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Agatha All Along poster with Agatha and her coven above the Witches Road in purple light
MarvelTelevision

Agatha All Along: Nine Episodes Down the Witches’ Road

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Agatha All Along wasn’t anywhere near as much fun for me as WandaVision, and I went in really wanting it to be, because Agatha was the best thing about the last two episodes of that show and I’d been looking forward to seeing what Kathryn Hahn would do with a whole series to herself. This Agatha All Along review goes through all nine episodes, spoilers and all, and I’ll be honest from the start that it didn’t really work for me. It felt disjointed, it never really flowed from one week to the next, and while there were moments of real magic in there, most of the time I was a bit bored and didn’t really care what happened to anyone. That’s a hard thing to say about a show with this cast. I’ve just written up WandaVision episode by episode, so the comparison is fresh, and with VisionQuest now on Disney+ and finishing off the trilogy, it felt like the right time to go back down the Road and try to work out why this one never grabbed me.

Episode one: Agnes is a detective now

It’s three years since Wanda left her trapped in Westview, and Agatha is still stuck being Agnes, only now the town isn’t a sitcom, it’s a gritty crime drama, all grey skies and dead bodies in the woods, with Agnes as the troubled small town detective. It’s a fun idea and it’s played completely straight for a good while, with a new FBI agent turning up to work the case alongside her. Then the cracks start showing, the way they did in WandaVision, and a teenager breaks into her house looking for the Witches’ Road, and the spell finally snaps. Agatha wakes up as herself, in her old basement, with no powers at all. Whatever Wanda did to her took everything, and she’s furious about it. Westview is still full of familiar faces too, Herb and Mrs. Hart and the rest, carrying on with their lives as if nothing ever happened, which is a nice little thread back to the first show. And Agatha, for once, has nothing to hide behind but her own personality.

Agnes, as a tired small-town detective in a plaid shirt, works late at her desk with a pen in hand
Agnes, as a tired small-town detective in a plaid shirt, works late at her desk with a pen in hand

The teen can’t tell anyone his name, there’s a sigil on him that stops it being said or heard, which becomes a running joke and is obviously hiding something big. Then the FBI agent turns out to be Rio Vidal, the Green Witch, played by Aubrey Plaza, who has some sort of history with Agatha that’s half old flame and half sworn enemy. Rio lets her live for now but warns her that the Salem Seven, the ghostly witches who hunted her before, are on their way. So Agatha needs her power back, and the teen needs the Road for reasons of his own, and that’s enough to get them moving. It’s a decent first episode, honestly, and the parody of those slow prestige crime shows made me laugh.

Episode two: putting a coven together

Episode two is the getting-the-band-together episode. The Witches’ Road is a legend, a path you can only walk as a coven, and at the end of it you get your heart’s desire, which for Agatha means her power. So she and the teen go round recruiting. There’s Lilia Calderu, played by Patti LuPone, a divination witch who keeps saying things that don’t make sense yet. There’s Jennifer Kale, a potions witch whose powers have been bound, and Alice Wu-Gulliver, a protection witch from a family with a curse on it. And because they’re one short, they rope in Sharon Davis, who was Mrs. Hart back in Westview, as a sort of stand-in green witch, which is a lovely callback.

The teen stands beside a smiling Agatha in her cluttered, wallpapered Westview house
The teen stands beside a smiling Agatha in her cluttered, wallpapered Westview house

They sing the Ballad of the Witches’ Road to open the door, the Salem Seven turn up on cue, and the coven runs for it, barefoot, onto the Road. This should have been where the show really took off, and parts of it are good. It isn’t the cosy, everyday kind of witchery you get with the aunts in Practical Magic, these are all people with grudges against each other, and Agatha has done something awful to most of them at some point. But even here it started to feel like a show that cared more about the next song or the next costume than about any of the people in it. Everyone gets a quick introduction, and then the Road begins, and from then on it’s one trial after another.

Episode three: the first trial, and Sharon

The first trial is a house on the coast, decorated straight out of the 1970s, with wine on the table that turns out to be poisoned. Jen is the potions witch, so it falls to her to work out an antidote, except her powers are still bound and the house starts flooding around them while they try. It’s a decent enough idea for a trial, part escape room and part cooking show, and Sasheer Zamata gets her best stuff of the series here, frustrated and sharp and clearly sick of Agatha. The others argue about who drank what and how much, and Agatha spends most of it being Agatha, which is to say unhelpful and very funny about it.

Agatha and Jen huddle together, looking alarmed, in the tiled kitchen of the 1970s beach house
Agatha and Jen huddle together, looking alarmed, in the tiled kitchen of the 1970s beach house

They make it out, mostly. Sharon doesn’t, she was never a witch and the Road isn’t kind to people who don’t belong on it, and she doesn’t survive it. That should have hit harder than it did. Debra Jo Rupp is great, and she was a part of WandaVision I really liked, but the show had given her so little to do by then that I barely had time to notice she was gone before we were on to the next trial. That’s my problem with the whole series in a nutshell, I think, things happen to people, but I never got to know anyone well enough to feel it. The coven picks itself up and walks on.

Episode four: a recording studio and Alice’s mother

They need another witch to replace Sharon, so they summon one, and of course it’s Rio who turns up to fill the spot, which puts Agatha’s ex, or enemy, or whatever she is, right in the middle of the coven. The second trial is Alice’s, a 1970s recording studio that belonged to her mother, Lorna Wu, who was a singer and who recorded her own version of the ballad before she died. The coven has to perform the song to get through, with Alice singing, and it ends up as a full rock number, and the music was one thing that the people making it clearly cared about a great deal. Each trial has its own take on the same ballad, and by the end you’ve heard it so many ways you could sing it in your sleep. Ali Ahn gives Alice a lot of quiet dignity in this one, a woman who’s spent her whole life waiting for the curse to come for her.

Alice in red sunglasses, Lilia, Agatha and Rio in 1970s rock outfits stand in a psychedelic recording studio
Alice in red sunglasses, Lilia, Agatha and Rio in 1970s rock outfits stand in a psychedelic recording studio

Then the teen gets curious and accidentally calls up the thing behind the Wu family curse, a demon that’s been killing the women in Alice’s family for generations, and Alice has to fight it off. She wins, which after everything her mother went through feels like the one bit of real justice the Road hands out. Jen saves the teen’s life in the middle of it, which starts her softening towards him. And then Rio takes Agatha aside and tells her the teen isn’t her son, which only means something if you know that Agatha had a son, and that’s dropped in with almost no explanation. This was the episode I thought might turn it around. It nearly did. But the next one went somewhere completely different, and the rhythm I’d just started to enjoy was gone again.

Episode five: broomsticks, a Ouija board and Alice

The Salem Seven catch up with them, and the coven escapes on makeshift broomsticks, which is a fun scene and one of the few times the show actually feels magical, witches flying through the woods with ghosts at their heels. Then it’s a 1980s cabin, the kind you’d find in a summer camp horror film, and the trial is a Ouija board. They use it to talk to the dead, and what comes through is Agatha’s mother, Evanora, who possesses Agatha and turns on the others. Alice drives her out using her protection magic, and for about a minute it looks like the coven is finally working together.

The coven sits on the floor of a wood-panelled cabin in 1980s camp clothes, gathered around a board game
The coven sits on the floor of a wood-panelled cabin in 1980s camp clothes, gathered around a board game

And then Agatha drains Alice’s power, right there, and kills her. It’s a horrible moment and it’s meant to remind us who Agatha is, the woman who drained her whole coven in Salem in 1693, and it does that. The teen stops her by saying a name, Nicholas Scratch, her son, and Agatha just freezes. Furious with Lilia and Jen for still siding with her, the teen pulls the three witches into a pit of mud, and as he does, a headpiece appears on him that looks a lot like Wanda’s. It’s a big moment, the first real sign of who’s been walking the Road with them all along. So now we know, or at least I had a good idea, and it was the first moment of the show where I actually sat forward a bit. Two episodes after that, though, I’d sunk back into the couch again.

Episode six: Billy Maximoff

Episode six takes a break from the Road completely and tells the teen’s story, and he’s Billy Maximoff, Wanda’s son from Westview, or at least his soul is. We go back to the bar mitzvah of a boy called William Kaplan, where Lilia, of all people, puts a protection sigil on him, and then to a car accident that kills William, and Billy’s soul, adrift when Wanda dropped the Hex, slips into his body. He grows up as William, with William’s parents, not really knowing what’s wrong with him, only that strange things happen around him when he’s upset. His boyfriend Eddie rides along with him while he goes looking for answers, and their scenes together are some of the more grounded ones in the series, two teenagers in a car at night trying to make sense of something impossible. Three years later he finds Ralph Bohner, the actor Wanda used as Pietro, and Ralph tells him about Westview, and about the family he had there.

Billy and his friend sit in a parked car at night, Billy staring out through the windscreen
Billy and his friend sit in a parked car at night, Billy staring out through the windscreen

It’s an interesting episode on its own, and Joe Locke is really good as Billy, but it’s also where the show’s problem with flow was most obvious to me. We spend a whole episode in a completely different style, a teen drama in a suburban house, and it stops the Road dead just as something had finally happened. Billy and his twin Tommy had already had a brief appearance as variants in Multiverse of Madness, so I knew roughly where this was going. He searches for Tommy, can’t find him, and goes back to Westview to free Agatha because she’s his best chance of getting to the Road. By the end Agatha has dragged herself out of the mud, and she and Billy agree to go on together.

Episode seven: Lilia’s tarot trial

This is the episode most people seem to love, and if any of the series had the magic I was hoping for, it’s this one. The trial is a castle, and the witches turn up dressed as famous witches from pop culture, and they have to lay out a set of tarot cards in the right order or the swords hanging over them come down. It’s Lilia’s trial, and it turns out that all those strange things she’s been saying the whole series are her experiencing time out of order, remembering things that hadn’t happened yet. All of a sudden half of her lines from earlier episodes make sense. And she works out something else too, that Rio isn’t just a rival witch, she’s Death.

Lilia, wearing a tall silver crown and a white witch’s gown, stands in a stone room lit by torches
Lilia, wearing a tall silver crown and a white witch’s gown, stands in a stone room lit by torches

Lilia solves the cards, and then she makes a choice. She flips one last card, the swords come down, and she takes the Salem Seven with her, sacrificing herself to get rid of them for good. The episode then ends on a younger Lilia at her very first divination lesson, which is a lovely, gentle way to say goodbye to her. Patti LuPone is wonderful throughout, a grand old witch who’s spent the whole series looking a bit lost and turns out to have been the only one paying attention, and this is the one episode where I felt the show had set something up early and paid it off properly. If the rest of the series had been built this carefully, I think I’d have felt very differently about it. But it’s one episode out of nine, and that’s not enough.

Episodes eight and nine: the end of the Road

The end of the Road isn’t what anyone expected, and it turns out the Road was never real at all, not until Billy wanted it badly enough to make it real. Rio offers Agatha a deal, she’ll leave Agatha alone if she can have Billy, whose second life has thrown the natural order out of balance. At the end of the Road, Jen finally gets her powers back, and it turns out Agatha was the one who bound them in the first place. Billy, meanwhile, finds what he’s been looking for, a way to bring his brother back, and he puts Tommy’s soul into the body of a boy who’s drowning, the same trick that happened to him. That boy, Tommy, has now turned up in VisionQuest, and it’s nice to know that thread is actually being followed.

Agatha and Rio face each other in a misty green forest, Rio crowned with dark leaves
Agatha and Rio face each other in a misty green forest, Rio crowned with dark leaves

Agatha refuses to hand Billy over. Rio comes for her in her own backyard, and Agatha kisses her and dies, and that’s that, or it would be if this were a different show. Episode nine goes back to the start, and we see Agatha giving birth to Nicholas in 1750, and Death letting her keep him for a while, and then taking him, and Agatha spending centuries killing other witches for their power, luring them in with the very ballad they’ve been singing all series. In the present, she comes back as a ghost, attached to Billy, and there’s a final burst of the ballad as Billy takes stock of everyone they lost along the way, Sharon, Alice and Lilia. Jen goes off on her own with her powers restored, the only one of the coven to come out ahead. And the two of them set off together to look for Tommy, which is where the series leaves them.

A young Agatha leans in a wooden doorway with a broom in her hand, centuries before Westview
A young Agatha leans in a wooden doorway with a broom in her hand, centuries before Westview

Why it didn’t work for me

Looking back at all of it, the biggest problem for me was that it never felt like one story. WandaVision was a mystery you could feel tightening every week, and the sitcom changes all pointed in the same direction, toward Wanda and what she’d done. Agatha All Along is a trial a week, each in a different style, each with a different witch at the centre, and they don’t really build on each other. One week it’s a poisoned dinner party, the next it’s a rock song, then a camp horror film, then a teen drama, and I kept getting the feeling that each episode had been made to be its own little thing rather than part of the same show. That’s why it felt disjointed to me. It never flowed.

And because of that, I didn’t really care about anyone, which surprised me with a cast this good. Kathryn Hahn is terrific as Agatha, but Agatha herself is a bit of a monster who doesn’t change, and the show seems to know it, so there’s nobody at the middle to root for. The others die before I’d had a chance to get attached, and the one I did start to like, Lilia, is gone two episodes from the end. Compared with how much I loved WandaVision back in 2021, it was quite a let-down. There are elements of magic all the way through, the broomsticks and the tarot and the songs, but overall it was a bit boring, and I don’t say that about many Marvel things.

What it means for VisionQuest and Doomsday

Where it does matter is for what comes next. Billy is out in the world with his powers and a ghost for company, and Tommy has been brought back in someone else’s body, which is exactly where VisionQuest picks things up, with Vision himself trying to work out who he is and Tommy turning up in his life. That’s three shows building toward a single family story, Wanda, Vision and their two boys, and the strange thing is that the one in the middle of it all, Wanda, isn’t in any of the ones after WandaVision. She’s presumed dead after Multiverse of Madness, brought down with Wundagore on top of her, and Elizabeth Olsen has said she isn’t in Avengers: Doomsday either.

So I’m not sure the twins or Agatha have any part to play when Doomsday arrives in December, and nothing here sets up the multiverse in the way that Multiverse of Madness did. If a team of young heroes ever does come together down the line, this is the show that put Billy in place for it, and Tommy too, so it’s not wasted. Agatha will be back in some form, she always is, and now she’s a ghost she can’t really die again. Marvel clearly has plans for all three of them. I just wish the Road there had been more fun to walk.

Rating: 2 out of 5. Not my favourite, and of the three shows it’s the one I’m least likely to go back to.

Was I too hard on it? Plenty of people loved the Road, so if Lilia’s tarot trial, the ballad or Billy’s story won you over, or you think the trials flowed together better than I’m giving them credit for, I’d like to hear why. Tell me in the comments.

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path of ascension 7 review
BooksLitRPG

The Path of Ascension 7: A Grind With Nothing to Grind Toward

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This story is starting to drag now, and Book 7 is where I finally admitted that to myself instead of pushing past it. Matt, Liz, Aster, and Susanne are still deep inside the Minkalla delve, fresh off one of the toughest fights of the series so far with three floors still ahead of them, and those final floors escalate hard. There’s no retreat option, no higher-tier allies to call on, every encounter pushing the group past what they thought they could survive, capped by a brutal final battle. By the time they clear the dungeon they’re banged up badly. Missing limbs, healing cooldowns maxed, basically crawling to the exit.

