Wednesday 8 August 2018

Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes S01E07 Review: Ants and Panthers

Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 1, Episode 7: The Man in the Ant Hill


AVEN071.jpgAh, the last part of the "prequel anthology" episodes! Unfortunately, it might very well be the weakest. Far more apparent than the previous three episodes, "The Man in the Ant Hill" definitely feels like three unrelated episodes stapled together into a single entity, and it really shows. Sure, three-quarters of this episode revolves around the pair of Ant-Man and Wasp, which is the common theme, but it feels like a succession of different days in their life more than anything. And the final seven minutes is an origin story for Black Panther... and honestly, I really felt like the episode would've been better served being split in half to better pace the Black Panther stuff (which feels genuinely rushed and pretty basic) and the Ant-Man/Wasp stuff (which feels repetitive).

The first story, lasting around for the first quarter of the episode, is basically Ant-Man researching Vibranium near the jungle of Wakanda, before he's assaulted by Ulysses Klaue and his mercenaries, intent on grabbing the Vibranium. Klaue, Wakanda and Vibranium might be more familiar to those who's been following the MCU, but at the point that the episode was written, it's just fresh off The Avengers and neither Ant-Man, Age of Ultron nor Black Panther were movies yet, so I'm actually somewhat surprised that they didn't actually go into more detail. We get some fun demonstrations of Ant-Man's abilities, including shrinking the entirety of his laboratory and the people inside and leaving them at the mercy of his ants. We don't really learn that much about the duo throughout the episode, though. Ant-Man's a very basic "FOR SCIENCE" technical pacifist who just wants to help people, while Wasp is far more emotional, eager and bubbly. I like the Wasp a lot! She's fun. Ant-Man's pretty bland.

The longest plotline has Wasp and Ant-Man chase the mutant (explicitly stated) Whirlwind throughout a city, with Wasp insisting that they should use their superpowers to help people, while Ant-Man is all for mere progress and technological advancements. The battle against Whirlwind is neat, and then Ant-Man and Wasp come into contact with SHIELD. Apparently Ant-Man has designed one of the prisons SHIELD uses, the ironically named Big House, as well as the Ultron guardians within.

Ant-Man rightfully calls out Fury on the rather... pragmatic stance that Fury takes towards the prison, noting how there's no reformation attempts done on the prisoners, while Fury calls out Ant-Man for sitting on his laboratory, safe and sound, while SHIELD tries to protect the people from superpowered maniacs. It's kind of a neat argument, for sure, although the way it's presented is a bit too simple with both Ant-Man and Fury taking very simplistic stances. I guess it's a cartoon for kids, though, and it does a decent job in spite of that. 

Black Panther OS Vol 1 2.pngThe Black Panther part kind of sort of ties in to the first segment with Ant-Man in Wakanda. We don't really get a lot of time to really understand just what Wakanda is beyond a generic African village with traditions, and the champion of the White Gorilla clan, M'Baku (it's kind of surreal to jump off the MCU where M'Baku is a grumpy ally of the good guys at worst), challenges King T'Chaka into ritual combat. M'Baku cheats, however, with the usage of a sonic generator supplied by Klaue, kills T'Chaka and causes T'Challa to escape the country in disgust. It's a bit sudden and honestly the show at this point doesn't give us much of a context as to who T'Challa is and why we should care -- it's neat foreshadowing, for sure, and I'm sure Black Panther will get actual spotlight episodes in the future, but this isn't actually the best way to introduce a new audience to the character. Overall, this episode's pretty messy. It does manage to introduce a lot of things and have a bit of an ethics debate in the midst of it all, but it really would've worked better with a bit of an overhaul and dividing the screentime equally between the Ant-Man/Wasp/SHIELD stuff and the Wakanda/Black Panther stuff. 

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