Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 17: Yellowjacket
Another episode that I am not the biggest fan of. We haven't seen Hank Pym in a while since the show sort of writes out his absence in that he's handed over the mantle of Ant-Man to Scott Lang... but Hank Pym himself ends up apparently going more and more crazy until he ends up being a bit of a hermit, trying to sell the idea of an even-smaller micro-sized prison to Tony and Janet... before he gets totally blown up! We get a funeral scene, and Janet ends up going on the warpath in trying to find out who the hell killed the man she loves. And those scenes are actually pretty well done. The Avengers scrambling to, well, avenge one of their own, and trying to talk Janet down from doing something stupid.
Complicating matters is the fact that a new vigilante calling himself Yellowjacket is making waves through town, being popular with the crowd for the decisive and seemingly final way that he deals with villains. The problem here is that Yellowjacket is also hunting down the Serpent Society and seemingly vaporizing them instantly, while the Serpent Society are the main suspects in Hank Pym's alleged death.
Of course, the twist is that Yellowjacket is actually Hank Pym, who's gone so crazy that his mind has fractured and invented everything that Hank is not as Ant-Man. Yellowjacket is brash, rude and picks fights in stark contrast to Ant-Man's pacifism. A superior or more well-planned-out show would actually make use of Ultron's return last episode and maybe tie this in to the Ant-Man/Yellowjacket story, but no, instead we get this honestly pretty sub-par dragged-out mystery where the rest of the Avengers refuse to believe Janet's claims that Yellowjacket is Hank Pym, whereas Yellowjacket is... just kinda fucking nuts.
The episode has a climax where the absolutely stupid Serpent Society (their dumbass insistence on fighting while the prison is threatening to crush them is pretty silly) and the Avengers are trapped within Yellowjacket's shrink-gun and the micro-prison, working together with Hank/Yellowjacket to get out of the prison. The episode ends with Hank completely subsumed by the more violent and gung ho Yellowjacket persona and, like Vision, I'm unconvinced that the character shift is warranted. Maybe part of it is that I find Yellowjacket pretty dang unlikeable, or maybe because I'm just baffled that the argument is "should we accept him or not?" instead of getting some real psychiatric help for Hank. It's not really a matter of forcing Hank to be someone who he isn't when he clearly isn't right in the head, no?
Ultimately, the best part of the episode remains Janet. From her frustrations on the first half of the episode, to her desperation to get Hank back... and her final conversation with Tony and her desperate pleas about how she's "always been the happy camper" and she's only ever going to ask for one thing -- to get Hank back... it's pretty haunting and well-written, showing just how desperately Janet misses and loves Hank. But, of course, the show insists on pushing this bizarre secondary personality, which I'm just completely bamboozled about. Not my favourite twist, and if this is a more comic-accurate depiction of Hank Pym's Yellowjacket persona (as I've stated, not the most familiar with Marvel comics lore) I'm actually glad they retooled it for the movies.
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