Marvel Zombies S01E04 Review: World War Z

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. 

Marvel Zombies S01E03 Review: The Last of Us

Marvel Zombies, Episode 3

This episode goes on another, different trope common in zombie apocalypse fiction, which I like a bit less than the previous two entries... but it's still a pretty solid one. 

We do start off with a continuity nod to the ending of the What If? episode that spawned this mini-series. Which... would be very confusing to a lot of newcomers here, especially those that didn't realize that one specific episode of one season of an anthology series led to this miniseries. It's this kind of super-continuity-loop that makes comic books so inaccessible, people!

But yeah. We start off with an epilogue of the team consisting of Spider-Man, Black Panther and Ant-Man's head arriving on Wakanda to see it overrun with zombified Thanos. With the passing of Chadwick Boseman being less recent, they decided to animate Black Panther's last stand against Thanos... although the character is silent throughout the whole fight. Seeing that this happens within the events of Avengers: Infinity War, the arrival of Thor, Groot and Rocket Raccoon is also shown -- although Thanos swiftly kills the two Guardians, maims Thor, and Black Panther ends up having to do a heroic sacrifice to drop Thanos into an energy reactor. This creates a giant cloud that the episode will later reveal to be the cause of lack of communications between Earth and any space allies. 

Spider-Man and Ant-Man's head survive this and are rescued by the cast of Dr. Strange: Multiverse of Madness, with the rest of the magical cast granting them asylum. Spider-Man's recap is interrupted as the magicians note that Wanda Maximoff, the Queen of the Dead, is moving her zombie horde and that conflict is imminent. Which is a setup for the 'main' plot of this zombie survival show. 

We then cut to the main cast, Team Kamala, as they rise up from the escape pod. Red Guardian mourns the death of his daughter from last episode, but Kamala manages to talk Red Guardian from doing anything drastic in his grief. It's all inspiring and everything, though arguably Red Guardian's exit later on this episode does nullify this moment somewhat. I do appreciate them trying to inject some pathos with these alternate-universe characters, though. 

The main trope here is finding a civilization settlement, Walking Dead style, that has embraced the zombie madness or are infected by it. Things seem to be fine for a while as our group arrives in New Asgard. The community has closed itself off from the rest of the world, and Valkyrie bars the way in until Khonshu appears out of Blade/Moon Knight's body and begins a conversation. It... it really raises some questions about the nature of gods and whatnot that Ragnarok and especially Love and Thunder turned into kind of a joke, but technically it does make sense that Khonshu would know the Asgardians. And it's a nice continuation of the gag that no one there 'gets' the whole Khonshu gimmick. 

The Asgardians are in a massive feast, but King Thor is morose and brooding in his throne. Red Guardian joins the Asgardians for the feast, mourning Yelena; while Kamala, Shang-Chi and the others discuss matters with Valkyrie. Valkyrie is reluctant to lend them a spaceship, going on an uncharacteristic 'Asgard needs no others' spiel. The tension builds up a bit, however, as Valkyrie notes that the feast given to them was supplied by the 'Queen of Sokovia'... Wanda Maximoff. 

Realizing what's going on, with Kamala having shared her creepy Wanda vision-dreams with the rest of the group, they begin to get ready for hostilities. Wanda, like her 'scion' Okoye, notes that her powers had allowed her to retain her human mind even after zombification, and again starts talking about how they can save the world... but needs the power that Kamala is hoarding. All this false niceties is built up nicely between Valkyrie and Scarlet Witch...

And then the illusion fades away as the Asgardians are revealed to have been feasting on zombie flesh. Apparently Valkyrie wasn't working under Wanda and was genuinely duped into a false treaty, but it's too late as all the other finger-eating Asgardians get infected with the virus. And one by one, Baron Zemo, Jimmy Woo and Death Dealer fall to the zombies. Jimmy has a bit of a running gag throughout all these episodes about him being the loud happy 'friend' to the silent, quiet and voiceless Death Dealer which... I didn't really find all that funny. It was a nice attempt, I guess? 

