Valkyrie is reunited with her team, but the period of peace doesn’t last long! Hulk must stop a riot outside a movie theater, while Nighthawk throws money at Jack Norriss to make him go away. (Yes, Nighthawk's that annoyed). Matt Murdock guest stars as Valkyrie’s attorney!
Thanks to Nighthawk's money and Matt Murdock's legal skills, Valkyrie is freed from prison. The Defenders return to Dr. Strange's home.
Since Val lost her costume in the prison system, Clea gives her a gift--a new golden costume. Jack Norriss, seeing her in it, wants her to stop "playing warrior woman." He still can't get over the fact that Val's spirit is in the body of his wife, Barbara Norriss. Val remonstrates him for his inability to deal with the situation.
Dr. Strange continues to try to figure out why his magic isn't working correctly. As he contemplates in the park, he uses his magic for some simple things, including humiliating a politician, which makes him realize his personality is also off. He notices in a newspaper that Nebulon, in his guise as the leader of the Celestial Mind Control cult, is now an envoy to the United Nations, and Ruby Thursday is a political candidate.
The Hulk, leaping his way around the west, finds some protestors outside a reputed snuff film. He lands and starts some chaos, only to realize that he was doing it for no reason. One of the protestors runs into an elf with a gun in the bathroom. The elf shoots her.
Someone throws a rock through Strange's window. It says they know the Defenders are harboring a communist--i.e. Red Guardian. Tania persuades the others to let her deal with it on her own and runs off.
Jack Norriss tells the other Defenders off about how little they're paying attention to the rest of the world, such as the political news Strange saw in the paper, and annoys Nighthawk. Kyle pays Jack $300,000 to leave the Defenders alone, and Jack agrees.
Red Guardian beats up the men who threw the rock, but one of them accidentally gets shot. She brings him up to a nearby apartment to get help, but it turns out it's a trap.
The old woman who lives there, and a giant, muscled, hooded man accuse Tania of all the anti-Semitic crimes of her country, the USSR, even though she is an enemy of the Soviet state.
She escapes out a window, and fights the muscled man outside. He turns out to have robot arms. She lets him knock himself out when he runs into a door.
She returns to Strange's house, where Strange finds out that Jack is gone.
Continued in the Defenders annual 1.
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