Panther Pulp as the gang travels down memory lane with a super-weapon trip session in a techno-mausoleum. Cap can’t stay of the brains of the writers, and some gruesome post-human body-swapping incites T’Challa’s grampa to effortlessly demonstrate how the Panthers totally rule.
1. Caught Somewhere In Time
Picking up directly where we left off last episode, Panther, with Shuri and Klaue in tow, makes his way back to Wakanda in search of the next step in this new puzzle. Klaue leads the gang to the Hall of Royals, an ancestral crypt the others are already very familiar with. In fact, it seems like T’Challa was here recently as this is the new hiding spot for the Crown, the still mysterious ancient Wakandan technology that turned Baron Zemo into Super Shredder and nearly wiped out Manhattan. You’d think T’Challa would at least take the same convoluted measures his grandfather T’Chanda did (ie. hide it in a spaceship). It turns out lugging Klaue through the jungle is more about giving him a hard time than anything practical, his great contribution to the new Panther Puzzle™ could be summed up in like six words, “hold the Crown, touch a coffin.” Using the movie’s concept of the ancestral plane as a means to feature a flashback episode is pretty neat, and allows a little retroactive plot development, strengthening the history between T’Challa and people like the Zemos, Zola, and Cap.
2. Invaders
In a bit of a MCU-esque revisionist take on the Invaders, T’Chanda (sick-lookin’ pulp Panther of the 40s and T’Challa’s grandpa) joins Captain America and Peggy Carter to take on representatives in both Hydra and the original Shadow Council. What can I say? Nothing motivates a plot to move along like Cap does, no need to let his evaporation get in the way. The two drop Howard Stark a bunch of lip service, but really make a good go of cooperating with T’Chanda, way better than the Avengers have ever tried with T’Challa. Though it never happens explicitly, I enjoy the way that Cap is pretty much playing third fiddle to T’Chanda and Peggy. T’Chanda is immediately established as a bad ass that knows how rip a human apart and reassemble human consciousness, and Peggy saves the whole damn day by just uploading her brain into the first robot prototype she sees and goes sick house on Zola until the place blows up. Cap tries to talk down Heinrich from jumping off of a mountain but does not succeed, which is honestly still a win but everyone else did what they intended.
3. The Evil That Men Do
While Heinrich Zemo is also pretty prominently featured he’s not quite the big bad that Arnim Zola becomes, literally and figuratively. There’s a lot of creation and setup in this: Heinrich plummets to his assumed death with the greed of an Indiana Jones villain, which is presumably what starts his son Helmut on a path to beef with future Panthers. We straight-up witness Arnim Zola become a gross robot forever through his own hubris. It’s definitely worth mentioning that Zola is voiced again by Mark Hamill who seems to be having some fun hamming it up with a German accent and quoting Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein.
4. Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Our new MacGuffin, or possibly one of many more to come, is a callback to a previously discussed ancestor of T’Challa, Yemandi the Wandering Queen. We last heard of her back in “Mask of the Panther” when the gang tried to take a breather at a SHIELD base conveniently located next to Yemandi’s Cutter, the steampunk Wakandan submarine filled with wooden robots and a piece of the Puzzle Paw. The gang is still hanging out in The Hall of Royals so we might be blessed with another flashback with Yemandi and the Shadow Council of her era! If not that then we at least have a vague idea of where Yemandi’s Box is: somewhere in Northern Africa that has snowy alpine castles.
5. Children of the Damned
There’s a lot of talk in this episode regarding different ancestral links and how they serve to shape the future. The most obvious is the whole episode being framed as a brain-blast trip out to the relevant exploits of T’Challa’s grampa. In it there are many small, slightly coded connections like the mentions of T’Chanda and Howard Stark’s friendship, witnessing the death of Heinrich Zemo as previously described by Helmut in his first appearance this season, and Zola’s new found immortality ending his lineage yet being maintained endlessly by it, so to speak. The more explicit mentions refer to Heinrich fulfilling the goals of his ancestor, Morgan le Fay(?!) and the shout-outs to T’Challa’s dad T’Chaka and whatever relation Yemandi has to the rest of the royal family. A superficial read finds that the path to the future lies in the past.
Continued belowThis is Stan Lee’s final animated performance and for once it’s not played for laughs but a final entry in Stan’s Soapbox.
“Zola, I see you’re still spouting the same threats, peddling the same hate. Guys like you always make the same mistake. Hate doesn’t make you strong. Hate makes you weak.”
Thanks for everything, Stan.
