Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase 4 & Beyond (and a chance to change your vote)

Like, I don’t see how you watch especially the post-credits scene and think “ah yes, here is an obvious, unambiguously good person doing something wholly innocuous”

if you're talking to me, i don't think i said anything of the sort? My suggestion is that the emotional ending is sabotaged by the character we are meant to empathize with being a monster in leather boots.

xxxxp Who is everyone here? Not a lot of people know what's happened.

(I mean in the MCU, though by volume that's probably true in this thread)

Very much fanwank.

I'd argue that fanwank would involve something more obscure than "two films that took in 2 billion dollars between them"?

DJPotm

i definitely think you can empathize with wanda while still thinking what she did was wrong, or even monstrous. the problem with this episode is that the mcu has no idea how to do endings, and they basically shunted aside all the reckoning for a later date. or maybe wanda won’t reckon with what she does and this is more of a supervillain origin story than we thought.

Given what they did with Patsy frickin Walker on Jessica Jones (again acknowledging that previous Marvel tv shows apparently no longer count), anything is possible.

If I had to make a prediction, I would bet Dr. Strange 2 starts with him doing some relatively light and zippy problem solving, but then sensing a grave disturbance in the force. Cut to Wanda using her powers to try and bring back her kids. Dr. Strange interrupts ("If you do this, it comes at a huge price, you will unleash the powers of Booga Booga and put the whole universe in danger, etc"), maybe they fight a bit, she does it anyway and half succeeds, then indeed unleashes the cursed power of Booga Booga. Then Dr. Strange will say "if you want your kids back, and to right the universe, we must first find a way to return Booga Booga back to the magic book." Or something. Maybe they'll go to Agatha for advice. Ends with the kids back, Wanda chastened, and Booga Booga back in the book. Except he isn't totally back in the book, because he's Mephisto, and he says "excellent, everything is going according to plan, bwahaha!" And then he turns back into Ralph/Evan Peters and just disappears into the crowd.

Question for the nerds, would Dr. Strange be aware of Agatha, or the mythic Scarlet Witch and/or its connection to Wanda?

BTW, looking at the original Phase 4 chart really underscores how much covid has screwed up their grand plans:

https://consequenceofsound.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Marvel-Phase-4.jpeg?quality=80

previous Marvel tv shows apparently no longer count

Is this true? Have they relegated certain stuff to “Legends” status?

Jessica Jones was not real

The Punisher died in a bus wreck

Wow, crazy how much would have already been released by now in our non-Darkest Timeline, and that Wandavision got pushed UP ahead of Falcon/Winter Soldier (which I knew, but seeing it on that graphic feels weirder)

I've honestly thought more than once that Disney collectively breathed retrospective sighs of relief in that both their big movie cycles (temporarily) concluded in 2019. Imagine if COVID had hit in March 2019 two months before Endgame was supposed to come out.

_previous Marvel tv shows apparently no longer count_

Is this true? Have they relegated certain stuff to “Legends” status?

Like there was a rumor that Charlie Cox would be appearing as Daredevil in the next Spidey flick but Feige recently said that the rights to the Netflix characters had yet to revert and that they had no plans for them at present. Which could be smokescreenery but who knows.

Interesting. Would be cool if they could take a mulligan on Patsy Walker at least.

I think as of February all of the rights to the Netflix characters have gone to Disney. Per the sigh of relief Ned probably correctly assumes, I suspect there has been a ton of rewriting going on this past year. I only half joked that WandaVision felt like it was maybe rushed to conclusion due to Covid conditions, but given the scuttled rollout of the other films and shows, plus getting the Fox properties (March 2019?), plus working out a solid deal to keep Spiderman (that happened in summer 2020, iirc), plus stopping and resuming and/or relocating filming of Dr. Strange, Spider-man and others, they likely had to reshape some pieces of their grand jigsaw puzzle.

Another nice Hahn interview here

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/arts/television/kathryn-hahn-wandavision.html

i did not like the finale much at all.

sorry marvel i know this comes as a blow

You're fired (from your job developing ten more spinoff series).

what began as beguiling, mysterious, utterly unlike anything else gets pooped out as another series of weightless cgi fights

i found myself thinking things like: “how come the phantom vision made of wanda’s memories can transmit historically dead vision’s memories, many of which wanda would have no knowledge, to the new vision reconstructed by the military??”

i’d much rather be asking myself things like: “can hedge clippers really cut brick?”

i also wanted a lot more of monica - she got kinda relegated to the bench imo

i actually caught myself wondering if the brick wall was made of cake

good question to be asking oneself when watching a tv show imo

i thought the resolution with the titular two characters worked pretty well, but the writers didn't seem understand what to do with monica or the rest of the bench, which is a bummer because the show kicked into another gear when they showed up

I thought the resolution to the Vision thing was pretty dumb and the fite was a letdown, but otherwise I enjoyed the show. Hahn alone was worth the price of admission and I think Olsen did a terrific job. I loved the Scarlet Witch as a kid and I like seeing her fleshed out a bit more.