Red Guardian retreats with the rest of the group, and there was a bit where he was trying to hide the fact that he ate zombie flesh, but ultimately confesses to Kamala about his fuckery and stays behind to very briefly hold the line. I felt like this moment could have been done a bit better, or could have been given to another character -- it felt like an odd whiplash for Alexei to go from having half the episode be about mourning his dead daughter, and the second half just dying like a punk to a mistake. And even if the point was to be cruel, I felt that the proverbial knife could've been twisted a lot deeper. 

Wanda uses her magic powers to hold on to Valkyrie's spaceship as the group tries to get in, but suddenly the silent, traumatized King Thor stirs and begins to attack. This was a pretty cool moment, and probably one of the better mini-character-arcs in this elseworld as it builds up on Thor's failure in the prologue. And a different kind of failure to the depression he experienced in the Endgame timeskip. Thor urges the survivors to escape, leaving Kamala with one last inspiring speech about how she's an Avenger now. 

With Thor holding off Scarlet Witch, our heroes make it away into orbit, beyond the cloud of 'infinity energy' that has suffused the atmosphere. Kamala activates the transmitter, trying to reach out to the Nova Corps -- the 'space police' from Guardians of the Galaxy that might be able to help them. Shang-Chi gives Kamala a bit of an inspiring speech about how they are giving Earth and humanity a shot. The Nova Corps appear, a bit too fast... and as communications is established, the excellent twist is revealed: Nova Corps knows that Earth is zombified, and is quarantining Earth to make sure the zombie plague is contained there. 

That's a great cliffhanger, and I felt like it's a great twist that makes sense for the universe. This episode feels like it has probably the most continuity with the original What If one-shot, but also with the greater MCU as a whole. I wasn't the biggest fan of some aspects of it like Asgardia's portrayal or Red Guardian's death; and if we're being honest I kind of wished that if we lost characters that it would be a bit more meaningful (Jimmy, Death Dealer and Zemo went out with little fanfare) but overall I did enjoy this episode a fair bit. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• In the Sacred Timeline...
• The opening scene of this episode features the epic entrance of Rocket Raccoon, Groot and Thor wielding Stormbreaker near the climax of Avengers: Infinity War. However, it ends a lot more poorly for our heroes this time around. Just like his sacred timeline counterpart, Thor's first hit on Thanos with the Stormbreaker did not go for the head. 
• Spider-Man and Ant-Man have been rescued by the supporting cast of Kamar-Taj, specifically the group of characters from Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, including Rintrah the minotaur and Sara Wolfe. 
• New Asgard in the sacred timeline would have been established between Infinity War and Endgame, but the cause of Thor's malaise and the tone that New Asgard has is wildly different.
  
• While not implicitly stated, the Asgardians knew of other god pantheons in Thor: Love and Thunder. The gathering of the gods seen in that movie does feature some Egyptian gods, so it stands to reason that Khonshu and the Asgardians would at least be somewhat familiar with each other. 
• In What If... Zombies?
• The opening scene of this episode takes place immediately after the final scene of the original What If... Zombies? episode, with Spider-Man, Black Panther and the head of Ant-Man facing off against a zombified Thanos in Wakanda; and showing the aftermath of that fight. 
• It perhaps bears repeating, but Dr. Strange and Wong have both perished and turned into zombies in What If... Zombies?, explaining their absence here. 
• Zemo is the character with the strongest reaction to the idea that Sokovia has a queen -- since Zemo himself is Sokovian, and would know. 

Marvel Zombies S01E02 Review: Resident Evil

Marvel Zombies, Episode 2

This second episode is another fun, relatively self-contained one. I do like that most of the Marvel Zombies episodes do feel like standalone entries in like a zombie movie series. This one goes for the trope of a remote, dangerous military/scientific base that is supposed to be safe, but ends up being overrun by zombies. 

