Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 8)

No video this week. Suck it.

Episode 8: “What if somebody fought God and won?”

Our premise this week is that Ultron, the robot baddie from Avengers 2, beats all the Avengers and wipes out all life on Earth in a rain of nuclear fire, then bisects Thanos like a little bitch when the big purple grape shows up to claim the Mind stone. He goes on to annihilate all life in the universe—not by Thanos’s pussy-ass method of snapping his fingers, but by the tried-and-true method of blowing shit up. That done, he sets his sights yet higher, and decides to fight the narrator of the series, the Watcher, so that he can kill every living thing in every reality. Ever.

Ultra-Ultron and the Watcher fight. As you would expect with beings of such unimaginable, incomprehensible power that it makes mere gods puny by comparison, so awesome that merely attempting to conceptualize the vastness of their existence would shatter the mind of any mortal, they do this by punching each other. We end on a cliffhanger as the Watcher turns to the only other person with experience in the galaxy-destroying business, Dr. Especially Strange from episode 4. Cue cliffhanger. To be continued, etc.

There’s also a subplot involving Black Widow and Hawkeye (neither of whom have superpowers, may I remind you) trying to evade a being that is powerful enough to detect the existence of alternate realities and beat up the narrator. They then decide to try the plot from the first “Independence Day” despite neither of them being Will Smith, or even Chadwick Boseman.

Q: They’re doing the Avengers thing of having everybody do one on their own, then coming together for the finale, aren’t they?

A: Yup.

Q: The Watcher keeps saying he can’t intervene because he swore an oath. So … who did he swear an oath TO? Like, doesn’t that imply there’s someone or something even bigger than him that can enforce obedience?

A: Good question, imaginary interlocutor. You’re so smart not to mention handsome. And not at all rambly, disjointed, forgetful or almost 50.

Q: Isn’t the animation a little uneven?

A: Yeah, beautifully detailed in some frames, then there’s an explosion or people running, and all their limbs turn to rubber.

Bo Burnham: Inside

Bo Burnham: Inside
Everything by: Bo Burnham
Network: Netflix

Let me begin by saying I went into this completely blind. I know nothing about Bo Burnham. I did not read up about Bo lore on Bokipedia. I did not watch 90-minute YouTube explainer videos on what everybody gets wrong about Bo. I am entirely unversed in the Bo Cinematic Universe. I mentioned that I had watched this to someone on Discord and they immediately accused me of being a TikTok girl and have no idea what that is, or what connection it has to any Netflix comedy special, be it wholly Boed or unBoed or any intermediate degree of Boification in between. Never heard of the kid.

I like him. I mean, his youth and talent and success irritate the piss out of me, but I like him.

Should I even explain what Bo Burnham: Inside is? Nah. Not much point. Bo makes a joke during this one-man audience-less show about the possibility that he’s just talking to himself, so let me quickly reassure you Bo, in many ways the total lack of audience is a relief. You can skip all the boring explanation bits of the review, for example, and just skip straight to trash-talking it. Go ahead. Do it. Not like anybody is going to fucking care.

There’s something fitting about talking to myself online about a musical-black comedy special consisting mainly of a man talking to himself online about being online all the time. Anyway, from what I can tell Bo is a comedy songwriter in the Al Franken, Weird Al or Eric Idle vein and I have just revealed the incredible paucity of my knowledge and unfamiliarity with this field. Funny songs, in other words, written, performed and shot by Bo in his home during the pandemic.

At some point online humor seems to have shifted from ‘silliness’ to ‘relatability’ and most of the jokes in this special aren’t jokes but things that exist in Bo’s life. Facetiming his mom, sexting, Jeff Bezos.

People don’t seem to tell jokes that much anymore, everybody agrees satire is dead now that people openly say and do the most moronic things imaginable, nobody understands sarcasm, and so what’s left is things that make people clap because they are able to identify them. Like a performer saying “San Francisco!” to their audience and receiving rapturous applause. Yes, that is a place, a place I am from! Woo! Yay! What I get out of Bo is a whole lot of relatability that I don’t much relate to, interspersed with some genuine comedy.

