Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 2, Episode 23: New Avengers
Another guest-star episode, and this one doesn't even feature any of the regular Avengers other than at the beginning and at the end! This episode is all about the New Avengers, which gathers a bunch of the guest stars we've seen throughout this season. Oh, and Wolverine. Which I suppose I should be mad about since he shows up without any foreshadowing and takes up a slot that could've been given to Ant-Man II or Falcon or Bucky or Doc Samson or Black Widow or another Fantastic Four member... but fuck that, it's Wolverine. It's hard to say that I'd prefer any of those over Logan.
Anyway, the episode quickly sets up the story -- the regular Avengers get wiped out from the timeline when Kang somehow breaks free. A brief flashback later on tells us that a bunch of alternate-universe Kangs, the Council of Ricks Kangs, freed him and tells him to clean his silly mess. Before Iron Man's "death", however, he managed to activate the New Avengers protocol, telling Jarvis to recruit a bunch of other heroes.
And the lucky heroes? First up, we've got everyone's friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, who's ripped away from enjoying an Aunt May sandwich to being overwhelmed by the raptors and ninjas and robots coming out of the timeline. The other heroes are a bit more professional. Wolverine is feral as he slashes and murders raptors (offscreen to us, but not to poor Spider-Man). War Machine is all business, and we have him meeting the far more jovial Thing, leading to a fun little moment of confusion when the Thing is confused as to why Tony Stark somehow became a black man. Meanwhile, Iron Fist's voice actor kind of mangles Japanese pronunciation, while he and Luke Cage are all business as they kick ninja ass.
After a rough introduction and a bit of an intro-dump by Jarvis, the New Avengers take on Kang and get absolutely curb-stomped. Which... yeah, when compared to the likes of Thor and Ms. Marvel, none of these actually really match up to them, power-level wise. Even with War Machine and the Thing standing in for Iron Man and Hulk, the rest of them are just kind of street brawlers. Spider-Man ends up taking charge, and we get a pretty damn badass bit as the other New Avengers distract Kang long enough (with the "play of the game" going to War Machine and his badass Leeroy Jenkins charge) for Spider-Man to blow up Kang's machine by letting his spider-sense tell him which parts to break. The episode ends with Kang being defeated by a dozen-strong Avengers squad and thrown into some swirly time void, and the six New Avengers being given honorary membership as reserve members.
(And it's just about as well that they are reserve members, because I don't think Black Panther, Ms. Marvel, Yellowjacket and Vision even had two lines shared between them for the past three episodes.)
Overall, though, despite my jadedness about how this episode has been handling the actual Avengers, any excuse to see Spider-Man and Wolverine team up with a bunch of honestly charming characters is pretty rad. Kang is honestly kind of flat in his return, and both War Machine and Iron Fist are also kind of bland, but we get a lot of fun snarky dialogue from Luke Cage and Thing. Overall, an honestly pretty fun and grand little guest star episode. And also our last guest star episode, as we ratchet up towards a season finale.
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