Back on track with this here sixth episode, T’Challa does some more soul searching without Shuri by his side. Will Ms. Marvel fill that void and deliver some sass in the Terrigen…gas?
Yes. Yes she will.
1. Crossbonethugs
It’s really important to me that I begin this with mentioning that Crossbones starts the episode off by invading Wakanda with an army of Hydra laser tanks and robots. The most important detail in this invasion in that Crossbones has a laser gun with a skull molded around the muzzle so it looks like a skeleton is screaming lasers at Black Panther.
There’s really nothing more to this whole intro besides T’Challa beating the shit out of Brock and his robo-goons, except that Crossbones has a new, minimal, more-comic-accurate costume that looks far less like the 400lb muscle-corpse he looked like last season.
2. Attilan with a Plan
YO! We’re going to Attilan! So my dream is coming true: we’re doing a little globe-trotting to visit all of our favorite monarchs, warlords, tyrants, and demagogues. This trip we’re visiting the gassy halls of the one, the literally only, Blackagar Boltagon and his not-so-merry band of gross-out/borderline family members (though we only really see him, Medusa, Crystal and two seemingly normal dudes dressed kind of like Black Bolt. Maybe accidentally wearing the same thing as each other is their inhumanity, I don’t know.).
3. Khan. Kamala Khan.
Enter: Ms. Marvel. She sasses. She Embiggens™. She breaks the fourth wall. Maybe it’s just my own decay and cynicism but Kamala (in this) is just exhausting. I don’t dislike her, as she’s mostly fine, it just seems like the writers watched a Twitch stream defining “extra” and applied the ill-gotten info to Ms. Marvel. It doesn’t help one bit that stretchy powers in motion gross me the hell out.
4. T’Challa’s Tuffet
So Panther is in Attilan to trick Ms. Marvel into opening a door with a very specific lock, but enough of that crap: they first must make their way down a spiral walkway guarded by giant glowing crystal spiders that scream with the voice of a man. This damned show keeps finding a way to take a situation that would normally bore or disinterest me and ramp it up into exactly the right type of insane bullshit I require. Big ups to that one scene where Panther karate-chops a spider’s legs off and then impales it with them, spraying Kamala with the crystalline viscera in the process.
5. Kirb’ Alert
Jack Kirby-created Princess Zanda is our villain this week. A member of this new Shadow Council, Zanda has a bit of an untold, possibly romantic history with our dear Panther and inexplicably has the power to shapeshift herself into, I don’t know, any humanoid? She easily emulates both Crystal and Ms. Marvel, though none of their powers. Her comic counterpart is basically treasure hunter with Delta Force-level training so this depiction is a bit of, if not a large departure from her genesis. At any rate she’s more than a match for T’Challa and has little struggle with kicking the shit out of him for like half of the episode. Wisely, Zanda gets the hell out of Dodge once Blackbolt and Medusa descend upon the dispute with the wrath of parents scorned by a call from the high school vice principal. *WHOOSH* Zanda turns into a bird (?) and flies away along with the end of the episode.