The dungeon plot itself lands well, and I want to be clear about that before I get into what didn’t work, because the escalation across those last floors is genuinely tense. It’s everything around the dungeon that’s the problem.

No villain, no destination, just more grinding

I’m all for the constant grind and progression that this genre runs on. That’s not the complaint. The complaint is that this one seems like it’s never going to end, and I mean that literally. What actually is the planned conclusion here? There isn’t an overarching villain or nemesis that I can see the party training to fight. It’s simply a grind to get stronger, book after book, with no real sense of what all that strength is actually for.

I kept waiting for Book 7 to point at something on the horizon, some faction or threat that all this power is eventually going to matter against, and it never quite does. Minkalla is dangerous enough on its own terms that the book doesn’t need a bigger villain to justify the difficulty. But a dungeon alone isn’t a series arc, and seven books in, I want to see where the arc is actually headed.

iron prince - warformed stormweaver
iron prince – warformed stormweaver

That absence is what makes Book 7 feel different from earlier entries in a way the dungeon delve itself doesn’t fully explain. A hard dungeon with an unclear purpose reads differently than a hard dungeon that’s clearly one step on the way to a fight the whole series has been building toward. Minkalla is brutal, but brutal toward what?

The alternate-life chapters didn’t help

A big chunk of this book is spent away from the main party in “alternate life” side sequences and secondary POV chapters. I know a lot of readers like this device in general, and I don’t hate it on principle, but in a book already struggling to justify its own length, cutting away from the one plotline with real momentum made the pacing problem worse rather than better. The dungeon floors are where the tension lives. Every chapter spent somewhere else is a chapter not spent there.

Compare this to Warformed, and the contrast is rough

I think about how Warformed has been written, and there are some real similarities in how both series handle progression, but the fact that Warformed is currently only two full books makes me genuinely eager for its third. With Path of Ascension, seven books in, I really struggled to finish this one, which is sad, because I remember genuinely enjoying Books 1 through 4. Something shifted between then and now, and Book 7 is where I felt it the most.

I’m not sure I’m going to continue with this series. I’d like to see where it’s going. The Minkalla ending, with the party emerging among the first teams out and drawing outside attention, does at least plant a hook for consequences down the line. But at the same time, this is a grind for me, and one I’m not progressing from as a reader. That’s a strange thing to say about a progression fantasy series, but that’s exactly where I landed with this one after finishing it.

3 out of 5

It was okay. The dungeon delve itself is well done, and the final stretch through Minkalla’s hardest floors is genuinely tense in a way I can’t take away from it. But a series needs more than escalating difficulty to keep me invested seven books in, and right now I can’t tell you what Matt and his party are actually working toward. If Book 8 gives me an answer to that, I might come back. Right now, I’m not certain I will.

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WandaVision poster with Wanda and Vision split between a black-and-white sitcom and colour
MarvelTelevision

WandaVision, Episode by Episode: Nine Weeks in Westview

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

WandaVision was exceptional television, and the thing I keep coming back to all these years later is that I never really knew what was happening, not in the first episode and not right up until the last one, and I loved every week of not knowing. I wrote a shorter review back in 2021 when the finale dropped, but with VisionQuest now on Disney+ and the whole Wanda and Vision story finally getting its third part, this is the long version, a full WandaVision recap that goes through all nine episodes one at a time, with spoilers for everything. And I mean everything, so if you somehow still haven’t seen it, go and watch it first. It’s only nine episodes, and it’s the kind of show that’s much better going in blind. I’ll also be talking about how it leads into Agatha All Along, which I liked a lot less, and where it leaves Wanda with Avengers: Doomsday only a couple of months away.

Episodes one and two: black and white, and something’s off

It opens as a 1950s sitcom, black and white, laugh track and all, with Wanda and Vision as newlyweds who’ve just moved to a town called Westview and are trying very hard to fit in. Vision goes off to an office job where nobody, including him, knows what the company actually does, and there’s a heart drawn on the calendar that neither of them can explain. It turns out to be dinner with Vision’s boss Mr. Hart and his wife, and the whole episode is the two of them scrambling to pull it off while hiding their powers, which is genuinely funny in the way those old shows were. Then Mr. Hart starts choking, and it stops being funny, because Mrs. Hart just keeps smiling and saying “stop it” over and over while he goes purple, and nobody in the scene reacts the way people should. Vision phases his hand into his throat and saves him, everyone laughs, and the episode ends with the camera pulling back to show someone watching all of this on a monitor.

Vision and Wanda, in black and white, dance in the doorway of their 1950s sitcom house
Vision and Wanda, in black and white, dance in the doorway of their 1950s sitcom house

Episode two moves into the 1960s, very much Bewitched in style with a cartoon opening, and it’s a talent show for the local school where Wanda has to cover for Vision after he swallows a piece of gum and starts behaving like he’s drunk. That’s where we meet Agnes properly, the nosy neighbour from across the street who’d go on to get her own show, and Dottie, who runs the planning committee and clearly doesn’t like Wanda. But the cracks are everywhere. There’s a red toy helicopter in the bushes, in colour, in a black and white world. A voice comes through the radio asking Wanda who’s doing this to her. And a beekeeper climbs out of a manhole in the street, and Wanda just says “no” and rewinds the scene like a tape, and that was the first moment I sat up and realised she wasn’t trapped in this thing at all.

Episode three: twins, and Geraldine knows too much

Colour arrives with the 1970s, Brady Bunch outfits, wood panelling and all, and Wanda is suddenly very pregnant, and getting more pregnant by the hour, which is played for laughs while also being really quite unsettling. The house keeps reacting to her, water pouring from the taps, power cuts across the town, a stork turning up in the living room, and Vision rushes off to find the town doctor while their new friend Geraldine comes over to help. Geraldine was a character I didn’t think much of at first, she’s just the friendly woman from the talent show, but she ends up delivering the twins in the living room, Tommy and Billy, and the episode spends a lovely couple of minutes being an actual sweet family comedy. Meanwhile Vision is outside talking to the neighbours, Herb and Agnes, and Herb starts to tell him something about Geraldine before Agnes cuts him off and changes the subject.

Wanda, heavily pregnant in a 1970s dress, sits on the couch while the town doctor listens with a stethoscope
Wanda, heavily pregnant in a 1970s dress, sits on the couch while the town doctor listens with a stethoscope

Then Geraldine slips up. Wanda mentions that she had a twin brother, and Geraldine says something about Pietro being killed by Ultron, which nobody in a 1970s sitcom should know anything about. Wanda’s whole face changes. And there’s this cold moment where she asks who Geraldine is, and the next thing we see is Geraldine flying backwards through a wall of light and landing in a field outside the town, surrounded by soldiers and vehicles with S.W.O.R.D. markings, and that’s the end of the episode. I remember not having any idea what I’d just seen, and wanting episode four immediately, and it’s funny to think that this was the first we ever saw of the Monica who’d end up flying alongside Carol and Kamala in The Marvels.

Episode four: the view from outside the Hex

This is the episode where it stops being a sitcom, and it goes right back to the moment at the end of Avengers: Endgame when everyone who’d been snapped away came back. Monica Rambeau rematerialises in a hospital, where five years have passed in an instant, and she finds out that her mother, the woman who ran S.W.O.R.D., died while she was gone. She goes back to work there, and Director Hayward sends her to help an FBI agent with a missing persons case in a small town in New Jersey. That agent is Jimmy Woo, which was a really nice surprise if you remembered him from the Ant-Man films. Nobody can get into Westview, or out of it, and the people they ask about it can’t even seem to remember that the town exists.

Monica Rambeau and Jimmy Woo stand by a car on a country road outside Westview
Monica Rambeau and Jimmy Woo stand by a car on a country road outside Westview

They send a drone in, it vanishes, and Monica touches the edge of the field and gets pulled straight through. Then Darcy Lewis from the Thor films turns up as a scientist, and she’s the one who works out that the town is broadcasting, on an ancient frequency, an actual sitcom called WandaVision. So now we’re watching people watch the show we’ve been watching, and the episode rewinds over the first three, showing us that the beekeeper was a S.W.O.R.D. agent, the radio voice was Jimmy, and Geraldine was Monica the whole time. The best bit is near the end. Wanda looks at Vision for a second and sees him as he really is, grey and dead with a hole in his head where the Mind Stone was, and then she blinks and he’s back to normal, and it’s absolutely chilling.

Episode five: Pietro’s at the door

Episode five is the 1980s, Family Ties and Growing Pains, and the twins age up from babies to five-year-olds in about a minute, and then to ten when the boys find a dog and want to keep it, which Agnes conveniently has a collar for. They call him Sparky. Outside, S.W.O.R.D. has realised that Wanda is controlling everything, and Hayward is very keen to treat her as a threat rather than a victim, which is when we find out that Wanda broke into their headquarters before all of this and took Vision’s body. Inside, Vision is starting to notice things. He breaks through to one of his co-workers for a second, and the man begs for help, and Vision finally confronts Wanda about what’s going on in the town.

Agnes, in 1980s workout clothes and a headband, chats with Wanda at the foot of the stairs in the Maximoff house
Agnes, in 1980s workout clothes and a headband, chats with Wanda at the foot of the stairs in the Maximoff house

Wanda actually walks out of the Hex to face S.W.O.R.D. directly, still dressed for the sitcom, and tells them to leave her alone in a voice that is nothing like the cheerful housewife we’d been watching. Then the end credits start rolling in the middle of an argument between her and Vision, which is a great touch, like the show itself cutting away from something it didn’t want us to see. And then the doorbell rings. It’s her brother Pietro, back from the dead, except it isn’t the actor from Age of Ultron, it’s Evan Peters, the Quicksilver from the Fox X-Men films. Darcy’s reaction, wondering out loud why Wanda recast him, is exactly what everyone at home was saying, and the theories went completely wild that week.

Episode six: Halloween, and Vision walks to the edge

Episode six goes to the late 90s and early 2000s, a Malcolm in the Middle style opening with the kids talking to the camera, and it’s Halloween. Wanda is in her comic-accurate Scarlet Witch costume, which she passes off as a Sokovian fortune teller, and Vision is in his old comic book outfit, and Pietro is being a terrible influence on the boys. Tommy discovers he has super speed, like his uncle, and Billy starts sensing things other people are thinking. It’s a very funny episode on the surface, but Vision skips the trick-or-treating to go on a neighbourhood watch patrol, and he finds the edge of town, where people are just standing frozen, one of them crying, and Agnes stuck in the middle of the street.

Wanda in her red Scarlet Witch Halloween costume smiles on a Westview street lined with pumpkins and trick-or-treaters
Wanda in her red Scarlet Witch Halloween costume smiles on a Westview street lined with pumpkins and trick-or-treaters

He keeps walking anyway. Vision tries to push out through the boundary of the Hex, and the moment he’s outside he starts coming apart, literally, pieces of him peeling away in the wind while Darcy watches from the S.W.O.R.D. camp. Billy senses it and tells his mum. And Wanda’s response is to expand the whole Hex outward, swallowing the S.W.O.R.D. base and everyone in it and rewriting them into Westview residents, which is about as clear a statement as she could make that she isn’t letting go. Hayward gets away, Monica gets thrown clear, Jimmy too. I remember thinking at this point that I didn’t know who I was supposed to be rooting for anymore, which I don’t think a Marvel show had made me feel before.

Episode seven: it was Agatha all along

This is the one everybody remembers. It’s done as a modern mockumentary, The Office and Modern Family, with Wanda talking to the camera in confessionals, and she’s falling apart, nothing is working right and the house keeps flipping between decades whether she likes it or not. Monica forces her way back into the Hex and it changes her, she comes out the other side seeing energy and able to do things she couldn’t before. Vision finds Darcy, who’d been turned into a circus performer, and she tells him everything, including how he died. And Agnes offers to babysit the twins so Wanda can have a day to herself, which in hindsight was the single most suspicious thing anyone did in the whole show.

Wanda, exhausted in a plaid shirt, talks straight to the camera in a mockumentary confessional
Wanda, exhausted in a plaid shirt, talks straight to the camera in a mockumentary confessional

When Wanda goes to find the boys, she ends up in Agnes’s basement, which is full of roots and purple light and a book that’s clearly very old and very evil, and Agnes walks down the stairs and tells her it’s been her the whole time, and then the show breaks into its own theme song. Agatha Harkness. She killed Sparky too. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t guess the whole Agatha thing, I had no idea she was a centuries-old witch, but I did work out that something was happening with her, because Kathryn Hahn is far too big a name to be cast as the nosy neighbour with three lines an episode. Once that thought was in my head I couldn’t stop watching her. The song itself became a hit and won an Emmy, and it still gets stuck in my head every time somebody says her name.

Episode eight: what is grief, if not love persevering

Episode eight opens in Salem in 1693, with a young Agatha being dragged before her own coven, led by her mother, for practising dark magic. They try to kill her, and instead she drains every one of them dry, which tells you exactly what she is. Back in the present she has Wanda in her basement and wants to know how she built all of this, so she makes her walk back through her own memories. We see the apartment in Sokovia, the shell with Stark’s name on it that didn’t go off, a little girl watching American sitcoms on DVD with her family before the world fell in on them. Then Hydra, and the Mind Stone, and a glimpse of something in the stone that looks a lot like the Scarlet Witch herself.

Wanda and Agatha stand close together in the dark as Agatha forces her back through her memories
Wanda and Agatha stand close together in the dark as Agatha forces her back through her memories

The scene that hit hardest for me is at the Avengers compound after Pietro died, with Wanda curled up watching TV and Vision trying to work out how to help her. He tells her that he’s never experienced loss, because he’s never had anything to lose, and then says the line everyone quotes: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” Then it jumps to after Infinity War, where she goes to S.W.O.R.D. to ask for his body so she can bury him and finds they’re taking him apart. She drives to Westview, to a plot of land Vision had bought for them to grow old on, and the grief just pours out of her and builds the town, the house and Vision himself. Agatha is stunned. She says it’s chaos magic, which makes Wanda the Scarlet Witch, and that’s the first time anyone uses the name in the MCU.

Episode nine: two Visions and a Ship of Theseus

The finale is the big Marvel fight I’d half expected the whole thing to avoid, and honestly it works because it’s been earned. Hayward has rebuilt the original Vision, all white and with no memories, and sends him in to destroy the one Wanda made. Agatha and Wanda fight across the town, Monica takes on Hayward, Darcy drives a truck straight into him, and Tommy and Billy are holding off soldiers in the middle of the street. The fight between the two Visions is my favourite part. Instead of punching each other to a standstill, they end up arguing about the Ship of Theseus, if you replace every plank of a ship is it still the same ship, and the Vision we’ve been following gives the white one back his memories, and he just flies off.

Wanda, Vision and their two boys brace themselves in the middle of a Westview street during the final battle
Wanda, Vision and their two boys brace themselves in the middle of a Westview street during the final battle

Agatha’s trick is to wake the townspeople up, and they come to Wanda begging her to let them go, telling her what it’s been like to be awake and trapped inside someone else’s grief, and that’s when Wanda finally starts to give in. She beats Agatha with the runes Agatha taught her about, takes on the full Scarlet Witch power and the costume that goes with it, and leaves her trapped in Westview as Agnes, the nosy neighbour, forever. Then Wanda tucks the boys in and walks Vision home as the Hex closes in around them, and he asks her what he is, and she tells him he’s the piece of the Mind Stone that lives in her, her sorrow and her hope, but mostly her love. He says they’ve said goodbye before, and she finishes it for him, they’ll say hello again. Then the after-credits: a cabin in the mountains, Wanda reading the Darkhold, and the boys calling for help, which is exactly where Multiverse of Madness picks her up.

