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

do you want a montage that lasts 30 minutes for every skill she learns, Karate Kid style?

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.

― G.A.G.S. (Gophers Against Getting Stuffed) (forksclovetofu), Friday, 5 March 2021 16:12 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm. it just felt like it was cheapening the emotional heft they were going for. i would love a season of wanda just dealing with her grief and learning to let go, and another season of hilarious agatha hijinks and wanda learning she's a witch, but the mix felt really weird and i don't think benefited either story well.

xpost Yes, that would be awesome. With a song. Though, come on, it is a little weird to have her suddenly in full control of vast super witch powers she didn't even know she had until, like, an hour earlier.

Come to think of it ... what was Agatha all along? Next to nothing, right? Wanda's grief gave her new powers, Wanda created the hex, Wanda expanded the hex, Wanda controlled all the people, Wanda trapped them inside the hex, Wanda created Vision, Wanda created her kids, Wanda created the sitcom context. What did Agatha do? Control fake Pietro (and give him super powers, though on both counts, why?). And kill Sparky? As my viewing companion pointed out, what was up with the scene with the television set, with Agatha as director, if Agatha was neither creating nor controlling what we were seeing?

I honestly wonder if the pandemic interfered with other plans they had. Like, it was going to go another direction, or maybe another episode, but they had to quickly rewrite some stuff and wrap it up. I'd sure like to think that's the excuse.

Had Darcy just been sitting in that ice cream truck for days?

Are you being for real here?

As my viewing companion pointed out, what was up with the scene with the television set, with Agatha as director, if Agatha was neither creating nor controlling what we were seeing?

Do you mean the one-second joke shot in a non-diegetic comedy song?

The Tannhauser Gate/Bladerunner reference on the theatre marquee caught me by surprise. Has to be about whether a synthesized Vision is as real or as much or more than the original, I guess?

xpost No, there are a couple of times. One, a little into "Breaking the Fourth Wall," where you hear the director's voice, and Wanda is all "wait, why are you talking to me?" or something, but also toward the end of the flashback episode, "Previously On," where Wanda is in a TV studio lit by klieg lights and Agatha gives her a slow clap as the only member of the studio audience.

Agatha was trying to pump Wanda for information on the source of her power and find out how she created the hex. She was manipulating Wanda into giving up her secrets, which was made pretty explicit when she said something along the lines of “tell me how you did this and tell me the source of your power so I can take it” multiple times

I know that, but she did that in the guise of a director, which fits the Agatha After All reveal, but not the reveal that it was not Agatha after all.

Agatha All Along was a comedy song placed as a punchline, not a solemn promise of dramatic canonicity. Lots of things happen in the Hex parts of the show that do not make realistic sense.

Good point. Also, they are actors playing fictional superheroes with magic powers, so ... (waves hands).

lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ev02QDuVIAABMLU.jpg:small

lol, maybe not

this isn't a hard show to find narrative faults with, but by far the worst for me is that Wanda enslaved/tortured/terrorized an entire town of people for weeks on end - which Rambeau finds justified because hey, who among us wouldn't - and there's no narrative repercussions whatsoever! She doesn't actually apologize! In fact the payoff to Agatha's story is that Wanda proceeds to brainwash her anyway and then stash the lobotomized superdangerous magical destroyer inside the town she just finished terrorizing! With heroes like this, I tell you...

also it just takes me right outta the picture that, along with an energy crown and a fresh dye job, part of the apparent makeover that you get when you more fully bond with chaos energy is an Alexander McQueen bodysuit

I mean, Agatha makes it clear that Wanda / Scarlet Witch is prophesied to destroy the world, I don't think you're supposed to walk out of WandaVision thinking she's all good! She's actually kind of mean, that's part of what makes her character work!

lol, I wonder what Agatha was going to do with all that world-destroying power ...

not sure if i'd call enslaving an entire town of people to act out her fantasy "kinda mean" but from the superhero side, everyone's okay with it? I guess as long as Kat Denning gets her one-liner in, we're all copacetic.

Definitely got choked up when Wanda and her family walked into their home for the last time.

The only people who know exactly how everything went down are Wanda and Agatha, and Agatha didn’t care beyond wanting to siphon off that power for herself. Monica knows that Wanda was controlling everyone in the town with her grief but doesn’t really know how it started or how much of it was voluntary. White Vision doesn’t have any experience or memory from the Hex. Jimmy and Darcy just know Wanda is an Avenger and are giving her the benefit of the doubt based on that. The townspeople know Wanda’s grief was overwhelming and controlling them and are terrified of her. SWORD is also terrified of her. The FBI are going off of Jimmy’s lead. The ending felt very much like they are ultimately setting Wanda up to be the initial antagonist for the next Doctor Strange movie.

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