It’s time for the Family Feud! Introducing the Panther Clan: T’Challa, Shuri and Hunter. Ready for action against the typical familial disagreements between a monarch, a super genius, a world-class thief and an evil dude in a gorilla mech suit; on your marks, let’s start the feud!
1. A Competent Thief
Hey, check it out! Hunter the White Wolf, adopted brother of Shuri and T’Challa, makes his season debut! His arrival brings a plethora of new info, world-building, and characterization. Starting with the superficial: this is probably my favorite design for White Wolf. His new duds actually look more canid than ever, with a contoured mask using black to highlight implied snout and jawlines, a divine little fur capelet and non-retractable claws. I really appreciate the effort to better play into his namesake rather than the white ninja clone we usually see in comics.
Hunter is pretty different from his comic counterpart. While on a very basic level he’s the same, he’s not the head of the Hatut Zeraze (the Wakandan secret police which I gather doesn’t exist in this continuity) and instead is a sort of a snarky black sheep super thief. His presence is pretty obviously a plot device to deliver vital new information to Shuri and T’Challa regarding information on the Shadow Council, and does so with great pizzazz. Having been approached by Killmonger to join his ranks, newly-minted thief White Wolf shuts him down and steals his shit which includes the identity of every Shadow Council agent in Wakanda. Hunter also reveals that Killmonger is the former teacher of both him and T’Challa, which adds a little bit more of a direct relation between the antagonist and protagonist than the movie offers. I really want to keep talking about White Wolf but there’s other cool stuff too, I guess.
2. Cat Fight
Not to knock the movie or its fight choreographer, Clayton Barber, but I never felt like they captured a unique interpretation of Panther’s locomotion and martial prowess. In this episode we get a really great sense of how T’Challa fights and, in comparison to a much different medium, I think it’s more interesting to watch and true to the character. While fighting a bunch of paramilitary goons, Panther ducks in and out of the shadows, utilizing stealth and agility to evade laser blasts and pounce on the unsuspecting. I’m doing it a disservice by describing the movements, but suffice it to say it’s cool seeing T’Challa make more feline movements (kicking off walls for full body pounces, running full-speed while partially ducked down with arms bent and clawed paws presented) the same way Spider-Man gets a reasonably thought out fighting style in the new Insomniac game. At any rate, I appreciate when a time-based medium can accurately emulate or improve upon what I see in my imagination between comic panels.
3. The Immediate Problem
The big bad here is another fan-favorite from the movie, M’Baku! Wisely still steering way clear of his past moniker, M’Baku does get a pretty cool callback to his old costume in the form of a giant hard-light mech suit. If you hadn’t already gathered, costuming and character design is of huge importance to me, and so far this season has yet to disappoint in both style and reasonable functionality. Back to relevance: M’Baku is our second card-carrying member of the Shadow Council. We don’t really get much in the way of a statement of purpose but he’s pretty set on repeating his belief that Wakanda belongs to him. It doesn’t and he gets his ass kicked pretty hard but maybe there just might be something dubious to this whole claim to the throne…
4. Where We’re Going We Need Roads
In this, our fourth episode, we finally get to see Wakanda! There’s not really much to talk about for the most part as it looks and functions similarly to what is in the movie, however, there is a key, to me, difference: infrastructure! Wakanda has a highway system! This is bound to be the least interesting thought this article but it totally warrants notice! Wakanda is a huge city-state, not some tiny isolationist Manhattan. It needs roads and with it highways and hovercars and shit! It’s like a giant, afro-futurist Tokyo with LA freeways which totally tracks, because there’s a ton of cool-ass busy people working in a weird agrarian technocratic monarchy and they’ve got places to be. There’s even a solution for freight transit in the form of an automated lane with cargo vessels that get picked off the road by a selective system. The highway is not just a set piece, it means something!
5. Focus
Call me crazy, but the animation in this particular episode was the smoothest we’ve gotten this season. On the whole, there are fewer animated forms on screen at any given time which may contribute to the economy of detail. I feel like we’re being treated all around; we get a focused narrative around a small, select cast that develops most everyone included and it looks nice presumably because of that. Regardless of how the rest of the episodes play out, the action in this benefitted immensely and played out like eating a whole bag of candy.