Is it the best Marvel TV show?

I think it is, apart from some of the Netflix shows. Daredevil, especially that first season, is in a different league for grown-up superhero TV, and I’d hate to choose between them. But of everything Marvel has put out as one complete series, WandaVision is the standout for me. Some individual episodes of Agents of Shield came close, Raina’s big moment and the second season finale especially, and Agent Carter had a couple of episodes that were close too, but neither of them held it together over a whole run the way this did. Nine episodes, not a wasted one, and a story that knew exactly where it was going from the first frame.

What made it for me was that it wasn’t afraid to confuse me. Most Marvel things tell you the plan in the first ten minutes, and this one let me spend three weeks not even sure who the villain was, or whether Wanda herself was the villain, which in a way she was. She took a whole town hostage. She made them live inside a sitcom, awake and unable to say anything, and the show never pretends that’s fine just because she’s grieving. And then it sits her down at the end and makes her give it all up anyway, kids, husband, all of it, and that ending is so sad I don’t know how a Marvel show got away with it. The weekly releases helped a lot too. I spent every Friday guessing, and I was nearly always wrong.

VisionQuest picks up the other Vision

Watching it now, WandaVision is clearly the first part of a trilogy, and Marvel’s even said as much. Agatha All Along picked up Agatha where Wanda left her, still stuck being Agnes, and gave Billy a new body and a new life, and now VisionQuest is on Disney+, with the first two of its eight episodes out this week. It follows the white Vision, the one who flew off in episode nine with his memories back but none of the feelings that went with them, and it brings in Tommy, who’s grown up somewhere else entirely, and Ultron, back from Age of Ultron in a way I never expected anyone to bother with. That’s an awful lot of loose ends from Westview finally being pulled on at once, and I’m really glad the Ship of Theseus argument wasn’t just a clever way of ending a fight.

Because that’s what that scene was always asking, if you put all the old pieces back together, is it still him? The Vision Wanda made was never going to survive her letting go, he said as much himself, and the one who’s left is the original body with the original memories and nobody at home, or at least that’s how it looked when he flew away. I don’t know yet what that means for him or whether the answer ends up being yes. Paul Bettany has been the quiet heart of this whole story since Age of Ultron, playing a robot who’s somehow the most human person in every room he’s in, and I think he’s more than earned a show of his own. It’s also nice to see one of these threads actually get picked up for once instead of being left hanging for years.

Where does that leave Wanda for Doomsday?

Wanda is the bigger question, and it runs straight into Avengers: Doomsday. Her story carried on in Multiverse of Madness, where the Darkhold took her somewhere much darker than that cabin, and that film brought in the incursions, universes crashing into each other, that the whole road to Doomsday has been running on since, which I dug into properly when I did my rewatch of the series earlier this year. So without WandaVision there’s no Darkhold, no Scarlet Witch, and probably no Doomsday in the shape it’s taking. That’s a lot to hang on a sitcom about a grieving woman in New Jersey, but it’s true, and it’s part of why this show has aged so well while some of the others around it haven’t.

But Elizabeth Olsen has said she isn’t in Doomsday, and with the film out on 18 December I’d love nothing more than to be surprised, because leaving the most powerful character Marvel has buried under a mountain would be a strange way to treat her. Whatever happens there, nothing takes away from what these nine episodes did. I’d happily sit down and watch all of them again tomorrow, laugh track and all, and I’d probably still be humming the theme for the Harts’ dinner party by the end of it. I loved this show thoroughly, every single week of it, and it’s still the one Marvel series I’d hand to somebody who swears they’re sick of superheroes.

So what about you? Did you work out that Agnes was really Agatha before the song gave it away, and was it the casting that tipped you off too, or something else? And which of the sitcom decades was your favourite, the black and white fifties, the Brady Bunch seventies or the mockumentary episode? Tell me in the comments.

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BooksDune

Dune Messiah and the Twelve Years After Arrakis

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Dune Messiah is the book in this series I have the most trouble with, and I have reread it several times trying to work out whether that is the book’s fault or mine. I had it down as a four for years. Going back to it after the first novel, I think three is closer to honest.

It is also, as of this week, the one with a film attached. Villeneuve’s third and final Dune adapts this book, and after what he did with the first one I am curious how much of the sourness survives the trip. It is a bold thing to build a finale out of, given what this novel does to its hero.

Twelve years, and a number the book will not let go of

Paul rules as Emperor and the jihad carried out in his name has killed something on the order of sixty-one billion people across roughly ninety planets. Herbert states that figure plainly and then keeps coming back to it, which is the whole design. He wrote this because too many of us finished the first book treating Paul as a straightforward hero, and this is the correction, delivered with the volume up.

Paul himself is not a tyrant by temperament and the book never suggests he is. He is a man locked inside his own prescience, seeing every path and unable to find one that avoids what is already happening, while a priesthood he does not control runs a bureaucracy that commits atrocities and quotes him while doing it. As an idea that is genuinely uncomfortable and worth the pages. The trouble is what Herbert does with the space around it.

The other thing that shrinks is the cast’s room to move. In the first novel people travel, plan, change their minds and go somewhere else. Here almost everybody is waiting: waiting for Paul to decide, waiting for the conspiracy to mature, waiting for a birth. Herbert is deliberately writing a trap and a trap has walls, but the effect on the reading experience is that scenes start to feel interchangeable, and a book this short cannot really afford that.

The prescience rules are worth pausing on, because Herbert tightens them considerably here and the tightening is the best new idea in the book. Seeing the future is not a menu of options. It is a narrowing, where each glimpse forecloses alternatives, and where another prescient mind creates a region you simply cannot see into. That turns Paul’s gift into the thing that traps him and hands the conspirators a workable method at the same time.

It is too short for the story it has

This is my real complaint and it has not softened with rereads. There is an enormous story implied here and the book is not big enough to hold it. A galaxy-spanning holy war has been running for twelve years, sixty-one billion people are dead, and we are told about it rather than shown any of it. There is not a single battle sequence in the novel. The jihad, which is the entire moral engine of the series at this point, happens offstage and arrives as a statistic.

I understand the argument that this is deliberate, that showing the war would make it exciting and therefore undercut the point. I still think there was far more that could have been done to open the universe out here and it was left on the table. We get corridors and council chambers. We could have had the war those corridors are arguing about, and the book would have been stronger for at least letting us see the edge of it.

A lone robed figure walking away into a moonlit desert with a distant city glowing behind
A lone robed figure walking away into a moonlit desert with a distant city glowing behind

There is a version of this book that is twice the length and genuinely great, and I can see its outline through the one we got. Give me the jihad from the inside, a Fremen legion on some world that has never heard of Arrakis, carrying out an atrocity in the name of a man who is sitting in a palace watching it happen and unable to stop it. That would have made the sixty-one billion land as something other than arithmetic, and it would have made Paul’s paralysis genuinely unbearable rather than merely stated. Herbert had the whole galaxy available and chose to spend the book in three rooms on one planet. For a series whose first novel opened out so completely, that feels like a retreat rather than a discipline.

None of that is helped by how little we see of the empire the war is supposedly building. We are told about ninety planets and a priesthood spanning them, and we visit approximately one city. For a series whose first book made an entire ecosystem feel inhabited, the second one is oddly incurious about the galaxy it has just conquered. When Herbert does open a window, as with the Fremen veterans who have come back changed from worlds they will not describe, it is very good, and there is not nearly enough of it.

The conspiracy, and the one idea that fully lands

What does work is the plot against Paul, mostly because of how it is put together. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam wants the bloodline back. The Guild navigator Edric supplies prescient cover, so the conspiracy is hidden inside Paul’s own blind spot, which is a properly clever bit of machinery. Scytale supplies the weapon and Irulan, married to Paul in title and nothing else, has been quietly keeping Chani from conceiving for years.

The weapon is Hayt, grown from the cells of the dead Duncan Idaho with metal eyes and something buried in him nobody has mentioned. The question of whether Hayt is Duncan, or an extremely good copy wearing his face, is the best thing in the book and the series never really stops asking it. When the Tleilaxu later offer to bring Chani back the same way, the offer is genuinely cruel, because it is sincere and Paul understands exactly what taking it would make him.

Chani gets less than she deserves too, which is a real shame given how much of the first novel she carried. She is largely defined here by what is being done to her body and by what her death will mean to somebody else, and the book knows it is doing that without ever quite fixing it. There is a version of Messiah told partly from her side, watching the man she married disappear into a role, and I would read that book immediately. I’d be very curious to see how the film handles this as I can’t imagine Zendaya simply being written off.

Scytale is the most purely enjoyable presence in the novel for the opposite reason: he is having a wonderful time. A Face Dancer who can wear anybody, working for an order with no particular stake in who wins, cheerfully offering the worst possible bargain at the worst possible moment. Set against a protagonist who cannot act and a wife who cannot leave, a villain with genuine freedom of movement is a relief every time he turns up.

Alia and Irulan are doing the real work

The two characters I find myself watching most closely are the ones the plot treats as supporting players. Alia is a teenager holding an interstellar religion together while every ancestor in her line argues inside her skull, and she is doing it without anyone who can genuinely help her, because nobody else alive has the condition. Herbert lights that fuse here and does not hurry it. She is sharp, capable and visibly starting to fray, and the book is content to let you notice rather than underline it.

Irulan is the other one, and she is the most quietly tragic person in the novel. Married to Paul for purely political reasons, never touched, writing the histories that turn her husband into a god while being cut out of every part of his actual life. She joins the conspiracy because it is the only lever she has, and the thing that gets her is not the plot succeeding but the realisation of what she has actually helped do. Her turn late in the book is the most human moment in it. If the novel had been willing to be longer, I would have taken more of her and less of the Guild.

There is also a whole strand running at ground level, among Fremen who fought for Paul and have watched what the jihad made of their religion. Otheym is dying of a wasting disease in a city he no longer recognises, and the information he hands over costs his household rather than anyone in the palace. Bijaz, the Tleilaxu dwarf who comes with it, is one of the more unsettling things in the series, a person built as a recording device and entirely aware of what he was made for. Those scenes are where the cost of the empire actually shows up, and they are a big part of why I keep coming back to a book I have just given three stars.

Where it lands

Chani dies bearing twins. A stone burner takes Paul’s eyes. By Fremen custom a blind man walks into the desert, and Paul, who could keep ruling on prescient sight alone and whose priesthood would be delighted to let him, goes anyway. The religion carries on without him and barely breaks stride, which is precisely the point Herbert wanted to make.

So it is a three from me, and it is still a book I keep going back to, because it is part of a series I have loved for thirty years and because the ideas in it are better than the execution around them. It is the necessary hinge between the first novel and Children of Dune. It just is not the best of the series by any measure, and I would not pretend otherwise to keep the run tidy.

None of which stops me rereading it, and I have, several times. It is the book that makes the rest of the run mean something, and a flawed hinge is still a hinge. I just wish Herbert had trusted the story with more room, because the ideas in here deserved a bigger book than the one he wrote.

It is also, whatever else I think of it, a genuinely brave book to have written. The commercially sensible move after the success of the first novel was another desert adventure with more worms. Herbert instead delivered a short, bleak correction that tells his new readership they enjoyed the last one wrongly, and he did it knowing exactly how that would land. I can criticise the execution and still admire the decision.

Rating: 3/5.

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The Dungeon Phoenix (The Dungeon Slayer #4): Tad Wins, and It Still Doesn’t Feel Like Winning

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I’m struggling a bit to get through these now, and The Dungeon Phoenix is where I noticed it. Tad Harrington closes the Warrior Titan dungeon at the start of this book, but it costs him everything. He’s killed by the dungeon’s boss, a void entity, and only wins the fight for his own body by inhabiting his former enemy’s corpse afterward. There’s no clean victory anywhere in this series, and by book four that’s starting to read less like grit and more like a formula the story leans on because it doesn’t know another way to raise stakes.

the dungeon titan
the dungeon titan

With no sign of his brother Liam anywhere, Tad has to clear his champion rank-up trial, hatch a mysterious void egg he’s picked up, and go rescue Liam and their friend Gerald out of Oblivion #1 basically alone. Along the way he fights a Phoenix for a Reforge Aspect that resets his stats back to level 1 with much higher multipliers attached. It’s a big power jump, and one that costs him nearly everything he’s built up to that point just to get it.

A never-ending grind, and a somewhat depressing one

That’s the thing I can’t shake about this book. It’s a genuinely never-ending grind, and a somewhat depressing one to be honest. Tad can never catch a break despite working his tail off constantly, and it’s a bit sad to watch at this point rather than motivating. I don’t need every LitRPG protagonist to be having fun, but there’s a difference between a hard-won victory and a character who’s just perpetually being ground down by a plot that won’t let up on him for one single chapter.

Fenrir, the void entity now sharing Tad’s body, is genuinely one of the better ideas in this book. The two of them eventually strike a pact to work together as brothers and rivals, which is new territory for the series’ void lore and one of the few threads here that felt like it was building toward something instead of just adding another obstacle. I wanted more of that dynamic and less of the grind surrounding it.

Liz’s arc is the one thing that landed

Liz, Tad’s fiancée, is pregnant with twins in this book, and one of them is a void child that threatens her life at birth. That’s a genuinely heavy stake to introduce, and her arc pays it off with a twist ending I didn’t see coming, one that resets her relationship with Tad going forward in a way that actually felt earned rather than just there to hurt. If the rest of the book carried the same weight as her chapters, I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about where this series is headed.

The rescue of Liam from Oblivion #1 is the external motivation carrying most of the plot, and it works fine as a reason for Tad to keep moving forward. It’s the internal cost that’s actually memorable here, though: what leveling up keeps taking away from him every time he clears another obstacle. The series clearly wants me invested in Tad’s power growth, and instead I’m more interested in what that growth is doing to the people around him.

Not sure this one’s built to end

I think I need a defined beginning, middle, and end in my stories rather than an ongoing, never-ending slog, and that’s the real question mark hanging over whether I keep going with The Dungeon Slayer. There’s a setup here for a coming conflict with an antagonist named Omega, and on paper that should have me curious about where things go next. Instead I found myself wondering how many more books Tad has to lose everything in before the series actually resolves anything at all.

The pacing doesn’t help either. This book spends real time on the rank-up trial before Tad even gets near the void egg or the Phoenix fight, and while none of it is wasted exactly, it’s the kind of stretch that used to fly by in the earlier books and now feels like another obstacle between me and whatever comes next. I noticed myself checking how much was left more than once, which isn’t something I did reading the first two books in this series.

The series clearly keeps some momentum going, even through a book that wore on me this much. But four books in, I’m genuinely not certain I’m going to continue with these. The grind is the point of a lot of LitRPG, and I get that going in. This is the first time in the series it’s felt like the grind is happening to me as a reader as much as it’s happening to Tad himself.

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BooksDeep DivesDune

Dune, and the Science Fiction That Isn’t Really Science Fiction

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I first read Dune as an older teen and I have gone back to it roughly once a decade ever since, usually dragging the rest of the series along with it. With a third Villeneuve film a month away, I have had the itch again, and rereading it this time I found myself thinking about something I have never quite been able to settle: this is one of my favourite science fiction novels, and I am not entirely convinced it is science fiction.

