they'd abandon two of their own to a supervillain -- but it's a neat sign of maturity.

We do get a fun little conversation between Wasp and Dr. Doom, where Wasp's taunts are just shut down in a pretty epic "stop embarrassing yourself" rant from Doom. Whatever Doom is trying to do as he scans Wasp and Invisible Woman isn't made clear until the final part of the episode, although the machines they're trapped in and the fact that, y'know, it's Dr. Doom does mean that everyone assumes the worst. The Avengers and Fantastic Four try to do a weird feint attack thing, but it eventually devolves into a brawl... a brawl that Dr. Doom surprisingly excels in, including a sequence where he straight-up boxes the Hulk and wins. Dr. Doom is absolutely victorious over both teams, despite Reed freeing the captured heroes, but then Doom lets them go.

The superheroes leave after a battle won, and to a majority of them it's just another superhero-vs-supervillain fight. But Reed has fought Doom for so long that he knows that everything Doom does has a reason. In this case, as the final scene shows Dr. Doom in his laboratory, we see that he already knows about the Skrull invasion enough to scan the heroes, and his scans tell us that Invisible Woman is a Skrull (and Wasp isn't, but we, the audience, already know who the infiltrator among the Avengers are). It actually plays in pretty beautifully to the chatter earlier in the episode, with "Susan" complaining to Wasp and Iron Man about Reed being distant, something that the two of them, familiar with Hank Pym, are predisposed to believe. But at the same time, Reed himself also mentions how distant Susan has been lately, and it's actually a neat clue to "Susan's" true identity.

Overall, while the episode sort of really serves up the "Dr. Doom is awesome" bandwagon, it's a decent enough opening sequence that sets up a far bigger universe that involves Marvel's other characters, as well as building up to the honestly quite interesting Skrull war. It is unfortunate that the cast members seem to take a hit with Thor and Ant-Man being absent, and Captain America technically being a Skrull, but we'll see if the payoff is worth it.