Reviewing Marvel Zombies Episodes (2 of 4)
Marvel Zombies Is Certainly A Bombastic TV Series
The second part of Marvel Zombies impressed me because of how weird it is, even compared to the first episode. The series really has become the bloody, gory toy box I talked about before, where Marvel characters are put in totally new frameworks.
That doesn’t—somehow—make these episodes not cliché, though. The first episode was about getting a “cure” to a location, but there were challenges along the way. This second episode starts off with the zombie outbreak first starting, pivots to a Mad Max parody for some reason, and then settles into being about a safe haven with a horrible secret.
Marvel Zombies Plays With Common Zombie Ideas
But again, this makes Marvel Zombies delightfully unpredictable. Instead of going back to Kamala, we jump to a version of Shang-Chi who’s never had his movie’s plot and gets the ten rings in a totally different way. And the big zombie outbreak scene gives us a ton of fun visuals as a certain type of super-technology spices up the carnage, danger, and makes the scene feel extra chaotic. I would’ve watched an entire episode of that scene, as long as it continued being that creative. But it time skips. It shifts locations. It tells story moments out of series order, and crosses over with episode one.
And the evil secret that holds up the safe haven? Well, fantastically, it’s not what I expected (I thought the abundant food on the ship was because of cannibalism). It’s a bleak “twist” foreshadowed effectively. It makes sense in the world—more or less—and just works well as a conflict. The relentless pursuit of Wanda’s controlled zombies is a fine catalyst to create general tension, but I like that this conflict doesn’t focus on that entirely. There are more dangers to consider.
The Slower Pacing Actually Works Super Well Here
But honestly, the real secret as to why this episode of Marvel Zombies works so well for me is that it has time to breathe and uses it well. I like me some fast-paced fun, and that worked for the last episode, but there are calm moments here. Multiple, even. The characters get to have fun, eat together, and even have—if somewhat hokey—conversations about their feelings. Even during the breakneck zombie attack scenes, the story takes these little pauses for emotional (and well-performed) dialogue. I don’t want a dour show, but it’s nice to sometimes acknowledge how bleak this world is, and just how many people died from the zombies.
Marvel Zombies Episode 2 Has Some Great Acting
The only actual big complaint I have at the moment is the terrible in-between scene. An homage to Mad Max: Fury Road is completely out of nowhere and ends quickly. And though maybe I’m not as on top of the lore as I think, Skrulls are people, right? They’re just a different species, correct? Why the hell does the scene treat their violent deaths as cartoonish fun? It makes multiple heroic characters that we’re supposed to like out as horrible, murderous people. It’s such a bad scene that I actually have to just pretend it didn’t happen to move forward with the series. Marvel Zombies certainly forgets it and won’t likely ever mention it again. Especially because—going off what I’ve reviewed so far—episodes appear to be doing the anthology thing. Start with some other patch of Marvel characters, somewhere else, before interlocking it all with what’s come before. Because of that, episode three has every chance to do what episode two did, but better, and with no massive issues, and that’s where my hope lies. That’s what I want to watch next.
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