Half of this could actually happen

Think about what is in here. The Bene Gesserit with their ninety generations of breeding and their Voice, the Kwisatz Haderach, Guild Navigators folded into tanks of spice gas seeing a safe path through space. None of that is science. It is magic with a technical vocabulary bolted on, and Herbert barely pretends otherwise. Then set it against the other half of the same universe. A war against thinking machines that ended with humanity banning them outright. Mentats, people trained as human computers because the alternative is illegal. A single scarce substance that an entire economy depends on and that everyone is prepared to kill over. Those are not fantasies. Those are things I can see happening, and one of them is arguably happening now.

That split is a large part of why the book keeps working on me. It sits on the line between the two and refuses to pick a side, so the mystical parts feel grounded by the plausible ones and the plausible ones get some of the grandeur of the mystical. Most books that try this end up feeling like neither. This one gets to be both.

It is also why the book survives being adapted and re-adapted without ever quite being replaced. The visual half travels perfectly well, because deserts and worms and knife fights are exactly what a camera is for. The argumentative half does not, because most of it happens inside people’s heads in a language the novel spends four hundred pages teaching you. You can film the Water of Life. You cannot easily film what a Reverend Mother is doing while she watches somebody drink it.

The trap, and the reset in the middle

The setup is a trap and everybody involved knows it. House Atreides is handed stewardship of Arrakis, the only source of melange in the universe, because Emperor Shaddam IV has decided that Duke Leto’s competence and standing in the Landsraad have made him dangerous, and the Harkonnens are happy to do the work. Leto walks into it anyway, because refusing an Imperial directive is a faster death, and because he thinks the desert might hold something worth the gamble. He is right about that. He does not live long enough to use it.

What breaks the house is betrayal from inside it. Wellington Yueh’s Suk conditioning is supposed to make treachery impossible, and the Harkonnens get around a thing the whole Imperium treats as unbreakable by taking his wife. Leto dies trying to take the Baron with him and gets Piter de Vries instead. Then Paul and Jessica are in the deep desert with a stilltent and no allies, and the novel effectively starts over a third of the way in. That reset is a bold piece of construction and it is why the back half feels like a different book wearing the first one’s clothes.

A sandworm breaching a dune ridge on Arrakis while three figures in survival suits watch from below
A sandworm breaching a dune ridge on Arrakis while three figures in survival suits watch from below

What I notice more on each reread is how much of the first act is people being competent at their jobs. Thufir running projections he does not trust, Hawat and Halleck arguing about whether the Harkonnens left saboteurs behind, Leto working out how quickly he can convert spice revenue into loyalty. Herbert lets that run long, and it pays off, because when the trap closes you understand precisely which piece of the machine failed and why nobody caught it. A lesser version of this book would have opened with the betrayal.

What the Fremen are really doing

The Fremen turn out to be far more than the desert fighters the Atreides had hoped to hire. They are running a terraforming programme measured in centuries, hoarding water in sealed caverns against a green Arrakis that not one of them expects to see, working from a plan an Imperial Planetologist handed them two generations back. Every sietch pays into it. Every death pays into it too, because the water in a body belongs to the tribe. Herbert works the social arithmetic of that out in more detail than the plot strictly requires, and it gives the whole desert half of the book a weight that the palace intrigue never quite matches.

It also means the politics everyone remembers is sitting on top of an ecological argument. Who holds Arrakis matters less, in the long run, than what Arrakis is slowly being turned into, and the people doing the turning are the ones nobody in the Imperium bothered to count.

The water discipline is where the world-building stops being scenery and starts being character. Spitting as a greeting because you are giving away moisture. Counting a man’s worth in the litres his body will return. Stillsuits that are uncomfortable, inefficient at the seams, and absolutely non-negotiable. Every one of those details does double duty, telling you about the planet and about the people the planet made, and none of it is delivered as a lecture. It arrives as manners, which is a much harder thing to write and a much easier thing to read.

The prophecy being a plant is the detail I find myself explaining to people most often, because it changes what kind of story this is. Paul is not fulfilling a destiny. He is a trained operator using a piece of psychological infrastructure his own order installed centuries earlier for exactly this contingency, and he knows it, and Jessica knows it, and the book tells you so directly. That the ending still feels triumphant while you hold that knowledge is the single cleverest thing Herbert does.

The household, and the people who take it apart

Paul gets the arc everybody remembers, but Jessica is the more interesting person underneath it. She broke a breeding programme thousands of years old because Leto wanted a son, and she spends the whole novel carrying what that decision costs, up to and including a daughter born already conscious because Jessica took the Water of Life while pregnant. The book treats Alia as a wonder. Reading it now, knowing where the series goes with ancestral memory, the wonder has an edge on it that I do not think was there the first time I read this at seventeen.

Around the two of them Herbert builds a household worth caring about in a remarkably small number of pages. Gurney Halleck with his baliset and his endless quotations, Duncan Idaho, Thufir Hawat running mentat projections for a house that has already lost and has not been told yet. None of them get much room and all of them land, which is a knack a lot of writers with three times the page count never manage. Duncan in particular does more with a handful of scenes here than most series manage with a whole book, and given how many times this character comes back later, it is worth noticing how economically he is established.

The opposition is drawn much broader and works anyway. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is an appetite with a title and a suspensor harness, Piter de Vries is what a mentat looks like when nobody bothers with the ethics, Feyd-Rautha is the polished one, and Rabban exists to be brutal enough that his replacement can arrive looking like mercy. That is a deliberate bit of political theatre inside the story, not just lazy villain design, and the book is explicit about the Baron planning it that way. Meanwhile Stilgar and Chani carry the Fremen side without ever being flattened into noble savages, and Liet-Kynes dies in the sand working out exactly how his father’s plan slipped away from the people it was meant for.

The two scenes that stay with me

Two moments do the heavy lifting for me and they always have. The first is Paul taking the Water of Life and coming out of it as the Kwisatz Haderach. That sequence felt like fulfilment and closure at the same time, the whole book arriving at the thing it had been pointing at since the gom jabbar, and Herbert earns it because the training, the prophecy and the ecology have all been laid out in advance. Nothing about it is a gift. Even the prophecy is a fraud, seeded on Arrakis centuries earlier by the Missionaria Protectiva so that a stranded sister could exploit it, and the book is completely open with you about that while you are cheering.

The second is the sandworm ride when they take the shield wall. It is exceptional storytelling, the point where every piece the novel has built starts moving at once, and it is the image the whole series gets remembered by for good reason. The films have their own version of the desert and it looks tremendous, but the shield wall belongs to the book.

Sixty years on it still holds up better than most of what came after it. It won the Hugo and the first ever Nebula Award for Best Novel, and if you have only met this universe through a cinema screen, the novel is where the ideas actually live. If you want the same era of writers wrestling with religion and politics at a similar pitch, Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers sit on the same shelf, and Leviathan Wakes is the modern series that inherited the interest in resource politics over laser battles.

Rating: 5/5.

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Book cover of Betrayed By The Hero's Party Book 2 by Borgy60: three smiling adventurers in a farm valley
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Betrayed By The Hero’s Party (Book 2): Dorn Fixes Everything, Again

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I scored Betrayed By The Hero’s Party Book 2 a lot lower than book one, and I’ll be honest about why straight away, because it’s the same thing I flagged last time only worse. The prose still sounds like it came out of a machine. Long, repetitive, boring in stretches, and I nearly didn’t finish it, which almost never happens to me with a series I went in wanting to like. When I wrapped up my review of book one I said I’d be reading the next one and hoping it would read a little more human by then. I did read it. It doesn’t.

The setup this time is a good one on paper. Dorn’s established now, a working Warden of Works with a posted rate, and the job is a hundred-year-old containment wall up on the northern moor that the guild won’t inspect and the Crown won’t pay for, kept standing off the books by an old shepherd whose family has been quietly patching it for three generations. Something under it is waking up. The guild’s answer is to kill whatever wakes and Dorn’s whole trade is built on the opposite idea, that nothing properly kept ever needs killing, and there’s a decent book in that clash. I just never felt like I was reading it.

Getting to seventy percent and running out of reasons

I got to about 70% and was really flagging. That’s the honest version of how this went. I kept going because I figured something new had to turn up eventually, a twist, a change of pace, or at the very least the prose loosening up a bit now that the setup was out of the way, and sadly none of that really happened. The same kind of scene just kept arriving in the same kind of sentences. Dorn looks at a problem, Dorn understands it better than anybody else in the room, Dorn fixes it, and the book spends a paragraph or three telling you how well he fixed it, with the ledger and bookkeeping detail piled on top so every repair comes with its own receipt.

And the declarative thing I complained about in book one hasn’t gone anywhere. Every sentence closes itself off, every paragraph lands on a neat little verdict, and after a few hundred pages of that it’s like being read a very long invoice. Book one had the benefit of the idea being fresh, so I could forgive a lot. By book two the idea isn’t new anymore and the prose has to do some of the work. It can’t.

Which is a shame, because I was one of the people making excuses for it. Last time I said it might be somebody writing in a second language and I didn’t want to be unfair, and I still don’t know for certain what’s going on behind it, but when the same tics are this thick two books in, it’s hard to keep giving it the benefit of the doubt. A long book can get away with being slow. A long book that’s slow and says everything twice is a lot harder to get through.

A craftsman in a work apron kneels to repair a cracked stretch of an ancient dry-stone wall on a heather moor while an elderly shepherd woman with a crook watches beside her sheep
A craftsman in a work apron kneels to repair a cracked stretch of an ancient dry-stone wall on a heather moor while an elderly shepherd woman with a crook watches beside her sheep

Dorn can do anything, so nothing matters

The bigger problem, for me, is Dorn himself. He continues to demonstrate his powers of keeping, and he basically can do anything he wants at this point. Which would be fine in a power fantasy if the world pushed back at all, but it doesn’t, because everyone else in the realm is useless. The guild makes mistakes, the Crown makes mistakes, the officials make mistakes, all of them fairly stupid ones, and the only person who can ever sort it out is Dorn. Every time. There’s no moment where he’s actually out of his depth, where he has to lean on someone else, or where the cozy approach costs him anything real.

And that’s what drained the tension out of the wall plot for me. Something ancient is stirring under a century-old barrier, and I never once worried about how it would turn out, because I’d already watched Dorn out-think an entire civilisation for two books running. The shepherd is the most interesting person in the book, a woman who’s kept this thing alive for decades with no backup and no thanks, and she ends up mostly standing to one side while he takes over. I’d have happily read a lot more of her.

It’s a very different kind of cozy from something like Beware of Chicken, where the low stakes feel like a choice the main character makes and the people around him are real people with their own stuff going on. Here the low stakes just come from nobody else being competent enough to be a threat. Or a help. Oh yeah, and he marries the smith. Whoop, whoop. That’s about all the romance subplot managed to get out of me, and it’s a fair summary of how much anything in the book landed.

Where that leaves me with this series

It’s really hard to say too much positive about this one. Nothing new happened, nothing changed, and by the end I was mostly bored, which is a rough place to land for a book whose whole pitch is that the quiet repairman is secretly the most important person in the world. The first book sold me on that idea. This one just repeats it at length until I stopped caring whether it was true.

I know I’m on the grumpy end here. Plenty of people on Goodreads are giving it high marks and calling it a worthy sequel, and if book one’s prose never bothered you I can see this being more of the same in a good way. More Dorn, more fixing, more of the realm learning its lesson. But if you were already on the fence after book one because of how it reads, I don’t think book two is going to win you back, and it lost me completely. It’s on Kindle Unlimited, which is the only reason I’d even suggest trying the first chapter to see for yourself. There’s a book three out already, and I won’t be reading it. First time in a while I’ve dropped a LitRPG series this early, and a bit of a letdown given how much I liked the idea of this one going in.

Rating: a long way below book one, and the series ends here for me. No number from me on this one, just a pass.

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book of the dead 5 ascension review
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Ascension (Book of the Dead #5): Tyron’s Rage Hasn’t Cooled, Even at This Level

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Book of the Dead is one of my better LitRPG series going right now, and Ascension is the book where I stopped worrying it was going to lose the plot the way so many of these series eventually do. RinoZ has an actual plan here, the same way Mark of the Fool and Dungeon Crawler Carl clearly have plans, and that’s rarer than it should be in a genre where a lot of series just keep escalating the numbers until the author runs out of ideas.

Tyron hasn’t lost his hatred for the Empire and the gods despite everything that’s happened to him. That matters more than it sounds like it should. Millions of people have died across this series already, and it would be easy for a necromancer protagonist to go numb to the body count piling up around him. He doesn’t. That hatred is still the engine driving him forward, and Ascension leans into it instead of softening him into something more palatable for a wider audience.

The cost nobody talks about enough

Here’s the part of this book I keep turning over. After the events of book 4, Tyron managed to destroy an entire city with his horde of undead, picking up more revenants and undead recruits along the way as the fighting escalated. The Empire’s response was to purge the whole sector: millions of people labeled “contaminated” and killed for it. That’s not directly Tyron’s fault. He didn’t order that purge, and he wasn’t in the room when it was decided. But he absolutely played a hand in the chain of events that led there, and there’s some backlash toward him for it in this book that I think is the weakest element here.

book of the dead 5 ascension review

It’s not weak because RinoZ handles it badly. It’s weak because the book doesn’t sit with it as long as I wanted it to. A necromancer protagonist causing millions of deaths through his own escalating power is exactly the kind of moral weight this genre usually skips past on its way to the next fight, and Ascension gestures at it without fully cashing it in. One review of this book flags a related imbalance from a different angle: the series runs roughly ninety percent research and experimentation to ten percent action, and while the action is genuinely well done when it shows up, that ratio is part of why a consequence this heavy can pass by faster than it probably should.

I’d have liked another chapter or two of Tyron actually wrestling with what he’d caused, rather than the book trusting me to feel the weight of it from a couple of scenes of backlash. It’s there. It just isn’t given the room the rest of the book gives to combat and progression.

The Realm of the Dead earns its page count

Tyron’s visit to the Realm of the Dead is where this book’s power leveling actually pays off, and it’s a genuine highlight of the series so far. Coming out the other side, he’s strong enough to single-handedly hold off an entire legion of the Empire’s best soldiers, which is the kind of power spike that usually makes me roll my eyes in this genre. It didn’t here, because RinoZ doesn’t let him win clean. He only gets brought to his knees when a platinum-level enforcer attacks him directly, and that fight is where the book proves Tyron is still vulnerable even at this level of strength.

That balance is the thing keeping me in this series when a lot of others have lost me by now. Tyron keeps growing, the numbers keep climbing, and he’s still not untouchable. A single platinum enforcer can still put him on the ground. That’s the difference between power fantasy and power fantasy with actual stakes attached, and Ascension lands on the right side of that line more than once across its length.

The fight against the enforcer specifically is the best single scene in the book. It’s the moment where every bit of the Realm of the Dead power-up actually gets tested against something built to counter it, and RinoZ doesn’t cheat the outcome to keep Tyron looking invincible.

Merigold’s half of the book

The Golden Legion thread, with Merigold Herimar trying to hold her command together against court politics and infighting while the Empire keeps pressing its campaign, gives the book something to cut back to whenever the Tyron material gets heavy. She’s a low-ranking noblewoman who’s ended up leading a military force she probably never expected to command, and watching her hang onto that position through sheer stubbornness is its own kind of satisfying, even if it’s clearly the secondary story here next to Tyron’s.

It’s not a thread I’d want the whole book built around, but as a counterweight it works. Every time Tyron’s chapters get grim, cutting to Merigold trying to hold a room full of nobles together gives the book somewhere else to breathe.