I think it’s unrelatable because the experience of a successful 30-year-old single entertainer living in the United States of Deliberately Fucking Up Their Covid Response at Every Imaginable Stage in Every Imaginable Way of America has been pretty different from a failed 47-year-old married-with-kids writer in Japan. Turning 30 is a distant, half-forgotten image in my rearview mirror. Aside from a three-week period in April 2020, I have been going to the office every day. We have been going shopping, eating in restaurants, getting haircuts, seeing our friends about as much as we did before, i.e. never. Like I have friends. Covid has changed many things, but the degree to which I am or am not online has not been one of them. So songs and jokes about how awful it is to be isolated and online all of the time, however well crafted and expertly shot, tend not to land for me. I wonder if they land for most people outside of a small clutch of social media addicts.

One of the non-song actual stand-up bits involves Bo wondering aloud if it is possible, in this day and age, times being what they are, and so on, is it at all possible for everyone to just shut the fuck up about anything. But you know what? I think most people do shut the fuck up. I think the vast majority of humanity shuts the fuck up on a pretty consistent basis. Maybe if you have a somewhat larger online presence than a Twitter account with three followers and a blog with even fewer than that, then online discussions might feel a bit more heated, but for most of us I suspect the Internet is about as participatory as a rock concert or one of America’s larger wars—in a very abstract way it couldn’t exist without us but nobody is seriously asking us what we think of it. Replying to famous Twitter accounts is like talking back to the TV. Anyway, it’s not like nobody had opinions prior to 2006.

The bit ends with Bo rhetorically asking himself why he doesn’t shut up, then quickly cuts away.

There is, of course, something ironic about a man with a self-written and directed comedy special in which he is the sole performer and often the sole subject complaining about people talking about themselves online. He is the very problem he is describing, a living example of the man who jams a stick in his own bicycle wheel and complains when he falls off. He does exhibit awareness of this, but he himself admits that self-awareness doesn’t absolve anybody of anything. So. There.

I did laugh though, at least in the first half. The facetiming and sexting songs are chuckle worthy, the dark humor of songs about how useless it is to worry about the world ending hits pretty hard, and much of the camera work and setup has an almost childlike and gleeful sense of inventiveness. There’s a brilliant bit about brands attempting to exhibit a social conscience, “The question is not whether you will buy Wheat Thins, but whether you will stand with Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme Disease.” Spoofs of recursive reaction videos to reaction videos to reaction videos and twitch streamers trying to play the life of a depressed 30-year-old shut-in are also kind of funny. The song “White Woman’s Instagram” manages to be more than just relatable, by subtly lampooning the cheapening of real feeling and empathy by giving equal emotional weight to inspirational Lord of the Rings quotes misattributed to Martin Luther King, silly photos of dogs and heartfelt open letters to one’s dead mother.

The second half I liked a lot less, as it is mostly Bo chronicling his declining mental state in his isolated, always-online existence.

For one thing, I don’t buy it. There is something awfully contrived about filming yourself having a mental breakdown while staying in shot, in focus, and zooming artistically away at the appropriate moment.

I don’t buy it.

Maybe it’s Gen X suspicion of any public display of emotion, but I don’t buy it. I don’t believe Bo’s house is that messy, I don’t believe he set up a camera to catch himself waking up, I don’t believe he really cried on camera. I realize as I type this that the performative nature of public grief is part of Bo’s whole beef with the Internet, so this too is probably deliberate, but still off-putting and kind of alienating.

I don’t buy it.

For another, the whole pandemic has been far easier to cope with if one is not one of these quantum Schrödinger humans who disappears if they are ever unobserved. Bo’s theatrical moping about his expensive Los Angeles house is just barely more tolerable than Gal Gadot singing to us from her mansion and one suspects comes from the same root, the same need to be the center of attention at all times. I feel slightly greater sympathy to those suffering to the pandemic without the padding provided by being a YouTube celebrity with a number of comedy specials.

But you know. It was sporadically funny, sometimes gut-bustingly so, visually interesting, something a little different. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I just don’t think I’ll ever want to watch it ever again.

P.S. Listening to the songs from the special on Spotify is a whole other experience. Stripped of the burden of sitting through 45 minutes of material and allowed to command your full attention, I really appreciate that these aren’t just silly little quips, but actually pretty good tunes in their own right. They are bops, my friends, they are each a mood, whole and entire.

