Loki Episode 3

Ha ha, it’s Loki 2077.

(Loki proceeds to fuck everything up)

Yep. Definitely Loki 2077.

That’s a nerd joke for you. The rest of you just skip to the next paragraph.

There’s a sequence in this week’s episode that perfectly captures this series’ sense of plot progression:

l  Boy Loki and Girl Loki have snuck aboard a train heading to Location A

l  B & G Loki are discovered

l  There is a Fight

l  B & G are thrown from the train

l  During the scuffle a device is broken which means the Lokis’ plan is in SHAMBLES and they are DOOMED

l  After a brief discussion they decide ... to walk to Location A

So everything that happened was kind of pointless. They didn’t need to sneak onto the train at all, they could have walked. The consequence of the device being broken was that they decided to do the thing they had already decided to do.

All we get out of the entire sequence is a bit of banter between Tom Hiddleston (Loki One) and Sophia Di Martino (Loki Two) and her Mancunian accent. Tom gets to rehash his character backstory about being quite close to his adopted mother while Sophia gets to drop vague hints and tell us precisely nothing. This is also in line with the show’s penchant for repeating plot points we’ve already been over.

Fans will squeal about the character development but no it bloody well isn’t don’t be so daft, it’s a reiteration of things we already knew about Our Loki (mama’s boy) and deliberate obfuscation about Other Loki. Oh, and iTs CaNoN tHaT tHeYrE bIsExUaL jesus this era is going to look pathetically fixated on people’s sexual orientations in 10 years’ time isn’t it.

(I wonder if Sophia’s offhand remark she has a post-apocalyptic relationship with a postman is a reference to the Kevin Costner movie/David Brin novel of the same name? IT’S CANON SHE’S FUCKING KEVIN COSTNER doesn’t get you Twitter retweets though so probably not.)

Otherwise, it’s Tom reenacting his relationship with Owen Wilson, only now it’s with Sophia. Have Tom bicker with someone he’s supposed to be working with, how very original. To be sure there’s sparks there, a bit of fireworks even, and Tom can play charming yet vulnerable like nobody’s business so the interplay is fun to watch, but I can’t help the nagging feeling it’s not actually in the service of anything related to the story. 

And why does Sylvie, who is supposed to know all about the planet in question blowing up, not know where the Ark is? Whatever.

We still don’t know quite what Sylvie/Sophia is aiming to do or why—I THINK that as an unwitting “Variant” much like Tom she has been hunted by the TVA and has decided to strike back and destroy her pursuers rather than quietly submit to erasure, but that’s kind of conjecture on my part. As I keep saying, some clarity with regards to your antagonist (or perhaps deuteragonist at this point in the plot) would really help grease these narrative gears.

The only progression or new information that we get is that the TVA is also staffed by Variants, meaning they’re all kind of witless dupes too, including Owen/Mobius. So the TVA is pretty well solidified as the “real” bad guys of the show and a jet ski future for Mobius is looking more and more likely. Though it does make Sylvie/Sophia murdering all those other TVA guys kind of gross—look, the baddies can either be “mooks” that are just obstacles your hero can vanquish without worrying about morality, OR they can be real, live humans with their own hopes and dreams, but suddenly switching from one to the other is going to make half your story feel very, very odd.

See also: Stormtroopers are just brainwashed kids, now let’s go murder-fuck a couple thousand of them.

At least we got to see where the entire special effects budget went: on a kind of grey-purple planet that could be Vormir but isn’t, with an astonishingly fake-looking planet in the sky, plus a kind of “Snowpiercer” train that also steals the save-the-rich premise from the same movie, and a single cut action sequence lifted from “1917” only the people are patently just running around in a circle while the camera spins on a tripod.

It all ends in a kind of cliffhanger which gives Tom yet another chance to strike almost exactly the same pose he held at the end of episode two.

