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

I really liked this episode. Scarlet Witch was always a big favorite of mine as a kid, so I liked the dive into her backstory. I thought it was an unexpectedly touching portrayal of grief, at least from the MCU.

But, come on, "that line" was neither the greatest example of screenwriting in modern history, nor was it an example of how "terrible" the writing is "always" in the MCU. Can we maybe have a piece of pop culture that is not immediately shoved to the most ridiculous ends of hyperbole? Both positions, which were all over Twitter this weekend, are embarrassing.

agreed. it was a nice line but unfortunately completely contradicts the comforting thing that Vision says immediately prior, something like 'it can't ALL be sadness.' well, if grief is love persevering, and it can't all be sadness, i guess love doesn't really last! SORT IT OUT, VISION

I mean... it doesn't work that way, at least not in my experience

The underlying point and what resonated so hard with people is that grief is a painful manifestation of love, and it's helpful to get through that pain to remember that it is a manifestation of love. The fact that that pain fades doesn't directly mean that the love does; it means that over time, the love become less immediately painful. The two statements are absolutely in support of each other, not in contradiction.

ty for expressing that DJP. i was trying to figure out a good way to say it, but you nailed it

haha DJP no i agree, i was just being needlessly argumentative by taking a cartoonishly literal interpretation of this show's dialogue, per tradition

lol well-played

What is ILX if not literalness persevering?

pic.twitter.com/IbzjnqKrsH

— Gabe Delahaye (@gabedelahaye) February 28, 2021

Okay lmao

i've seen a million of those and that's the only good one, well done

I saw that one, but idgi, guessing because I'm not familiar with the Vanessa Bayer source material.

Jon, it’s this skit from Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xS9Y_mjTjc

Thanks! Haha, should have assumed it came from that show, seems to be the breeding ground for 85% of memes on twitter right now. I haven't watched it yet, one of those shows where I feel like I missed the moment and it can never possibly live up to the hype.

I would ignore the hype tbh, it’s just funny

Also with a lot of good visual candy, as evidenced by its reuse in memes

On a separate point - and one that likely deserves an essay if one hasn't already been written - given that Kirby/Lee were doing Douglas Sirk-style hypermelodrama romance comics long before they repurposed much of that angst into the Avengers and X-Men should indicate just how baked-in to the formula this glurge is. People have been bitching about too much of it being in the books for over sixty years, why should now be any different?

I can't even tell where the quote is from

the second result was this edifying article, though

that quote is from my lengthy and de-spoilered post upthread.

the hiding tags work! I wonder if they googleproof

You don’t have time to watch one damn show on Disney plus and suddenly you have no idea what anyone is ever arguing about on Twitter anymore.

— Dewayne Perkins (@DewaynePerkins) February 28, 2021

that vanessa beyer skit on that show was easily the funniest thing on the show and also one of the funniest things I've seen in the past 25 years

it's my favorite part of the show and also a pavlovian trigger for me to post the aunty donna ellen sketch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5FGOaz__W0

that vanessa beyer skit on that show was easily the funniest thing on the show and also one of the funniest things I've seen in the past 25 years

I sincerely feel the book LEAN IN should be about Vanessa Bayer's performance in that sketch and not some Facebook shit

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/kathryn-hahn-steals-the-show-again

ok that finale left me an emotional mess and that’s the first time I’ve been able to say that about an MCU thing after 22 movies and several series

Wanda!!

This was good. I had a confident guess about a mid-credits scene which of course didn't happen.

As a library worker I must protest some collateral damage.

Note that there's a bot mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene... The mid-credits one is just a set-up for Captain Marvel 2, but the post-credits one is way more significant for this series.

As for the episode itself, it was kinda meh. They didn't do anything wrong, and the emotional beats worked, but again everything happened just as I had expected. The real Vision is restored. Monica becomes Spectrum. Agatha isn't shown to be truly evil, she doesn't die, and they're setting her up to become sort of a trickster mentor for Wanda. Tommy and Billy didn't actually disappear with the illusion either, and we're probably gonna see them in Young Avengers, if not Dr. Strange 2. So yeah, it was competently done, but not much originality or surprises, just lining everyone up with their comic counteparts and setting up future movies and series.

