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

Black Panther is a title more than person so it could be anyone. Shura was Black Panther in the comics for a while

Final image of the episode was on the nose but, well, in a good way. Not a GOOD good way but you get what I mean.

idk this episode was v clumsy. dialogue as exposition, multiple instances of plot-forced stupidity, etc etc.

even before the heel turn it was, like, come on this guy has been through 1000 psych tests. make his fall plausible or it doesn’t mean anything.

whatever, not like I won’t watch it all but Invincible is better rn

Yeah, this may be another instance of 'John Walker is like this in the show because John Walker is like this in the comics'. If the MCU is letting Marvel Comics history carry the storytelling water for them, they're doing it wrong.

Like, I appreciate how he's portrayed at this point but I agree that the transition from how he was portrayed at the start hasn't really been earned.

I don't know, John's felt like a wrong'un since we first saw him. "Captain America should be the best human, not the best soldier" and all that jazz. The show is still pretty middling mind

Yeah I was about to say, from the get-go (start of second episode rather than the two-second bit in the first) you get a sense of someone who was overwhelmed at living up to a standard.

of course! that’s the setup! but that struggle between who he is and who he wants to be hasn’t been dramatized.

lol I made the crack about Invincible before Mahershala Ali even showed up. is there anything he’s not great in?

no knock on Wesley Snipes, who continues to steal every scene Eddie Murphy gives him, but I am an Ali stan since The 4400 and I cannot wait for Blade.

i’m enjoying this but sam and bucky feel like supporting characters in their own show - john and karli are the ones with story arcs and zemo is the fun wildcard

i thought this was great, personally.

very much having fun with this. doesn't have the fun mystery box/whimsy of Wandavision but still a blast

What do we make about the fact that in Sam's conversation with Morgenthau they gave him almost word for word the line that MLK,Jr. puts in the mouth of the "white moderate" in Letter from the Birmingham Jail: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action."

Well, context is important; he said this to someone who tied people up in a building and then blew them up

That said, Sam’s characterization throughout the entire MCU has been solidly neoliberal so I don’t know why anyone would expect home to suddenly morph into a cross between James Baldwin and Huey Newton*

* I do have a theory but it’s neither nice nor generous

I was just wondering whether the writers did this as an intentional reference. Maybe my memory is overstating the word-for-wordness of it.

Sam stood with a dude who was the embodiment of white bread American values and still seems to believe in the 'dream' even though he has abundant reason not to; it's interesting to see the show flirt with taking this head on, but retreat. I don't know that they have the balls to go all out on it.

It wasn't clear to me (likely because I fell asleep and missed part of episode 3) that the people impacted (the 'refugees') weren't people returning from the Blip, they were people who were displaced because people came back. Karli is a relatively sympathetic villain for these movies/shows. I'd like to hold out hope that this show will tackle the toxic elements of nationalism. We'll see.

the show's throwing in with a "both sides are evil and a little right" mentality. it will be interesting to see how they use Sam and Bucky to thread that needle, hoping they'll come up with something a little more conceptually satisfying than the end of Winter Soldier (as much as I love that movie)

I would interrogate why you think Steve Rogers as depicted in the MCU stands for “whitebread values”

I was so high when I typed that last night I'm surprised the sentences are even comprehensible.

lol fair

As someone who hasn't read many comics since the 90s, I thought the idea that superheros=supremacists super-interesting. It's good argument, and could, of course, be extremely damaging to the MCU, which is why it felt so surprising. I guess this is already well-worn ground in the comic books (?). I read something about how it's the reluctance to use their powers that differentiates the good guys from the villains (who think their powers are their birthright, etc.) in the MCU, but I don't find that convincing.

I also don't really love Zemo's use of the word "supremacist" -- I mean, it's a word that at east in my world is only used with the word "white" prepended to it, so the use of the unmodified noun inevitably comes off as "you know, like white supremacy, but not involving whiteness," which I guess is a little too abstract for me. (I also feel like the comics world is quite plainly depicted as one where superpowered beings are not inevitably going to use their power to crush the unpowered -- come on, this takes the most famous line in the entire Marvel Universe, "With great power comes great responsibility," and renders it meaningless, false, or a cruel joke.)

I think it's a 100% rational position for Zemo to take, given what happened to his family as a result of superheroes saving the world from a menace that they themselves created. It's also meant to be one character's point of view, not a thesis statement for the entire fictional enterprise.

Yeah I guess this is where "haven't seen that many of the movies" comes in for me, I don't really know what's up with Zemo before this show

How good does your MCU knowledge have to be to enjoy the new shows? My partner has watched a couple of the films but has a terrible memory for that kind of thing.