I think I joked about this time-travel show ending up being kind of a time loop like Tenet or something, but this repetition and recycling of scenes and conversations ain’t funny.

Loki Episode 2

Well, we had some highs and lows this week.

The highs, or singular high really: The relationship between the two leads. Part father versus son, part by-the-book veteran versus young maverick, part crook working with the cops, it’s comfortingly familiar but that’s exactly what gives the actors room to play. Owen Wilson’s Agent Mobius and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki have one or two nice moments, one in particular that is revealing of Mobius’ character in a clear yet unvoiced, understated way:

See, company man for life Wilson keeps a Jet Ski magazine on his desk. He’s never ridden one, being a lifer, living to work rather than working to live. Loki presses him on it. Why jet skis? Well, they look great. The conversation then elides into the nature of Wilson’s job, and more to the point, what happens if he is successful: Order. Eternal, predictable order. Wilson really captures the air of a man repeating the company line with his best smile while simultaneously showing us how it’s crushing his soul.

Great scene, loved it, nice character-building work there. Hope it pays off at the end and Mobius gets the freedom he secretly craves.

The rest of it I’m less enthused about it, precisely because it lacks the clarity of the character byplay.

We’re two episodes in to this six-episode series, a third of the way through, and here is the sum total of what we know about our antagonist:

It’s a chick.

Motivations? A little fuzzy. Methods? Ya got me there. Goals? Search me, pal.

All we got is the surprise twist reveal that it’s a woman, which might have been more surprising or impactful if people related to the show had babbled a little less about Loki being genderfluid and thus given the game away to such an extent that even I was able to predict the twist.

What does Bad Loki do? Attacks a bunch of Minutemen, which incidentally is exactly what she did at the end of episode 1 so a bit of repetition there, huh show. Not really advancing the plot ya know. Anyway, she steals a time charge thing that erases stuff in a radius around it and kidnaps one of the time cops. She had also left a stick of “Kablooie” gum with a kid in medieval France in Ep 1, which now turns out to be part of a plan to lure the time cops to find her in 2050 Atlanta.

Wilson, Hiddleston and one of three women of color cast in secondary roles to make up for having two white men in the lead show up. Naughty Loki beats up Nice Loki. Then sends the time charge thingies to various points in history, which apparently screws up the timeline for some reason. Then she escapes.

Why does she need to lure the team to her hideout? Why do the time charges screw up history? Why does she even want to screw up the timeline in the first place.

Dunno.

Compare this to, say, InfinityWar: Boom, scene one, here’s the bad guy, here’s what he wants to do, here’s how he’s going to do it, let’s rock. Clear stakes, you know what the good guys need to do, I can now focus on the scenes before me rather than wasting time trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Good Loki is also a bit confusing. He gives every indication of thinking he can take over the TVA from the inside, in which case what is with the scenes of him moping over his dead mom, friendship with his brother or destruction of his homeland (another bit that is kind of a retread of character development from ep 1)? One more thing I’m hoping will have a payoff somewhere along the way, because as of now he goes from sobbing over the death of his people to putting salt on a salad in five seconds of show time.

So, for the second episode in a row, I mainly feel that the story is spinning its wheels, playing for time just as Loki does, trying to delay for as long as possible telling me what is actually going on. Repeating beats we already had in episode 1. There are a number of scenes were you just have to wonder what the point of it was—like Evil Loki beating up Good Loki, nothing is achieved other than wasting two minutes of show time and letting Tom Hiddleston pose dramatically under Red Alert lighting. Doesn’t move the plot forward or reveal new information. Just there to provide a bit of action since, as I mentioned last week, the writers feel the need to have a guy walk in with a gun every once in a while just to keep things moving along.

Another culprit is the character of Judge Renslayer, whose role in the series so far has been to pad out the timing and give Wilson somebody to react to for five minutes each week.

