Marvel Zombies, Episode 4
And finally, we end the first season of Marvel Zombies with... a bit of a leap in tone and story themes. Which I'll go on record here as not being a big fan of. I don't dislike it as much as I did the final season of What If, but I felt like for a show that fired on all cylinders for the first 3 episodes, this one just felt... so off.
The first part of it is just a continuation of the excellent (if simple, for the genre) twist that Earth is quarantined by the military government Nova Corps, who is willing to vaporize the survivors if it means quarantining the virus to Earth. We get a brief space dogfight sequence until the good guys' spaceship blows up. Kamala summons a Noor-construct sphere to protect everyone on re-entry, long enough for the Kamar-Taj magicians to teleport them to safety.
And our ever-expanding cast of characters are now gathered together with Spider-Man, Ant-Man, and a group of minor Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness characters like Rintrah the minotaur. And... the rather odd decision to add a bunch of new background characters like the London Master who would later get a dedicated action scene without being a proper character from the MCU? In such a tight show, this is a bit surprising.
We get the very random shoehorning of a plot point that I really felt could have been delivered last episode when we are doing a recap/tie-in, and it's not even a plot point that I felt was necessary, nor is it thematic to the MCU. The Magicians of Kamar-Taj ended up approaching Bruce Banner (who... survived his encounter with Scarlet Witch's hordes in What If, I guess) who turned into the Hulk, and somehow, something-something, absorbs the infinity energy to become 'Infinity Hulk' to anchor the energy.
It's really random, and it's not like 'Infinity Hulk' actually has a personality, being reduced to essentially an avatar of the energies. This really does feel like something they could've tied to some other character or plot device that we've already been introduced. It just feels random. But it's essentially just a setup for a superhero-movie-Act-3 beatdown, because Scarlet Witch is bringing her massive horde to kill Infinity Hulk and take that energy for her own presumably nefarious reasons.
We get a bit of a conversation between Kamala and Shang-Chi, probably the only two members of the group to come out of the first 3 episodes with much of a character development. It's a typical 'hope in the darkness' superhero speech which feels nice in the bleak setting. They are joined with Valkyrie, Blade-Knight, Katy, Spider-Man, Ant-Man and the magicians as they prepare for battle.
And then we get superhero madness. Gathering in the ruins of Paris, Scarlet Witch sends her zombie horde at Infinity Hulk. We get a wink-wink-nudge as Infinity Hulk destroys the Abomination zombie, before a giant horde of zombies start swarming in, including some 'special' ones like the Atlantean zombies, the Asgardian zombies and the Pym-particle-enlarged zombies. Again, seeing the zombie hordes is cool but I just didn't really care about the Infinity Hulk, or the whole 'anchor of the world' thing.
The survivors arrive through the portals and we get a couple of nice cameos, I suppose, like the battles with zombie Hawkeye, and the zombie original Ant-Man-and-the-Wasp duo. Which... you'd think they would try to do more with Scott Lang being among the survivors, but they really didn't? Thankfully, there's a bit more in terms of having people fight zombified versions of their friends. After a conversation where Wanda tries to get into Kamala's mind again, Wanda brings out the zombie versions of people who died in this season. Because of course they show up. Zombified versions of Red Guardian, Yelena Belova and Melina Vostokoff attack Kamala; the giant Wasp (Hope) is unleashed upon Spider-Man and Ant-Man; and Shang-Chi and Katy have to deal with... Jimmy Woo and Death Dealer.
Which I would dismiss as being meaningless, but they did some cool bits with Jimmy and Death Dealer actually just being a jumble of corpse parts held together by magic.
Oh, Thor also died offscreen and arrives, killing the Masters of Magic. And one by one, our heroes die. Valkyrie gets killed by Okoye and Blade is vaporized by Thor. The other heroes are immobilized and are at danger at dying, and while Infinity Hulk takes out Thor, this gives an opening for Wanda to zip in and take out the Hulk and steal the energy. And then Kamala jumps in, and gets brought into a conversation with Wanda, who promises to 'fix everything'.
And I guess that's the big thing, where the zombie horde invasion gets utterly successful. The scenes are chaotic enough that I wasn't sure if Shang-Chi and Katy are even dead or not, but enough of Kamala's friends die in this episode that she ends up succumbing to Wanda's offer.
And then big explosion of retcon-illusion magic erupts, a combination of Kamala and Wanda's differing kinds of magic, and Kamala ends up transported to what appears to be the normal world where she's drinking boba and stuff. And as she goes off with her besties Kate Bishop and Riri Williams... reality glitches, as Kamala begins to see the zombified world beyond her 'illusion', seeing a surviving Ironheart yell at her that 'everything is fake'.
So yeah, that's a lot. The zombie superhero fight at the end is fine, I suppose, although I must admit that I found it probably the most boring of the four final-part-of-the-episode fights in the four Marvel Zombies episodes. Still didn't like the Infinity Hulk twist, and I really did feel like they kept too many characters to the end; when focusing on just showing Shang-Chi and/or Blade dying as a 'fallen mentor' to Kamala would have been more effective than the chaos we had. Wanda trying to enact a planet-wide WandaVision reality warp is an interesting concept, but one that felt a bit rushed. With each of the Marvel Zombies episodes having been relatively mood-based and paced slowly, the hectic, madcap dash of this last episode was not the most inspiring thing to watch... and whether it's an optimistic ending or not, I honestly rather wished that the first season ended with something that's not such an obvious 'look at the new status quo' cliffhanger. I had fun with this -- more than What If or YFNSM -- but I definitely am not the biggest fan of the ending.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- In the Sacred Timeline...
- The Nova Corps and their 'shield' ships would primarily be seen in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. They were last mentioned in Infinity War after Thanos's forces tore them apart prior to the movie to get the Power Stone. Evidently, they survived here.
- This isn't the first time Wanda warps reality to hide a truth she refuses to accept, albeit this is on a much larger scale -- the idyllic town of Westview being warped by her chaos magic is the plot of WandaVision.
- In What If... Zombies?
- In perhaps one of the bigger confusing plot threads, Bruce Banner was last seen in What If... Zombies finally transforming into the Hulk to fight Zombie Wanda and giving the other members of the resistance time to escape. That he somehow survived, got magical runes etched onto him by Kamar-Taj magicians, and intercepted the infinity stone shockwave is a bit odd.
- Zombie Hank (Ant-Man I) and Zombie Janet (Wasp I) were the ones that spread the zombie plague in What If... Zombies?. They were only seen in flashback and were unaccounted for as zombies... until now.
- Zombie Wasp, Hope van Dyne, was one of the main characters in What If... Zombies? until her death as after gigantifying. She acted as a mentor for this dimension's Spider-Man, explaining why Spider-Man joins Scott in having such a strong reaction to her.
- The boy with the red scarf that Kamala looks at the end of the episode is Kamran, one of the main antagonists of Ms. Marvel and her love interest in that show.
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