Black Panther's Quest Last Avenger Television 

Five Thoughts on Marvel’s Avengers: Black Panther’s Quest‘s “The Last Avenger”

By | December 5th, 2018
Posted in Television | % Comments

Well Panther Pals, our mid-season break is upon us but we’ve got one hell of a slobberknocker to send us into the New Year. Tables are turned and paradigms are shifted as our favorite kitty king is pushed into a corner for the holidays with nothing but his family, a future-tech kingdom, an all-powerful God artifact and an underutilized Hulu subscription to keep him warm in these trying months.

1. Marvel’s Accusers

It feels like we arrived on a parallel earth at some point during the energy explosion that atomized Cap like so much e-juice. Picking up directly where last episode left off, Black Widow acts out of character because she’s probably Princess Zanda but I don’t really know what the hell is up with everyone else who seems to just totally hate T’Challa’s guts and blindly believe he murdered Steve. Carol Danvers shows up to throw around her authoritarian judgment and an unjustified mad on but she’s no stranger to being a weird contrarian to advance a contrived plot. Kamala rolls up with Captain Marvel but has a more sympathetic approach to the apprehension sort of like a kid forced to be a proxy mouthpiece for their parents political beliefs. I bring this up only because Ms. Marvel’s hesitance to apprehend Panther and Shuri feels like a potential gateway for the second half of this season being a reconfigured “Civil War 2.” Considering how the rest of the season has played out so far, no theory seems too outlandish.

2. Demolition Panther

We’re treated to a lot of action as we wrap up this phase of the story arc, giving us some pretty heavy-hitting match-ups that put Panther, Shuri and Wakanda’s abilities on display. The general cat-on-the-run story advancement is conducive to these geeky little punctuations where T’Challa and Shuri are constantly beset by throw downs with their pals. These can feel a little gratuitous (if not fun), but serve the functional purpose of giving us a benchmark for the might of the Black Panther. There’s little surprise when Panther goes ham on C-list fish men but when he gets to open up and go toe to toe with the likes of Thor, Iron Man, etc, a pretty bad ass precedent is set. Now that T’Challa is back safely in Wakanda with the Crown, it’s only a matter of time until Shuri is able to discover some of the latent powers of this new or ancient vibranium and beef up that Panther Power™ for the inevitable future incursions with the spurned Avengers, the Shadow Council, and assorted skull-faced interlopers.

3. Cat Suit

Tony brashly reveals his Mk. III Stealth Mode by crashing through the pressurized cabin of a moving supersonic jet but the victor of the prêt-à-porter fashion showdown is T’Challa in his bold new take on the classic materializing armored battle suit. With more obviously pronounced feline features, Panther’s new, but shortly lived, armor looks sick and you can totally read the fear and jealousy all over Iron Man’s expressionless face plate. To touch on my last point again, the new suit is not just a great way to add to T’Challa’s already vast arsenal but to emphasize the superiority of Wakandan technology. The Iron Man armor is intrinsic to the character so ripples can be felt when all Panther has to do is hit a button on his La-Z-Boy to supplant Stark’s life’s work.

I don’t want this to be the last we’ve seen of the armor or the design but since, contrary to my previous point, it pretty much hand-waves away core distinctions between character roles and abilities, I’m sure this will probably be relegated to the bargain bins along with Cyber Gear Batman figures.

4. Home for the Holidays

Panther pretty reasonably sets his boundaries by the end of the episode. Sequestered in his homeland and protected by shields both diplomatic and literal, we can probably expect to see less of the Avengers for some time and more internal strife within the borders. I foresee more offensive scrapes with the Shadow Council, familial resolution with Hunter and, hopefully, the addition of more homegrown characters from the Panther canon. Since we pretty much know that Cap isn’t dead, I’d imagine a bit of effort being put into engineering a vehicle for his return via the power of the Crown or perhaps some sort of link to the Ancestral Plane or something similar, but as ever take my theories with a grain of salt.

Continued below

5. Wakanda Wrap-Up

With what I had seen in previous seasons of Marvel’s Avengers, I was initially skeptical of how this season would run. I’m more than a little surprised that I’ve come out on the other end of this first half as somewhat of a convert. When it really goes for it, Black Panther’s Quest let’s you have a blast with a good amount of focus and interesting takes on characters. I most appreciate the series’ lack of concern with any real established canon, preferring instead to weave together often disparate elements of the Black Panther mythos to create something ultimately fresh for both old and new audiences. I can’t knock it much for those occasional dips into the dull, as those episodes are thankfully few and far between, though I must admit I’m growing less and less fond of the already obnoxious convention of prolonging bland and vague MacGuffins over the course of a season, spoon-feeding the smallest morsel of development in a threadbare plot. While Quest is totally guilty of treading a lot of water, it’s still just around 22 minutes per episode and typically most of that run time is used appropriately and interestingly. The decision to narrow the focus on just a few core characters while peppering episodes with fun team-ups is among, if not the, greatest of the show’s assets, and one that has definitely kept me invested in the season and where it goes from here.

Thanks for reading, gang. While there is no scheduled date as of this writing the Panther Puzzle Pals will probably reconvene sometime in mid to late January if the previous seasons are to be used as a general guideline. Until then definitely catch up or keep checking out all the great coverage here on Multiversity Comics and I’ll see you in the New Year!


//TAGS | Black Panther's Quest

Jay Scythe

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