5 out of 5

I loved this one. It’s a very good book, and I’m eagerly waiting on the next entry, which I’m hoping actually closes the story out rather than opening three more threads the way some of these series do around book five. Ascension has the clearest sense of direction this series has shown yet, Tyron’s power growth finally has a real cost attached to it, and the fight against the platinum enforcer is one of the better single scenes I’ve read in LitRPG this year. If you’ve been on the fence about starting Book of the Dead, this is the entry that convinced me it’s going somewhere on purpose, the same instinct that’s kept me reading RinoZ’s other series book after book.

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i summoned their replacements book 1 review body
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Betrayed by the Hero’s Party, I Summoned Their Replacements (Book 1): Reed Has to Earn It

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Very different take and a very different story here, even with nearly the same title on the cover. I Summoned Their Replacements is the second “betrayed by the hero’s party” series I’ve picked up this year, and where the other one (the Borgy60 series I reviewed book one of back in September) is a ci’dozy repairman story, this one is a proper dungeon-grinding revenge LitRPG. And I loved it. Five stars on Goodreads, rough bits and all.

The hook is simple. Reed is a level-19 summoner whose Random Summon skill is a running joke in his party, the kind of skill that pulls a wooden chair out of thin air in the middle of a boss fight, and for two years they treat him like a pack mule, skim his loot and knock him around. Then the Hero buries him alive in a collapsing dungeon and reports him dead. Down there the skill finally evolves, and instead of furniture it starts reaching into the past for legendary fighters pulled from the moment before they died, plus the odd item he badly needs, and they bind themselves to him. From there it’s about surviving, levelling and working his way back toward the people who left him in the dark.

Reed isn’t the strongest person in the room, and that’s why it works

What sold me is that Reed is not automatically the strongest guy in the world the second his skill evolves. He’s still level 19. His summons are strong, but he has to keep them alive and keep himself alive, and the only way to get stronger is to go and challenge dungeons, over and over, and actually grow into the power over time. So you get a real climb. I watched him go from 19 to 40 across the book with the help of his summons, and by the back half he’s become very dangerous, but it felt earned because I’d been there for the fights that got him there.

That’s a big deal for me in this genre, because the lazy version of a betrayal story hands the main character everything in chapter three and then spends the rest of the book letting him be smug about it. This one doesn’t. Reed needs his party, he needs gear, he needs to pick his fights, and when a dungeon goes wrong it genuinely goes wrong. It’s much closer to the summoner-grind feel of Hell Mode than to an overpowered-from-page-one fantasy, where the fun is the planning and the slow build of the roster rather than just watching someone win.

And the summons themselves have a bit of weight to them. They aren’t just stat blocks. Each of them died badly in their own time, one holding a gate on her own for hours, one assassinated by her own council, which gives her something in common with Reed straight away, and that history makes the party feel like people who’ve got their own reasons for sticking around rather than tools he’s picked up.

Book cover of Betrayed by the Hero's Party, I Summoned Their Replacements 1: a blindfolded swordswoman in a forest

The dungeons are the best part

The dungeons themselves are quite unique, and honestly this is the thing I’d tell people about first if they asked me why they should read it. So many LitRPGs have the same dungeon: goblins, then bigger goblins, then a goblin with a crown. The mobs and bosses here are interesting and properly weird compared to the norm in the genre, the kind of thing where you want to know what’s on the next floor just to see what it’ll throw at him. That’s the same itch Dungeon Crawler Carl scratches for me, floors that feel designed rather than filled in, and it’s a big part of why I tore through this one. It also means the levelling never gets stale. Every jump in Reed’s level lines up with a fight I actually remember, against something that wasn’t just a reskin of the last thing he killed, so the numbers going up actually mean something rather than being a counter ticking over in the background.

Then the Hero’s party works out that the assassination didn’t take. Instead of turning up themselves they send their tank to clean up the mess, and by then there’s an eight-level difference between Reed and the man sent to finish him off. Eight levels turns out to not be enough. Reed doesn’t just beat him, he kills him, and after two years of being the party punching bag it’s a really satisfying moment, the first name crossed off and a clear signal of where the rest of the series is going.

The rough edges are still there

Now, this one is also obviously written at least partly by AI. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and if you read my take on the other Betrayed series you’ll know it’s something I notice. The difference is that this one has been edited and cleaned up a lot better. The prose mostly gets out of the way of the story, which is all I really want from it.

Mostly. There are still continuity issues and gaps where scenes jump around for no reason. He’s in the forest after clearing a dungeon, then he’s in the inn with his party, then he’s back in the forest again, and it happens often enough that it should have been caught before this went out. There are also sections that sound very similar to the other Betrayed by the Hero’s Party books, with that same very declarative, repetitive style creeping back in for a few pages at a time, where every line lands like a statement of fact and then the next line says it again slightly differently.

Would I rather it didn’t have those problems? Obviously. But they’re bumps, and the story kept pulling me past them. The difference between this and the other Betrayed series is that when the prose wobbles here there’s a genuinely good book underneath it doing enough to carry me through, a hero who has to fight for every level and dungeons I actually wanted to see the end of.

Rating: 5/5. Loved it. Some messy scene jumps and a few patches that sound like a machine wrote them, and I didn’t care one bit by the time the tank showed up.

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mark of the fool book 4 review
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Mark of the Fool (Book 4): Alex Finally Runs Into a Wall He Can’t Loophole

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This whole story feels like it has a defined beginning, middle, and end, and that’s rarer in this genre than it should be. It shows in how Mark of the Fool 4 is built. It’s clearly a middle book, and middle books in any genre do tend to drag a bit (if you’ve read Wheel of Time you know what I mean!), but it’s still enjoyable and it does the job of moving the larger story forward rather than just treading water until the next big beat.

Alex travels to Thameland this time to dig into the mystery of the Ravener, alongside his university companions, who’ve all grown in power since the Games of Roal. Generasi is still recovering from a demon knight’s wrath from earlier in the series, and the university mounts an expedition into the hills of Greymoor that puts Alex up against threats no amount of academy training could have fully prepared him for.

The Mark stops being a workaround

The real turn in this book is that Alex hits an actual wall in his magical progression. To master the spells he needs, the Mark itself can’t be worked around anymore. It has to be removed or transformed, full stop. I think Alex gradually worked around the limitations that were placed on him to find a solution that best suited his own unique issues, and that’s the version of a power-up arc I want to see more of in this genre: not a new ability handed to him, but him actually solving a problem that’s specific to who he is rather than a generic obstacle every protagonist in this kind of story eventually clears the same way.

What I liked most is that the book doesn’t let him find a clean third option. Removing the Mark and transforming it both carry real costs, and for a good stretch of the book I genuinely didn’t know which way Alex would go, or whether either choice would actually work the way he hoped.

mark of the fool book 3 review

That’s the spine the rest of the book hangs off, and it works because the series has spent three books establishing exactly what the Mark is and isn’t capable of. When a limitation that specific finally becomes the plot, it lands as a real stakes-raiser instead of an arbitrary wall thrown up to manufacture tension.

The Heroes of Thameland, and a slower stretch

The Greymoor expedition brings in the Heroes of Thameland, other Mark-bearers who’ve been fighting monsters independently across the realm and finally get a reunion here. I liked the idea of expanding the cast this way, though it’s part of why the middle stretch of this book drags a little. Splitting focus across more Mark-bearers means less time with Alex directly, and this series is at its best when I’m watching him specifically work through a problem rather than checking in on a wider cast of side characters.

There’s also a hidden-society thread here, assassins and spies tied to Uldar and something called the First Apostle, that deepens Thameland’s own secrets without fully paying off yet. It’s clearly setup for later books, and on its own terms it’s fine. It’s just another thread competing for space in a book that’s already carrying the Ravener mystery, the Greymoor expedition, and the Mark’s forced turning point all at once.

Claygon, still developing

Claygon keeps growing here too, in the same slow-burn way the series has handled it since Book 1. Nothing about this book pushes Claygon into anything fully sentient. It’s still “developing,” the same word I’d use to describe where the character was a book ago, just with more happening under the surface than before. The series is clearly saving something for later, and I’d rather it take its time than rush the payoff just to give this book a bigger character beat.

Where this lands against the series so far

Coming right off Book 2, the jump in scale here is noticeable. Thameland’s war zone raises the stakes past anything the academy setting alone could manage, and the Mark’s forced turning point gives Alex a genuinely personal problem to solve rather than just a bigger threat to punch through. Looking back at Book 1, it’s a good reminder of how much groundwork this series laid early so a limitation like this one could actually mean something four books later.

It drags in the middle, and the expanded cast costs the book some of the focus that made the earlier entries work as well as they did. But the core of this one, Alex actually solving his own problem instead of leveling past it, is exactly the kind of progression fantasy beat I keep coming back to this series for. It’s enough to keep me firmly on board for wherever the Ravener mystery goes next.

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The Eye of the Bedlam Bride book cover, Dungeon Crawler Carl book 6
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The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (Dungeon Crawler Carl #6): Carl Closes the Book on His Dad

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I enjoyed The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, but it’s a real step down from book five, and I finished it in August with a lot more mixed feelings than I expected to have about a Dungeon Crawler Carl book. After The Butcher’s Masquerade, which I loved and gave a five, I went straight into this one on Audible ready for more of the same. Some of it was great. Carl finally gets to close the chapter on his father, Samantha started to grow on me in a way I didn’t see coming, and there’s a lot of the same humour and chaos I love about this series. But the whole card battle thing just didn’t work for me, and it’s a big part of the book.

The floor this time is Ghost Earth, a replica of the world right before everything ended, filled with the ghosts of ordinary people living out their last days with no idea what’s about to happen. That’s a properly unsettling idea, and it gets under your skin more than most of the floors have. Donut picks Cuba as the starting point over Carl’s objections, which is very Donut, and from there the crawlers have to capture monsters and turn them into cards to fight with. Donut is the Deck Master, of course. She was never going to let anyone else have that job. Starting in Havana, among ghosts who can’t see you and don’t know their world has days left, is a strange and kind of haunting place for a LitRPG to put its heroes, and for the first stretch of the book I was really into it. It felt like the series was about to do something different with all that sadness hanging in the air.

Carl finally deals with his dad

Original 2023 cover of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, showing Princess Donut, Carl and the spider-bodied Bedlam Bride with battle cards

The part of this book that hit hardest for me was Carl’s family. We’ve had hints about his past for a while, and Ghost Earth finally lays it out, and I really enjoyed watching Carl close the chapter on his father. It’s not a happy story, and the book doesn’t pretend it is. Seeing those last moments as ghosts, unable to change anything, is about as sad as this series has got, and it’s a side of Carl we haven’t seen much of before, under all the swearing and the bare feet.

And then there’s his little brother. He was just sad. That’s the only word I’ve got for it. A kid Carl didn’t know existed, caught up in a mess that had nothing to do with him, and I found it genuinely upsetting in a book that’s usually got a joke ready for every moment. And finding out that Carl’s ex knew about his brother and kept it from him makes her even more horrible than I already thought she was, which after abandoning Donut back in book one I didn’t think was possible.

What I liked is that it gives Carl a bit of closure without tying it all up in a bow. He doesn’t get to fix it. He just gets to understand it and let it go, which is more than most people in his situation would get, and it means he can go into the next floor carrying a little less. It’s the kind of quiet emotional moment the series is better at than people give it credit for, and it’s the best stuff in this book.

Samantha grew on me

I didn’t expect to say this, but I started to like Samantha a bit more in this one. She’s always been the loud, ridiculous, slightly terrifying one in the party, and that’s still true, but this time round she landed for me more as a character and less as a running gag. There’s something kind of endearing about how she throws herself at everything with total confidence, whether it makes sense or not, and her completely unhinged declarations got more laughs out of me this time than in any book before. I found myself looking forward to her bits rather than waiting for them to be over, which is a big change from how I felt about her before.

Donut’s still Donut, which is to say she’s fantastic. Being Deck Master suits her perfectly, she gets to be bossy and dramatic and right about things at the same time, and her back and forth with Carl is still the best double act in LitRPG. Picking Cuba over Carl’s objections and then running the whole deck like she was born to it is the most Donut thing she’s done in a while, and she carries a lot of the fun in a book that’s sadder than most. Without her I think the card game would have bothered me even more.

Mordecai’s past and the Bedlam Bride

Mordecai’s past finally comes out properly in this one, and it changes how I see a couple of people I thought I knew. He’s been the gruff, reluctant guide in Carl and Donut’s corner since the early floors, and now we find out he and Chaco were crawlers in the same season, that Chaco killed Mordecai’s brother on Odette’s orders, and that Odette sold out the people closest to her to buy her own way out before turning into the galaxy-famous talk show host we know. That’s a lot to take in about someone who’s been in the background of every floor, and it makes every scene with Odette land differently now. I won’t spoil every detail, because some of it is better found out first hand, but it’s one of the better reveals the series has done.

The bit with Shi Maria, the Bedlam Bride herself, is suitably creepy, a spider demigod with a woman’s head who drives people mad just by attacking them, once married to a god nobody can find. The team goes after her as a card, and the way she ends up tangled up with Carl leaves a mark on him, literally, an eye on his chest and something living inside him that I could tell was going to matter later. It’s one of the stronger threads in the book. I just wish the way they got there hadn’t been the card game, because a creature that scary deserved a fight that felt as dangerous as she is.

The card battles seemed a bit stupid

The Butcher's Masquerade cover, Dungeon Crawler Carl book 5, with Princess Donut in sunglasses on a staircase under a spotlight

I didn’t love the whole card battle thing, and honestly it seemed a bit stupid to me. The idea of capturing monsters and turning them into a deck, then fighting with the deck, sounds fun on paper. In practice I found it took the tension out of the fights, because instead of Carl and Donut being in danger, it’s their cards fighting other cards, and there are a lot of rules to keep track of. The heavy explanation of how it all works slows the pace right down in places, and I’m not someone who minds a rules dump in a LitRPG.

It felt like a gimmick to me. Every floor in this series has its own twist, and normally that’s part of the fun, but most of them still come down to Carl being clever and violent in a dangerous place. This one put a layer between him and the danger, and the book lost something because of it. I’d have happily had a lot less card game and a lot more Ghost Earth.

It’s not all bad, some of the card fights are funny, and “Alpha Carl” being a card version of Carl is a great joke. There’s a crab called Raul who I’ll remember. But if I’m picking the weakest part of the series so far, it’s this. The frustrating thing is that the floor around it had so much going for it. A dead world full of ghosts, Carl’s family, Mordecai’s past, a spider demigod, and every time it got going the book would cut to another round of who’s holding which card. I kept wishing the game would get out of the way.

I’m getting worried about the dungeon

The other thing I came out of this book with is a growing worry about the dungeon itself, and its sanity. The AI was initially one of my favourite characters, right after Carl and Donut. Way back in the first book it was this weird, petty, funny presence that seemed almost on the crawlers’ side, and I’d always half assumed it was going to end up helping them against the people running the show. Now I’m not so sure.

In this book it’s starting to go off the deep end. It’s glitching, it’s acting stranger, and I can’t tell anymore whether it’s breaking down or turning into something else. I’m less sure it’s going to help the crawlers at all. Every time it pops up now there’s a little edge to it that wasn’t there before, less mischief and more something I can’t read, and I don’t love what that might mean for Carl further down. I’ve had wobbles with this series before, book four was uneven too, but never about the dungeon itself, and that’s a good kind of worry to have about a series six books in, it means I’m invested, but it also made this one feel a bit uneasy in a way that didn’t always sit well next to the card game silliness.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5. Not my favourite in the series by a long way, but I went straight on to book seven anyway, which tells you how much I still love these characters.