Star Wars Visions

I kind of liked the idea of bringing the circle of inspiration around full circle. The fact that George Lucas was originally inspired by not only 50s serials like “Flash Gordon”, but also by Akira Kurosawa’s samurai flicks, such as “Hidden Fortress” or “Yojimbo”, is one of the better-known back stories behind the OG trilogy. 

So bring it home. Let’s see what animators in the land the inspired the Jedi and lightsabers make of their hybrid cousin.

The answer is, well … Jedi and lightsabers, mostly.

In nine episodes produced by seven different Japanese animation studios we get two jedis fighting, a jedi rock band, two jedis fighting, a jedi fighting, nine jedis fighting, a robot jedi fighting, three jedis fighting, a furry jedi fighting and two jedis fighting.

In other words, the country that gave Star Wars its quasi-space samurai turns out to mostly be interested in quasi-space samurai. The characters, the settings, the costumes--the series doesn't look inspired by medieval Japan, it just looks like medieval Japan. Period. With jedis. Which is kind of a shame, I guess. Like a tourist who travels to Europe and eats nothing but McDonald’s, I can’t help but feel this is a missed opportunity, and wish that the animators had looked at Star Wars and seen something other than their own reflection.

Wellll-l-l-l, the visual look was always going to be the thing and the whole thing with this series anyway, wasn’t it? Like the “Animatrix” series (2003, or about five years ago by my reckoning) or “Halo Legends” (2010, i.e. that was just last week, surely?) the main if not only reason you do this is to splash a technicolor coat of Japanese cool over your product.

A couple of the episodes are indeed pretty to look at, especially the first one, “The Duel”, which has a very cool “Hellsreach” style jumpy, skittery black-and-white look to it, with splashes of red and blue color when the laser swords get whipped out.

“The Twins” gets a bit more gonzo, but looses several thousand points in my book for just copying the most iconic scene from “The Last Jedi”. Did I say the animators took nothing from Star Wars? My mistake. They took this one scene, and xeroxed it.

“Tatooine Rhapsody” and “T0-B1” are cutesy Astroboy style cheese harkening back to 80s animation; “The Elder” is basically “The Duel” again, only the bad guy is an old man instead of a woman; “The Village Bride” and “The Ninth Jedi” are a bit Ghibli with their wilderness scenes and plucky heroines, and “Akakiri” (red mist) is very Kurosawa with its bold use of color and bickering old guides.

There’s some stunt casting in the voices, with Lucy Liu, George Takei, David Harbour, Neil Patrick Harris and Temuera “Boba Fett” Morrison all taking a turn behind the mike, though as with much of anime its hampered both by trying to info dump at the speed of Japanese speech and by a listless give-me-my-paycheck delivery of hammy dialog. Voice acting is not in-person acting, and I can’t help but feel the production would have been better served by focusing on performances over names.

I do like the de-emphasis on canon though. It's a millstone that is only going to weigh down any future attempts to tell any other stories in this universe, so the sooner it is cast off the better. Just wish they'd been willing to go a little more lateral, but baby steps I guess.

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 7)

Episode 7: “What if we wanted to be free to do what we want to do, and we wanted to get loaded and have a good time? And that’s what we did, we had a good time, we had a party? Woo yeah?”

The premise here is that a spoiled and feckless Prince Thor of Asgard decides not to fight evil, but rather boredom and the squares, by slipping off while his parents are away (his dad for rejuve treatments, his mom to get wine drunk with other moms) and throwing a cataclysmically large party on Earth. 

Oh dear, you say to yourself, it doesn’t sound like they can fit much punching into that kind of storyline BECAUSE YOU ARE A NAÏVE FOOL WHO KNOWS NOTHING. Thor and co. and I do mean co. as in pretty much every side character from the Thor and Guardians movies gets a cameo anyway they throw a party of such massive proportions that it threatens to destroy the entire planet. Fire giant king and herald of the end of the world, Surtur, rips the Statue of Liberty’s arms off while trying to hit on her. Thor’s lightning accidentally knocks out power to the entire eastern seaboard of the US. Loki develops a plan to use the arch of St. Louis as a giant slingshot. That kind of thing.

It is up to Captain Marvel to stop Thor in a battle of the blondes, by using all of her cunning and crafty wiles or haha no not really, by punching Thor a lot.

It’s mildly diverting though the whole thing is structured like an 80s sitcom episode replete with putting the world back together before mom finds out.