But before that, we start off with another group of more neglected MCU characters, with Shang-Chi, his love interest Katy and Agent Jimmy Woo from Ant-Man ending up running around in San Francisco during ground zero. Because Pym Laboratories is there, we also get to see a bunch of giant zombies lumbering around, a nice nod to, again, the fact that this is taking place in a superhero universe. There is some rushing of moments, but as an origin story it does kind of make sense. In this version of the continuity, Wenwu / the Mandarin decides to make his move early, rescuing his son and ultimately dying in a sacrifice to save his son. This moment really did go a bit too fast and knowing what we do of Wenwu from the Shang-Chi movie this feels rather abrupt of a death... but it is an origin story for this depiction of Shang-Chi. 

With the Ten Rings wrapped around his arm to prevent the zombie infection from spreading, Shang-Chi ends up doing a bit of a resistance. Smash cut to five years later, where they are in a Mad Max esque biker gang, with Wenwu's minion Death Dealer silently following them. Just for the sake of additional wacky-comic-book-hijinks, they fight Skrull bikers. Which... okay? Sure. Also, Katy gets partial custody of five of the ten rings. Again, sure. It's alternate-universe stuff, even in the comics these alternate universes tend to do things different for the sake of being different. 

All of this is nice and rapidly-paced, though, which does hurt the setup a little. But ultimately Team Shang-Chi arrive in a location called the City on the Sea, which is one of those Walking Dead style safe havens. Shang-Chi's team has been gathering resources like cows to be let into the community, and this is around the time that Team Kamala from the first episode shows up. The two groups almost get into a fight over Shang-Chi's zombified arm, but the leader of the City on the Sea show up... and it's Baron Zemo, alongside his bodyguard John Walker. ('USAgent' Walker is probably the most OOC one in this show, because working for Zemo doesn't really fit either his Falcon-era or Thunderbolts-era personalities)

Baron Zemo doesn't like superheroes, but he'll let them into his City... which is actually a repurposed version of the Raft. It's actually a clever bit, I've seen some zombie movies (well, mostly the Resident Evil movie adaptations) where a water-based base is a safe haven from the land-locked zombies. There's a brief moment as the two teams finally have a chance to relax from all the zombie-running they have been doing, and they kind of get to know each other. Or, well, mostly it's just Shang-Chi that talks to Team Kamala, since Katy and Woo are comic relief and Death Dealer's entirely silent. There's a bit of a ship-tease between Yelena and Shang-Chi and whatnot, all moments that don't really matter in the long run but also makes these characters feel like an incarnation of their MCU characters instead of just a bunch of dead-people-walking. Team Kamala catch Shang-Chi up on their plan to get the plot device into space, and the next step is to reach New Asgard to get a spaceship. Shang-Chi is sympathetic but only wishes them luck. 

Turns out, though, that an underwater base is really only useful in a 'normal' zombie apocalypse world, and not a 'superhero world' zombie apocalypse world. The zombie plague has reached the Atlanteans (or, well, Talokans in the MCU, I suppose) and these zombified underwater-people attempt to breach the Raft. The Raft itself was constructed to stop the strongest metahuman villains, so they are relatively safe other than the constant thumping on the walls. Baron Zemo confides in Walker that this is the main reason he allowed the heroes in, as insurance against the zombie Atlanteans. 

Of course, there aren't just zombie fish-people, but zombie superhero fish-people. Okoye's presence as the main pursuer and minion of the Scarlet Witch is pretty neat as her horde reaches the harbour, and then Okoye awakens... Namor. Speaking of Scarlet Witch, her powers have grown far enough that it's infecting Kamala Khan's dreams, identifying her for some sinister reason. Blade ends up acting as a combination of an older mentor and someone who knows the more magical side of things to Kamala, which is neat. 