Did the card battles work for you, or did you want the crawlers back on their feet fighting? Tell me in the comments.

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beyond the rift transdimensional hunter book 4 review
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Beyond the Rift (TransDimensional Hunter #4): Another Ringo Ending That Runs Out of Room

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Four books ago this series started as a socially anxious teenager beta-testing an augmented-reality game. Beyond the Rift has to close out her identity crisis, her fame, the rival team, the stalker, the sabotage, and the actual mechanism behind the whole game, all in one book, because this is where the series ends. It mostly pulls that off. I enjoyed this one a lot, and there’s a genuine surprise late in the book that I didn’t see coming. But this is also a Ringo series finale, and Ringo finales have a shape I’ve seen before on this site: everything resolves, and it resolves fast, and you can feel the page count running out before the plot does.

That’s a strange thing to say about a book I’m rating this highly, but both things are true at once. The stuff that works, works because three books of setup earned it. The stuff that doesn’t quite work reads like a book that had more to close than the page count budgeted for. I’d rather end on that combination than on a finale that plays it safe and resolves nothing.

The stakes go all the way up

Whatever else is true about the pacing, this book doesn’t undersell what’s on the line. The countdown driving the back half is about as blunt as stakes get: in six months, the world ends if this doesn’t get fixed. That’s a long way from a beta test for an augmented-reality monster-hunting app, and the distance the series has traveled from book one to here is honestly the most satisfying part of reading it straight through.

The character arcs get their moment too, and this is the part I wasn’t sure a single closing book could manage. Lynn’s mother, the ER nurse whose shifts were the whole reason gaming for money mattered back in book one, gets real closure rather than a mention in passing. Even Elena, the rival who ran the mean-girl antagonism all the way back at the start, gets a real scene instead of just fading out of the story once she stopped being useful as an obstacle. Even the teammates who spent book two eaten up by jealousy get somewhere better than where they started. A finale that remembers every thread it’s carrying and gives each one a real beat is rarer than it should be, and this one does that better than I expected going in.

That’s a genuinely hard needle to thread across four books and this many named characters, and it’s worth calling out on its own rather than just as a footnote to the plot. A lot of series finales pick two or three people to actually resolve and let everyone else exit on a wave and a nod. This one goes down the list properly, and by the time it’s done I couldn’t point to a single major character from the first three books who got shortchanged on their way out.

The reveal doesn’t throw her under the bus

There’s a point late in the book where everything Lynn has been managing, the game, the algorithm, the danger underneath the training simulator, comes out in the open in a way that could very easily have turned into a pile-on. I expected the narrative to make her the convenient scapegoat once the full picture landed, the teenage fall guy for decisions bigger institutions made long before she was ever recruited. It doesn’t do that, and I was genuinely surprised by how the book handles it.

This is a series that has spent three books putting the consequences of other people’s decisions onto a teenage girl, from Ronnie’s dismissive friend group in book one through the doxing and stalking in the two after it. Watching the story actually protect her for once, at the exact moment it would have been easiest to make her the fall guy for the drama, carries more weight than it would in a book that hadn’t put her through everything the first three did first. She doesn’t get thrown under the bus, and that restraint is the single best decision this book makes.

It would have been the easy version of this scene to write. Teenage girl, corporate secret, global crisis: the setup all but hands you a scapegoat plot on a plate, and after three books of Lynn absorbing blame that was never hers to carry, I’d have believed it if the story had gone there one more time. That it doesn’t is the moment I trusted the book to actually land the rest of its ending, even in the places it didn’t quite manage to.

Loose ends that never get tied off

Two things bothered me enough to notice on a single read, which is unusual for this series. Lynn has a boyfriend by this point in the story, and at a key moment he knows something he has no reasonable way of knowing. The book never explains how he found out. It’s just true in one chapter, and I kept waiting for the scene that connects the dots between what he knew before and what he shouldn’t have. It never arrives.

The bigger loose end is the rift itself, the thing the title is named for. It doesn’t get a clean resolution. I finished the book honestly unsure whether that’s a deliberate door left open for a fifth book or a thread the authors ran out of room to close properly. Given how everything else about this ending closes, I’d bet on the second, but I’d genuinely like to be wrong about that.

A jagged dimensional rift crackling open in the night sky above an ordinary suburban street, from Beyond the Rift

Four books is enough runway to set up a real payoff for both of these, and neither one gets it. It reads less like an intentional mystery and more like a note nobody had time to go back and fix before the deadline. I’d have taken either answer happily: explain the boyfriend, or leave the rift open on purpose and tell me so. What I don’t love is getting neither, in a book that otherwise closes almost everything else it opened across the first three volumes.

The teen-romance padding, and one scene that doesn’t land

There’s a broader looseness in how the teenagers on this team talk to and around the adults in their lives that reads a little off through this whole book, like the dialogue forgot there’s supposed to be a generational line there at all. The romantic subplot is part of that. It gets more page time here than it’s earned across four books, and by this point it reads like the series checking a box rather than developing anything new. I’d have traded a chunk of it for more room spent on the actual finale mechanics, which are the part of this book that needed the space.

The clearest example of the bigger problem is a scene where one of the eighteen-year-olds on Lynn’s team starts hollering at a woman in her forties for getting kissed. It’s played as a beat, not a joke and not really addressed as a problem afterward, and it just reads wrong. An eighteen-year-old yelling at an adult stranger about her own romantic life isn’t protective and it isn’t funny. It’s crass, and the age gap between who’s doing the judging and who’s being judged makes it worse rather than better. It’s a small scene in a long book, but it’s the moment where the teen behavior around adults stopped feeling like teenagers being teenagers and started feeling like the book forgot how adults and teenagers actually talk to each other.

The ending Ringo endings always have

I’ve said this about a Ringo series before: Troy Rising stuck its landing and then got heavy-handed about the politics on the way there. This series has close to the opposite problem. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and it doesn’t get preachy. It just doesn’t stay long enough. Four books of buildup, real stakes, and a genuinely dark turn in Behind the Veil, and then the actual ending arrives compressed into a fraction of the space it needed to breathe.

That’s not unique to this series, either. It’s close to endemic in how Ringo closes things out, from what I’ve read of his work on this site: the middle stretches get room to develop, and the finale gets rushed to the line as if the deadline landed before the outline did. Compare the ratio here. The romantic subplot and the teen-adult scenes get roughly as much page time as the actual closing of the central mystery, and only one of those needed that much room to work.

It’s the one criticism I’d make of the series as a whole rather than of any single book in it. Three books spent this much time getting Lynn, her team, and the actual threat to a boiling point. The fourth owed the ending at least as much patience as the other three got, and it doesn’t quite deliver that.

4.2 out of 5

I really enjoyed this one, loose ends and all. The reveal is handled better than I expected, the character work I liked in Into the Real and Through the Storm pays off here instead of getting dropped for spectacle, and Lynn earns her ending. It’s just an ending that needed another hundred pages to actually land the way the rest of the series set it up to.

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behind the veil transdimensional hunter book 3 review
BooksLitRPGSciFi

Behind the Veil (TransDimensional Hunter #3): The Book the First Two Were Building Toward

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I said in my review of Through the Storm that the alien plot barely moved across four hundred pages, and that the fame-and-bullying material kept crowding out the thing I actually showed up for. Behind the Veil is the answer to that complaint, and it doesn’t waste time getting to it. Lynn’s team won the multi-team boss battle that closed book two, and now they have to level up fast enough to compete in the national TransDimensional Hunter championship, which is the spine the rest of the plot hangs off. That competitive structure gives the book a ticking clock the first two never really had. An anonymous scrimmage doesn’t carry the same weight as an actual bracket with a real ending, and the book knows it.

It also means the team Lynn spent book two holding together under jealousy and resentment finally has to function as a team, under a deadline, with something real riding on it. That’s the payoff for all the roster friction the last book spent so long establishing. It stopped feeling like setup somewhere in the first third and started feeling like a team that had actually earned the right to be under this much pressure together.

Underneath that spine is where this book really lives, and it’s the strongest entry in the series by a wide margin. I enjoyed the first two well enough to reread them more than once, but this is the one I’d point somebody to if they wanted proof the series was worth sticking with. Two books of atmosphere and hinting finally turn into an actual mechanism, and the mechanism is a good one. If book two was this series trading its science fiction hook for a coming-of-age story, book three is where it remembers what it’s supposed to be and does both at the same time.

The reveal actually explains something

Here’s the thing books one and two kept teasing without paying off: the game’s glitches aren’t random, and neither is where the monsters spawn. Lynn starts noticing that the creatures cluster around power terminals, and the terminals glitch. Clear the monsters and the electrical fault resolves itself, every single time, and that consistency is what convinced me this had been mapped out since book one rather than improvised to justify a trilogy. It’s a real, checkable pattern, which is exactly what the first two books were missing whenever the game’s weirdness came up. Readers who found the earlier “glitches that feel personal” material vague finally get a mechanism instead of a mood.

A translucent, glowing insect-like creature bleeding through beside a sparking power terminal while a girl in AR gear watches, from Behind the Veil

It also pays off something I flagged all the way back at the end of Into the Real. That book closed by implying TransDimensional Hunter wasn’t entertainment at all, that it was a detection and training system with something real behind it. Book one only had room to gesture at that idea before the credits rolled. This is the first entry that actually shows the training being used for something, instead of leaving it as an atmospheric promise the series might get back to eventually.

Then it scales, and this is where the book earns its stakes. The outages don’t stay local. They spread far enough to threaten transportation on a much wider scale, and the book doesn’t flinch from the human cost of that. People living rough near the spawn grounds start dying. The AR overlay was never just a rendering of nothing laid over the real world. Something is bleeding through, the game is functioning as a containment mechanism whether anyone signed up for that or not, and the people with no walls around them are the first casualties. That’s a considerably darker turn than anything in the first two books, and it’s the moment this series stops being cute about consequences.

The pressures finally have teeth

Three threads that were background noise in books one and two get promoted to real plot here, and all three land harder than I expected going in. The fan-who-becomes-a-stalker thread takes the fame material from book two and curdles it into something genuinely threatening rather than just uncomfortable. It’s not background anxiety anymore. It becomes an actual safety problem on top of everything else Lynn is juggling. The sabotage between teams, which read as dirty-play flavor before, escalates into something with real consequences for whether her team even makes it through the championship bracket.

And then there’s the algorithm, the thread I flagged all the way back in my review of Into the Real as glitches that looked personally targeted rather than random. It finally gets addressed as an actual plot point with an explanation behind it, instead of being left as unexplained atmosphere the series could return to whenever convenient. The jealousy inside her own roster, which mostly simmered in book two without costing anyone anything, finally has a price attached to it here too. Losing isn’t a hypothetical anymore once a national bracket is on the line, and the book makes sure everyone on the team feels that.

None of these threads needed a full extra book of setup to pay off the way they do here, and that’s the real difference between this entry and the one before it. Through the Storm spent four hundred pages building pressure without much release. Behind the Veil spends its length cashing all of it in at once, and it doesn’t feel rushed the way that description makes it sound. It feels like a book that finally has enough plot to fill its page count instead of padding it out with school drama.

This is the book the series needed

Baen shelved this series as military science fiction from the start, and for two books that felt like false advertising. Behind the Veil is the first one where the label actually fits, without losing the character work that made the first two worth reading in the first place. Lynn is still a person rather than a chosen-one archetype the plot bends around to make her win, and the team dynamics established across the first two books actually get used here instead of just referenced in passing.

The last time a third Ringo book had this much riding on it, it stuck the landing on the plot and then got heavy-handed about the politics on the way there. This one just sticks the landing, full stop. Reviewers keep noting that books one and two were heavily character-driven and book three is where the plot actually kicks in, and having now read all three, that’s exactly right. It took two books to earn this payoff, and the payoff was worth the wait rather than merely justifying it after the fact.

What I appreciated most is that none of it comes at the expense of what already worked. The championship structure could easily have flattened Lynn and her team into pure competition-arc mechanics, gear checks and bracket math standing in for character. It doesn’t. The people who mattered in the first two books still matter here, they’re just operating under a deadline that finally means something, and the stakes on the board are big enough that every decision the team makes actually costs something if it goes wrong.

The audiobook is still narrated by Sarah Mollo-Christensen across all three books, and this is the entry where that continuity pays off the most. So much of what happens here depends on tension escalating in real time rather than being summarized after the fact, and having the same voice carry Lynn through all of it makes the escalation land harder than it would cold. Three books in, that consistency is its own quiet reason to stick with the audio version instead of switching formats partway through.

4.8 out of 5

This is the best of the three so far, and it isn’t close. The mystery finally has a mechanism, the stakes are real enough to carry an actual body count, and none of the character work from the first two books got left behind to make room for the plot. I loved this one. If Into the Real was a better idea than the game it was attached to, and Through the Storm was a necessary bridge, Behind the Veil is the book those first two were quietly building toward the whole time.

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MarvelMovies

The Fantastic Four: First Steps — Reed Is Scared and Franklin Is Waiting

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

This is the last film before Doomsday and the last post in this rewatch, which makes it the natural place to ask what all of it was for. Watching First Steps again with everything else fresh in my head, the answer is clearer than I expected. This is the film the whole run has been walking toward, not because it’s the best of them, but because it’s the one holding the pieces that actually matter.

I barely mentioned the separate-universe thing in my 2025 review. The film is set in its own world, distinct from the main MCU, and at the time that seemed like a creative convenience, since it let the retro-futurism exist without having to explain why nobody in New York had noticed a chrome 1960s next door. It isn’t a convenience at all. A separate universe is the precondition for an incursion story, and an incursion story is what’s about to happen in a few weeks. Everything I liked about the film’s self-contained world, the reason it felt coherent in a way almost nothing else in that era did, is the same property that makes it necessary. The film gets to be its own thing and carry the weight at the same time, which is a trick nothing else in this run pulled off. It reframes the retro-futurism too. That’s not a style choice, it’s the visible evidence that this is somewhere else, and the more distinct it looks the more the eventual collision is going to cost.

image

Reed and Doom is the oldest fight Marvel has

My period review ended on the Doom tease with a careful note that there was nothing to go on yet. There’s plenty to go on now, and what I’d add is that the film had already done the important work before the tease even arrived. Reed in this version is anxious, over-prepared, and visibly carrying the weight of being the person everybody expects to solve everything. That’s the correct Reed and it’s the one that makes the rivalry function. Doom against a serenely brilliant Reed is just two clever men arguing at each other. Doom against a Reed who is quietly terrified of failing the people who depend on him is a real fight, because Doom’s whole proposition is that he would do the job better. I said in 2025 that the version of Doom that works is the one genuinely certain he’s the only person competent enough to run things, and Reed is written here as the exact counterweight to that argument, before anybody watching knew what shape the argument would take.

Franklin I gave almost no attention first time round, which in hindsight was a mistake. He’s the loaded gun on the mantelpiece, because anybody with a passing knowledge of the comics knows what that character can eventually do, and the film puts him carefully on the board and then leaves him completely alone. On a first watch that looks like restraint. On a second, knowing an event this size is coming, it looks like patience. Whether December uses him is the single most interesting open question going in. He’s either the answer to a problem nobody else can solve, or a temptation the writers ought to resist, and the film has kept both doors open, which is more discipline than this franchise usually manages.