It’s funnier in the premise than the execution, but hell with it, these are comic book characters and it’s oddly refreshing to see them portrayed as such. Sure, it’s a filler episode in a filler series, designed to tide Disney+ audiences over between “Loki” and the next big series, “Hawkeye” (well okay large-ish series, I mean c’mon, it’s Hawkeye) so it’s not exactly essential viewing. But then the whole MCU is about as essential as Twinkie filling anyway, so why not. I did catch myself thinking at one point “ah, not like any of this series is canon anyway” which is kind of a bass-ackwards way to approach entertainment. Of course it’s lightweight, forgettably flimsy fun, what else was it supposed to be? Why should it be anything else?

The expectation that every story link into every other story is probably not a good one for storytelling. This is just kind of its own thing for 30 silly minutes. Good for it. I bitched and moaned about this series not taking its ideas seriously, but if it won’t, then this is the way to go: Dispense with the faux-Shakespearean tragedy about a wizard who gets sad or, um, zombies, and just have goofy, silly characters doing goofy, silly things.

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 6)

Episode 6: “What if we made one that was actually kind of good?”

For all my snark about this series, I thought this week’s episode wasn’t too bad, really. So this will be short, as I’m far better at snark than expressions of genuine appreciation or emotion.

I especially liked the theme (whether intended or not, I have my doubts) about the dangers inherent in worshipping superheroes or following charismatic leaders. This is Marvel we are talking about after all, so I’m not sure whether they realized this week’s story beautifully illustrates why trusting in a superhero to save you is such a short-sighted and stupid mentality. But own goals still count as goals, so score one for Marvel!

This one does a decent job of putting familiar characters into new situations and—rather than having them just beat each other up—shows how they might react to their new situation. The conceit is that Killmonger, Michael B Jordan’s character from “Black Panther”, decides not to concoct a hideously complex and byzantine plot to take over the highly advanced hermit kingdom of Wakanda by challenging its king to ritual combat, but rather decides to concoct an even more byzantine and frankly ludicrously complex plot to provoke a war between America and Wakanda so that he can sweep in, save his homeland and rise to the throne as a hero rather than a villain.

Step one is to save Tony Stark from an ambush in Afghanistan (rewriting one of our first-ever MCU scenes waaaay back in Iron Man 1). Killmonger is handsome, he’s charming, he’s heroic, he has an amazing capacity for self-righteous violence, of course everyone immediately loves him. Naturally he exploits this hero-worship to get into Tony’s good graces and engineer an ambush that kills both Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther and Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes, before murdering Tony and pinning the blame on Wakanda. This works like a charm and the two countries are soon at one another’s throats.

If they’d stopped there, I would have loved, LOVED this. I mean, it’s not quite an “Invincible” or “The Boys” level deconstruction of why superheroes are actually kind of a bad idea really and maybe we shouldn’t be quite so willing to stop thinking for ourselves, but for Marvel this is pretty spicy stuff.

Then they throw in a gratuitous battle scene where the Americans send in an anime esque robot army. Killmonger deactivates them, then for reasons best known to himself reactivates them and spends five minutes beating up robots with a spear. The whole battle scene is just … weird. Unnecessary and just bizarrely frames this as a heroic struggle rather than a pointless fight engineered by an unscrupulous zealot (for his own aggrandizement I guess—though he was already the hero of the hour before the fight so I’m not sure what he hoped to accomplish).

Q: So, nothing to be snarky about?

A: Well, at one point, the Watcher (the narrator) says something along the lines of “Heroes never die.”

Just after Black Panther, Iron Man and War Machine um, er … die.

Q: How many times is this series going to kill Tony Stark?

A: AS MANY AS IT TAKES.

Hey, at least the old dude from Ant-Man wasn’t the bad guy this time.

Q: Chadwick Boseman is in this one, too?

A: Yes and just to make it extra weird he voices his own ghost.

Q: Did they leave the door open for a sequel again?

A: They did indeed, featuring everyone’s two favorite Marvel characters, Pepper Potts and Black Panther’s kid sister.