Namor starts to attack, however, and the Raft goes into red-lights crisis lockdown mode. Baron Zemo's definition of 'insurance' doesn't actually mean having the superheroes there to fight Namor, however, but to... launch Team Kamala's cells out of the Raft as bait. That is... that is so hilariously impractical! I love it. It's so dumb. Shang-Chi's group is horrified at this and realize that Baron Zemo is evil. Namor zeroes in on Kamala and attacks her group, but Kamala's forcefield powers protect them and the battle ends up with them being pushed back into the Raft. 

Namor and the Atlanteans start slaughtering everyone in the Raft, and the great usage of dark lighting combined with the blaring klaxons and red lights is pretty atmospheric for the carnage. A nice nod to the MCU as well as Namor is temporarily halted with the same Hulk containment unit from The Avengers. And just like that containment unit, it fails to do anything but delay Namor. 

Baron Zemo runs around as the typical 'quisling in power' seen so much in these zombie stories, shutting down doors behind him and delaying our heroes. Yelena gets a bit of a spotlight here as she forces Zemo to tell her about the manual override for the life pods, and goes deeper into the Raft to activate it. Meanwhile, Namor's rampage slowly dwindles down the group of survivors, killing Shang-Chi's unique-model resistance members and John Walker. Ultimately, Kamala manages to take down Namor, shoving a forcefield fist into the fish-man's mouth and blowing it up. 

However, as the survivors enter the lifepod, Red Guardian realizes that Yelena has not returned yet. Again, it's a rather simple moment when someone stays behind because they have already been infected. Pretty good animation particularly on Red Guardian's part as a grieving father mourning her daughter being left behind -- nowhere as good as the same character's performance in Thunderbolts when a similar scene happens, but it does act as a nice cap-off to the episode as Alexei grieves, and Yelena stoically pours a drink while waiting for the zombie horde to breach the doorway to her control room. 

This episode is probably my favourite one in the season. It is admittedly me really liking the setting of a high-tech base being overrun, but the darker lighting and the blaring lights really do make best use of the otherwise not-my-favourite animation style. The Yelena/Alexei moment was done well, and I do like the showcases of Shang-Chi and Zemo's respective groups showing how other parts of the world have taken to the zombie apocalypse.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• In the Sacred Timeline...
• The events of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would have happened post-Endgame, but I suppose it isn't too far of a stretch that Shang and Katy would be still (or already) working as hotel valets five years before that movie. 
• It isn't too much of a stretch either to think that Wenwu and his Ten Rings organization would be keeping an eye on Shang-Chi. 
• Jimmy Woo would chronologically be last seen in Ant-Man and the Wasp. The Shang-Chi and Ant-Man movies actually both take place partially in San Francisco, so it makes sense that they'd meet up. 
• The events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the character development of Baron Zemo and John Walker/USAgent, would have happened after Endgame. Clearly things went a bit differently here, with Zemo somehow taking control of the Raft, but also setting up base near a bunch of shipping containers like he did in Falcon. 
• Namor and the renamed Atlanteans would have only made contact with the surface world in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, but apparently the zombie plague reaches the depths of the oceans as well. 
• The Skrull biker gang are trying to steal the cows that Shang-Chi's group is transporting. One of the more memed older Fantastic Four stories involves Reed Richards transforming a group of Skrulls into cows as punishment. 

Marvel Zombies S01E01 Review: Dawn of the Dead

Marvel Zombies, Episode 1

I watched Marvel Zombies as it came out, but for some reason I didn't do a review for it. In my mind, I thought I did a full season review, but.... but I apparently never actually posted it? As I slowly catch up to the MCU projects I've missed doing reviews for, I suppose I could talk a bit about Marvel Zombies... and I decided to save it for the Halloween month! 

Marvel Zombies takes place after one of the episodes of Marvel's What If, which is a Marvel Zombies episode. And we start off with a somewhat chipper trio of younger heroes -- Ms. Marvel, Ironheart and Hawkeye II. They are supposed to be leading the 'young Avengers' that never really materialized at the moment of writing, but it's nice to see them doing something here. Oh, they also have FRIDAY, piloting an empty Iron Man suit. 