As a result, I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be looking forward to next week. Girl Loki seems to have already executed her plan. Boy Loki has escaped the TVA but I’ve no idea what he means to do with his newfound freedom. Don’t know about you guys but a third of the way through a story I’m not sure I should be drawing a blank as to what happens next.

As for the rest. Well, the less said about the terrible, tiny, tiny set for “Pompeii” the better. Green screen work on par with the opening shot of the “Gobi Desert” and that’s not a compliment. Loki and Mobius figuring out Other Loki is in Atlanta makes zero fuggen sense. Kidnapped space Nazi going “It’s real, it’s real,” just more mystery boxing of the plot. Stop it, just stop it.

Loki Episode 1

Well, it’s a setup episode, like they used to do at the beginning of each season of “Game of Thrones”, and spends the bulk of its time reminding you who people are and what they are trying to do. I can foresee we might reach some kind of terminal endpoint with this, where each Marvel movie or show has to devote increasingly long stretches of time to the backstory before it can move forward. A bit like that subplot from “Hyperion” with the girl living her life backwards and her family makes longer and longer videos to explain what’s happening to her until she loses it and screams at them to stop.

Marvel, I beg of you: Stop.

So. Yes. We’re re-introduced to Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in all his brittle egotistical glory, a pre-End Game Loki who skipped over the last five or so Marvel movies and landed right in the middle of the Gobi Desert only it’s quite clearly a green screen and hats off to people working under pressure during a pandemic but really, the light doesn’t match at all and it was quite jarring, sorry.

NuLoki is promptly arrested by jackbooted quasi-Nazi time cops emerging out of Quantum Leap doorways (er, Minutemen from the Time Variance Authority, sorry this is a crowded genre and the tropes are everywhere) so we can have both Loki’s life story and The Premise explained to us.

To whit: There is only one timeline, and a bunch of time cops arrest and execute anyone who tries to change things or create alternative timelines. Though some time travel is apparently allowed. But deviating from your “path” is not. I don’t think it’s supposed to make sense—the arbitrariness of the TVA is probably the point. Anyway, somebody with a grudge against the time cops is going around killing them.

NotLoki is frog-marched off to his Kafkaesque trial in a sort of 70s style version of the dystopian bureaucracy from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, replete with black jokes about the absurdity, inefficiency and unfairness of it all, before Wowen Wilson’s Agent Mobius saves him from imminent erasure.

There follows the narratively demanded refusal of the call to adventure that literature professors have insisted every protagonist must go through. Mobius wants !Loki’s help, but he’s not having any of it. To convince him, Mobius shows a highlight reel of past Marvel movies, plus a rather long anecdote where it is revealed Loki was mysterious hijacker “D.B. Cooper” back in 1971 which is a real thing that happened. TIL. (I hope this becomes relevant again—Loki does tell the stewardess he’ll see her again which is foreshadowing 101—otherwise that was a hell of a waste of time).

This gets to the one part I thought was poorly written in an otherwise slick script, where the writers couldn’t seem to settle on a motivation for Loki2’s turn and gave him ALL the motivations: He got his own mom killed and regrets it; He realizes how pathetic his ambitions were next to the power of the TVA; He sees the future in which he reconciles with his brother, and how it leads to his own death.

They also threw in a rather pointless chase sequence, written presumably out of the instinctive realization the episode was 90% exposition and they needed some action to keep people’s eyes open. So Loki escapes, then immediately goes back to the place he escaped from. It’s writers like this who scrap the Council of Elrond in favor of people screaming at each other. Trust your audience, folks. There seems to be this tug of war between the needs of episodic television, where each 50-minute chunk needs its own climax and resolution, and the needs of a miniseries, where the action can rise over the course of several episodes. There might be a happy medium, but this isn’t quite it.

As a result, I’m not quite sure what Loki’s motivations are. Is he determined to change his life around, or just sees the TVA as a way of getting what he wants? Leaving it vague and confusing might be a deliberate choice but if so, probably a mistaken one. We just had one series—Wandavision—that was all about obfuscating what was going on in the plot. We don’t need another one. Show me what your protagonist wants to do and let me enjoy the ride with them.

