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Boomb Tube: Planet Leader

By | July 22nd, 2014
Posted in Columns | % Comments

Welcome back to Boomb Tube, Multiversity’s weekly column detailing the current Cape Cartoons scene. We missed a column last week because Wikipedia listed there being another episode of Agents of Smash titled ‘It’s A Wonderful SMASH’ but apparently that just aired somewhere in the UK and I can’t find it online. Once again, Wikipedia and Agents of Smash have failed us both.

So for this week we’re traveling to Sakaar to reenact “Planet Hulk”, the only “Hulk” comic I’ve actually read. Oh and also apparently this week’s the Agents of SMASH season finale. Good for them.

As always, spoilers ahead!

The Leader greets the Agents by proclaiming “Welcome to Sakaar where I’M THE STRONGEST ONE THERE IS,” which is a pretty arrogant statement when there are literally rock people hanging around. Hulk immediately calls out Leader for taking over a “primitive mud ball” instead of someplace like Earth, though to be fair, taking over Sakaar is arguably much more impressive.

Leader also details his plans to ensure that Hulk and pals are only remembered as monsters while A-Bomb retorts that The Leader will be remembered for having his butt kicked by the Hulk. A-Bomb is arguably much more wrong, as I constantly forget who The Leader is whenever he’s not on-screen. He’s in charge of an entire planet at the moment and I’m struggling to remember his actual name without Wikipedia. Again, I’ve been failed by the both of you.

Leader then proceeds to throw monsters at the Agents which surprisingly doesn’t kill them. He then suggests to “THROW THEM IN THE PIT,” and even though the Agents have experienced some truly terrible ordeals lately, I’d hate to think they’d be forced to attend Dashcon. For an extra $17,000, he can even thrown them in the ball pit for an extra hour.

The Leader doesn’t resort to Tumblr memes, however, and instead gets the entire crowd to agree with him through mind control, leading to the Agents getting thrown into The Pit which turns out to be neither a Dashcon reference, a Fallout 3 expansion or anything to related to a concert. Instead, The Pit is a slave-mine filled with The Warbound from the original “Planet Hulk,” story which is again disappointing.

She-Hulk, meanwhile, has been separated from the other Agents so the Leader can make her his quee- NO. NO, ABSOULTELY NOT, PUT DOWN THAT MIND CONTROL DISK.

Oh wait, The Leader clarifies that he’s just holding She-Hulk as collateral. Which is still pretty messed up, as She-Hulk barley gets any screen time as is and literally any character could’ve been used as insurance. To be fair though, I wouldn’t want to keep A-Bomb around me either.

Back at The Pit, the miners and Warbound characters who I am too sober to remember the names of get their chance at beating up Skaar for the unspoken incident he caused while under The Leader’s control. This leads to Skaar being thrown into The Belly, proving that Sakaar has more holes with stupid names than a “Hunger Games” themed brothel. Skaar tries to have a heart-to-heart with Hulk while inside the hole (gross), where they’re attacked by a giant monster who doesn’t want this scene to happen as much as I do. After sidestepping the monster, Skaar and Hulk find the exit which leads to… The Leader’s palace? You can really escape prison by going through a hole and sidestepping a poor man’s Rancor? The Belly isn’t a punishment so much as its a very convenient plot progression.

Over at the palace, an alien handmaiden confirms that She-Hulk will be wed to The Leader after all, which is not a plot any of us would have to put up with if he’d taken A-Bomb after all. And lo and behold, A-Bomb showed up right as I typed that sentence. Apparently he can just turn invisible and sneak out. Whatever. He reports the news that She-Hulk’s engaged, to which Red Hulk gives the best response:

“Engaged? To what?! EHH, never mind, I don’t care.”

Clancy Brown’s delivery of that line is a fluid non-stop demonstration of a character truly not giving the slightest shit about the story they’re in. I think I found my favorite character, right in time for the season finale. He then proceeds to solidify his position as The Best” by grabbing a guard’s hover skateboard and utterly wrecking everyone’s shit, save for the slaves who he frees as his own.

Continued below

Back at The Leader’s bachelor pad he informs She-Hulk that her cousin escaped through sub-human intelligence and dumb luck which is a pretty pretentious way of admitting that your prison has a gigantic exit. After knocking her out, The Leader finds Skaar and Hulk discussing the former’s secret origin, how Leader had caused Skaar to lose sight of himself and become a villain. At this point that’s not so much a secret origin as much as it is a very vague description of what happened but we’ll roll with it, as The Leader knocks out Hulk and Skaar to bring them back to square one at the Colosseum. There, Skaar apologizes for being mind controlled by The Leader which is enough to encourage The Agents to kick his ass, steal his space ship, and get ready to leave his so-called “practice planet.”

And look, quick tangent here, but it is genuinely mind-boggling that Leader considers taking over Sakaar “practice”. I have trouble encouraging myself to wake up in the morning and this dude could took over a barbaric alien planet in his spare time. If I were one of the Hulks, I’d give him Earth out of respect. Instead, A-Bomb drops a load of mind-control discs on Leader while saying “A-bombs away!”

I can’t believe I’m saying this but Leader deserves so much more. Not a marriage with She-Hulk though, that’s gross.

The Leader escapes because really all A-Bomb did was drop some discs on him but that Warbound guy who looks like The Thing promises that they’ll find him right after they establish some old-fashioned American Democracy on this planet. Thankfully The Leader’s not too far behind, as he actually sabotaged The Hulks’ new ship which leads to them getting lost in space.

No joke. That’s how the episode ends: with The Hulk calmly talking into the camera about how they’re lost in space while A-Bomb makes a “Danger, Will Robinson!” reference. The bad news is this means there’s likely to be a second season. The good news is that if there isn’t, then the Hulks all died in the cold vacuum of space where they belong.

Final Verdict: 4.3  – Considering how the last episode went completely insane at the end and became one of the best episodes in the series, this was a total letdown. Somehow, an episode set on an alien planet featuring The Leader didn’t live up to the hype.

We’ll have more concrete thoughts on Agents of SMASH as a whole in the following weeks.


//TAGS | Boomb Tube

James Johnston

James Johnston is a grizzled post-millenial. Follow him on Twitter to challenge him to a fight.

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