The extended scene begins with a little girl running through the streets and crowded marketplace of what’s clearly India, arriving at the door of a building where a woman tells her to leave because “there is sickness here.” We go inside and we see that Ruffalo’s Dr. Banner has been working there, trying to help the sick people and the little girl pleads with him to help her father (both of them speaking in Hindi). He follows her out to a remote rundown shack on the outskirts of the city with goats tied up outside, and when he follows the little girl into the shack, she jumps right out the window.
It’s a trap!
Scarlett Johansson walks out of the shadows and says that for a man who is supposed to be avoiding stress, he picked a weird country to come to, and they have a bit of small talk in the way of introduction of what brought them both there. Banner makes a comment about the little girl they used to trap him, saying that “they’re starting agents very young,” and she tells him that she started that young.
He asks her how they found him, to which she’s replied that they never lost him but they’d just been keeping others off his scent. When he asks whether she’s there to kill him, she tells him that she’s there on the behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D. and that Nick Fury is going to need him to come in, to which he responds, “What if I say ‘no’?” “I’ll persuade you,” she responds.
“What if the other guy says ‘no’?” he then asks.
“You’ve been two years without an incident,” she reminds him. “I don’t think you want to break that streak.”
She then tells him that they’re facing a potential global catastrophe and pulls out a PDA and shows him something on it, saying that it’s a “tesseract”… and it’s a picture of the Cosmic Cube, as seen in Captain America: The First Avenger! “What does Fury want me to do? Swallow it?” Banner jokes. She tells him that it has a gamma signature that it’s too big for them to trace, but that he’s the foremost expert on gamma radiation.
“So Fury isn’t after the monster,” he muses, and she says not that Fury has told her.
And then he loses his temper, barking “Stop lying to me!!!” but then quickly calms down and adds, “I’m sorry. That was mean.”
Sometime during this conversation, she reaches under a table and pulls out a gun, and Banner says, “We both know if Fury wants me, he’s going to get me,” and talks himself through why Fury might be taking this approach so that “the other guy doesn’t make a mess.”
Once he agrees to go with her, she says into her radio “stand down” and we go outside to see that the hut is surrounded by armed S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, which got a big cheer from the crowd.
“Just you and me?” he asks.
So there really wasn’t much action to speak of in this extended sequence, but it gave another great example of Whedon’s snappy dialogue and if you like Bendis’s “Avengers” where the group has a lot of fast-paced banter, then you should feel right at home! (But we’re not even remotely worried that the action will deliver along with the dialogue, going by the little bit of footage we’ve seen.)
The second half of what was shown was almost identical to the footage shown at the D23 Expo, though we did get a great look at the lush Stark Towers in New York City and a scene of Iron Man landing on a helipad outside. It then gets into the whole “head count” bit from Stark’s encounter with Loki inside his penthouse.
The final scene after the logo seemed like a new bit in which we see Stark and Banner examining Loki’s bo staff in the S.H.I.E.L.D. labs when Stark turns to Banner and zaps him with something and then commends about the fact that he didn’t immediately Hulk out and that he really seems to have it in control, wanting to know his secret. “Mellow jazz? Bongo drums?”
Watching this interplay, Cap snaps at Tony, “Is everything a joke to you?” to which Tony responds, “Funny things are.”
That’s it for our coverage of this hotly-anticipated panel, but stay tuned for lots more on Marvel’s The Avengers at SuperHeroHype before its release on May 4, 2012.
