Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes S02E11 Review: Detente

Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 11: Infiltration

We continue with the Skrull plot in an honestly pretty detached episode that feels more like filler. It's also technically an episode that should, theoretically, focus on two of the Avengers' most under-developed members, Ms. Marvel and Black Panther, but genuinely fails to do anything particularly interesting with them. Ms. Marvel in particular has always felt to be under-developed to me, because other than her sort-of replacing Thor as the heavy god-like being of the group, her personality is... serious? That's about it, I guess. And Black Panther's devotion to his country first and foremost and everywhere else second is neat, but the show never really allows that to sink in or really develop. That makes the Skrull Avengers storyline that eats up the bulk of this episode's screentime feel particularly bland and boring.

The Skrull Avengers make up this whole line about how they were the Avengers who were trapped on a Skrull ship after the whole Asgard bit and replaced, causing Carol to briefly question if the entire team was made up of impostors or not, but again, other than giving some conflict to delay the beatdown of the Skrulls to the final act of this episode, this whole bit isn't done well at all. At least T'Challa gets to show off his badass royal cape. Hawkeye and Wasp show up here and we get the brief and honestly anti-climactic resolution to the conflict between Hawkeye and Marvel. 

It's particularly frustrating because all the other storylines in this episode are so much more interesting. Tony is a shut-in and a hermit (and the show really missed an opportunity to make Hank relevant in some way here) and is super obsessed at his complete failure to try and detect the Skrulls anywhere in the world. Dr. Doom shows up, and as awesome as Doom is, all he basically does is hand over a plot device and then step away from the plot, with some genuinely flimsy justifications of "Doom does not do the dirty work" and "only Doom can conquer this world". Do love the little detail of Tony blowing up Doom's device in the season premiere being the reason why it took Doom so long to finish this, though.

Meanwhile, equally interesting is Nick Fury trying to figure out what's going on  as he looks at a huge picture of the Marvel universe's heroes and villains (including some X-MEN! Who other than Wolverine sadly never show up), frustrated that the Hulk is now MIA... and figures out from a recording of the Skrullcap and the Hulkbusters that it's Captain America that's the impostor. We really could've used more scenes here exploring Fury a little -- either make him more competent instead of being blindsided, or acknowledge his friendship with Cap as his blind spot, or give him anything to really make him less of a commentator and an acknowledgement that the cast is allowed to know that SkrullCap is a Skrull. And this episode shouldn't really have an excuse to not really explore Tony and Fury's mentality and paranoia -- or any other members of the cast, really, I'm not picky -- but instead we get the prolonged and honestly quite uninteresting squabble with the fake Avengers.

Of course, the episode ends with Queen Veranke, previously disguised as the Mockingbird, hacking Iron Man's armour with the virus (which is implied to be stolen during the whole AIM bit) and shoots Fury and his two sidekicks, before announcing that the invasion is in full force. Overall it's honestly a bit of a rocky buildup, and the one that is easily the weakest part of these Skrull episodes.