Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 2: Alone Against AIM
A bit of an interesting episode that focuses a fair bit more on Iron man. Apparently AIM, now led by some bloke called the Scientist Supreme, survived the battle against Hydra in the previous season, and now seeks vengeance towards Iron Man! They seek vengeance against Tony Stark, who, in turn, is without his armour as he takes meetings with Pepper Potts, his shareholders and later on with Maria Hill. It's a fun bit as Stark shows off his swagger and his devil-may-care attitude, but at the same time it's also clear that he's not the best at multi-managing, because he's definitely super-distracted about the meetings and is far more interested in creating the hard-light shield for (Skrull!) Captain America. We get a rare appearance from Pepper where she admonishes Tony for being so distracted, and again by Maria Hill, who's mellowed out since her last appearance and isn't in "arrest everyone on sight" mode... but still demands that the Avengers work for SHIELD.
It's at this point, though, that AIM decides to strike. The Scientist Supreme unleashes some monstrous robot-worm-eel-lamprey thing called the Technovore that exists only to devour Stark's reactor technology, who goes absolutely wild, while AIM takes Pepper and the rest of the Stark board members hostage. It's definitely interesting that the ones doing this to Tony isn't some huge big-name villain like Loki, the Mandarin or Thanos, but just a bunch of lowly AIM mooks, a decision that I'm sure was deliberate.
And if a bunch of the supporting cast weren't around, it'd actually be pretty bad for Tony and his company. Maria Hill and Tony Stark end up mounting enough of a resistance against the Technovore with guns and the hard-light Captain America shield, whereas Black Panther and Skrull-Cap are visiting Colonel Rhodey... who dons his War Machine armour for the first time in this series and unleashes an insane amount of explosions. Again, it's pretty interesting that Skrull-Cap is definitely playing along with everything for a while, and is being genuinely heroic and helpful... but the audience is just anticipating for the shoe to drop.
Meanwhile, Stark and Hill end up figuring AIM's plan in no small part thanks to Pepper being a badass hostage, and the two work their way to escape the Technovore and get to the main AIM soldiers. We do get a fun bit when the Technovore gets distracted by the War Machine suit coming online, leaving Stark behind to go after poor Rhodey. Iron Man suits up, SkrullCap gets a new mighty shield, and they blow up the Technovore by having it feed on the central arc reactor of the building. AIM's Scientist Supreme gets his ass handed to him by Pepper, again, as a badass hostage, and after all the talk about how AIM has obtained all of Stark industries' data... it falls into SkrullCap's hands. Interesting, since we never see SkrullCap give it back to any of the good guys. Is this the evil thing that SkrullCap's going to do this episode? Or is it just a red herring?
In either case, though, the focus of this episode is still definitely Tony Stark and humanizing him, and getting him to see Maria Hill's point -- which is a lot more sane now that she's actually having a proper conversation with Stark instead of just frothing at the mouth demanding they REGISTER. The two at least respect each other a lot more now, but neither are going to budge on the whole registration deal, which will lead to a very different Civil War if we're ever going to adopt that comic book arc. Overall, definitely a better outing for Maria Hill than her previous outing. It's overall a bit of a lower-stakes episode, honestly, but definitely one that was well-scripted and animated.
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