Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 9: Nightmare in Red
An... interesting episode, I guess? We some expected storylines that have been building up for some time, following up on Bucky's survival as he shows up as the Winter Soldier, working for a mysterious party as he steals Hulk's blood sample and injects it to an as-of-now unknown person and creating the Red Hulk. We get the return of General Thunderbolt Ross who argues with Maria Hill that the Hulk is dangerous and needs to be captured, too, causing a bit of a running theme throughout this more Hulk-centric episode.
But the episode focuses so much in introducing so many mysteries that it never really stops to breathe, and that's not counting the rather moronic decisions that some characters do, like Maria Hill suddenly reverting back to her season one's one-track mind as she basically decides that Green Hulk = Red Hulk for the simple handwave that the Hulk's apparently changed colours before. I mean, sure, she hasn't really interacted with the Hulk a lot, but she's seen that the Gamma process can be sort of repeated on a different person, right? The Red Hulk rampaging through the SHIELD Helicarrier's kinda cool, though.
But of course, this is all happening when the real Hulk has reverted back to Bruce Banner for a day and is fishing with Hawkeye in some lake somewhere... and real!Hulk and Hawkeye ends up fighting the Falcon of all people, who's working for the same mysterious maybe-government organization as Winter Soldier and Red Hulk. Anyway, misunderstandings mount, and this is the sort of rather hard-to-swallow sorts of misunderstandings that I praised episode 7 of this season for subverting. It just feels like our heroes are morons instead of "oh, they have a legitimate disagreement". I dunno. Maybe if the episode didn't quite have so many moving pieces with multiple Avengers teams, Winter Soldier, Falcon, Red Hulk, SHIELD, the Hulkbusters and Ross, we'd have a more coherently-paced episode?
Red Hulk apparently argues with whoever is pulling his leash because all he wants is to bonk heads with the Hulk, while Bruce Banner himself is being stopped from transforming due to Falcon's rage inhibitor doodad. Hulk, Wasp and Captain America manage to force the Red Hulk to retreat, but because Ross is a dick, the Hulkbusters move in to arrest Hulk... and then Skrull!Cap decides to tell Hulk that the best way to make them look good is to let himself be arrested. And yes, I know Skrull!Cap is an impostor and that people listen to Captain America, but I honestly don't think that Hulk would just blindly follow suit and let himself be arrested. Sure, Bruce freaks out when he sees Ross, but really? Everyone else just stands there and lets this happen? I dunno. The scene is paced to oddly for me to really feel like this plot twist was earned.
We later cut away to some mysterious sponsor who may or may not be a Skrull infiltrator, and apparently in addition to Winter Soldier, Falcon and Red Hulk, Dr. Samson is also part of this conspiracy? Are they all Skrulls? But then Bucky doesn't really make sense to be a Skrull, so I dunno. Overall, I get what the episode was trying to accomplish. Introduce a bunch of new characters, including Bucky (who's foreshadowed) and Red Hulk (who presumably is going to be a recurring villain), as well as showing the Skrull Captain America destabilizing the Avengers, but at the same time it's obvious that this whole deal is just an excuse for the writers to write Hulk out of the Skrull invasion. And as I would later find out, Hulk ends up being removed for basically nearly the entire season, so... yeah, not the best episode, honestly, even taken on its own merits.
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