Reviewing Marvel Zombies Episodes (3 of 4)

Marvel Zombies Failed To Keep Things Consistent

Marvel Zombies fell so far with this third episode. Every bad habit of the series, it seems, rushed out to the forefront, and the main thing to enjoy ends up being the gore. Not the animation—that’s often awful, full of plastic faces and stiff action scenes. The creative gore specifically makes this episode watchable.

I mean it. In the middle of extremely rushed character arcs and the story bouncing between generic problem to generic problem, there are moments of zombies speared through, but still being alive. There are moments of someone being torn to pieces and their head flying up among the chunks. The animators have a good understanding of how to keep zombie attacks brutal and violent, so they never really lose their threatening aura. That’s tough in a lot of zombie fiction, so points to Marvel Zombies.

The Zombie Hordes Are Still One Of The Best Parts

The only other compliment I can give—and it’s just an extension of the first—is that the gore is also used to set up twists and stakes-raising plot points. It’s not all spectacle. I could’ve guessed the exact nature of Wanda’s feast given a few more moments, but that doesn’t make the scene not a great use of several tropes. Obviously, the timeline of when the food would affect people is synced up perfectly for drama, but I can look past that sort of stuff. That’s fun.

What’s not fun is the stuff I’ve complained about in my intro—and now I will go into with a fervor. Basically, if I boil it down, this episode of Marvel Zombies has a dialog problem, and it’s really sunk in. It’s so bad it manifests in three separate issues. Yes, three.

Marvel Zombies Made Some Weird Scene Choices

The first one was unavoidable, but makes things very strange. Obviously, no one else is going to voice Black Panther here. That’s completely understandable. And the silent scenes work fine. But having Spider-Man tell us Black Panther’s last words second-hand feels wrong. And it’s very hard not to notice whenever someone isn’t voiced by their actual actor otherwise, especially after so many people came back for this show.

The second is the “comedy” dialog. Oh, my God. There’s a string of “jokes” that have terrible timing, are not funny, and just kind of fill space. The gore scenes are not rendered more impactful because of the tone change, either. Marvel Zombies episode three is simply made uneven and briefly annoying by making characters quip when they have no good reason.

Marvel Zombies Doesn’t Need Its Comedy Scenes

And finally, the dialog writing overall is bad. Not just the jokes. The whole thing. Peter Parker’s opening narration has so many “but then!” moments that it started to feel like bad prose in an under-baked novel. And the amount of truncated, expositional, or generic statements that happen in this episode infuriated me. Kamala has to talk Alexei out of his suicidal stupor in one of the opening scenes. And that’s a great idea. What a chance for some emotional dialog! It could’ve been a great scene about hope. But instead, Kamala convinces him so quickly it’s like she flipped his “fight on” switch. The last episode did such a good job getting across his grief, and the brutal twist of the feast scene in this episode was narratively cruel—but damn effective—writing for that arc. What happened in between? Was a longer scene cut for time, or something?

If this were a normal three-episode review of a show with a whole season, this is where I’d have written Marvel Zombies off as likely unrecoverable, or at least deeply uneven, and moved on. But there is only one episode left. It has some chance of sticking some form of some landing. The big twist at the end of this installment, and the open-ended Spider-Man plot, make it seem like the show has a concrete plan for a wrap-up, if nothing else. So, I may as well see if that plan has any merit. 

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