Kate (Netflix)

Title: Kate
Directed by: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan
Written by: Umair Aleem
Network: Netflix

Kate, an assassin with 24 hours to live (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), seeks revenge on the people who poisoned her. This happens just after she announced to her boss (Woody Harrelson, easily the best thing here but also just reprising his role from the Han Solo movie beat for beat) that she was quitting the assassination business. Gee. Wonder who could possibly be behind it all. What amazing plot twist will be revealed two thirds of the way through. I really cannot guess. Also I have severe brain damage and have never seen any revenge action movie ever before in my life.

If you’ve watched any of Netflix’s previous output—like “Old Guard”, “Extraction”, “Project Power” or “Titan”—you kind of know what to expect: Determinedly middle-brow fare with one big name Hollywood star and a script like something I might write. Narratively, there really is nothing new or original here. Our hero agrees to do one last job before quitting. The last job goes wrong! Oh noes! Now she’s been poisoned with a grain of Polonium and is immediately given 24 hours to live (a bit like the real-life case of Alexander Litvinenko, only it took three weeks for him to die). So a gender-swapped “Crank”, then. Kate begins to work her bloody, bullet-strewn way up the ladder of crime bosses until she reaches the top and gasp, twist, finds out her mentor was behind it all along.

Oh, and there’s an astonishingly foul-mouthed spoiled rich girl who gets dragged along because tough hero plus kid worked so well in “Extraction”. Also, weird little thing, but her name is Ani-chan, which is a strange name for a girl to have as “ani” means “older brother” in Japanese. I thought maybe it was a reference to the character’s gender fluidity or something, but no, nothing. She’s just a girl whose name happens to mean big brother. Odd.

If you can get past the predictability, then the visuals and action are entertaining enough.

There’s an almost amusing bit of “Die Hard” in the amount of shit the movie puts Kate (Mary) through before allowing her to finally succumb to the sweet embrace of death, including getting shot twice and stabbed in the face with a pair of scissors, in addition to the whole radiation poisoning thing. And I can’t help but suspect Mary was cast for her physical similarity to Sigourney Weaver—indeed as the movie progresses her hairstyle and look gets more and more Weaverish until I wondered if I was watching the wrong movie.*

*I was. Should’ve watched “Aliens” instead.

The camerawork during the fight scenes in particular is wonderfully wacky, flipping the image upside down when Kate lands on her back or with overhead shots spinning around as she throws the bad guys this way and that. There’s also a kitchen fight with a tattooed member of BTS that is visceral and crunchy in all the right ways.

Ultramodern Japan is shown here in all its pink neon cat glory, though my favorite scene was shot in a Lawson convenience store, just cos I got to shout at the screen “Hey, it’s a Lawson, a thing which I know exists.” I give the movie points for casting Japanese people in Japanese roles, instead of filling them with Chinese or Korean actors the way most productions seem to do (Hello, Altered Carbon). One or two scenes might overdo it, to the point I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be modern-day Japan or some kind of cyberpunk future.

I’m not sure if the final scene was meant to be a damning commentary on the cheap, fake plastic sentimentality of these kinds of movies, but man does it (accidentally?) do it in style: Our hero gives up the ghost while bathed in the neon pink glow of a bloated quasi-Hello Kitty character that appears to be shitting cherry blossoms. Like, daaaaamn. “Your tears are as genuine as a second-rate, crassly commercial copy of a children’s cartoon character.” Ouch.

That’s the one shot in this movie that actually hits hard.

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 5)

Episode 5: “What if Zombies?”

Q: What if the Marvel superheroes turned into zombies?

A: Hm. Okay, go on.

Q: Um. That’s it. That’s the idea. Zombies.

A: Yes. And?

Q: Well … they’re zombies. So they fight.

A: Look, superheroes fighting other superheroes is 90% of superhero movies. We already had a whole “Civil War” that was all about that.

Q: Yeah but they’re zombies now, so we can bisect them and cut their heads off and make them explode from the inside out.

A: Pure spectacle.

Q: Not sure quite what you expected when we crossed the two most stereotyped movie genres imaginable. Every superhero movie is more or less the same. Every zombie movie, ditto. So we get superheroes doing stereotypically zombie movie things in between punching each other.

A:  And Peter Parker making a jaunty, jokey “How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse” video after watching his aunt, his friends and his entire neighborhood die horrifically.

Q: Paul Ruud appears as a Futurama style head in a jar and makes dad jokes.