The episode’s ending does not inspire confidence in the writers’ desire to let the viewer in on the plot. There’s a twist reveal that was fairly obvious from Mobius’ line of questioning to Loki, so I give them credit for a proper setup there, but it is then immediately followed by a cloaked figure doing a bit of murder. Having just revealed who the antagonist is (supposedly), not showing their face in the very next scene is a dead giveaway you aren’t being entirely straight with us, show.

I do so very much hope they aren’t going to play J.J. Abrams Mystery Box keepaway with the plot all season. No more three-quarters reveal of who the real antagonist is. Here’s the protagonist, here’s the deuteragonist (Wow!), here’s the antagonist, these are the stakes, let’s get to it. Boom. That’s all you need to do, show.

Wither next for the series? Well, I’m not keen on the initial setup’s assertion that the entire history of the universe is already known, as that doesn’t leave much room for free will. Personal taste there, but Loki does voice objections to that thinking, so although it might be wishful thinking I do hope the whole idea of a deterministic universe gets a little exploration. Maybe the conclusion of the show will be that there is not one timeline, but many, and the TVA was wrong to try to police it in the first place? Like I say, the TVA do wear a little too much black to be the good guys here.

Side note: Not a fan of criticizing writers for everything their characters say, as some characters are SUPPOSED to say shitty things, but telling the villain the purpose of his existence is to help people be their better selves is, however narratively true, kind of a big middle finger to everyone Loki ever killed. I mention this because Marvel does kind of have a thing where the lives of normies don’t really matter, they’re just props for our heroes, and the line is said by Mobius who I think is supposed to be kind of sympathetic, a put-upon middle manager fighting against red tape in his own organization.

As for the cloaked figure at the end, I’m betting that presages a more radical variant of Loki than the one we’ve gotten to know. There’s been a lot of talk on social media about Disney and Tom confirming Loki is “genderfluid” so I’m betting the antagonist is a female version of our antihero. Either that or the show is a perfect loop and Tom ends up pursuing a future iteration of himself.

Black Panther

I avoided this one for a while on the assumption it wouldn't be "for me." As in, it wouldn't resonate with me but then it wasn't supposed to so any criticism would come from misunderstanding the intent. I decided to give it a shot after one reviewer pointed to this movie as an example of how to structure a good action movie -- i.e. the villain has clear, identifiable goals and you understand their motivation and how they try to achieve their goals; the heroes likewise have clear goals and take clear steps to thwart the bad guy; each scene moves this conflict forward and escalates it until the final showdown.

And on that criteria I give it an 8/10, not perfect, but pretty damn good. There's a little too much assumed empathy with the bad guy and understanding his motivations is maybe easier for Americans than British-born Canadians living in Japan. So yeah, that part is maybe not "for me."

The structure also has one odd twist, and maybe I'm being hard on it here because I was told what a masterpiece it was, but the bad guy and arms dealer Klaue team up in one scene for a museum robbery, go their separate ways, then the bad guy rescues Klaue from the good guys only to shoot him. Now hands up if you can spot the extra steps here.

Honestly I think Wakanda is one of those Marvel world-building concepts which, like the Blip, make less and less sense the more you look at them (such as, a technologically advanced society that is also an absolute monarchy where rulership is decided by ritual combat), but if you understand it as a story-telling device then it does the job of setting up the whole "Our country first" versus "Duty to help others" debate. 

My other quibble would be the chase scene in South Korea is just awful, Star Wars prequels bad, bad CGI, actors half-heartedly shouting flat and dull lines while evidently looking at a greenscreen.

Otherwise, yes, mechanically, structurally, this movie works. I complained about Falcon Plus Winter Soldier being overstuffed thematically and watching Black Panther really highlights that kind of problem in the writing.