And the beginning gives us a simple 'people surviving in a zombie apocalypse and making do', with some minor battles against zombie Hawkeye. Or, well, zombie Clint. Whose fate was left ambiguous during the What If episode, which otherwise accounts for most of the earlier Avengers. The dialogue and dynamic here isn't anything to particularly write home about, but it's also a zombie movie and characters in zombie movies tend to be pretty economical in being reduced to simple traits. Kamala's the optimistic one, Riri's the pessimistic one, and Kate plays the straight-man against both of them. 

Riri finds out that an item they scavenged from a corpse in a Quinjet is some kind of Ant-Man-shrunken-down plot device, an Intergalactic Transmitter that is part of 'Project Life-Shot', which could contact help from space if they could travel to a SHIELD base. With our survivors introduced and our plot premise set up, our heroes head off to travel! 

Again, this whole setup, particularly with the pretty peppy (if bland) dialogue, does lull you into a rather tame sense of security. The road trip takes them to see some of the sights of the zombie-blasted wasteland that the USA has been turned into... until they arrive into a cataclysmic location where two god-like zombies are fighting... Captain Marvel and the Eternal Ikaris. The fight of two Superman-esque superheroes have blown up holes through mountains and have created a perpetual storm, which is a very moody location and probably one of my favourite parts of this series -- that zombified superheroes that retain their powers will cause some pretty cool levels of devastation. 

And as our heroes lose their van and go on foot... the realities of being in a zombie survival show kicks in as Kate Bishop is brutally, swiftly and suddenly atomized by a blast from the warring Captain Marvel and Ikaris above, reduced to a skeleton. This genuinely did surprise me, but it also made me believe that I'm going to watch a proper zombie show instead of just invincible, plot armoured heroes  Kamala's desperation as she loses her allies one by one is well-portrayed. Riri gets bitten and stays behind to distract Zombie Captain Marvel and Zombie Ikaris, while FRIDAY takes Kamala off to safety. And just to twist the knife in further, once Kamala is safe, FRIDAY flies back to help Riri... with no allusions to whether either of them will survive. But it's a nice character moment as FRIDAY is implied to have not been able to die alongside Iron Man. Little details like this. 

Kamala is rescued by an unexpected character... Blade. Who, at this point, has not properly appeared in the MCU, unless you are counting the alternate-universe Blade from Wolverine vs. Deadpool. But this isn't just Blade, this is Blade with the powers of the Moon Knight. As cool as the visuals are and as cool as Mahershala Ali is.... "Blade Knight" is kind of underused, particularly since we don't really explore either side of his superpowers beyond doing cool sword stuff. But I guess being cool is the whole point of his presence in this show. 

Blade and Kamala go off to Ohio, and Blade gives a bit of a recap on how he was chosen by Khonshu after the previous avatar was lost during the zombie outbreak. They find the SHIELD base surrounded by a seemingly docile zombie horde, and enter to meet the group from Black Widow -- Yelena Belova, Red Guardian, Melina Vostokoff and a bunch of nameless Widows. 

Melina, being the resident science person, explains that they can't use the transmitter because the planet's atmosphere is filled with interference after the 'battle in Wakanda' (which we saw glimpses of in the original What If episode). However, that discussion is interrupted when a horde of zombies comes up. This is an army led by Zombie Okoye, last seen facing off against Zombie Scarlet Witch and turned into her "scion", her leader of her troops. 

Zombie Okoye unleashes a horde of zombies upon the compound, giving us our third-act fight scene. This zombie horde has Hawkeye (who Okoye collected earlier this episode), Captain America, Abomination and Ghost. And I really like this random cherry-picking of Marvel characters that hasn't shown up in the original one-shot. 