The biggest surprise for me was that Pietro turned out to be just random Westview dude. How'd he get the super speed, then? Is Agnes powerful enough to just casually give people superpowers? And him looking like Quicksilver from the X-Men movies was just a meta joke and nothing else?

Well his "man cave" looked very much to me like the basement he lives in in Days Of Future Past, I'd be more confident but can't be arsed looking at DOFP to check.

Sure, but he can't be this universe's counterpart of the X-Men universe's Pietro Maximoff, because there already was one who died. So even if the man cave was supposed to look similar, I don't see any signifigance to that?

It reinforces (to me) that it was exactly just a meta joke and nothing else. Very much fanwank.

thought the series was fine as something to look at during a pandemic or whatever, especially when it was "what is going on" type thing, but the last 3 or so episodes were awful, with this final one being incredibly stupid, imo

Well, I suppose I liked the final scene with Wanda and Vision (how many times is she going to see him die?), but we thought this finale was pretty bad. There was a point early one where I thought, man, this is like watching some Disney show, and ... well.

I quite liked it.

This ruled

agnes's husband ralph is gonna be confused

yeah, didn't work for me either. may type up some more reasoned thoughts later but my 2cents is this ended up being deep true emotional story sabotaged by laser beam blasts and midair punch'em-ups... and vice versa! Everything after Agatha All Along was too absurd for me to take seriously and too serious for me to effortlessly enjoy.

Lots of people just standing around watching while stuff happened around them in this episode.

Or, you know, just hovering in place.

Nothing against you, forks, but...absurdity is built into the whole overarching enterprise.

Of course, but deep true emotional stories are not! I think this worked for the most part as long as it tried to tell its story on a small scale.

Or more to the point, when marvel did deep true emotional stories in the books, they were couched in heavy camp, aimed at the young and the stunted and landed fairly leaden. "Even an Android Can Cry," referenced explicitly in this episode, has long been the subject of scorn and academic conversation for just that reason.

It wasn’t until I became a parent that I noticed how often kids are treated as props with little concern for the real logistics, like “oh and who is watching their kids now??” questions going unanswered — but even given that baseline leaving your apparently beloved children to die, painfully, alone, awake, while you get emo downstairs is some written-for-teens nonsense.

yeah, let's tuck in the mindbabies for dramatic effect as the red wall of reality relentlessly encroaches was a bridge too far for me too. Though obviously the second post-credits bit is meant to suggest that wanda is scouring the reaches to bring them back, so we have that to look forward to in Doc Strange 2: Doc Stranger

Liked this! It's funny, whenever I read people gushing over this I'm like "come on it's good but not that good" but whenever I see people going "come on it's good but not that good" I realize I really like it! Anyway: they had a lot to do and they didn't really get it all done but it's episodic TV, I get that.

As for the kids, it doesn't bother me at all because I take that scene to be Wanda understanding that those are not actual kids, they are just projections of her wants; by contrast with Vision, who is a memory of an actual being who existed and who is explicitly set up as created in part by the Mindstone. The "kids" were inventions who at this point in the series she's known for four days. Nothing painful is going to happen to them, they are not existing people who now have to live with the memories of the torture they underwent like the people of Westview, they are just going to cease to pretend to exist!

I feel like this left it really unclear what the story is with white Vision. Are they saying that because he still has the memories the Vision robot still "really is" Vision, and Vision just goes back to being alive in later movies? I have to say, MCU has already been really bad about killing people and then being like "we fixed it, no longer dead" -- I guess I have to admit it's very true to the comics to do this so maybe I should just get used to it.

Finally, I really hope Agatha Harkness had a premonition that some hardcore magic was going to happen in Westview NJ so she moved there like a year before these events and started hooking up with Ralph the doofy but strangely hot young stoner who lived alone in a house with a big basement

Re the kids, then again the strange line "thank you for choosing me to be your mom" suggests that maybe the kids ARE real beings who somehow entered the hex to portray Wanda's children, and who have some existence outside of it -- but then of course they're not dying in that scene, just reverting to their true selves, whatever they are.

Honestly what's great about the [ show hidden text ] element is how it can make a whole series of responses seem like a blank Mad Libs page.

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