Obligatory postscript about the death of Chadwick Boseman. Lost a cousin last year to cancer, so really, fuck everything about this horrible disease. I've no idea how they'll continue with the next Black Panther movie "Wakanda Forever", but I bet you any sum of money it opens with a tribute to Boseman. Godspeed.

Army of the Dead

First up, at 148 minutes this movie is too damn long. Not that there's any arbitrary ideal length for a movie, every movie should be as long as it takes to tell its story. But one easy way to check if it's too damn long is to ask yourself, after each scene, "What was the point of this?" If you can't answer the question on half the scenes, then guess what, the movie is too damn long.

The premise of this Ocean's-11-meets-I-am-Legend movie is achingly simple: crew break into a Vegas casino infested with zombies. This is not a story that takes 148 minutes to tell.

Not that it isn't fun in places. The middle stretch, once the team is actually in the casino and things slowly start to unwind, has some charming team-building and genuine tension. But the first third drags on for too long and sets up things with no payoff, and the last third is just people slow-motion running and shooting things.

Dave Bautista, getting a leading man role here, is the leader of the crew. He's hired by Hiroyuki Sanada to retrieve money from the zombie casino before the US government nukes it. He's supported by a Hispanic mechanic (Ana de la Reguera), dude with a chainsaw (Omari Hardwick), a German safecracker (Matthias Schweighofer), a pilot (Tig Notaro CGIed in after the previous actor was accused of sexual misconduct), a guide (Nora Arnezeder), a CoD Zombies Twitch streamer (Raul Castillo) and his redshirt I mean buddy (Samantha Win), plus a slimy camp guard and Dave's daughter (Ella Purnell) also tag along, PLUS there's Sanada's shifty right-hand-man who is played by an actor who could be David Hasselhoff, but isn't (it's Garret Dillahunt).

Is that too many characters? Yep. It's overcrowded, and trying to stuff it all in leads to scenes that either drag on for too long, or else have no reason to exist at all.

For example, the Twitch streamer brings along another friend, who immediately chickens out when he learns the details of the mission. This contributes nothing. 

We learn that there are some "alpha" zombies led by some kind of super-smart king zombie, and in a really icky scene, learn one of the lady zombies is/was pregnant. This contributes nothing.

Notaro gets a bunch of unfunny scenes trying to fix a damaged chopper. There could have been tension in the will-the-chopper-actually-fly scene, but she fixes everything in advance and the lift off no problems. Contribution: Zero.

Dave has a heart-to-heart with his daughter where we see he is motivated not by greed but by guilt and desire to be a better father--good!--this is shortly followed by ANOTHER heart-to-heart with the mechanic where SHE reveals she is not motivated by greed but by her love for Dave and no, we don't need everyone's in-depth motivations and this literally repeats the emotional beats we just had. Also, the Mechanic is immediately killed after. So yeah. Negative one contribution.

There is, of course, a double-cross, but honestly the reasoning behind it so ludicrous and manages to makes the entire premise of the movie dumb, like, zombie dumb.

The other things that drag the movie out are Snyder's evident affinity for slow-mo gunfights and having things be out of focus. Used sparingly, either might be effective, but sheer repetition kind of drains the energy here.

I said it was fun though, didn't I, and it is in the middle-stretch. Matthias Schweighofer in particular absolutely steals the movie as the German safecracker. He's the only character with any kind of arc (goes from scared of zombies to able to fight zombies), and his relationship with Omari Hardwick's hard-ass merc is the only one that shows any development or genuine warmth as Hardwick goes from despising the deadweight to genuine comradeship. Plus Matthias is an absolute hoot as a physical actor. 

In fits and starts there's also some genuine tension. Like redshirt Samantha Win is predictably offed early on due to the double-cross, but the movie still gets tension out of this: As she fights through swarms of zombies, we wonder not whether she will survive, but if she will live long enough to reveal the double-cross.

