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

_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.

I thought I saw where they were going with "My mission is to destroy the true Vision"/"But you are also the true Vision", then he just flew off though

I feel like while they were saying goodbye to the kids, etc., red Vision might have wanted to mention the fact that he did a mind transfer to white Vision!

it's a game they ike to play

right but he didn't do a mind transfer, he just woke up the memories of the old vision. and there's no indication that white vision will be able to make sense of the full scope of those memories without the empathy and insight offered by the mind stone

yeah, i think they're gonna do a Data
"is this what it means... to FEEL"

Sure, but it still seems like Wanda would have liked to know about the “awakening” or whatever.
xp

"teach me about this thing you call....love"

i'm not sure what he's made of

About 6 billion dollars of vibranium iirc (I probably do not rc)

I'm not just being glib - Wanda did a magic and she made a The Vision. One of the takeaways of the show is a better understanding of her grief and trauma, but another is the terrifying level of power she has (if not necessarily to hand).

the bit with white vision was just advanced original star trek -- oh no, a logical paradox! i must explode/disappear! and the whole hex was just like various star treks tng/ds9/dsc in which some sad powerful person created a simulation to assuage their grief, albeit those powerful people weren't commandeering live people

this had much better acting and much better production values, and the way the premise was set up was grebt

but man, what a fizzle. wanda is sad for manipulating ppl, but not *really*, because True Love. vision is more or less alive. wanda beat agatha because the latter let her out of the cellar and the former made a rune. heyward, the head of an elite secret countereverything division, got foiled by the sassy chick in the ice cream truck, after which he just waited for the FBI to arrest him. rambeau is ridiculously hot but has no other actual purpose beyond preventing heyward from shooting wanda's hypothetical children, who can hypothetically take care of themselves

and tbh i'm more or less okay with that! it was beautifully shot and moving at times, and god knows science fiction is terrible at endings. but christ comics/mcu stans are insufferable

I’m fully down with pop philosophy 101 endings like the Ship of Theseus thing rather than just endless punching to resolve fights, but of course I like Star Trek and Fallout which are best when they go that way. Also why I liked the end of the Dr Strange movie.

How lucky is Disney/Marvel that they had everything shot before lockdown hit, and this is the series they launch their tv franchise with?

I was just reading an interview with the director. Apparently they finished filming something like two weeks right before lockdown, but of course had tons of time in post under lockdown, and it was there that a number of changes were made. Ten episodes down to nine, for example, and a bunch of stuff with Monica cut out. From a reddit thread based on the interview with Kevin Smith:

it was meant to be the first 3 episodes dropped at once.
"aerospace engineer" came from tweaked dialogue during a reshoot and they didn't realise it was going to blow up.
"Kick-ass" not an intended inside joke. It was improv.
Scripts for later episodes were still being reworked when they started filming
Original 10 eps planned, ended up compressed to 9.
Part of the final convo between Monica and Wanda was a late addition
Ralph Bohner was a reference to Growing Pains
Kevin Feige is incredibly focused on each project and would know a script better than the director, despite being involved in every project simultaneously.
The ads were not about Infinity Stones
Walnuts is Shakman's favourite Dick Van Dyke episode
Evan Peters was a meta-comment on recasting. Shakman's response to disgruntled fans is, Mutants and Multiverse is coming because they've been announced, so be patient
Shakman did plan to do a whole sequence in the finale where Monica, Ralph, Darcy and the kids try to steal the Darkhold from the basement and Senor Scratchy intercepts them and morphs into a demon.

Lol okay, given what they were considering I’m even more glad they did what they did

Monica deserved more time!
and i would've liked to see Demon Scratchy

good review: https://lifestyle.livemint.com/how-to-lounge/movies-tv/wandavision-season-review-marvel-makes-tv-magic-111615266040682.html