Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 22: The Deadliest Man Alive
Just how long did they drag out this Hulk-gets-captured storyline? Pretty dang long, honestly. Since episode 9 of this season, around halfway through the Skrull Invasion storyline. We're nearly over with the second season, with around four or five more episodes left, and they didn't really think of getting Hulk back until now? Jeez, no wonder the big green brute is angry. Hell, I'm surprised he's not even angrier at the whole thing!
And, yeah, Skrull Cap might be the one who got Hulk arrested. Hulk himself seems to be aware that it wasn't the real Captain America that got him captured by the Hulkbusters around halfway through the episode. But the Avengers bar Wasp and Cap are honestly pretty ready to hang Hulk up to dry as "yep, he's crazy and uncontrollable" around halfway through the episode, and honestly considering they are the indirect source of Hulk's imprisonment and anger, hanging him up to dry just because he's a loose cannon is genuinely such a dickish thing to do.
Of course, there's the whole deal with the Red Hulk helping to beat the Hulk during his first rampage, setting up a sob story about how he was mind-controlled by the Red Skull (which is an actually neat continuity nod) and ends up getting a lot of good publicity as he basically ends up being accepted by everyone in the Avengers. Of course, Captain America and Wasp refuse to believe this, infiltrate the prison Hulk is kept in, and Wasp discovers that Hulk is being triggered to become extra angry with a device implanted in his head, with a remote that Red Hulk controls. Is... is shooting Bruce Banner in the head that hard, Ross? Jeez.
Anyway, the final battle ends up happening between Red Hulk and the Hulk, with Red Hulk's real motivations honestly feeling quite muddied. What was his end-goal? To get the Hulk captured because he's a monster? You already have that. To infiltrate the Avengers? Then what's the point of making a different Hulk look bad? I guess Ross is just crazy in his own personal warped vision of what his 'duty' should be. The eventual battle with Hulk and Red Hulk in the harbour, with Hulk caring more about saving civilians and the Red Hulk dismissing them as collateral damage, is a simple superhero-y trope, but a pretty effective one. We also get a nod to how Iron Man doesn't actually trust the Red Hulk, having installed nanites into his ID card to help disable Red Hulk in the end.
But he was still a dick to Hulk, and apparently everyone but Steve voted for Red Hulk's inclusion. Small wonder Hulk walked away at the end of this episode, although it's in far more amicable terms than I honestly would've expected. "WE TRUSTED THEM!" indeed, Hulk. I guess you're just a better person than I am.
Oh, and we get the revelation that Red Hulk is actually Colonel Thunderbolt Ross himself, making him an extra flavour of hypocrite. I just really didn't think that Red Hulk's secret identity was such a huge deal that it needed to be dragged on for that long (I was spoiled on the Red Hulk's identity around halfway through the season). I dunno. This episode in a vacuum is a pretty solid one -- Hulk being caught in a "me against the world" mentality, the Red Hulk's slimy integration into the Avengers, Cap and Wasp's infiltration, and all the action scenes... all great stuff, but the way that this whole Hulk storyline has been handled throughout the second season is just sloppy and honestly pretty poorly paced. I think that's a huge problem of the second season of Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes in general, honestly. Each individual episode tended to be good, but seen as a whole, the new characters mostly all remain static, and other than the Skrull/Kree invasion, a lot of the longer-running storylines felt pretty underwhelming.
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