WARNING: The following contains spoilers for M.O.D.O.K. Season 1, streaming now on Hulu.
Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K., Season 1, Episode 5, “If Bureaucracy Be… Thy Death!” features a strange and funny Easter egg. M.O.D.O.K.’s workplace nemesis Monica Rappaccini straight-up killed an Avenger on her first day at AIM, only to watch M.O.D.O.K. take credit for it. The show is deliberately vague about who that Avenger was, but judging by a few clues, a viable fan theory has emerged.
Monica’s rivalry with M.O.D.O.K. stretches back to the comics. With Patton Oswalt’s inept supervillain hanging so much of his self-esteem on killing an Avenger, it makes sense to have Monica one-up him in that department, explaining why she hates him so much. It also gives the show a chance to take Tony Stark out of the question of who she killed: M.O.D.O.K. is trying to kill Stark in the episode, and the show specifies Rappaccini’s murder took place in 2009. That opens up a number of possibilities, and a few viable clues to go on.
The joke hinges around never revealing the identity of the dead Avenger. The audience sees only a skull in a tattered red hood, killed by the weapon that M.O.D.O.K. immediately claims was his own. Indeed, M.O.D.O.K.’s dialogue remains specifically vague about who it was, although he stresses how “huge” the dead Avenger was and how Monica would have ruined the hero’s film franchise with his death. That implies a heavy hitter on the level of Iron Man, though the use of the red cowl confounds that as well. The color rules out figures like Captain America and Hawkeye who wear different colored cowls, along with Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Vision and Scarlet Witch, who either wear no cowls or have radically different ones.
That seems to eliminate most of the core Avengers, at least as they appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. M.O.D.O.K., however, doesn’t operate in the MCU --- hence the appearance of X-Men-centric villains like Mr. Sinister and Arcade, who have not debuted in the MCU -- and that gives the red cowl on the skull a viable candidate -- Hank Pym who, differed wildly in the comics from his MCU incarnation, wore a very similar cowl as Giant-Man.
That fits with all of M.O.D.O.K.’s descriptions quite aptly. Pym was a founding member of the original Avengers and remained a staple of the series for years. He was also an abusive alcoholic, which made for strong storytelling, but was part of the reason such a big change was necessitated by the MCU. And he’s already a part of M.O.D.O.K.’s Marvel universe since the titular villain has used and altered Pym particles in the past.
His Giant-Man incarnation thus becomes the precise kind of wonky but canonical element that M.O.D.O.K. enjoys playing with. It lets Monica eliminate a genuinely A-list Avenger while still allowing Scott Lang or a similar figure to show up as Ant-Man. It also gives M.O.D.O.K.’s line about the size of the death a clever double meaning. It even provides Monica with a little moral authority, since Hank’s abusiveness suggests the Avengers aren’t as clean as they might pretend.
All of that is speculative, of course, and the gag might be ruined if viewers ever learn who the Avenger actually is. It exists largely as a way of poking fun at Marvel’s tendency to keep their options open on certain key questions to retcon their way out of it in the future. But Pym makes a strong stand-in for those who want the question answered, without disrupting whatever continuity an overtly satirical show like M.O.D.O.K. has planned. In any case, it gives the series’ hapless antihero another impossible goal to reach. Somewhere his workplace rival beat him soundly, and -- as he may suspect -- he will never be able to match her.