Kaiju Battle!
Well, let’s close out the year with
What If…? one last time. This is supposedly the final season, but we’ll
see.
Last time on What If…? Peggy
Carter had to battle a friend. She was saved from being stuck in 1602 by
Strange Supreme, the evil Dr. Strange she’d befriended as part of the Guardians
of the Multiverse. He took her to his Sanctum Infinitum and showed her his
collection of Universe Killers, beings from alternate dimensions that could in
theory have destroyed their home realities. He asks for her help in tracking
down an escapee and sends her into a Universe where the Red Skull won World War
2, both Sharon Carter and Steven Rogers having died in the bombing at Project Rebirth
and destroyed the world. She meets the escapee, and its Kahhori. This is the
point where we learn that Strange Supreme has lost whatever tenuous grip on
sanity he’d had and had been capturing Universe Enders and other immensely powerful
beings to sacrifice in a ritual to restore his universe. Kahhori and Carter
team up, freeing dozens of Strange’s captives in a prison riot. Strange starts
dumping prisoners into his forge and tries to get Carter and Kahhori into it as
well, but the women are outfitted with gear from Strange’s other victims to get
a powerup, the most memorable of which being a Hela giving Carter her helmet
and shouting for her to give him hell. They’re able to separate Stephen Strange
from the demon he’d taken within him, Carter trying to get him to see Christine
wouldn’t want this. Strange merges with the Demon again and they’re knocked
into the Forge. Carter catches herself, Strange Supreme tries to blast her but
Stephen stops his dark side from doing so, making him the final sacrifice.
Carter is brought to the Watcher’s realm. Uatu says he’ll bring her home now,
but first shows her that Kahhori made it back, and what Strange Supreme wrought.
He reforged his universe but ensured that he would not be born into it. So,
Christine can live but will never know him. The two depart on the long way home
to Captain Carter’s universe. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
Ep 19: What If… The Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?
We open with an 80s Anime era
opening. The Avengers fought against evil for years until the Hulk lost control
and started fighting against his friends. He unleashed a horde of Gamma Beasts,
giant Kaiju monsters to battle his former friends. To battle these giant
beasts, Tony had the bright idea to make Gundams… I mean giant mechs to fight
them. We cut out to see a girl watching this show on an iPad, right before an
actual Gamma Beast attack begins, destroying her home.
Uatu takes us back to see how this “Gamma
War” got started, saying it began with a friendship, and showing us Bruce
Banner running around the DC area as Sam Wilson calls “on your left” to him as
he gets close to passing. They introduce themselves to each other after and
bond a little as Sam gets Bruce talking about the ways he’s trying to de-stress
to keep the Hulk at bay. He gets Bruce to start going to group therapy and we
hear about how Bruce admits that he’s just as afraid of containing the Hulk as
anyone. Sam tries to keep helping which seems to work until a day out on a
fishing boat where a sudden storm causes a boon to break and nearly knock
someone into the water. Banner saves the fisher but gets hit hard and transforms
into the Hulk as a defense mechanism. Sam tries to talk him down but the Hulk flees,
feeling ashamed that Sam saw that side of him. Desperate, Bruce tries the
dumbest plan I’ve ever head of and thinks that overdosing himself on Gamma
energy will drive the Hulk out. The huge amount of Gamma energy he takes in
instead causes a whole new Hulk beast to branch out from him and take form. The
creature, dubbed Apex by Uatu, escaped, grew in size and eventually started
asexually budding to form an army of monsters. To battle these bigger, meaner Hulks,
the Avengers built bigger, meaner Hulk Busters to face them. The original
Avengers fought hard but were killed in the struggle. The next generation of
Avengers, led by Sam Wilson’s Captain America and Captain Monica Rambeau fought
the beasts back into the sea and seemingly finished them off. But ten years
later and the monsters are appearing again.
Sam, Monica, and Bucky meet with
their allies via telecon and tell them about how the Gamma Beasts have returned
and have begun attacking costal cities. Red Guardian insists that they won’t
dare face off against him in Mother Russia again, and Melina Roskov tells him
she wouldn’t really call it a battle when he ran away. Nakia says that they’re
detecting the same Gamma signature of the original Apex in the Arctic. Monica
suggest that they get Bruce Banner on it, but Sam refuses to consider that. He tells
the others to watch their territories while he and Monica head out. Bucky asks
her if she really thinks that Bruce is a better call. She says they won the
last war by the skin of their teeth and you don’t get that lucky again. She
tells Bucky to track down Banner and get him on this. He says that according to
that old cartoon, Bruce lives in a lab at the center of a Volcano. Good show,
though.
Sam and Monica travel out into the
ice and are attacked by two Gamma Beasts. They try to hold the monsters off but
get knocked under the ice and see hundreds of the creatures begin to surface. They
call back a little and see the Gamma Beasts marshalling around Apex, who has
returned and is twice the size of its offspring. The lesser Gamma Beasts seem
to react to Apex’s roars and Sam realizes that this isn’t an infestation, it’s
an invasion. Sam and Monica are knocked back by the beasts roar and they move
out.
