AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES S1x001

"IRON MAN IS BORN!"
Written by Brandon Auman | Directed by Vinton Heuck

The Plot: Iron Man defends the United Nations from an attack by Hydra. While fighting against some dreadnaught robots, he discovers that the terrorists are using his technology in their war machines. SHIELD arrives as the battle winds down, and Iron Man realizes that SHIELD's Mandroid suits are also designed using Stark tech. Iron Man confronts Nick Fury aboard SHIELD's helicarrier, and following their argument, Fury realizes that there's a leak within SHIELD.

The captured Hydra operatives are taken to the Vault, where Fury interviews Baron Wolfgang von Strucker. Meanwhile, one of the Hydra agents is revealed as the villainous Grim Reaper in disguise. The Reaper springs Strucker and presents him with his Satan's Claw gauntlet, which allows the elderly villain to drain life force from SHIELD agents and restore his youth. But Fury defeats both Strucker and the Reaper, and they're recaptured.

Continuity Notes: this episode features the debuts of Tony Stark/Iron Man, his operating system, JARVIS, Pepper Potts, James Rhodes, and Hydra, plus Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Jimmy Woo, and SHIELD. The Hulk is mentioned a couple of times as well, and it's noted that super-villains are becoming more common in the world.

The Vault is described as "the first of the super-villain prisons", for tech-based super-criminals. Among its inmates are the Crimson Dynamo, Technovore, MODOK, and Strucker. Two more prisons -- the Cube and the Big House -- are mentioned, with Fury hinting, to Hill's surprise, at the existence of a fourth.

During the fight between Fury and Strucker, the baron saps some of Fury's life force, giving the head of SHIELD his distinctive gray temples as he gets a bit older.

My Thoughts: Ahead of the debut of the series proper, EARTH's MIGHTIEST HEROES released five "microseries", little bite-sized chunks of episode, online. Each microseries focused on one of the founding Avengers, so you had one devoted to Iron Man, one to Thor, one to the Hulk, one to Ant-Man (and the Wasp), and one to Captain America. I think the idea was that you might imagine these characters all had ongoing TV shows up to this point, so you were seeing something like "episode 27 of IRON MAN", "episode 16 of THOR", etc., to establish that these characters existed and had histories and supporting casts prior to the start of EMH. This, plus the fact that there are pre-existing villains already incarcerated (and, as we'll see in the upcoming microseries episodes, still on the loose as well), creates a feeling that this world has existed for a long time, and we're just now catching up with it. I absolutely love this approach.

Following their online release and then subsequent to the airing of the two-part series premiere (which we'll get to in about a month), the micro-chapters were combined together to make five full episodes of the first season. My recollection, and we'll see as we keep going whether I'm right, is that every microseries had three chapters devoted to its title character, with the final two dedicated to a secondary character or villain. So in this case, we have Iron Man's adventure against Hydra, followed by a "Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD" story.

So far, the series is off to a good start. Iron Man would've been the most recognizable Avenger at the time this show was produced, with two blockbuster movies under his belt, so it makes sense that he would headline the first episode. Eric Loomis portrays the Golden Avenger, and while his "nearly there but not quite" impression of Robert Downey Jr. gets just a bit grating now and then, for the most part it's fine -- and I can understand why the producers would've wanted an RDJ sound-alike, even if none of the remaining Avengers will sound anything like their bigscreen counterparts (in part because most of the characters had yet to make their MCU debuts).

The rest of the cast is fine, though I admit to not knowing who a lot of them are. I was a bit of a voice actor aficionado as a child and a teen, but by my thirties, when EMH premiered, I had lost track of the newer voices in the business. So while I know the great Phil Lamarr as JARVIS, a lot of the other performers were (and still are) mostly blank slates for me. Interestingly, the Grim Reaper's actor is uncredited in this particular episode, but it turns out he was voiced by the inimitable Lance Henriksen!

One of the things I really like about this episode is the Nick Fury mini-adventure that closes it out. Visually, this is the "Ultimate/MCU" Fury, being African American, but he's clearly far more inspired by the Silver Age Jim Steranko version of the character than either of those other interpretations. He gets into brawls iwth bad guys, wears the classic SHIELD jumpsuit (with emergency glider wings built in!) and has a flying car. Plus, as noted above, by the end of the episode, he has white temples.

There's a lot of conversation between Pepper, Rhodey, and Tony about the fact that Iron Man is doing his thing alone, and that Pepper is uncertain he can handle everything the world has to throw at him by himself. It gets a little ham-handed by the third or fourth time it comes up in the episode, but I get it -- they want to plant the seeds, early and often, that Iron Man is a loner and believes he doesn't need help, in order to set up some conflict when the Avengers are eventually formed. That's about the only nit I have to pick with the script, however, which is otherwise great.

Like I said up top, the series is off to a good start -- and I love that, besides the seeds for the Avengers' team-up, other sub-plots are being planted as well, with Fury's comment about summoning Black Widow to find the SHIELD leak, plus mentions of the Hulk and the other villain prisons -- and the fact that we're presented with an antagonistic relationship between Iron Man and SHIELD right off the bat. (In the comics, I like SHIELD as the good guys. I hate when they're used as a corrupt organization and pitted against our heroes. But that's not what this is. This is simply a case of Iron Man not liking SHIELD, and I'm fine with that.)

Next Week: "Thor the Mighty!"