Nothing has changed my mind about Galactus, though. He should have been bigger. If anything the rewatch made it worse, because the rest of the film is so confident about scale in every other respect: the world is enormous, the tech is enormous, the ideas are enormous, and then the world-eater turns up at a size you can comfortably fit inside a wide shot and the air goes straight out of it. I compared it to Infinity War at the time and I’d make that comparison harder now, because that film understood a cosmic threat has to feel unanswerable before the answer arrives. First Steps skips the beat entirely. Galactus shows up as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be survived, and a lot of carefully built dread leaks away. The Silver Surfer still works and is still the best version we’ve had, so the herald landed even when the god didn’t.

Ranking the run, and what it taught me

Something I noted approvingly in 2025 and still undervalued: the domestic scenes are doing real work rather than just providing warmth. An incursion story is, underneath everything, about two worlds where only one gets to continue, and that’s an abstraction. Abstractions don’t generate dread. What generates dread is having spent two hours in somebody’s kitchen. The film’s patience with ordinary family business, the arguments and the meals and the easy competence of people who know each other well, is what turns a cosmological event into something with an actual price tag. It’s also why the Galactus problem stings so much, because the film did the hard half correctly and then undersized the thing threatening them.

Since this is the last post, here’s where the rewatch left everything. Guardians Vol. 3 is the best film of the group and it isn’t close, because it’s the only one allowed to be about something other than the franchise it belongs to. Deadpool & Wolverine is the most fun and the most confident, and the one I’ve gone back to most for pleasure rather than homework. First Steps is third, and the gap between it and those two is more about ambition of subject than execution. Then Thunderbolts*, which tried something real and fumbled it, and Brave New World, which mostly ran errands for later films.

Doing this in order changed my view of the whole stretch more than any individual film did. Watched one at a time, across years, these read as a series of disconnected disappointments with the odd highlight. Watched close together with the destination known, a pattern shows up: almost every one of them was carrying weight for a plan that changed underneath it while it was being made. That doesn’t make the weaker ones good, and it does explain why so many of them feel oddly shaped, like rooms built for furniture that never turned up. The films that hold up best are the ones that were carrying the least, which isn’t a coincidence and is probably the most useful thing I’ve taken from nine months of this.

First Steps is the exception and I don’t think that’s an accident either. It’s the one made after the plan changed, with the destination already known, so everything in it points somewhere real. That’s also its limitation: it’s a very good setup and a slightly thin film, and the 3.5 I gave it in 2025 still feels right. What’s changed is that I now think the setup was the job, and it did that job well. The reception was solid and I suspect it’ll look better still after December.

Doomsday arrives in a few weeks. Of everything I’ve rewatched over these nine months, this is the one to watch last and the one most worth watching twice. The world is separate, Reed is scared, Franklin is waiting, and Doom is coming. That’s a better position than this franchise has been in for years, and after everything above, I didn’t expect to end this project feeling optimistic.

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mark of the fool book 3 review
BooksLitRPG

Mark of the Fool (Book 3): The Games of Roal Actually Earn Their Page Count

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I enjoyed this one a lot. Alex Roth finishes his first year at the academy and heads into the Games of Roal, and the whole tournament arc was lots of fun in a way I wasn’t fully expecting going in. Tournament arcs are a genre risk. They can eat a book’s entire page count without moving anything forward, and Mark of the Fool 3 mostly dodges that trap by making sure the Games actually cost something real.

What sold me on it is that Alex and Claygon, despite being seemingly overpowered coming into this, didn’t win everything. That’s such a small thing to get right and so many progression fantasy books get it wrong. Watching the two of them almost lose more than once was genuinely interesting, and it kept the tournament from turning into a victory lap for a protagonist we already know is strong.

The professor fight that almost happened

There’s a stretch in the Games where Alex is up against one of his professors, and I know a loss there would have derailed his prospects as a budding business magnate. The academy politics around Alex’s standing are very much a live wire in this book. Knowing that, it still would have been genuinely interesting to see him actually lose that fight. Not because I wanted him to fail, but because the book had built up enough tension around that specific matchup that a loss would have landed as a real consequence instead of a foregone conclusion. It doesn’t happen, and I get why it doesn’t, but that’s the moment in the tournament that stuck with me the most going into the rest of the book.

The professor himself is written as genuinely dangerous rather than a speed bump the plot needs Alex to clear on the way to the final rounds. That’s part of why the fight worked as well as it did. I wasn’t sitting there certain of the outcome the way I usually am with these academy-tournament matchups.

Alex’s magical progression this book felt earned rather than rushed, which matters more here than in a lot of LitRPG because the Games of Roal put him directly against people who’ve trained specifically for competition instead of the mixed threats he’s faced up to now. Watching him and Claygon adapt to that format, rather than just steamroll it with raw power, is where the tournament structure actually pays for itself.

The demon summoner thread didn’t need to be here

mark of the fool (book 2)
Mark of the Fool (Book 2)

The demon-summoner conspiracy running through Generasi during the Games was okay for me, but it added another thread that wasn’t really critical to the underlying Thameland and Mark of the Fool storyline as far as I’m concerned. It gives the book something to cut away to when the tournament material needs a breather, and it sets up the university expedition into the war zone that’s clearly coming, but on its own it felt like a subplot doing a job rather than a story I was invested in for its own sake.

That’s not a big complaint. It’s the kind of thread a series needs a few of to keep the pacing moving, and it does that job fine. I just noticed myself more engaged every time the book cut back to the tournament than every time it cut to the conspiracy plot, which tells me where this book’s actual strengths are.

Claygon, still growing

Claygon keeps developing in this one without tipping over into anything fully aware or intentional yet, which fits where I’d expect the character to be this early in the series. The clay companion is clearly building toward something, and I’m curious where that goes, but book 3 is smart to keep it a slow burn rather than rushing it.

Where this lands against Book 2

This is a step up from Book 2 for me, mostly because the Games of Roal gave the book a structure with actual tension baked into it, something the academy-year format doesn’t always have on its own. Going back to Book 1, the tournament format is a good reminder of how far Alex has come. He’d have had no business being on that stage a book ago, and now he’s a real threat in it even without winning cleanly.

Overall I’m still fully on board with this series. The Games of Roal could have been the kind of filler arc that makes a middle book of a long series feel like a detour, and instead it’s the best stretch of Mark of the Fool 3. The demon-summoner thread is doing setup work I’ll probably appreciate more once the payoff arrives, and Alex and Claygon losing a few rounds along the way is exactly the kind of restraint that keeps me trusting where this series is headed.

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MarvelMovies

Thunderbolts: What Do You Do With the Sentry?

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

In my 2025 review I wrote that the MCU had built something it couldn’t really use in the Sentry, because he’s either the solution to every threat or he has to be written out of every room he’s in. Going into December that’s stopped being a criticism and started being a genuine problem the film has to solve. Doom is coming, and the most powerful being on the board is a man whose defining trait is that nobody, including himself, can rely on him.

Rewatching made the bind sharper. If the Sentry turns up at full strength, most threats stop being threats, because a character with that ceiling flattens any ensemble he’s in. That’s precisely why the comics kept him unstable rather than simply strong: the instability was the balancing mechanism. But this version’s instability got resolved, and that’s what my original complaint about the love-conquers-all ending was really about, though I didn’t frame it that way at the time. The film didn’t just take an easy emotional out. It removed the one thing that made the character usable, because a Sentry who has been fixed is a Sentry with no reason not to solve the plot in the first ten minutes. So the options going into December are: leave him out and invite the obvious question, bring him in and neuter him again with some fresh contrivance, or re-break him and undo the ending the film was proudest of. None of those is good, and I’d genuinely like to know which one they’ve picked.

Where I’d correct myself is that I implied the film had ruined him permanently. Two years on I think the damage is more recoverable than I made out. The pieces are all still there, the performance is still good, and a writer who wanted to could put the instability back without contradicting a thing. Whether anybody will is a different question entirely.

The team still isn’t reassuring

I ended the period review wondering whether this particular group is who you’d want standing between Earth and anything serious, and answered “not really”. I stand by that, and the intervening two years haven’t helped at all. They’re carrying the Avengers name now, which worked as a gag for an ending and is a strange thing to actually live with. The original team worked because that film gave each of them a reason to be in the room and then let them earn the shorthand over another decade. This lot inherited the shorthand without doing any of the work, and it shows every time somebody says the name out loud.

Marvel's The Avengers movie poster featuring Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Nick Fury. In theaters May 4
the avengers

What the rewatch did change is my read on Yelena. Florence Pugh is even better than I gave her credit for, and she’s the only member of this group I’d be actively glad to see in a fight at December’s scale. Not because she’s powerful, because she plainly isn’t, but because she’s the only one whose reactions I can predict, and in an ensemble that size predictability is worth more than raw output. I said at the time she was the only person here with a functioning interior life. Watching again, she’s also the only one doing the film’s real emotional work — everybody else talks about damage and she plays it, mostly in silence, mostly in scenes that aren’t ostensibly about it. That matters going into an event film, because ensembles reward actors who can hold a moment without dialogue and there aren’t many on this team who can.

The mental-health material, reconsidered

This is where my opinion has moved most. In 2025 I criticised the resolution for taking the easy way out and compared it to a live-action version of that Pixar film about a girl’s emotions. I’d soften that now without withdrawing it. What I badly underrated was how unusual it is for a film at this scale to make depression the actual plot rather than a character note dropped in for texture. Watching the surrounding era back to back for this project, almost nothing else in the run attempts anything that isn’t ultimately resolvable with a fight. Thunderbolts* tried, and it fumbled the landing, and the attempt counts for a good deal more than I allowed at the time.

The comparison I’d draw now is with Brave New World, which set up a psychological hook and resolved it with a speech and left me similarly unimpressed. The difference is that this film built its whole structure around the idea rather than bolting it on at the third act. A film that aims high and misses is more interesting than one that aims low and lands, so: still an okay film rather than a good one, but a considerably more ambitious okay film than I credited in 2025. The reviews were warmer than mine and I can see why, even if I’d still land where I landed.

One thing I want to record properly because the rewatch confirmed it: the early vault sequence is among the best action in this whole stretch of the franchise, and the reason is constraint. Nobody in that room can shrug off damage. No flying, no beams, no city-levelling. Four people who are all quite good at hurting each other, in a confined space with limited sightlines, and choreography that respects all of it. It’s legible, it has weight, and you can always tell who is where. Set that against almost any third act from the same era and the difference is stark, because scale is not tension, and a fight where two indestructible people throw each other through buildings has no stakes at all. Audiences worked that out long before studios did. I also stand by my complaint about Taskmaster going down far too fast, and it’s more annoying on a rewatch, because the film clearly knows how to stage a fight when it wants to. That wasn’t a limitation of craft, it was a decision to clear the board.

I suspected at the time this would be remembered more for what it sets up than for what it is, and that’s held. The New Avengers framing has been the operative state of things ever since, which means this fairly unremarkable film is quietly the one that defines who’s holding the name when Doom arrives. That’s a lot of weight for a movie that couldn’t decide whether it was a character study or a heist. There’s an unresolved thread worth watching too: the film never satisfactorily answered who’s actually in charge, and going into an event this size, a team with no clear command structure and one member who could end the fight single-handedly is either an interesting problem or a hole waiting to be papered over.

If you’re watching it cold, watch it for Pugh and the vault, and set your expectations for the ending. Go in expecting a serious film about damaged people and the last twenty minutes will annoy you the way they annoyed me; go in expecting a competent ensemble action film with a better-than-average emotional hook and you’ll come out satisfied. Same movie, very different experience depending on what you were promised. And if you’re watching specifically as December preparation, pay attention to how it handles power levels, because that’s the thread that carries forward. Everything else here is character work that may or may not get picked up. The Sentry question is the one Doomsday cannot avoid. Watch it asking how you’d use him if you had to. I couldn’t come up with a good answer, and I’m not convinced anybody else has either.

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poster captain america brave new world
MarvelMovies

Captain America: Brave New World — The Metal in the Ground

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I called adamantium a curiosity when I first reviewed Brave New World. Watching it again with December on the calendar, it plays like the most deliberate piece of groundwork the MCU has laid all decade.

Back then I had no reason to think about it as anything other than a plot device. It was the mineral everyone wanted, the thing that gets Thaddeus Ross into trouble with a treaty and gives Samuel Sterns something to manipulate. A metal in the ground that important people care about. Fine, next scene. But Celestial Island sitting on a deposit of adamantium only matters if adamantium matters to something bigger than one president’s legacy project, and in February 2025 nothing in this universe justified that. There were no mutants. There was no Weapon X. There was no reason for an audience to feel the weight of the word at all.

A chunk of glowing metallic ore on a dark laboratory table with holographic schematics projected above it
A chunk of glowing metallic ore on a dark laboratory table with holographic schematics projected above it

Knowing what’s coming, the film lands completely differently. This was never really Ross’s story. It was the first domino in bringing a metal that only ever meant anything in mutant stories into a universe that had no mutants in it. The treaty, the island, the whole arms-race framing, all of it exists to establish scarcity and stakes around a substance the MCU had no current use for. That’s genuinely well-disguised long-game writing and I didn’t give the film enough credit for it first time round, because my period review focused almost entirely on whether Sam had earned the shield and mostly missed that the movie was quietly doing something else underneath that question. I was right that this is a good filler movie and not one of the series’ best — the pacing still sags through the treaty negotiations, the Red Hulk resolution is still too tidy, and Harrison Ford is still giving a performance the script doesn’t quite deserve. I was wrong to file the adamantium plot as filler alongside all of that. A slow subplot and a seeded subplot look identical in the moment, and only the sequel tells you which one you were sitting through.

Sam, and what he’s actually for

My original doubts about Sam as Captain America haven’t gone away entirely, but they’ve softened, and rewatching is what did it. The throughline is much clearer with distance. Sam was never going to be Steve Rogers with a different face, and the film’s insistence on making him a political operator rather than a soldier looks far more intentional now than it did in 2025. On a first watch that felt like a movie hedging, handing him conspiracies to unravel because it couldn’t give him a fair fight. Now it just looks like the film telling you what kind of Captain America this one is.

An empty round briefing table in a dark war room with a glowing holographic globe hovering above it
An empty round briefing table in a dark war room with a glowing holographic globe hovering above it

He’s earned a seat in December less because he proved he can out-muscle a Hulk and more because he proved he can hold a room full of people trying to manipulate him. Against Doom specifically that might matter considerably more than a straight fight would, because Doom isn’t a problem you punch, he’s a problem you out-think or lose to. The Red Hulk fight still doesn’t land the way the film wants it to and a second viewing didn’t rescue it, though I’ll admit the talk-him-down resolution reads better in hindsight now I can see it establishing Sam’s whole approach rather than being a one-off choice in a set piece. The Isaiah Bradley material has aged particularly well too. Carl Lumbly is doing the heaviest lifting in the picture and it wasn’t obvious on a first pass how much of the story’s moral spine runs through him rather than through Sam. Watch it as Bradley’s story with Sam as the investigator and it holds together a good deal better than it does as a Captain America origin.

Sterns deserved a better film than this one

Here’s the thing the rewatch made me less forgiving about. Bringing the Leader back after seventeen years should have been a marquee event. Tim Blake Nelson plays him as genuinely unsettling, a man whose intellect curdled into patience, and the film keeps cutting away from him to deal with treaty logistics. On a first watch that plays as pacing. On a second it just looks like waste, and the frustration is sharper now because I can see what the film was budgeting its attention for. It spent screen time establishing adamantium and Celestial Island because those needed to exist for later. Sterns didn’t. He was the story this film actually had, and he got squeezed by the story the franchise needed planted.

