Warning: comments below contain spoilers.
The Avengers and Thunderbolts stage an issue-long intervention with Moonstone, who has absorbed a great deal of “transnormal energy” and launched into a fit of destructive pique. The gathered super-beings try ineffectively to either talk or beat her down as she hurls off a string of barbed psychological critiques and crushes them with gravimetric energy.
There seems to be a central assumption in this series – the Avengers should have given Baron Zemo the benefit of the doubt — which I find impossible to swallow. Since, despite the title, it’s essentially a Thunderbolts story, the narrative almost demands that they be in the right, that the reader believe they could have handled the situation but for the Avengers’ blundering, self-righteous interference.
This ignores the fact that no sane person in the Marvel Universe would trust Baron Zemo, given the ledger of his actions over time. It also glosses over the fact that the Avengers have already given Zemo and the Thunderbolts an extraordinary amount of freedom to demonstrate their intentions and only intervened directly when the scale of Zemo’s ambition seemed to grow exponentially. From any sensible view, the Avengers would be irresponsible not to at least investigate the situation.
There’s also an odd moment when Moonstone decries the Avengers’ “ridiculous lofty standard,” as if the Thunderbolts have cornered the market on redemption. That she spits this charge at a group of Avengers that includes a charter member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, an android created to destroy the Avengers, the former henchman of an enemy spy, an intermittently mad scientist given to dangerous psychotic breaks, and a recovering alcoholic in a battle suit undermines her position to a crippling extent.
The smartest choice of the issue is the choice of Songbird as this chapter’s narrator. (The perspective has shifted with each issue.) Songbird is the character who rests most uncomfortably between the two teams, closer to the Avengers in terms of ideology but tied to the Thunderbolts emotionally. Unfortunately, as with previous issues, the story is overwhelmed by psychological evaluation.
Whether it’s blistering diagnoses from Moonstone or Songbird’s narrative observations, all of the Thunderbolts are under the personality microscope. Zemo, Vantage, and Hawkeye get in on the act, which amounts to a great deal of telling what these people are about and very little in the way of showing. Even when somebody does act consistently with their described nature, there’s accompanying narration to make sure we don’t miss the significance. Of course, the premise doesn’t really demand any balancing evaluation of why the Avengers do what they do.
The timeline of the issue is odd, too. While it’s essentially a long fight scene (verbal and physical), there’s time for one character to change armor (mid-sentence) and another to be contacted (through a third party) and travel from a different planet entirely without any explanation of the means used to do so.
I have to admit being affected by the context for this series. Starring one group of characters whose title was cancelled over a year ago and another who are about to be revamped to the point of obsolescence, this could have stood as the last “traditional” Avengers story. (Chuck Austen’s run on the Avengers’ own title hardly counts, as he could rarely be bothered to focus on the title characters.) While writers Kurt Busiek and Fabian Nicieza couldn’t have known this at the time, the story they’ve crafted just stacks more kindling on the pyre, playing the Avengers as outmoded in morally ambiguous situations, shouting “Avengers… assemble!” in the midst of a mess of their own making.
It’s all supposed to be about issues of trust and redemption and shifting alliances, but it ends up being too exhaustingly chatty to achieve that. It’s convoluted instead of complex, and it doesn’t create any balance between the opposing forces. It’s a mess, honestly.