AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, SEASON TWO (2014-15)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                               PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*                                                                                                                        Though I didn't get much bang out of the slam-bang antics of AVENGERS ASSEMBLE Season One, Two offers even less impact. One thing I didn't give Season One credit for was that at least the stories packed in loads of established Marvel villains to offset the repetitious menace of the Red Skull and his Cabal. This season, the Cabal is scattered, with characters like Attuma and Modok mounting individual assaults on the heroes, and Red Skull handing off his baton of villainy to Thanos. Hyperion, the road-company Superman, is joined by four other alternate-world versions of famous DC heroes, all of whom are pretty dull. The killer robot Ultron also carries over from Season One, but the focus only upon the major menaces creates a sense of sameness in the episodes. On the plus side, at least Elvish Dracula is out of the picture.                                       

 One new hero, the Scott Lang version of Ant-Man, joins the Avengers, but like the other members, he barely has any backstory, and less personality. Maybe he improves when the series introduces his fellow shrinking-partner The Wasp, but since that character will probably be based on the girl-boss from the live-action MCU, I'm not anticipating the advent.                                                            

The villains are no better. Thanos lacks the gravitas of the comic-book original or the lesser stature of the MCU version, and his hench-villains The Black Order are dull, regardless of whether they're close to the comics-originals or not. The Squadron Supreme is no better, and though I can understand why the writers dropped the dorky name given to the "Wonder Woman" doppelganger-- that of Power Princess-- the artists took a step back in giving the character an even more dorky costume. Ultron is just Ultron. Only two episodes were slightly memorable. In "Valhalla Can Wait," Loki tricks Thor and the Hulk into visiting the domain of Hela to settle their strength-quarrels, while in "Beneath the Surface," Black Widow has an above-average subsea-catfight with a female enemy of Attuma's. Oddly, this Atlantean original shares her name, Zartra, with that of a little-remembered ancestor of Namor's Atlantis. I wouldn't have credited the writers of ASSEMBLE with knowing such Marvel minutiae.