A: All that achieves is to remind me of the better shows and movies he is referencing, but whatever.

Q: Did I mention one of the zombies explodes from the inside out?

A: Yeah, then they had a sad scene where the surviving heroes comfort one another about having the courage to go on living, which is a wonderful thing to have Chadwick Boseman’s voice tell you, but again Marvel really seems at a loss as to how to create a consistent tone. If it’s a jokey zombie slapstick, maybe stick with that instead of trying to do tragedy every third scene.

Q: Happy makes “pyew pyew” noises.

A: He does indeed, right before he gets murdered and turned into a zombie. See?

Q: What if we ended on a cliffhanger?

A: I don’t think that really works either. The fun of these things is to showcase all kinds of crazy or offbeat versions of the existing franchise, not establish some kind of ongoing storyline. I’m not really dying to know what happens next. Once you’ve introduced the idea of zombie superheroes, that’s it. 

There’s nothing more to explore here.

"Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 4)

Episode 3: “What if one superhero fought THEMSELVES?”

At last, Marvel’s love of having their superheroes fight one another reaches its logical endpoint in this week’s episode, where we give up entirely on trying to come up with a viable antagonist and just have Benedict Cumberbatch beat himself up.

Of course, we can’t just have him start wailing on himself without preamble like some kind of uncultured barbarians, so the first third of the episode is a shot-for-shot reenactment of 2002’s “The Time Machine”, right down to our desperate protag’s motivations for failing to change the timeline and oddly hilarious and unlikely ways his beloved keeps eating shit.

Luckily, Tilda Swinton shows up to give us some bullshit excuse for why there are now two Stephen Stranges, and on to the magical punching we go.

This one partially makes up for what it lacks (utterly, utterly lacks) in narrative creativity with visual flair, with Evil Stevil growing more monstrous as he absorbs the power of various magical creepy-crawlies and with the Stephen twins beating one another up in a variety of novel ways while the entire world goes antigravity black tar thanks to Stevil screwing with the timeline.

It also has the courage to follow through on its apocalyptic promise and end things on a downer note as the entire universe collapses around the surviving Stephen.

Q: What if we completely changed the central motivation driving your life, from recovering the use of your hands to saving the life of a loved one?

A: Nothing. You’d still end up in exactly the same place with exactly the same people, only looking a little sadder. I mean no, that’s not entirely fair, the episode is about how Strange would become obsessed with undoing the past, but I think it is a little odd that his entire life up to and including becoming a wizard would be exactly the same.

Q: What are the implications of Absolute Points in the timeline for the future of the MCU?

A: None. If you haven’t guessed I despise the kind of Thermian discourse that grows up around shows like these, in which people pretend these stories about people in colorful costumes punching one another are somehow grounded in any kind of consistent, objective reality. The possibility to write stories set in alternative universes has always existed until Marvel suddenly pretended it didn’t so they could triumphantly announce it did again. Time travel in Marvel movies will obey whatever laws the writers feel makes a better story.

Q: Did you catch all the Easter Eggs?

A: I think I see why “The Ending Explained” and “Easter Eggs Explained” and other videos in this vein are so popular: It’s the only kind of coherent analysis possible when the material itself is essentially theme-free. There’s not much going on other than the mechanics of the plot, the gears and pistons pushing one character this way, another that way, so that we can have the requisite people punching one another in the requisite combinations. Look! The Thanos Copter! Ha ha, wasn’t that great.

Q: If you could go back in time—

A: People like to say “no ragrets” but not me, by golly not me, no sir. Changes. Oh boy, I’d make changes. So, so many changes. Utterly selfish and personal changes. Gotten better haircuts, to start with. Dear Lord. And not dating any of my ex-girlfriends. Just a series of horrific multi-vehicle highway pileup level disasters weren’t they. Sorry ladies. Chosen to study something a bit more lucrative than journalism in university.

What? Baby Hitler? Eh. I got my priorities, you got yours.

So yeah, I do kind of get Stephen’s motivations in this episode.

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 3)

Episode 3: “What if one superhero fought a different superhero?”

At last, an episode that answers the timeless question Marvel fans have been pondering for years—what if Marvel made a show about the Avengers?

Truly groundbreaking stuff.