Monica and Sam start making repairs
on their mechs, Bucky calling Monica and letting her know what he’s found. Officially,
Banner’s location doesn’t exist, but he’s found the black site where he was stashed
away. Monica goes over to Sam and tries to talk to him. Sam is adamantly
against getting in touch with Bruce, but Monica insists that this is the only
way they can stop this. And points out that it’s weird he seems more scared of
Bruce, his friend, than of the Gamma Beasts. Sam relents and Monica tells him where
to go.
Sam flies out to the Astra Islands in
his mech. He disembarks and searches around the island for Bruce. He finds him
in the jungle, and Bruce brings him to his ‘home’ an abandoned nuclear bomber
plane. Sam tells him what’s happened, and Bruce says he can’t help. He says he
hasn’t had an incident in years and can’t throw away that progress. Sam insists
that they need a Gamma beast of their own to fight it. He says that they don’t
need him, they need a flash drive of his. He calls the program the ‘Mighty
Avenger Protocol” and that that’ll give them a fighting chance. Sam says that
that’s it, they use his program and that he gets to keep hiding. He says that
maybe if Bruce faced his beast he might be able to get past it. Bruce tells him
that he made the Protocol precisely for that, so there could be people to face
off against him. Sam tells Bruce that he never saw a Monster when he looked at
Bruce, he only ever saw his friend. And he thought that maybe if Bruce helped,
he'd finally understand that.
Same heads towards the rest of his
Team, Monica telling him that the Apex and co are about to make landfall in New
York. It’s always New York. He uploads the Might Avenger Protocol to the others
and they prepare to use it. The Beasts make landfall as the main Avengers land.
The Team consists of Monica, Red Guardian and Black Widow (Melina), Shang-Chi,
Bucky, Nakia, and Moon Knight. They hold off a few beasts before Sam joins them
and they activate the Mighty Avenger Protocol, which causes their mechs to merge
into a Megazord. Their Megazord is able to mow through the lesser Gamma Beasts,
but Apex proves too much for them, the Megazord being knocked back and out. Things
seem bleak until Bruce announces over the radio ‘On your left,’ and it’s
revealed he’s flying his bomber plane into the fray. He put himself into the
decommissioned gamma bomb and prepped it to go off with him inside. He drops
the bomb and sets it off, absorbing gigajoules of Gamma radiation and transforming
into the Dragonzord… I mean, Hulk-Zilla. Hulk-Zilla battles Apex, Sam and the
others realizing that Bruce decided to go this route in the hope he can beat Apex
and replace him as leader of the Gamma Beasts. Apex gets Hulk down, but Sam
decides to give him a hand, launching one of the Mech’s fists at the Apex to
distract it. Hulk is freed and knocks Apex aside, using atomic breath to
obliterate the Apex and then snorting its ashes up into him. The others get
ready to fight Hulk-zilla, but Sam tells them all to stand down. He marches up
to Hulk-zilla and tries to talk his friend down. Sam tells him that even like
this, he sees Bruce as a friend, and he bets his life that Bruce still sees one
too. This seems to get through to Bruce, who marches into the sea and draws the
lesser Gamma Beasts after him. Monica apologies to Sam for what happened,
saying that she knows Bruce was his friend. Sam insists that they still are. The
episode ends with Sam flying back to the Astra Island and Hulk-zilla leading
his lesser Gamma Beasts there to live. How sweet.
That was an okay episode. Like a lot
of other What If…?, I feel like the story is hampered by how short the
runtime is. With just 30 minutes to play with we were sprinting from moment to
moment to get to the ending. I think this would have worked a lot better with
another half hour tacked on. We could have played around a bit more with how
Sam was avoiding trying to find Banner despite him being the best solution to
their problem and given us more time with the individual Hulk Buster mechs
before they merge into their Megazord formation. The idea of Shang-Chi, Moon
Knight, Nakia, and Red Guardian all on a team together is super neat and I’m disappointed
that we barely got any time with any of the Mech Avengers besides Sam. On the
other hand, I do like how ultimately the Hulk in the title was just clickbait.
Marvel projects have an unfortunate habit of writing lots of evil Hulk
variants. It almost seems like they think it’s inevitable that Bruce will snap,
or a darker version of the Hulk will take control and he’ll be an absolute
horrible monster after the fact. Like in the Old Man Logan, alternate
timeline where the Hulk rules about a quarter of the continental US and his
chief enforcers are his inbred hillbilly children and Grandchildren he'd had (against
her will) with his cousin Jen. And then there’s the time Hulk leads his Warband
against the heroes of Earth; Maestro, an evil Smart hulk from an alt future;
and numerous other evil future Hulks. So instead of having the Apex being a
Hulk monster that it’s tied directly into Bruce Banner’s flesh is a nice change
of pace. And I appreciate giving Bruce the win of choosing to transform into
the Hulk-Zilla and getting to keep enough of his humanity even in this new form
to lead the other beasts away. It’s the kind of win he doesn’t often seem to
get. So yeah, okay story, could have been longer. Next time Aggy Harkness is
headed to Hollywood. Neat.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/118690774/
Bluesky: basicssuperhero@blsk.social
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