great shows like “X-Men ’97” and “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.” While the computer-animated look of “Wakanda” doesn’t stand out in quite the same way as the more hand-drawn aesthetics of those previous series, it still looks good, and there’s a lot of interesting material in the four episodes, each one telling an independent story of Wakanda’s secret spy network, the Hatut Zaraze.
But there’s one thing that keeps bugging me: vibranium. The mystery metal from space, the source of Wakanda’s hyper-advanced technology in the present-day MCU, has always been somewhat ill-defined in the franchise. It’s basically indestructible and absorbs energy at an extreme rate. It’s also responsible for transforming the ecosystems around it. In the movies, this typically manifests as sci-fi tech like flying vehicles, supersuits, energy weapons, cloaking devices, etc.
But in “Eyes of Wakanda,” we jump back thousands of years, and in many ways, the potency of Wakanda’s vibranium tech seems… largely the same? They have holographic projections, spears and knives that fire purple energy blasts, and other devices that, for all intents and purposes, seem to be about as advanced as what we see in the modern day. Now, I’m entirely open to the idea that the mere presence of vibranium led to Wakandan civilization hitting certain other technological advancements well before the rest of the human world. But that’s not necessarily in-line with what we see in the “Black Panther” movies.
