Uh, so gang, as suddenly as it all came to be our time as Panther Puzzle Pals is at an end. Sort of. “Atlantis Attacks” sees the conclusion of the our kitty king’s season-long quest and the end of his reign, though, for whatever reason it’s not the last episode of the season. Most of the old ways meet their end on this, our penultimate chapter in Black Panther’s Quest!
1. Shadow Council Disassembled
The Shadow Council has, for the first time, more or less totally assembled. Tiger Shark is sadly missing from the group but he quit and got his old job back with Lady Elanna in Atlantis, presumably ending his cycle of being thrown off cliffs to his apparent demise. Now that I think about it Princess Zanda isn’t around either, though, she could just have taken the form of T’Challa at any point in the series. We’ve all been hoodwinked again and Hawkeye was the only one to see it.
Numbers aren’t everything as a quick Panther pounce allows him control of Klaue’s super-charged sonic arm blaster and wrecks the place. M’Baku immediately falls to his apparent death and T’Challa makes a hasty exit into the jungle with Klaue in tow as hostage. Klaue, ever the opportunist, calls it quits on the Shadow Council and just walks off into the woods to start a family or find some other form of gainful employment. Madame Masque is foiled by getting tied up and carried off by a giant mutant bat (more on that next episode!) and Killmonger eventually gets his ass kicked so badly that his mask falls off (gasp), a running symbol of true defeat. All in all it’s a pretty bad day for the Shadow Council but I guess they achieved their one goal so good on them!
2. Bask in the Glory
Having bested T’Challa in single combat by blowing his helmet up with one punch (one punch!) Bask is the newly christened Queen of Wakanda. She’s an old guard reactionary so the first item on the docket is to nuke Atlantis again. It’s a unilateral power move but one highly supported by the party for reasons that I can only assume are of self-interest. I guess there’s money in it or just the satisfaction of a job well done.
A two second conversation with Shuri reveals that ending the lives of an entire race is a shitty thing to do. A quick flashback clarifies the end of an exchange had with her brother, Bashenga, in the titular episode: Mad with power, Bask stands before Bashenga with a freshly razed Atlantis burning in the background. With half a mind to melt her twin brother just because she sees reason when Bashenga throws down his weapons and warms Bask’s heart and…vaporizes. At first this seems like a visual device to end the flashback but, uh, Bask also vaporizes a little later after saving Wakanda from getting nuked by her own royal super laser and ordaining Shuri as the new queen. We hardly knew ye…like, at all.
3. Killmonger’s Big Move
For all the subterfuge and treachery, all of the shadow play and puzzle-craft, Killmonger’s hand is finally revealed: he hates Atlanteans. His whole “plan” ends up being a convoluted attempt at Atlantean genocide because of…nationalism? He doesn’t mention anything regarding his motives short of it “saving his people” or whatever but the line is drawn when he figures it wise to kill the encroaching Atlanteans at the expense of the lives of everyone in Wakanda. At this point I’d bet that Killmonger would claim that getting his ass handed to him and then imprisoned (or executed) in Atlantis was also part of his plan. I think this whole time he might have just been a metaphor for the top-down corporate structure of the Disney XD writers room and the knee-jerk plotting decisions seemingly made on a whim. Probably not.
4. Atlantis Retaliates
Following the destruction of the kingdom, the Atlanteans immediately respond with full scale invasion, reasonably so. Tiger Shark leads the charge with a direct assault on the throne, hilariously and appropriately getting thrown from the zenith of a structure for at least the third time. An exceptionally pissed Elanna kicks the shit out of T’Challa until he dons the Crown and gains the power of +1 persuasion, making her aware of the pitfall of mutually assured destruction: everyone dies. Arms are laid down, giant crab tanks are called off and peace is suddenly made but Tiger Shark doesn’t get the memo and proceeds to take revenge on Hunter for knocking him off the tower by working his guts over until he’s straight up dead. T’Challa goes into a blood rage and beats Tiger Shark so bad that Death herself doesn’t feel like stepping in. Panther and Elanna agree on a prisoner exchange, Tiger Shark will be a prisoner of Wakanda and Killmonger will probably get disemboweled in the van ride back to a smoldering Atlantis.
5. The End?
Everything moves at breakneck speed in this messy conclusion. Though everything has been building to this moment it all feels rushed and contrived almost like it got the kibosh from the suits at Disney in the first few months. There’s too much set up for it all to really get resolved in a single 22-minute episode so there’s a lot of convenient deaths (two of which resemble The Snap in Avengers: Infinity War for an unrelated plug) and characters just disappearing, walking off or not even bothering to show up. It’s not unbelievable that a new season of Avengers Assemble will offer some insight on the ramifications of all-out war and the dethroning of T’Challa but it rubs me raw that this couldn’t just be another two-part episode and deliver a better-paced conclusion to what ends up being a fun but rudderless steampunk submarine staffed with wooden robots.