More of that kind of smart writing could really have come in handy but instead we're back to slow-mo bullet fests. Cue sequel hook. Roll credits.

Venom One, No, Not "There Will Be Carnage"

This was a bit of a dog’s breakfast, wasn’t it? I’m trying to figure out where this went wrong and it’s weird because none of the individual parts, taken in isolation, sound all that bad, it’s just they never quite combine into a coherent whole. Basically, I think the movie tries to do too many things, and as a result does nothing particularly well.

I didn’t write it so I’m kind of trying to read minds and guess what happened here, but it does feel like a good idea butchered through rewrites or edits in an attempt to check certain boxes that didn’t need to be checked.

What is this movie even about? The minimalist, bare-bones outline of the plot is: “Down-on his luck reporter Tom Hardy gets infected with an alien being that gives him superpowers. The two must prevent a tech-bro tycoon/mad scientist who wants to bring more of the aliens to Earth for Reasons.”

You look at that, and you realize that the first sentence has almost nothing to do with the second.

How does Hardy being down on his luck move the plot forward?

Well, gives him a reason to dislike the tycoon. Check that box. What, you mean a reason other than the whole “infect the entire human race with alien spores” thing? Uh, yeah, well, that doesn’t come up until the final act, in a scene where a space shuttle is readied for launch in five minutes.

Why does the alien symbiote agree to help Hardy prevent this from happening?

Well, it likes him for, um, reasons. I don’t know, there’s a throwaway line about them both being losers, whatever that means. Check that box.

Just, so many scenes and beats don’t seem to have a reason for existing in this movie.

After he’s infected, there’s an extended sequence where Hardy/Venom break into a news corp office tower so he can plant evidence that the tycoon is up to no good. After his escape from a SWAT team whose rules of engagement are apparently shoot to kill for offences like breaking & entering (hey, this is America, so… maybe?) this never comes up again. Cool action scene (even though we already had one), check.

Immediately after, we discover that the alien goo thing is slowly killing Hardy. Second Act hurdle, check. At the end of the movie, Hardy is reunited with his alien goo. The health problems are never mentioned again and Hardy looks quite chipper.

Well into the third Act, the tycoon is ALSO infected with an alien spore thing. Before he is infected, the tycoon plans to find more alien spore things because he thinks human-alien hybrids are the next stage in evolution (idk man I don’t write this stuff). After he is infected, the tycoon plans to… find more alien spore things. Huh. Okay. Third Act twist, check.

In all this mess I think what should have been the heart of the movie, a kind of odd couple slash buddy cop action-comedy with Hardy and the alien sharing his body kind of gets lost. You can kind of see glimpses of it in the first chase scene where the tycoon’s goons try to capture the pair (starting by attempting to ram them with explosive kamikaze drones, look I really didn’t write this thing) with Hardy playing the oceanically out of his depth reporter unwittingly and unwillingly turned superpowered killing machine.

Hardy is good in these scenes though eccentric and uneven in others. Eddie Brock is a tough character to make likeable, a charming but self-centered asshole who lacks the brains of a Tony Stark or Stephen Strange to balance it out, and the part feels like it was written for a much younger actor. With Hardy, he seems more arrogant man-child than headstrong kid. What does Brock want? I don’t really know. What does Venom want? I… don’t know. What are Brock and Venom trying to achieve? Mainly to stay out of the bad guy’s clutches—it’s only at the very end that their motivation switches to stopping the bad guy’s plan, but then again the bad guy only came up with the plan 10 minutes before the ending so you can’t really blame them there. 

Still, being unable to answer those questions makes these guys to relate to.

Same goes for the rest of the cast. Riz Ahmed as the big bad spews a couple of lines about how awful the Earth is and how humanity needs to migrate to the stars, so I guess he’s a kind of Elon Musk not-quite-parody, but quite why he thinks bonding with aliens is the way to go is all a bit say-wat-ish. And then he gets infected with the alien which changes his goals and motivations… in no way whatsoever. Huh.

