What If, 'Zombies' - Sep 8

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about MCU once again. This time, we are back with the ‘What if?’ series, and now we got zombies.

Pause. To be more specific, zombies have a long and established career slash history in the Marvel world by now; there’s a separate comic world inhabited by the zombiefied Marvel heroes and villains, but, again, this is a separate world from the mainstream comic one – and the same can be said about the MCU take on it. Uatu the Watcher shows us different worlds from the main MCU one, and this one just happens to be infected with zombies. Fun.

Again, pre-‘Loki’, the TVA would’ve appeared in such a world and tried to fix it, at least, lest things get as bad as they did in this week’s episode when the world got nearly overrun by zombies – or maybe it actually did.

To elaborate, again, the zombies in Marvel™ are much more than just shuffling mindless corpses: at the very least, they have bestial cunning as well as reflexes, and at worst, they’re as intelligent as they were in life – and much more ruthless, usually. …In D&D, there is a monster called a ghoul or a ghast, which is based on a monster from the Arabic mythology, a ghoul or a ghul, which is something intermediate between a basic zombie and a basic vampire: it has intelligence, just as the latter does, and is much quicker and tougher than a zombie is, but otherwise? It looks more like an animated corpse, or a zombie, than a vampire, who often comes across as suave and sophisticated… at least at first. Once the fangs are out, it is all different, but still… Where were we?

Right, this week’s episode of ‘What if?’. It obviously draws upon the previous Marvel Zombies’ incarnations, though it also tries to be original by making its’ cast go all over the places and phases; there’s a non-evil (supposedly) Sharon Carter in the mix, for example, but, again, all of this mix and match comes from the Avengers’ corner of the Marvel universe; there’s no sign of mutants or of the Defenders, off the top of one’s head. There are no agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. either; Coulson’s appearance in the episode 1x03 was more of a cameo than of anything more specific; what next?

A shout-out back to ‘Shang-Chi’ in regards to mix and match in regards to the racial question: Disney/MCU appears to try to have their cake and to eat it too: in AoS, they played around with interracial relationships, (Coulson and May as the most obvious example), but somehow nothing corporeal came out of it; the best was WASP and WASP, (think the FitzSimmons), and POC and POC, (Mack and Yo-Yo). In the ‘Defenders’ franchise, there were almost no interracial relationships: WASP Jessica was with the WASP Murdoch, while Mack – who was a POC – was with a different one: progressive indeed! Is this early 21^st century or the 20^th? …Of course, the ‘Defenders’ franchise also had the ‘Iron Fist’, whose main relationship was an interracial one, but it was done very clumsily, and out of the entire Defenders’ crew, the ‘Iron Fist’ went down first – but we digressed.

…On the other hand, ‘Zombies’ does work hard to keep us focused; for an episode that is all about zombies and excitement, it feels like the biggest letdown yet: it may be an ‘Apocalypse’-based episode, but somehow the tone is all over the place, and the shout-out to ‘WandaVision’ didn’t help either, though an evil zombie Wanda was a good villain. That said, I left feeling the episode not shaken or awed, but almost bored, since it is obvious by now how the story will end: the good guys always win, even if a horde of Thanos’ zombies will arrive from space as a final twist. Sigh. When Ward was revealed as a Hydra agent back in AoS’ S1, that was a twist. This was something else, and nowhere as good, leaving the audience wish either for the blank despair of 1x04, or for the cautious optimism of 1x03. 1x05 constantly careens between the two, and leaves the audience with dissatisfaction instead. Sad, but that is real life for you. It sucks.

For now though, this is it. See you all soon!