I had to have a few tabs open to figure out who was what and which was going on in the middle episodes of WandaVision, but sounds like you would be able to murmur that sort of annotation more efficiently?

I guess this is already well-worn ground in the comic books (?)

Not necessarily in mainline Marvel books, but, yes, a strong theme of 1980s and 1990s revisionist supercomics, and of many booped out since by the Millar-o-bot 5000.

Whether or not we think Marvel superheros use their powers "with great responsibility" or not, I still think they (and in particular, Captain America, which is especially rich with irony) think that they are these exceptional beings who ultimately only answer to themselves. We saw this hashed out a bit in Civil War, but I think the fact that Zemo states this so plainly, in a time where many (mostly white) people are reckoning with their own participation in supremacy, is both topical, and potentially ruinous toward the whole idea of superheroes.

Probably worth noting that Zemo wants the supers snuffed out partly because he sees himself as an exceptional being who ultimately only answers to himself.

How good does your MCU knowledge have to be to enjoy the new shows? My partner has watched a couple of the films but has a terrible memory for that kind of thing.

I could probably fill her in as we go more or less, but it might not be very fun for her.

potentially ruinous toward the whole idea of superheroes.

they've held up under this kind of penetrating analysis for 51 years so far

I didn't remember Zemo at all, nor most of the callback characters in these things. So much of these are just a blur to me and I've seen most of them twice at least! Thankfully my son pays more attention.

Yeah I guess this is where "haven't seen that many of the movies" comes in for me, I don't really know what's up with Zemo before this show

Zemo lived in Sokovia, which was the country Ultron tried to turn into an extinction-event asteroid in Avengers: Age of Ultron. He had moved his family out of the city because he figured they would be safer in the countryside (he was a Hydra agent in the city) but what ended up happening is that they were trapped on a falling rock and were killed as the excavation efforts focused on the main city. This drove him to be the primary antagonist in Civil War, where he used Bucky to set Captain America and Iron Man against each other in an attempt to destroy the Avengers in retaliation for killing his family. His primary motivation is to make sure superhuman s are stomped out so that they can’t kill any more families.

BTW - highly recommend watching those character recaps on Disney+ under the "Marvel Legends" series. They're not long, usually between 5-10 minutes. Even for diehard fans it does help you remember a lot of forgotten story details. In particular I couldn't remember what happened to Sharon Carter (basically, nothing since Civil War - but so long ago in real time/sheer number of Marvel movies!).

Wandavision would've been a little more enjoyable if I watched those beforehand, and I will definitely watch whatever they put out before Loki.

*Also lol at Zemo being a "typical" secret agent family man in CW to now having been super rich all along

Definitely seems a bit of retconning around Zemo in this

I do like the idea that Zemo was a bored trustafarian who has been progressively radicalized by his life experiences

It also explains how a random Hydra henchman had the capital to finance what he did in Civil War

I thought this episode was pretty good. Clearly nu-Cap (and iirc, someone did actually call him nu-Cap) is not long for this world. The question I guess is whether he dies a redeemed hero or villain.

My thoughts on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are maybe best encapsulated by the line Bucky tosses out about how the macguffin lady died in
"Riga, a city near the Baltic Sea." Which presumes that these three superheroes and true citizens of the world are unfamiliar with the capital of Latvia? Or more to the point, that the audience is not, so let's throw this awkward bit of dialogue and likewise spoonfeed our viewers at every step so we don't lose them.

Also, Tuomas otm about Gruenwald; what a weird place to look for inspiration.

^^ that one really jumped out. see also "my grandfather or whoever was a ~world war two resistance fighter~"

u misspelled Latveria, so embarrassed 4 u

Deeply embarrassed that I was able to pull the name of the capital of Latveria up in my brain as soon as I saw your post but had to double check if Riga was Latvia or Albania.

Post credit scene this week

End training sequence for me pretty amped for the next episode

*got me

The percentage of painfully corny dialogue in this show just goes up and up. I feel like the people who write this are just not trying very hard and it bums me out, because the premise really does give them a lot to work with.

And when I say "not trying very hard" I don't just mean the words the actors are being made to say are hard to listen to, I mean there's very little attention paid to any kind of plot plausibility at this point. Like, Karli is now said to be "under under underground," laying so low nobody can possibly find her, and she's .... literally back at the same building where she just was and where dozens of people know that she's recently been? Together with every single one of her top lieutenants?

Sarah's boat was in such bad condition that "Mr. Dinh" realized it wasn't worth it to buy it, but all it needed was... a couple of dozen random people from the neighborhood with no special expertise in boat repair to hang out puttering with it for a day?

Personally I thought this episode hit hard — and always would, but this week underscored it.

yeah this was a good one