To the casual MCU fan, the addition of zombies into the world of patriotic captains and iron men seems like a nastily fun way to screw with the established universe – however, to a long term Marvel fan such as myself, the arrival of flesh eating ghouls was surely manna from heaven.
You see, I was there at the start when Mark Millar first dropped super powered flesh eaters into his run of Ultimate Fantasic Four, which, in turn kicked off Robert Kirkman’s Marvel Zombies series.
As a result, the idea of zombies infiltrating the MCU has been nothing but a pipe dream, but thanks to the roving eye of Uatu the Watcher, we finally get to watch the unholy (admittedly animated) unison of Stan Lee and George Romero. Can it possibly hope to live up to my impossibly high expectations?
You bet your moldly, rotted butt it does.
As the Watcher gravely fills us in, Hank Pym’s attempts – like in our universe – bore fruit when he managed to rescue his wife, Janet, from the Quantum Realm. However, unlike the Ant-Man And The Wasp we know, Janet has contracted a freaky, zombie virus that spreads into the world above thanks to an infected Hank and soon sweeps through the MCU as we know it with reckless abandon.
The kicker here is that any person with powers who gets bitten retains their super-abilities after the fact leading to an apocalypse in double quick time.
Into this ruined world tumbles Bruce Banner, fresh from the epic hiding the Hulk got from Thanos at the start of Infinity War and while he’s initially confused at New York being more deserted than a Morbius screening, his puzzlement turns to horror when the invading Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian are summarily attacked and eaten by a zombified team of Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Wong.
Saved by a ragtag group of survivors that contains the Wasp, Spider-Man, the Winter Soldier, Okoye, Sharon Carter, Happy Hogan and Kurt from Ant-Man, Bruce is quickly brought up to speed by Peter Parker’s homemade instructional video and the team decide to mobilize on a transmission that claims that a cure exists at Camp Leigh, Steve Rogers’ old training ground.
After a journey to New Jersey that sees some of their number fall under the hungry onslaught of yet more corpsed-up Avengers, the remaining survivors make it to their destination to find the zombies being held a bay by a mysterious broadcast that turns out to the Vision. It seems that the mind stone embedded in his forehead repels the zombies and he’s even managed to cure Ant-Man – well, his decapitated head, anyway – but that’s the only good news because it seems that the Vision has some truly sinister motives at play…
While the concept on unleashing a zombie apocalypse the scale of Day Of The dead upon such a group of iconic characters seems perversely awesome, matters are made even more startling by the fact that this is the MCU characters that are resorting to cannibalism as bits of their limbs hang off while their former friends and teammates resort to some brutally squishy methods in order to survive. If you thought What If… The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes was an episode with a particularly ruthless edge, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Not only do we see Hank Pym being the reason everything gets fucked for the second time in five episodes, but this is the third dead Tony Stark we’ve seen since Endgame and matters get even more brutal from there. Beloved characters who’ve we have spent over ten years cheering for are popped like balloons, sliced in half and beheaded before your very eyes and while it proves to be genuinely disconcerting, it’s also bizarrely refreshing to see such heavy hitters reduced to expendable flesh sacks as the episode pulls off the animated PG version of a George Romero bloodbath.
However, while the episode flagrantly disregards the sanctity of comic life to entertaining effect, it still manages to inject enough heart and humour into proceedings to still feel like classic Marvel shenanigans. Leading the charge is Peter Parker (Hudson James doing a nicely passable Tom Holland), who innocent demeanor and bubbly nature makes him the guide to a zombie dystopia we would all want to be with. Endlessly hopeful in the face of such carnage and still somehow expelling youthful exuberance from every pore (his survival video blogs are fucking inspired), he makes a sweet counterpoint to the grizzled antics of Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, Emily VanCamp’s Sharon Carter and Danai Gurira’s Okoye who provide the badass to Peter’s quips. However, its also nice that the episode grafts in some “normies” too, with Jon Favreau’s “Happy” Hogan and David Dastmalchian’s Kurt desperately trying to keep up with their superpowered companions.
However, while things start of naturally quite extreme (this is a zombie story after all), it takes an ever deeper plunge into horror territory with its second half as we discover that a love sick Vision has been luring survivors to Camp Leigh in order to feed them to a zombified Wanda Maximoff. It’s here that we get the two most outlandish moments of an outlandish tale as we find that a captive, but still living Black Panther has already had one of his legs amputated and fed to the Scarlet Witch and that the weirdly jovial severed head of Scott Lang can’t resist dad jokes even when hes been reduced to a head in a jar.
Maybe most impressively, the episode still manages to supply some meaningful character arcs in the midst of all this flesh eating anarchy that arguably are better than those seen in the main movies. Bruce Banner has a far more satisfying resolution with his stubbon, green skinned, alter ego than he did in Infinity War (plus he gets to fight Scarlet Witch) and Evangeline Lilly’s wracked with guilt Wasp has way more to play with here than either of the two Ant-Man sequels put together.
Gleefully fun in a way that some of the more harsher episodes aren’t, it’s no wonder that this episode has managed to spawn a spin-off that’s currently gestating while I type and it proves once again just how malleable the Marvel Cinematic Universe can still be when allowed to take big, crazy swings.
All hail the MZU.
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
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