As we wind down to the last episodes of the year a bunch of haymakers get traded, magic hats get tossed around, both heroes and villains meet their violent demises and a Cartoon Cartoon gets the recognition it probably wants. 2018 Penultimate Panther begins…here.
1. Face/Off
Okay, so right off the bat: I was wrong. Princess Zanda didn’t end up being in disguise as Zemo. Instead she was just hanging out somewhere for the past few weeks, waiting for the perfect opportunity to pretend to be Captain America for like 20 seconds. I have my suspicions that after escaping from a confrontation with Hawkeye and Black Widow she has plans to read the script and hang out until it’s convenient to impersonate someone a little bit later, maybe even in this very episode!
2. Assembled
New York City doesn’t just come under threat without an attempt at intervention from the Avengers! Most of the whole gang is here: Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye join the fray, and boy do they have a shitty attitude about the whole thing. Basically everyone is down to love, hug, and trust Cap until it’s convenient to the plot that they don’t. Tony and Clint are both pretty pissed off about their respective diplomatic and reciprocated romance issues, but the weird one for me is Natasha’s bandwagoning. If anyone should be sensitive to the plight of an international super spy and the downright vexing goings-on associated with such subterfuge, you’d think it’d be the Black Widow. But even she has some weird moral high ground that I don’t quite understand. Thor is pretty much here because he wanted to beat some ass and make a sick Johnny Bravo reference while doing it.
The Avengers showing up to duke it out on the George Washington Bridge again is a fun callback to the first episode of the season, where we last saw them all fully assembled. Either there’s been a significant time leap or Damage Control is at least more efficient than the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, because the GW Bridge is looking nice after having been last seen violently razed by a 10-story monster octopus and crab tank lasers, meanwhile the trains still need fixing to function on a basic level.
3. Helmut Nash
Just because Zemo wasn’t Zanda all along doesn’t mean he wasn’t up to some rotten shit the whole time. I appreciate that this season was played pretty close to the chest and had little allusion to Helmut’s long con, waiting until now to spill the beans that he orchestrated all of the events in the past several months to get a hold of the Crown. When Zemo betrays pretty much everyone and puts on the Crown we finally find out its true power: it turns you into Super Shredder. Helmut grows like six feet, gets some sweet buzz saw pauldrons, a sword-arm that shoots lasers and suffers from chronic energy migraines because his plot device malfunctions when not used specifically within Wakandan borders.
There’s something weirdly tragic about the whole reveal that Zemo was the architect of pretty much all of this, if not wholly unsurprising. I guess I wasn’t rooting for him or anything considering…well, everything about him, but it’s more of a vicarious bummer that Panther and Cap were really starting to put trust into the dumpster man and now they’ve gotta wrestle with their concepts of interpersonal judgments and evaluations for maybe the rest of their lives. Regardless, Zemo did everyone raw and for that his punishment is getting wrapped in steel cables and deep-sixed in the Hudson like so many goobers with gambling debts and now North America is in danger of blowing up because the Crown was worn incorrectly. Good times.
4. Council Recess
The Shadow Council is in some pretty serious shambles; Killmonger is still pretty resolute and hellbent on taking over Wakanda, or whatever it is he’s actually trying to accomplish with the Crown. As of now, he’s going to have pretty much the worst time trying to pry the artifact out of T’Challa’s paws but he’s still made mighty by his continued alliance with at least Madame Masque and Tiger Shark too, I guess. Zanda is off somewhere, probably pretending to be a well-known Avenger, M’Baku is in super prison and Klaue is covered in a weird goo, perhaps forever. Since Zemo was pretty much the secret catalyst for all of the nefarious coincidences, it’ll be up to the guile of Wakanda’s former lead tactician to truly take the reigns and maybe call in some reinforcements that aren’t shark men.
Continued below5. End Cap
Cap eats it! He jumps on the Crown like it’s a grenade but probably wasn’t bargaining on getting vaporized (if not blasted to Dimension Z) before T’Challa’s very eyes. Widow (who is very definitely not Princess Zanda showing up to play the blame game to a gullible, biased audience) starts playing the blame game and convinces all of the Avengers that T’Challa, the Avenger known as Black Panther, friend and frequent collaborator of Steve Rogers, just intentionally murdered Captain America with a magic hat in his own embassy. There’s no further shit that could possibly go down that would drive the Avengers into a greater blood lust. Ramparts tremble and society collapses, the Avengers will kill when their moral compass kicks the bucket.
The body count will be revealed tomorrow as our final episode of the year directly follows this one!