This is one of those episodes that is all about superhero X getting into a fight with superhero Y because, c'mon, Marvel has never been that great about creating villains so having the heroes fight each other is about the only way to generate any excitement or tension. Of course such fights always have to be justified with a bit of narrative magic, so first we get The Pledge where it seems like we’re getting a replay of the first Avengers movie, then The Turn, in which all the Avengers suddenly start dropping dead in various unlikely scenarios, then The Prestige, when it turns out to be some guy I don’t know about because I never watched the Ant-Man movies.

All of this is therefore leading up to the goofy fun of Loki beating up some old man who is by turns extremely small and then extremely large.

There are some jokes along the way about Chris Hemsworth having great hair and smelling like lavender and sight gags like one superhero doing an impression of the exploding ninja in “Big Trouble in Little China”, all of which kind of undercuts any sense of seriousness or tension when superheroes start keeling over faster than anti-vaxxers at a biker rally. Marvel is as quick as ever to reassure you this is all just a bit of fun and not to take it too seriously.

Q: What if one of the actresses asked for too much money to use her likeness?

A: Then Black Widow would stand out as the only one that looks or sounds nothing like her live action counterpart.

Q: What if it was super-easy to kill all these superheroes?

A: That’s the only thing that really stuck with me about this one to be honest. Like man, Marvel villains must be incredibly incompetent. One old dude wiped the whole team out in less than 30 minutes.

Q: What if you did a comedy episode in which a bunch of people die?

A: Huh. Then the way they die better be pretty amusing or darkly humorous, otherwise the jokes are going to seem wildly out of place. Poisoned? Shot with an arrow? Um, hate to tell you show, I ain’t laughing yet. Ironically the Hulk popping like a giant grape was about the only funny one AND THAT WAS THE ONLY DAMN ONE WHERE YOU HAD PEOPLE REACT WITH HORROR AND SADNESS.

Q: What if two superheroes fight?

A: Then you’d better have a damn good build-up to that fight or lots of fun interaction between the characters, because as a plot that’s about as tired as it gets. This one doesn’t do a half-bad job of it—the cracks about Chris’s pretty-boy image aren’t bad even if tonally bizarre—and Tom Hiddleswagger is as waggishly charming as ever. But it is, in the end, still just two guys fighting, and “who would win” questions are the dullest possible ones to ask in this genre.

Q: Okay but what if Wolverine fought the Hulk?

A: Did you even read … I can’t believe you … Wolverine, and it wouldn’t even be close.

Q: What if entertainment properties generally face a choice between Exploring their concept and Exploiting their popularity, and the more the concept gets tired and played out the more they lean on Exploiting it, such as by endlessly rehashing old story lines with minor tweaks or bringing back Alfred Molina?

A: What are you implying.

Q: What’s not an answer.

A: That’s not a question.

Q: Fair point. Maybe it’s time to stop.

Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 2)

Episode 2: “What if Chadwick Boseman was awesome?”

Well, any discussion of this episode is probably going to be overshadowed by the fact that it was the last performance of beloved actor Chadwick Boseman, appearing here as the beloved superhero T’Challa, prince of the beloved fictional kingdom of Wakanda.

While I remain deeply suspicious and cynical about the type of person who has the, hm, immense self-belief it must take to become a famous actor, I won’t try to deny the online outpouring of love that met the news of Mr. Boseman’s death. Again, the Internet does love to go crazy over its Keanu Reeveses and Brendan Frasers, its Bob Rosses and Steve Irwins, so I take the flood of messages with a grain of salt, but I figure there’s still gotta be a grain in there somewhere, and that’s no small thing.

It does mean that T’Challa, the character, has been utterly overshadowed by Chadwick Boseman, the actor, probably to the detriment of the character. T'Challa is awesome because Chadwick Boseman is awesome. To be anything less would be an insult to the dead, but honestly, that does not make for interesting writing or a great character. T’Challa cannot fail or be afraid or get angry or make mistakes or doubt himself, because he isn’t T’Challa he’s Chadwick Boseman.

That said, this was a fun episode, at least at the start, as it kind of leans into the meme of Chadwick Boseman’s awesomeness with a replay of the opening scene of the first “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie between Star-Lord (now Chadwick Boseman instead of Chris Pratt) and Djimon Hounsoun’s character: When Star-Lord introduces himself, instead of asking "Who?" Djimon instantly recognizes him and falls over himself fangirling over Chadwick. “Should we be bowing? I feel like we should be bowing.”