There’s also an ex-fiancée and her new boyfriend in there. Yup. They exist in this universe. There’s a kind of funny moment between Hardy and the no-longer-ladyfriend about her pet cat mainly notable because the joke actually lands. Otherwise, they’re just plot devices.

All of these issues could, I think, maybe have been resolved if there was greater focus on what this movie was going to be about. Odd couple learn to appreciate each other? Okay, gotta give each of them something worth appreciating. Then show how their adventures drive the realization. Dramatic climax where they finally learn to work together to stop the bad guy. Boom. Roll credits.

I did write that, so you can blame me for that one.

 

 

 

Jupiter's Legacy

This one is very rough about its pasted-on beard edges. The eight episodes are pretty slow paced for what actually happens: Ageing superhero dad confronts rebellious kids who feel big daddy J's values are old-fashioned and out of date, while in flashback scenes set in the late 1920’s we see how Pops and others originally got their superpowers. Season 1 is all setup and no payoff, introducing a whole mess of conflicts, old vs young, good vs evil, brother vs brother, without really developing them much.

There was one brief flicker of original thought, when the protagonists “The Utopian” (another Superman knockoff a la Omni-Man and Homelander) goes to visit a former supervillain turned shrink for a chat, and the shrink essentially calls bullshit on the premise that our times are now somehow more complicated than they were 90 years ago. Life has always been complicated and filled with compromise, he explains.

(What has changed, from a meta perspective, is we expect greater psychological realism from superhero stories than we did in the past.)

The CG is “Doom being played on a pregnancy test” poor and the fight scenes consequently more silly than satisfying and the hair & beard prosthetics are, hm, distractingly unconvincing. The actress who plays Chloe, the protag’s daughter, is just awful, never looking not miserable in all situations. The flashback scenes by contrast were stylishly done, though as mentioned above the plot development creeps along like one of them newfangled automatic horseless carriage things.

Still, I thought the bones of the story weren’t bad—superhero families behaving, like, you know, families—though maybe a touch overdone in recent years, or hell in recent months, with Invincible and The Boys and whatnot. Given the sluggish and slightly dreary delivery of season one though, I’m not sure we’re ever going to find out what they planned to do with it.

Love Death and Reboots 2

Season two of the Netflix's animated SF short story anthology. Comes in much shorter than season 1, with eight episodes as opposed to 18 in the first batch, and many of the ideas feel similarly truncated, all setup and no payoff. Noticeably less bloodthirsty and boobthirsty than the initial outing, perhaps as a result of viewers asking them to tone it down a bit? 

1. Automated Customer Service: Robots + Death. Cleaning robot goes bad and attempts to murder its exceptionally ugly owner and her irritating dog. The customer service line she attempts to call is mildly amusing.

2. Ice: Brotherly love + Death. Oddly-proportioned people go ice-whale watching. Not a lot happens, but I liked the understatedness of the ending, the way they just tell it with a look and a smile rather than spelling it out.

3. Pop Squad: Death. A middle-aged Anakin Skywalker does a 50's art deco Blade Runner. Easily the darkest of the stories here, and one of maybe two that are even remotely thought-provoking.

4. Snow in the Desert: Love + Robots + Death. Old Man Logan, er, Kenobi. Immortal desert hermit gets attacked by bounty hunters. Impressive cg but not a lot else going on here. Twist ending was entirely predictable, despite coming at the end of an almost comical series of reverses.

5. The Tall Grass: Death. Polar Express, but evil.

6. All Through the House: Death (Potentially). Santa Claus, but alien.

7. Life Hutch: Robots + Death. Michael B Jordan defeats a robot evidently implanted with the brain of a cat by using a laser pointer. 

8. The Drowned Giant: Death. A dead whale washes ashore but our David Attenborough narrator reimagines it as a gigantic human corpse in order to underline our blasé attitude to death in nature and the indignities to which we subject dead animal bodies.