The resulting zombie fight is pretty neat as we get some match-ups, with Red Guardian managing to finally fight and defeat the zombified Captain America, who sneaks in through the vent. Zombie Ghost gets to show off a really cool sequence of using her phasing abilities to kill the nameless Widows, when her live-action counterpart doesn't really use her powers in a creative fashion in Thunderbolts.

Again, in typical 'dwindling crew' situation, Melina uses the Red Dust to try and hold off the zombie horde, sealing away the rest of her allies... but Okoye, empowered by Scarlet Witch's powers, is too powerful and kills Melina. Ghost manages to chase the group through the bulwarks, but gets awesomely sliced up by Blade in a quick but brutal encounter. 

Kamala, Blade, Yelena and Red Guardian manage to then escape the facility after bringing down a tunnel to escape Zombie Abomination, and the journey is on as the little zombie survivor group continues on to try and save the world. 

I really like Marvel Zombies because unlike the later seasons of What If, it really felt like it was made by people who wanted to make jokes about the MCU, yes, but also cared to write authentic alternate-universe versions of the characters with some bathos and some depth to it. Moments like FRIDAY deciding to fly back and die with Riri; or the way that the Widow family reacted to each other, are all nice little moments that aren't like, going to make you tear up or anything, but done well to make me invested. The animation is also crisp, and being set in the dark with a lot more down-to-earth abilities makes the fight scenes at the end (with everything involving Ghost in particular), again, way more impressive than anything in What If's later seasons. 

I really did enjoy the opening episodes of this series a fair bit, despite -- or rather, probably because -- it is meant to be a standalone one-shot.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• So here is where I try to untangle time 'alternate universe' shenanigans, because I'm a geek and I do this as a hobby. The events of the What If... Zombies? episode takes place relatively concurrently with Avengers: Infinity War, which we can tell from the arrival of the Black Order at the beginning of the episode, and Zombie Thanos attacking Wakanda as the final scene. This miniseries takes place approximately 5 years later, placing it after the Endgame timeskip...
• In the Sacred Timeline...
• The events of Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever which led to the superhero origins of Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye II and Ironheart would have taken place post-Infinity-War, but the episode gives a handwave that Kamala's grandmother sent her the magical bracelet earlier; Kate Bishop survived and trained on her own thanks to her mother Eleanor's paranoia, and Riri just happened to scavenge Iron Man's armour after the events of What If... Zombies. 
• Captain Marvel would have been summoned to earth from space by Nick Fury in Avengers: Infinity War. We don't know exactly how it happened, but apparently she got infected regardless. 
• Ikaris and the rest of the Eternals would still be in hiding during all this time. Since a vast majority of Earth's population was turned into zombies, it's likely that the events of Eternals did not happen since the Celestial wouldn't awaken if humanity hasn't advanced enough.
• Blade has not appeared in the mainline MCU projects yet, but Moon Knight would have taken place post-Endgame. Clearly, something happened to Khonshu's traditional host(s), leading to him being associated with Blade instead. 
• The events of Black Widow would have taken place before Infinity War, explaining why Red Guardian, Yelena Belova, Melina Vostokoff and the rest of the liberated Widows would still be gathered together instead of scattering over time. 
• Abomination would still be in prison after the events of Incredible Hulk, and probably got infected at some point afterwards. 
• Ghost would still be on the run after Ant-Man and the Wasp, and again, probably succumbed to the zombie plague. 
• In What If... Zombies?
• Iron Man was one of the first zombies seen in What If... Zombies?, where he was decapitated and dealt with by Wasp. Riri notes that she salvaged the armour afterwards, since 'no one was using it'. 
• Zombie Hawkeye was among the zombies that attacked the cast of What If... Zombies in the train station, but was left behind and never dealt with. He's apparently wandered off to this street. 
• Okoye was last seen among the resistance fighting against zombie Scarlet Witch. She was last seen surrounded by Scarlet Witch's magic before being killed, and apparently left enough of an impression for Wanda to resurrect her as a scion.