I mean, I get people being bummed that the quirkiness and originality of the faux-sitcom stuff faded away completely by the end, but I mean, it's the MCU, it was pretty much a given as soon as we hit that episode focusing entirely on Rambeau, Jimmy and D'Arcy.

I thought he just ‘unlocked’ the hidden memory data already within the white vision

i mean.. sure i guess.

the acting was tremendous throughout,
no doubt

implied that the memories were still somehow encoded into his cells. sort of foreshadowed with all the talk of carbon dating, radioactive signature decay...

and thematically, it fits

what happened to agatha by the way? wanda turned her back into agnes just in time for the illusion to go away, which seemed pretty pointless, because now she’s just agatha again presumably

I thought he just ‘unlocked’ the hidden memory data already within the white vision

as evidenced when Wanda's Vision said to Alabaster Vision "they tried to block your memories but you are too fly for them to stay hidden away forever" and then unlocked them

tbh I really like the idea of this broad, hammy sitcom-cliche-spouting stranger wandering through Westview while the shellshocked townspeople studiously avoid her

the vision vs. vision "ship of theseus" scene was one of my favorite of the series. got to the core of what i find interesting about the character.

xps re: Agatha - implication I thought was that Wanda's mojo was so strong at this point (and she milkshaked all of Agatha's juice) it was a perma-hex until Marvel decides it's time to Agatha back

xp loved the Ship of Theseus robot-logic-o-rama as well

and yeah, i pray we get a scene in the future of Agatha "okey-doke artichokey!"-ing the modern residents of Westview someday

yeah, the ship of theseus bit was enjoyable.

white vision (now with UNLOCKED MEMORIES tm) basically IS Vision now and we'll surely see him shortly but I think the implications of how much Vision is Wanda's creation could have benefited from more exploration.

SWORD rebuilt Vision's body using Wanda's energy and then Wanda's dream-vision "unlocked" (perhaps more accurately "transferred" / "implanted") the inherent hidden memories... so in a very real way, Vision is Wanda's lover AND creation, a gender-flipped Pygmalion and Galatea. That's a storyline I'd like to see more of!

i totally thought that wanda’s vision like, bluetoothed them over or something, but yeah i guess i missed it

wanda's vision didn't have many of the memories that white vision had. there is no "true" vision that has both pre-infinity war memories and memories of wanda's family life in the hex.

More stuff that will need explaining involves those pesky infinity stones. I thought Wanda and Vision were both given power by the mind stone, but the mind stone has been (ostensibly) destroyed, at least in this universe, so wouldn't that mean no more mind stone power? Similarly, Wanda's brother was (apparently) given speed powers by the mind stone as well, but at least in this world Agatha (no mind stone) could give Ralph the same powers. Also related, even though the mind stone has been destroyed or is otherwise totally MIA, Wanda in her created world could give her Vision the powers of the mind stone. If all these powers can be created independent of the mind stone, then what use was the mind stone to Vision, Wanda, Pietro, etc.? For that matter, Nu Vision definitely lacks the mind stone, and Dr. Strange now lacks the time stone, right? I guess with Loki in possession of the mind stone in some alternate time line/TV show that means the stones will still play some role, though after establishing them as the ultimate OP I hope they find a way to make them less of a focus.

If you infuse tequila with peppers and then throw the peppers away, does the tequila lose its pepper flavor?

If not, why would Wanda's powers have vanished after the Mind Stone was destroyed?

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?

I guess I always assumed the mind stone was less a seasoning and more a source. Maybe it was in Wanda's case, but Vision literally had it embedded in his head, it had to be there for a reason, right?

i totally fell asleep every time somebody said “mind stone” on this show

I took a shot of tequila.

lol @ Josh

reminds me of that sequence in The Wire where McNulty used the timestone on Stringer

or when Tony used the reality stone to rub out Big Pussey

Vision was Snot Boogie

I'm not sure where the idea that Red'n'Gold Vision is "the phantom vision made of wanda’s memories" comes from, though? The main tragedy, as I read it, is that Wanda wants to create a perfect world, but because she's recreated Vision in his entirety*, the whole shebang is only counting down until he figures out what's going on and rebels.

*albeit a version that can only exist inside the hex.

if r&g vizh isn't made by wanda's memories and impetus i'm not sure what he's made of? I think the implication is that r/g is a manifestation of vision prime's "soul" and that white vision is made from his body (and wanda's hex power to jumpstart it for reasons that are totally handwavy) and that r/g pushed the button in white vision's forehead that allowed him to ACCESS ALL MEMORIES BEEP BOOP
again: all absurd and can be read any of a dozen different ways - most notably how it happened in the comics, but also what we saw in the show, which includes wanda making r/g vizh from fairy dust and dreams

wanda says "you're the piece of the mind stone that lives inside me," which is how she was able to conjure a simulacrum of vision that had its own autonomous thoughts and feelings. i'd venture that white vision, with no mind stone, can access those memories but won't be able to process human emotion like mind stone vision could.