Similarly, there’s a kind of cute scene where we learn Thanos the Mad Titan decided to give up his plan to wipe out half of all sentient life in the universe after talking to Chawick Boseman for five minutes. Ha ha. Chadwick Boseman is awesome, am I right?

The rest is just kind of filler, tbh. Once they’ve set up and made the joke about how awesome Chadwick Boseman is, there isn’t much point to the rest of it except to reiterate how awesome he is a couple more times.

As a tribute, it’s nice. Touching. Just the right send off probably, as fitting a curtain-closer as one could hope for. Raul Julia's last film was "Street Fighter" and if I had to choose between going out as a martial artist who is awesome and a martial artist in a 90s video game, I pick the awesome. As entertainment, the episode is, well, it’s not really answering any of the questions it appears to raise.

Q: What is more important, your nature or the nature of your environment?

A: Your nature.

Q: Wow, you didn’t even hesitate. Which is odd because this is an ongoing and complex debate within a number of scientific fields such as psychology, genetics, and neuroscience. Are you sure?

A: Yep.

Q: Oh come on, not even a hint of doubt?

A: Nope.

Q: So you’re saying that a man raised as the son of a king, accustomed to authority and obedience, pampered in comfort and luxury, destined for absolute rule over a peaceful and highly advanced kingdom would have turned out exactly the same had he been an orphan raised by space pirates?

A: Exactly.

Q: Well, that’s, ah, very. Okay, explain.

A: Easy. He’s Chadwick Boseman.

Q: And?

A: That’s it. That’s all. He’s Chadwick Boseman.

Q: So, the original Star-Lord (Peter Quill, played by Chris Pratt) was kind of a roguish asshole in the Han Solo mode not because Peter Quill had been raised by a single mother crazier than a sack full of weasels who then died of cancer leaving the young boy wholly and utterly bereft and alone and then in that single moment when he was at his lowest he was kidnapped by space child traffickers who intended to sell him to a godlike planet-being as psychic food, not any of that, but because Peter Quill was a dick?

A: Well, he was no Chadwick Boseman, am I right?

Q: I see. Okay, try this then: Is there any conflict or tension between one’s loyalty to the family one creates through friendship and shared experiences, and loyalty to one’s genetic family, who have not shared those experiences?

A: No.

Q: So if you lived most of your life believing your family was dead, then 20 years later found out they were still alive, you would not feel torn between staying with the family you had built for yourself on the one hand, and returning to a family you barely know or remember on the other?

A: Nah. They'd love each other.

Q: Because…?

A: Because he’s Chadwick Boseman.

Q: Uh huh.

A: Chadwick Boseman is awesome.

Q: Not to disagree here, but it seems to be we’ve set up two juicy sources of potential conflict that might actually explore the concept we’ve introduced here, then immediately resolved both of them without even the slightest pause because …

A: Chadwick Boseman is awesome.

Q: … because Chadwick Boseman is awesome, exactly. And—not to take away anything from Mr. Boseman’s state of awesomenity, awesomeitude, awesomeosity—perhaps also because Marvel is nervous about its viewers being even slightly uncomfortable or conflicted or thoughtful for even a sliver of a nanosecond?

A: These are kids’ shows, you know.

Q: The way children’s entertainment has gradually overtaken more and more of the market as western society psychically retreats for the hellworld we have created into comforting nostalgia and fantasy has not gone unremarked, no. Nor has the fact that the actual target audience of such entertainment is most definitely and emphatically not kids entirely escaped notice. Yes, these are fun little throwaway morsels designed to do nothing more than distract us for a moment and fill the idle times in our lives, but I think it’s fair to sigh over the way they steadfastly refuse to even hint at any kind of conflict that does not involve punching things.

A: Chadwick Boseman punches Benicio del Toro in this one.

Q: He sure does. He also exhibits an awareness of the history of slavery in the United States despite never having visited there, being raised in a position of incredible privilege from a young age, and then spending the overwhelming majority of his life hundreds of lightyears away from Earth.

A: What are you talking about? Chadwick Boseman knows all about the history of the United States.

Q: We really have conflated the character with the actor haven’t we?

A: Chadwick Boseman is awesome.