So you have have love and death without the robots, or robots and death without the love, or all three together, but there's always death. Death is mandatory. 

WandaVersion

I give it's "Lost but Suburbs" vibe in the early episodes credit for fully committing to the bit, if nothing else. The imitation of sitcoms over the decades was pretty thorough, including everything from the laugh track to story lines and dialog and humor styles. That said, it was a bit like the no-cut cinematography in 1917, a gimmick whose gimmickiness overshadowed the point of the gimmick. Actually, in the end there wasn't much of a point to the gimmick, except to entertain the viewer with the gimmick. Like the sitcom situations don't actually serve the plot in any way, it's just established that Wanda is living in this woo-woo land of make-believe. The show just drops the whole shtick in the last few episodes and no more is ever heard of it.

I also think the danger of a show within a show, a layer of fiction within your fiction, is that your IRL fiction has to be very, very grounded otherwise the lines between your real fiction and fiction fiction start to blur and the viewer gets confused about what's real fiction and what's fiction fiction. You get me? The "reality" of your fictional universe kind of gets worn away and it gets harder to empathize with your characters since they're all fiction. 

So, and this is just an example, just spitballing here, just a f'rinstance, just say, making your main villain a literal witch would be a bad idea. Hypothetically speaking.

Good god that was dumb.

Attention writers: Wanda is the villain. She is also the victim. This is interesting, do not run away from that and insert some boring ass white dude and a literal fucking witch.

Also thought there were a whole bunch of extraneous characters in this, a show which could have been a pretty tight focus on dealing with grief. Like the writers or showrunners or Marvel or Disney got a little scared of how dark they were getting and threw in a slightly irritating Millennial youtuber type personality and the relative of some character I've never heard of from a movie I haven't seen.

Falcon Appearing in Conjunction With The Winter Soldier

I finally caved and got a Disney+ subscription and the first thing I watched was the Mandalorian but I have nothing to say about it so moving right along to other things I have nothing to say about, but will anyway: Not Only Falcon But Also Winter Soldier.

Confession time, the few MCU movies that I watched have almost all been blasted into my brain from the back of airplane seats at 30,000 feet above the Pacific, so nothing has really stuck. Needless to say, everything I know about this world has come second or third hand from social media but luckily we all know what a reliable source of information that is.

That said, I kind of liked this.

The opening and set up in particular were solid, especially the Bucky stuff with his psychologist and Sam's stuff with Isaiah. The whole question of whether a Black man could or should become the symbol of America was well-handled I thought, acknowledging both history and present issues, but also making the case for people to define for themselves what their national identity is.

That said, this was Subway sandwich overstuffed. I really wish Bucky had more airtime, because that's another fascinating subject they could have tackled--guilt, forgiveness and redemption. How do you make amends when "Sorry" does not even begin to cover it? 

But nope, no time for that because in addition to race in America, we've also got immigration and the refugee crisis to deal with, and the dark side of being treated like a hero, and the radicalization of youth, and political accountability, and and and and it's all too much. The bad guy aims are vague and unconvincing and Bucky's redemption arc gets wrapped up off-screen.

Random thoughts:

1. More Bucky and Yori and the cute waitress from the sushi place. 

2. It was just bizarre to me that they had Nubian women in full tribal regalia wandering around Latvia or Lithuania oh come on like you can tell the difference, you'd think that would have drawn more attention

3. Didn't know who Sharon was so the whole "Power Broker" subplot was a bit ?

4. Karli was in the Han Solo movie that nobody watched, too

5. Mackie going from practicing with the shield with Bucky in one scene, to not being able to catch it the next was just an odd bit of editing

6. More Zemo. Yes I know everybody loved his dance. More villains with comprehensible backstories and identifiable goals, please.

7. Is "USAgent" supposed to be significant? And who is Seinfeld lady? Don't make me google essential plot details please, shows.