Loki Holds the Whole Thing Up
If you only watch one Marvel show before December, make it the first season of Loki. The TVA’s the most useful thing it does, and variants, branching timelines, pruning and the Void all get established so cleanly that Doomsday won’t need to explain them. Owen Wilson’s Mobius is the show’s quiet achievement. I’ve still got my complaints, every other variant’s male with no explanation and the romance doesn’t land emotionally, though I understand better now why the finale needs it. Because that finale’s the thing. Killing He Who Remains looked like a character beat in 2021, and knowing the branching led to incursions and worlds colliding, it plays as the single most consequential decision anybody in this franchise has ever made. A TVA badge turns up in somebody’s hand about a minute into the July trailer, so that department isn’t done either.
Season two is the weaker run of television, but its last twenty minutes are the best ending Marvel’s ever written for its best character, and then it declined to follow up on it in any meaningful way. The multiverse is intact because Loki’s personally holding it together. Every timeline that survives does so because a man sat down at the end of time and took the threads in his hands, which means the universes colliding in December are only there to collide because of a Disney+ finale nobody talks about much any more. I don’t want him pulled back into an ensemble film to throw daggers at Doom, that’d be a downgrade however well it’s staged. If December does bring him back, it needs to be for something only he can do, and it needs to cost him, because anything less turns that ending into a pause. And I’d want it acknowledged even if he stays put, because a sacrifice only means anything if the story admits it happened.
Shang-Chi’s Signal Is the Oldest Unpaid Bill
The post-credits scene of Shang-Chi is one of the strongest hooks in the whole pre-Doomsday run. The Ten Rings are far older than the thousand years everybody assumed, and they’re broadcasting to something, and five years on nothing’s explained who’s listening. It’s effectively a piece of homework Doomsday has to mark. A hook this good deserved its own story rather than being folded into an ensemble event as one thread among thirty, and that’s the disappointment I’m bracing for. Shang-Chi’s hardly been seen since his own film. Still, it’s the kind of unpaid bill this film’s going to be full of, and if there’s anywhere for it to land, it’s here.
Watch it for Wenwu as much as anything, because Tony Leung’s still the best villain in the MCU, and five more years of antagonists have widened the gap rather than closed it. He’s a quiet, grieving man being worked on through his loss, and that’s a smaller and sadder thing than almost anybody else on this list has been asked to play. The fights hold up too. That matters because of the moment about a minute into the July trailer when Shang-Chi and Gambit go through a room in a house full of stained glass, a charged card and a long glowing staff on one side and those gold bracers on the other, tearing up the furniture while the windows blow out. I don’t know why they’re fighting and I’d rather not. Seeing Gambit at all after this long is enough for me, and I’d like to think it’s more than a good bit of noise.
