The Red Skull Pops His Ugly Mug up to Menace the Avengers [Review]

The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes! have a new threat, but is he someone Captain America already has experience with? Click “More” to read our review!

S2, Episode 19: Code Red

While Cap and Iron Man work out, Tony asks Cap if he would become the new, permenant leader of the Avengers. Just then, a toxic attack on the Mansion deforms Cap. A large part of the city is also affected by the cloud of toxic chemicals. Everyone it comes into contact with watches their skin turn red. After Wasp gets infected, Secretary of Defence Dell Rusk calls in, blames the Avengers for the incident, and tells the team they are shut down until further notice. Rusk’s team of super heroes (Red Hulk, Falcon, Doc Samson, and Winter Soldier) attempt to take down the Avengers. As each Avenger falls to the toxin, they discover it was the Department of Defense who set off the device. When a cure is found, Tony finds Captain America isn’t on site. Winter Soldier has taken Cap to Rusk. Tony tries to cure Cap from a distance with a missile carrying the cure, but Winter Soldier stops it. Cap discovers Rusk is his old adversary, Red Skull. When Winter Soldier delivers the cure instead of finishing Cap off, Cap is healthy enough to defeat the Skull. When Cap goes back to Rusk’s office to find Winter Soldier, he’s nowhere to be found.

This was a pretty darn good episode of Avengers. While it’s safe to say this is far more suspenseful than it is action-packed, the suspense seems to be delivered through the action. Iron Man is racing to find a cure before any of the team can be killed by the Red Skull’s toxin, while the others are protecting the home turf. Each falls to the toxin one by one making it harder and harder for Tony to find that cure. Thor successfully takes the toxic cloud into space, but the Skull is tricky… He has Red Hulk waiting for them and the two heavyweights go at it and match each other’s blows. That ultimately prevents Thor from being able to get back to the mansion where he could easily handle the Code Red team. It’s well-written and everything seems to fit together quite nicely. It’s the first time the Red Skull is seen since the Cap intro micro-episodes. There’s a real feeling of claustrophobia in the mansion as Tony locks himself into the lab while the Skull’s men encroach ever so steadily. The episode just carries this visceral tone that you can literally feel as it plays out.

For those who are new to comics (or only started reading comics over the past 5-10 years), you might be a tad surprised who wrote the comic book arc this episode was based on. For about a year and a half, right before he signed his career away to DC Comics, Geoff Johns was the writer of the Avengers comic series (yes, there used to only be ONE Avengers series, kids). During this time, he wrote a story called “Red Zone” in which the Red Skull, disguised as Dell Rusk, infected a town in America for which the Avengers race against the clock to try to cure. “Code Red” seems to borrow heavily on this story, changing it a bit to make it fit into the flow of the series a little better.

Tags: Comic Book TV Slider The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes!