3.5. Hulk 2
Bruce Banner is in Los Angeles visiting an old friend and mentor, physicist Geoffrey Crawford, who he believes may be able to help him in his search for a cure.
Dr Crawford tells him his research looks promising, but reminds Bruce of his promise give a guest lecture to his students at UCLA in exchange for Crawford's help, to which Bruce replies that he hadn't forgotten, but he was hoping Crawford had.
The auditorium is packed for Bruce's lecture, but it quickly becomes clear that most of the students are only interested superheroes, not physics. Eventually he relents, and agrees to answer five off-topic questions. He gets asked about other Avengers, and the Chitauri Invasion and answers them good naturedly enough. Then for the last question, a student asks him what it's like to be the Hulk.
Although he knows the kind of answer the students are hoping for, he answers honestly, talking about what it feels like to live his life knowing that at any moment it might be yanked out of his hands, and no knowing whether he's going to come back to find Hulk has saved the world, or whether a simple disagreement he could have resolved will have been escalated to mass death and destruction.
As he's talking, students begin pulling out their phones, and even just walking out, until there's only a handful of students left in the auditorium. Annoyed, Bruce asks if he was really that disappointing, and one of the remaining students tells him that there's been an explosion on campus.
Bruce follows the students outside, and sees smoke coming from one of the buildings. He overhears one of the students say that it's where Dr Crawford's lab is, and realises that there a risk of contamination. He takes of running across the campus and tries to explain to the campus police who are guarding the area that there's a risk of radiation.
As he's arguing with them, something moves in the ruined lab, and Bruce and the police watch in horror as a Gamma Monster emerges from the ruins, wearing the remains of Dr Crawford's labcoat. Bruce is backing up, desperately trying to keep Hulk from taking over and making things worse.
Just as it looks like he'll have no choice but to hulk-out, a group of costumed heroes, the Alliance, arrive and take charge. Working together, they corral Dr Crawford. He seems to be calming down, starting to revert to his human form, when there's a sudden high pitched noise. Bruce reacts immediately, covering his ears and starting to go green, though he manages to fight back the transformation. But Dr Crawford goes wild, roaring and swiping blindly at nothing, and before Bruce can react, Bi-Beast breaks Crawford's neck, killing him.
Later, back at the Avengers Tower, Bruce is on a video call with Tony Stark while Tony is fitting Clint Barton with new body armour. Bruce tells Tony about what happened, and his theory that the Alliance had somehow forced Crawford to go mad in order to kill him. Tony is skeptical, pointing out that there's no motive, which Bruce concedes. However, after the call Tony has JARVIS bring up footage of the attack taken from people's social media uploads, to look for anything suspicious. He doesn't see anything particularly odd, but Clint has JARVIS freeze the footage and zoom in on the face of the Alliance's archer, Trickshot. As the image appears on the screen, Clint goes white, and tells Tony he's taking the Avengers Quinjet.
The next day, Bruce visits Dr Crawford's wife to offer his condolences, and do a bit of sluething. He tries asking if Dr Crawford had any enemies, but is seems Crawford was exactly who he appeared to be - a mild-mannered scientist who loved his work and lived quietly.
Disheartened, Bruce returns to his hotel room to find Clint has broken in to wait for him. Clint tells him that he thinks Bruce is right, not necessarily about Crawford's death being murder, but certainly about the Alliance not being on the level. When Bruce asks how he knows that, whether this is S.H.I.E.L.D intel, Clint says no, he knows because Trickshot is his brother.
Bruce accepts the offer to fill in for Crawford at UCLA in order to have an excuse to remain in Los Angeles, and he and Clint spend their free time surveillling the Alliance, trying to figure out their deal. However, the Alliance seem to be genuinely well-meaning. They fight bad guys, rescue kittens from trees, lecture vandals on social responsibility. Boomerang even volunteers at a soup kitchen.
Bruce is ready to give up and admit that it was all a misunderstanding, but Clint is detirmined. He's tracked the team to their secret base, and he wants to break in and search it, even though Bruce thinks it's a bad idea. When Bruce pushes him, he tells him his backstory, about how Barney had beaten him and left him for dead as a teenager because he wouldn't help him commit armed robbery. He can't accept that Barney has really just turned hero after sinking that low. Reluctantly, Bruce agrees to go with him to search the base, but says that if they don't find anything, that needs to be the end of it, which Clint agrees to.
They break into the base and initially everything seems normal enough, and then they enter the main room. There, sitting in front of a bank of screens, is Samuel Sterns. His head is swolen and visibly mutated, but he's not green like the Hulk. When he stands to greet the intruders, we see that he's frail, and connected up to a bag on a drip stand.
Initially Bruce assumes that this means he was correct, this is all an evil scheme, but Sterns assures him that the Alliance really are heroes. He reminds Bruce that he'd helped him, and he'd only wanted to mutate other people because he genuinely thought it would advance humanity, but he knows better now, because the irradiated blood which gave him his powers is killing him. He started and manages the Alliance because he wants them to be his legacy.
The Alliance get back from their mission, and rush to the control room to protect their leader, but Sterns insists that Bruce and Clint are friends. When Bruce challenges Sterns about Crawford's death, Songbird leaps to his defence, tearfully admitting that it was her fault, but it had been an accident. She hasn't had her powers for very long, and she's still learning to control them. When Clint asks why they'd killed him instead of taking him into custody, Bi-Beast says it had exactly calculated the risk Crawford posed to the civilians, and killing him was the only option.
Bruce and Clint leave, but on the way out, Barney corners Clint, but to Clint's fury he doesn't even try and apologise, just makes small talk.
Back at their hotel, they say goodnight, but Bruce can't sleep. Eventually he gets up and knocks on Clint's door, guessing that he won't be sleeping either, and tells him that he's going to try and cure Sterns. Even though he hadn't directly caused the accident, it would never have happened without Bruce's involvement, and he feels responsible. Clint says that he'll stick around as well, because he still has a bad feeling about the Alliance, and he wants to keep an eye on them.
Bruce begins work on the cure, but doesn't get any further than he ever had in curing himself, which is to say, nowhere. When he's at the Alliance base, collecting more blood samples, Sterns suggests he needs the help of a biologist, and Bruce realises that he needs the person who'd helped him create the first serum - Betty Ross. Only problem is, when he calls Leonard Samson he finds that she'd never gone home after the battle against the Abomination.
Working together, Bruce and Sterns build a device that can track the Gamma signiture of mutates, and locate a signal in Nome.
Clint flies himself and Bruce to Alaska to find Betty. By asking around, they learn a strange woman rented a house on the outskirts of town at about the right time to have been Betty, so they head out there. As soon as they get close however, they find that the land around the building has been boobytrapped. Clint saves Bruce from a trap, but isn't fast enough to stop him triggering a second one, and Bruce hulks-out.
Clint tries to talk Hulk down, and seems to be doing a decent job, but Betty, who has been watching from the house, sees Hulk towering over an unenhanced human and runs to help, taking her Harpy form and the two fight, because they're superheroes and it's traditional. Clint tries to stop them, but they ignore him, and it's not until he physically puts himself between them and gets injured that they finally stop and return to human form.
While Betty patches up Clint in her cabin, Bruce explains why they're there. Betty has been hiding out here to avoid her father, but she too feels responsible for Sterns's condition, and agrees to come and help.
On the flight back, Clint is clearly in pain. Bruce asks if there's anything he can do, to which Clint replies that unless he can get him a new shoulder there is, which gives Bruce an idea. Tony had shown him the work of a Korean engineer, Helen Cho, who has created a Regeneration Cradle which heals wounds by basically 3D printing new tissue. Bruce suggests that not only could it heal Clint, it could also slow Sterns's degeneration and buy them more time for their research.
Back at the Alliance's base, Betty and Bruce begin work on a cure. The next day, Helen Cho turns up with her new baby. Bruce is very apologetic to have interupted her maternity leave, but she just says that when Tony Stark calls, you drop everything, and she's excited to get more test data for the cradle anyway.
The cradle works as Bruce had expected, healing Sterns temporarily, but doing nothing to stop the radiation poisoning. Tony has paid for Helen to stay at the best hotel in Los Angeles, so she's happy to stick around to keep healing Sterns, and to lend her expertise to Betty and Bruce if they need it.
Betty and Bruce work together on the cure, and although it's initially awkward, they find themselves falling into old rhythms, and getting along better and better. Despite their improved working relationship however, they're getting nowhere with the cure. Using Dr Crawford's notes, they're able to make what they initially think will work as a cure because it works on cells they have irradiated, but when they test it on a sample of Bruce's blood, they find that it reverses the mutation as it's happening, but once the subject is already mutated, it's too late to cure them. Since Sterns was irradiated four years ago, there's no way it'll work on him.
One night, Betty falls asleep in the lab, and Bruce carries her to the sofa and tucks her in with a blanket before going back to work. When she wakes up, he comments that it's just like old times, and they finally have the heart to heart they've been putting off. Betty tells him that despite everything that happened after the Battle of Culver University, she's moved on, and he needs to as well. Bruce tries to blame Hulk for their break up, but Betty points out that his mental health problems had been there long before the accident, the Gamma just gave them a face. He says that he doesn't want to admit that, because it means his father still has power over him, and Betty hugs him.
While Betty and Bruce have been working on the cure, Clint has been working with the Alliance. At first he's just spying on them, but they know he's there, and deliberately let a bad guy escape past Clint's hiding place to lure him out, after which he agrees to work with them. To his surprise, he finds that he actually gets on with most of them, and even begins rebuilding some of his relationship with Barney when he sees him actually working to save people.
We have a chance to learn a bit about the Alliance, their powers and backstories. Boomerang's boomerangs don't actually come back - he'd wanted to be a baseball themed hero, since he used to be a pro, but the Leader had insisted on the boomerang theme because he's Australian. Mach IV used to work for Hammer Industries until Justin Hammer was arrested, and then couldn't find any more work so decided to become a hero to show off the tech he designed. Songbird had been a pro-wrestler until she developed powers and was banned because she's a meta-human. Atlas's entire backstory is classified by the Army, but he got a dishonourable discharge when it was discovered he was using a posting in South America to smuggle tropical fish back to the USA. And Bi-Beast is a sentient alien android who bears a lifelong grudge against all bird because the aliens who made him were bird people, and also does not understand why everyone else on the team wants him to change his name.
After his conversation with Betty, Bruce comes to the realisation that they're looking at the problem the wrong way. After all, he and Betty are both radioactive but they're not dying from it, so the solution isn't to cure Sterns, it's to complete his transformation into a mutate.
They try the treatment on Sterns, and it works, finally turning him into a full mutate, green skin and all. Her work complete, Betty packs up to leave and go and find herself a new super-remote cabin to hide out in, and Bruce begins prepared to return to New York.
Clint does one last mission with the Alliance. Before he leaves, Barney finally apologises to him for what he did when they were teenagers, and Clint accepts his apology. As they're leaving however, he notices Boomerang hide something in the building they've just protected from armed robbers. He waits for the Alliance to leave, then goes back to look for the object, finding a briefcase. When he opens it, it finds a bomb, wired up to vials of green liquid.
He starts to contact Bruce, but before he can, the Alliance reveal themselves. He tries to fight them, but it's six on one. Barney insists that he should be the one to deal the killing blow. As he stabs Clint, he whispers in his ear that this makes them even.
Clint wakes up in the regeneration cradle in a lab at UCLA. Bruce tells him that Barney had deliberately stabbed him in a way that didn't kill him, giving Bruce (with Helen Cho's help) enough time to trace the missed call Clint had made. He explains what he'd seen, the gamma-bomb, and Bruce realises that everything that had happened had been Sterns trying to get a stable serum so he could mutate everyone, the way he'd always planned. He'd even engineered Crawford's death because he knew he was the one person with the expertise to stop him.
Bruce and Clint begin plotting where the Alliance had done missions, to figure out the locations of the bombs, when the first explosion rocks the city.
At the airport, Betty is waiting for her plane when the bomb goes off, filling the air with green gas, and people in the terminal start mutating. Realising what it must mean, she turns into Harpy and flies away.
She goes to the Alliance base, but it's been cleared out, no sign of anyone. However, the gamma tracking device Bruce had made is there. At first there's too many gamma signitures, but then she spots a lot signiture at the college, and realises that if that's not the site of one of the bombs, that must be Bruce.
She arrives at the lab, where Bruce and Clint are discussing the next move. The national guard and the Avengers are both on their way, but they won't get there in time, and even once they are, all they can do is crowd control. Betty and Bruce are also both terrified what will happen if Ross gets his hands on one of the mutated citizens.
Betty realises that the cure they'd made might work, since it hasn't been long since exposure, but despairs of them even having enough, saying it would take a huge team of scientists to make the cure, and they'd need a way of delivering it. Betty points out that this is a university campus, if they need willing hands they can use the students, and Helen Cho says that if they can show her where the engineering lab is, she should be able to make a device for aerosolising the cure.
They round up the students and start work, but Clint says that since he can't help with the science, he's going to go and try to help people in the city. Bruce makes him promise to be careful, and after he's gone, Betty teases Bruce, asking how come she didn't know he was bi.
Clint makes to the center of the city, where he finds a group of non-mutated people being cornered by monsters. He does his best to defend him, even though he's outnumbered, when an arrow comes out of nowhere and hits the nearest monster. Turning around, he sees the Alliance have had a change of heart and come back to help. As they fight together to protect any non-mutated citizens, and stop the mutated ones from just killing one another, they explain that they'd known Sterns was up to no good, but they'd had no idea this was what he was planning.
The scientists finish making the cure, and Bruce calls Clint to let him know they need a way to fly it over the city. Songbird and Mach IV each agree to take on, Clint attaches one to the Quinjet he'd used to fly to Alaksa, and Betty offers to take the last one. Bruce is worried that Harpy won't remember or care what they're trying to do, but Betty says that she remembers everything that happens when she's Harpy, and takes the device.
Bruce joins Clint in the quinjet, and they and the other three take over, flying through the city, releasing the cure. Bi-Beast, seeing Harpy, is overcome by his hatred of birds and leaps off the roof of a building to fight her.
Sterns, who has been hiding in the city, sees the cure begin to take effect and is furious. He produces another of the green vials Clint had seen in the bomb and pours it onto a group of cured civilians. They begin not only to mutate, but also to fuse into one huge gestalt being.
Horde grabs hold of the Quinjet, flinging it towards a nearby skyscraper, though Clint is able to get control back at the last minute. Bruce comments that he really thought this was a problem he was going to be able to solve without Hulk's help before telling Clint to finish curing the citizens while deals with Horde, and this time it's Clint who makes Bruce promise to be careful. Blushing, Bruce transforms and Hulk leaps out of the plane to fight Horde.
Betty finally succeeds in throwing Bi-Beast into the sea, where he sinks, but as she resumes distributing the cure she spots Horde and Hulk fighting. She tries spraying Horde with the cure, but it's not working. She lands on the front of Clint's plane, and we hear Harpy speak for the first time as she tells Clint "need cure, need big needle".
Clint calls through the message to the University, and Mach IV, who's on the same comms channel, offers to go pick it up since he's the fastest. He passes his aresoliser to Boomerang. In order to get it accross the city and cure as many people as possible, he uses his Boomerang like a baseball bat to hit the devise to Atlas, who throws it to Trickshot.
Mach IV returns with the cure. Harpy and Hulk try to hold Horde still for the injection, but it's too strong. Trickshot steps up, pointing out what the need is someone with really good aim. He gets Mach IV to fly him up to the top of a building above Horde, tells Clint over the comms that he really is sorry, and jumps, Hulk and Harpy holding Horde still just long enough for him to inject it, before it throw all three of them off, knocking Barney away like he weighs nothing. It looks like he's a goner, but Atlas manages to jump in the way just in time so that Barney hits him instead of the ground, as behind them Horde returns to being a group of very confused citizens.
Sterns tries to sneak out of the city but finds the Avengers waiting for him, and when he turns to run, the Alliance are blocking his path.
Amid the aftermarth, the Alliance are arrested. When Clint protests, Barney tells him it's okay. They are guilty after all, and they've discussed it and decided they're not going to try and avoid responsibility for what they did.
Bruce and Betty say goodbye again, but this time she says she's decided to go back to Culver University if they'll have her, because this has really reminded her how important education is. She asks Bruce what his plans are now, and he says he thinks maybe it's time he actually tried getting therapy, and she tells him that she knows a good phychiatrist if he needs one.
Before she goes, she also says goodbye to Clint, who's been trying to look like he's not eavesdropping on them. After she's gone, Clint reveals that she'd told him Bruce is bi. When starts to awkwardly explain that he's not in the market for a boyfriend, Clint asks if he's in the market for just a friend, and Bruce says he thinks he can manage that.
Helen Cho is waiting at the airport for her flight back to Seoul. Her baby starts to cry, and as she tries to calm him, the baby's skin begins to turn green.
In the post credits scene, Thunderbolt Ross arrives at the Raft. Looking around at the cells where the Alliance are being held, he tells them he's got a proposal for them.
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