Anyone familiar with Bryan Andrews’ animated Marvel work will know he likes a big finish. In fact, we had three season finales worth of What If..? that all ended with stupidly huge endings that saw obscenely powerful mix-n-match villains hitting their god-like stride as the assembled cast of that season engaged them in supremely complicated combat. Well, to absolutely no one’s surprise, he’s done it again with the final round up for Marvel Zombies – but with added dismemberment.
However equally unsurprising is the fact that unlike his multiverse spanning show, zombie media isn’t usually constricted into having a happy ending (have you seen Night Of The Living Dead?), so as the moldering forces of the Queen Of The Dead mass for the final battle, there’s no actual guarantee that we’re going to get a happy ending out of this. Gather round fellow Marvelites, it’s time to lay Marvel Zombies to rest – for now.
After avoiding the attempts of the Nova Corps containment fleet to blow them to pieces, Kamala Kahn and her fellow defenders of the living have found temporary sanctuary at Kamar-Taj, however, it’s only a brief lull in the struggle against rot and ruin as Wanda Maximoff’s ultimate plan has been revealed. To cut a long story short, it has something to do with the Infinity Hulk.
OK, to explain, maybe I need to make a short story long and delve into some background. Five years ago, when Black Panther sacrificed himself by throwing himself, Zombie Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet into the vibranium core of Wakanda, the resulting explosion could have torn through the entire planet. However, it turns out that Bruce Banner had survived his earlier scrape with Maximoff and, with the help of the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj, threw his Hulk body into the breach in order to use it to contain the vast energies at play. The resulting being is the Infinity Hulk, and it’s his power that Wanda is hoping to steal to achieve her goal.
The battle is joined and it’s vicious with our surviving heroes and an insanely powerful Hulk fending off such zombified fiends as a size-shifting Hank Pym, an undead Thor and Kamala’s lost friends all brought back from the dead. However, Kamala soon learns that it isn’t just the Hulk’s extra power that Wanda has her milky white eyes on and that the true key to her diabolical victory is to claim Kamala’s power for herself as well – but why?
As the Scarlet Witch uses her freaky hex powers to reach into Ms. Marvel’s mind, she claims that her aims are ultimately benevolent and she’s actually looking to save the world – but what does “save” actually mean like to an undead witch with zombie army. She Wanda telling the truth? Is she lying? As her friends fall one by one in exceedingly gruesome ways, Kamala has to make a choice that will effect everything. Is it the right one, or is she dead wrong?
There are a few things that you’re going to have to accept if you’re going to enjoy the final episode of Marvel Zombies. The first is that technically, it isn’t the final episode at all as it leaves the door open so wide for a second season, both the Hulk and the Abomination could walk through it shoulder to shoulder without so much as even grazing the door frame. Now, while this isn’t entirely unexpected – this is Marvel after all – it does end up leaving a few too many questions left unanswered while simultaneously cooking up a cliff hanger which lands more in the realms of unsatisfying than making you want to tear your hair out in anticipation of a sequel. However, Andrews seemingly has a plan to counteract this and it’s essentially to make virtually the entire episode the final (sort of) battle as he raises the stakes and the body count with determined enthusiasm.
So let’s focus on those less endearing attributes first, and while things get suitably big and epic, it seems that Zeb Wells’ script simply isn’t interested in giving us too many answers about anything. Yes, shows need to leave certain things unsaid in order to stoke up the fires of a plot for the next season so all this might not be a problem if the Marvel Zombies return, but in the right now, it’s something of an issue.
Take the Scarlet Witch for example. Despite getting Lizzie Olsen herself in to voice the big bad, it hints that despite being a dedicated husk with Beyoncé’s ability to constantly have wind blowing dramatically through her hair, her second full shift into evil after the Doctor Strange sequel just leaves too many questions to work as well as it could. We don’t know which of her forms is now the dominant one – the screaming zombie, or her old, human one who is mostly utilised in a more diplomatic way before the chaos starts – we still don’t know exactly what she hopes to achieve from absorbing the powers of Infinity Hulk as she’s pretty much already taken over and decimated the world. There’s hints in the twist ending that she might of cast a WandaVision type spell to give everyone – even the Zombies – the illusion of a normal existence, but to be honest we just don’t know anything other than Kamala is alive (ironic considering Wells killed her in his Spider-Man comic run) and in some sort of fake reality, but in all honesty, it’s more of a “huh?” finish rather than an “OMG!” one.
I think my real issue about leaving so many aspects of the plot unsaid is that so many characters have died to get us to this place that the show starts to shift from being amusingly merciless to becoming a bit of a genuine downer. Thor becomes a zombie, Blade is atomised, Shang-Chi is savaged by the severed body parts of his friends, Valkyrie is stabbed – it just all gets a little much if you’re going to maintain that the show is going to continue.
However, as if to make up for one too many answered questions and an ending that (for now) goes nowhere, Andrews rolls up his sleeves and delivers yet another gargantuan action sequence that makes you wonder if the director plans out his setpieces by literally recording himself smashing action figures together. Joining such previously combined beings such as an Infinity powered Ultron and Captain Carter carrying a variety of multiversal weapons comes a Hulk that’s got the powers of cosmic bling pumping through his gamma irradiated bod; but while there’s an argument to be made that Andrews has an obsession with throwing Infinity Stones at any given narrative problem, it essentially evaporates when he obliterates the Abomination with a single punch.
The enjoyably spiteful show ultimately stumbles across the finish line due an ending that leaves way too much wide open for a second season and yet doesn’t give you much to root for. The use of Kamala Kahn was a savvy one, but her Doctor Strange style decision to offer up her powers to a victorious Wanda simply isn’t explored enough to not make it feel like a cop out. Worse yet, seminal moments like Kamala meeting Spider-Man (two excitable peas in a pod if there ever were any), and a potential return of Riri Williams are annoyingly brief. However, if you want to watch insanely epic zombie carnage such as Spidey yanking the heads of a dozen ghouls simultaneously with his webs, or revel in the sight of Valkyrie slicing up a giant Wasp from the inside, Marvel Zombies has you fully covered. However, when the show inevitably rises from the dead in a year or two, a stronger balance between plot, characters and gore would help it become more than a mean spirited act of monumental world building.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 