That’s the recurring cost of these connective-tissue movies and it’s worth naming plainly: a film asked to set up three future things while telling one present story will usually shortchange the present story. The Torres material plays better the second time, mind you. Knowing Sam ends up on an Avengers roster makes every scene of him training a replacement land differently — he isn’t just mentoring, he’s clearing his old position because on some level he already knows he’s being called up to something larger. None of that is stated out loud. It’s just there in how he treats the kid.

So if you’re rewatching it cold, adjust what you’re watching for. Go in tracking whether Sam is convincing as Captain America and you’ll come out roughly where I did in 2025: unconvinced, mildly entertained, aware you’ve seen better. Go in tracking adamantium, Bradley’s history, and the way the film keeps putting Sam in rooms rather than fights, and it becomes a much more interesting watch. Not a better movie exactly. A better-positioned one. Marvel’s own cast announcement confirms Sam is on the roster, which means he walks into December with more to prove than any Captain America has had to prove before an Avengers-scale fight. Steve had three films and a war. Sam has one uneven solo outing and a lot of goodwill he hasn’t fully cashed.

Being good and being necessary are separate things, and this franchise has spent fifteen years teaching people to conflate them. A film can be a chore and still be the reason a later film works; it can also be a delight and lead absolutely nowhere. Brave New World is squarely the first sort, and I suspect that’s how it’ll be remembered: the movie nobody rewatches for fun, that everybody has to account for when they explain how adamantium got into this universe. There are worse legacies, and there are certainly better ones.

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MarvelMovies

Deadpool & Wolverine: The Door Everything Else Walked Through

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I ended my 2024 review saying I had no idea what to make of Robert Downey Jr. being cast as Doctor Doom and that I’d need something to actually go on. Two years later I have plenty to go on, and my instinct that week was about half right. The half I got right is that it was a bold swing and this franchise badly needed one. The half I got wrong is that I framed it as possibly an admission they couldn’t move past him, and that reading hasn’t held up at all. Doom isn’t Tony Stark with a mask on, and nothing about how it’s been handled since suggests the recast was nostalgia wearing a disguise.

In 2024 I wrote about this as a Deadpool film with unusually good taste about the Fox catalogue, and that’s still true and it badly undersells what the film was actually doing. This is the film that formally imports the Fox universe into the MCU — not in spirit, but in the actual plumbing. It establishes that pruned timelines exist, that characters can come out of them, and that the machinery for pulling a Patrick Stewart or an Ian McKellen back onto a screen is already built and already explained to the audience. Everything the Doomsday roster is about to do walks through the door this film opened. I didn’t clock that at the time because it doesn’t announce itself: the Void plays as a set for a third act rather than as a piece of continuity engineering. Watching it now, knowing what it enabled, the Void is the most consequential thing in the movie and Cassandra Nova is very nearly a distraction from it.

Almost. She’s still the best thing in it

I said in 2024 that Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova was playing at a level most Marvel villains never reach and I’d go considerably further now. Across everything I’ve rewatched for this project she’s comfortably the strongest antagonist of the era and it isn’t close. The reason holds up on a second viewing: she doesn’t want anything from the audience. No quips, no charm offensive, no tragic backstory deployed at the ninety-minute mark to buy sympathy. She’s a telepath who enjoys her work, and the film trusts that to be enough on its own. It’s a genuine shame she’s stuck in a film most people file under comedy, because she’d have anchored something a great deal heavier.

The rule I was most curious about revisiting was the anchor being, because that’s exactly the kind of invented cosmology franchises abandon the moment it gets inconvenient. A universe dies when its anchor being dies: clean, dramatic, and enormously restrictive if you actually keep it. They mostly haven’t kept it. It’s never been contradicted outright, but nothing since has leaned on it either, and the incursion framing that’s been driving everything toward December runs on completely different rules. Anchor beings were a device to justify one film’s plot and they’ve been quietly left where they were. I don’t hold that against the movie, which needed a reason for Wade to go looking for a Logan and invented a good one. But anybody expecting that rule to govern how universes work in December is going to be disappointed.

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The Logan question, two years on

I argued in 2024 that the variant framing meant this didn’t cheapen Logan and I still think that’s right. What’s changed is my confidence about why. At the time it felt like a technicality that happened to work out. Now, having watched a great deal of this era back to back, I can see how genuinely rare that restraint is. The easy move was to bring back the Logan people cried over. The film specifically didn’t, and it took on a harder story as a result: a Wolverine whose defining trait is failure rather than fury, which is much less fun to watch and considerably more interesting to sit with. Jackman is better in this than he was in several of the films where he was the lead, which is a strange thing to be true of what is technically a legacy cameo.

The thing I most want to correct from the period review is a matter of emphasis. I described the cameos as a eulogy for characters who never got a proper ending and treated that as a nice gesture. It was much more than a gesture. Going into Doomsday with Stewart, McKellen and Grammer actually returning, this is the moment the franchise decided the Fox era counted — not as a curiosity to be rebooted past, but as history worth carrying forward. That’s a real editorial position and the film took it two years before anybody had to formally commit to it. Blade’s scene lands differently now too. In 2024 it was a nice moment for an underappreciated actor. In 2026, with the Fox generation being welcomed back onto the board, it looks like the opening line of a much larger argument about who gets to be part of this story at all.

What to know going in

If you’re coming to this cold as December preparation, be aware the film assumes a great deal. Not MCU knowledge exactly, though there’s plenty of that too. It assumes you have opinions about a set of films from the 2000s and 2010s that an awful lot of people have never seen, and the emotional payload of half the cameos depends on remembering a franchise that got cancelled or a character who deserved better. If you don’t carry that history, those scenes read as random people arriving to applause you’re not part of. That’s a design decision rather than a flaw, and it’s why the film lands so hard for those of us who were there, but it does mean it works much less well as an entry point than its box office would suggest. Watch the first Deadpool and, if you possibly can, Logan, and most of what matters will land.

In 2024 I rated it top of my list for the year and gave it four and a half or five, and I’d hold that. What I’d add is that it’s aged better than almost everything around it for the same reason Guardians Vol. 3 has: it’s a complete film with a beginning, a middle and an actual ending, and it isn’t holding a promissory note for a sequel that may never arrive. Watch it again before December. Not for the plot, which you’ll remember perfectly well, but for how much of what’s about to happen was quietly assembled here while everybody was busy laughing.

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MarvelMovies

Thirty Seconds in the Credits

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I ended my 2023 review saying the film might have set up something considerably more interesting than itself in its final thirty seconds, and that attaching a promise that large to a film almost nobody watched was a curious decision. Kelsey Grammer is confirmed for Avengers: Doomsday. The scene was real. And it remains genuinely odd that Marvel put the first concrete step toward its biggest crossover in the credits of its lowest-grossing release.

A plan or a punt? I’ve gone back and forth and landed on: a plan, executed in completely the wrong place. The scene is far too specific to be a whim. Monica wakes in a universe where mutants are ordinary, where Beast is a colleague rather than a curiosity, and the film treats the moment as an arrival rather than a joke at anyone’s expense. Somebody knew exactly what that was for. What’s strange is the venue. If you’re announcing that the X-Men exist and that crossing between universes is something characters now simply do, you put it where people will actually see it. Instead it went out attached to a film with the smallest audience the franchise has ever had, which means most of the people who eventually care about it will have encountered it second-hand through somebody else’s clip.

The rewatch makes the chain clearer than it looked at the time, and it’s longer than I realised. Monica gets her powers walking through a barrier in a small town in New Jersey, in a television series about grief. Those powers eventually let her pass through a hole in space that shouldn’t be passable at all. She comes out the other side in a universe with mutants in it. Three years later the actors from that side of the wall are walking into an Avengers film. That’s a genuinely well-built line, spread across a series and a film most people watched separately if they watched them at all, and when December arrives and Fox actors are standing next to MCU ones, part of the reason nobody will need it explained is that this scene quietly did the explaining.

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Is it better than its reputation?

Slightly, and only slightly. The reception was broadly fair. I gave it two and a half or three in 2023 and I’d hold that. The problems haven’t moved: the story is thin, Dar-Benn is a poor villain with nothing worth arguing about, and the whole thing moves so fast that nothing gets any room to develop. It’s short, which I still count as a virtue, and it’s short largely because there isn’t very much in it. What it doesn’t deserve is the reputation as an outright disaster. It’s a modest, occasionally charming film with one good idea and a genuinely delightful lead, and the numbers it did got treated as a referendum on the entire franchise rather than as one film underperforming.

Iman Vellani is still the best thing in it and I’d say it more strongly now. Playing the only person in the film who’s excited to be there, without becoming grating, in a first feature, is a real achievement. Every scene with her family still lifts the picture, and watching it again the film is at its most enjoyable whenever it stops being a space adventure and becomes a comedy about superheroes in somebody’s kitchen. If December uses her properly she’ll be one of its highlights, because she’s the rare character who can stand in a room with the originals and read like a person rather than a franchise obligation. The body-switching gimmick has held up too, as the one genuinely inventive thing here: turning a fight into a coordination problem instead of a strength contest is a good idea and nothing since has borrowed it, which is a small shame.

Carol, and the thing nobody has fixed

My view hasn’t shifted and I’ve had three more years to look for evidence that it should. The complaint was always about power. Her abilities come from an Infinity Stone, which ought to put her somewhere near the ceiling of what exists in this universe, and she’s consistently written as somebody who can be knocked through a building and meaningfully slowed down by it. Thanos dismantled the Hulk bare-handed with no stones at all, and adding one only made an already overwhelming being more so. The scale simply doesn’t line up, and nothing since has addressed it. She remains a character the films describe as immensely powerful and depict as merely strong, and if December wants her to matter in a fight with Doom then somebody is finally going to have to show the ceiling.

And Monica is still stranded, as far as anybody has bothered to say. That’s a loose thread with an actual person on the end of it. She’s in another universe, cut off, and the last we saw she was waking up somewhere she doesn’t belong. I said in 2023 that I wasn’t especially engaged by the character and that’s still true, and it doesn’t change the fact that leaving somebody stuck in another reality for three years without a mention is odd. If Doomsday resolves anything from this film it should be that, because she’s the one who made the crossing, and there’s something wrong about a story that uses her passage as a doorway for everybody else and then forgets she went through it first.

Watch the last two minutes. Genuinely, if you’re short of time before December, that’s the part that matters, and it’s the strongest example in this whole rewatch of a scene meaning far more later than it did at the time. Then watch the rest for Kamala, who deserved a better film and will hopefully get a bigger one. Two and a half stands. It’s a small film with a very large footnote, and the footnote is about to become the main text.

That’s the 2023 run finished. Next in the rewatch we reach the point where the crossover stops being a rumour and starts being a thing that has actually happened on screen.

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BooksLitRPG

Betrayed By The Hero’s Party (Book 1): The Repairman Gets His Twenty-Two Years Back

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I’d like to say up front that I really enjoyed this book, because there’s a large BUT coming and I don’t want it to swallow the part where I had a genuinely good time. Betrayed By The Hero’s Party is built on one of the better ideas I’ve come across in cozy LitRPG, and I think it absolutely deserves the rating I gave it.

The setup: Dorn Vasker is a Caretaker. It’s a support and maintenance class, he can’t fight, he can’t cast, and the famous adventuring party he’s spent twenty-two years keeping alive drops him because he’s a line item they’d rather not pay. So he moves to a broken little town called Tarnwick, buys a dead man’s repair shop, and starts fixing things for whoever wanders in. And then the System, which has apparently been keeping accounts this whole time, works out what his contract had quietly been skimming off him and hands the lot back. Six levels, retroactively. Twenty-two years of skill growth with the caps taken off. Plus a class evolution nobody’s ever had, Warden of Works, where his power scales with everything he has ever repaired.

Meanwhile the legendary gear he’d been maintaining for the Ninefold Banner starts falling apart in the field without him, which it turns out was never magic, it was just Dorn. And they come looking.

image

Payback where nobody actually takes revenge

What I like most is that the book refuses to become a revenge story. Dorn doesn’t hunt anyone down, doesn’t monologue, doesn’t turn up at a critical moment to humiliate the people who dropped him. He just gets on with being extremely good at his job in a town that needs him, and the consequences arrive on their own schedule because that’s what happens when you discard the only person who understood how your equipment worked.

That’s a much harder thing to write than the version where he crushes them, and it’s the reason the book stays cozy rather than curdling into something meaner. The whole thing is really an argument that the trades matter, that the person maintaining the gear is doing skilled work and not menial work, and that a system which measures worth by combat output is measuring the wrong thing. Which is a nice thing for a genre this obsessed with damage numbers to say out loud.

The Ninefold Banner turning up is handled the same way. They don’t arrive as a boss fight, they arrive as people with a problem they can’t solve and a growing awareness of why, and the discomfort of that scene does more than any duel would have. They cut him to save money. The money was never the expensive part.

The town works too. Tarnwick is a bit broken, the people in it have small problems that Dorn can actually solve, and the pleasure of the book is watching a place slowly come back because one competent person moved in and started fixing things. It’s a very small-scale kind of stakes, somebody’s plough, somebody’s roof, and the book is comfortable staying at that scale for long stretches, which I think is the right instinct even when it costs it momentum.

I’m not always here for the levelling chase

This lands in a lane I like a lot, and if you’ve read much of what I write you’ll know I’m not always in it for the progression treadmill. Numbers going up is fine. It isn’t, by itself, a story, and there’s a whole category of LitRPG where the levelling is the plot and the plot is the levelling and I tend to bounce off it after a couple of hundred pages.

Slow-burn, cozy, somebody quietly building something is much more my thing. Beware of Chicken is the obvious comparison and the one I kept thinking of, a farming story wearing a cultivation story’s clothes, and Betrayed By The Hero’s Party absolutely falls into the same vein. Different setting, same instinct: the interesting part isn’t the fight, it’s the life being assembled around it.

What makes the cozy version work, when it works, is that the protagonist has to want something ordinary. Dorn wants a functioning shop and a quiet town and to be paid fairly for skilled work, and none of those are things you can grind your way to, so the book has to solve them socially instead. That’s the trade the whole subgenre makes. You give up the escalating threat and you get a story where the obstacles are people and money and reputation.

So on concept, on premise, on what it’s actually trying to be, I was on board from very early and stayed there.

The elephant, and it’s a fairly large elephant

Now the BUT. Sadly, despite the idea and the concept, it really does read like the whole book was written by AI. Every paragraph and every sentence is definitive and declarative, each one closing itself off neatly before the next one starts, and after a while the rhythm of it becomes impossible to stop hearing. The metaphors pile up past the point of doing any work. The characters all speak in the same measured, slightly flattened way, so nobody has a voice that’s recognisably theirs.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t know and I’m guessing. It might be somebody for whom English isn’t a first language, writing the way they’ve been taught is correct rather than the way people actually talk, and if that’s what it is then I’m being unfair by even raising it. Maybe I’m being too generous with that reading. If it’s the other thing, somebody wanting to produce a lot of book very quickly and easily, then my advice is the same either way, which is that this needs an editor with a very sharp scalpel who will go through it and make it flow like a person talking.

And I’m not the only one who noticed, which is partly why I’m confident enough to say it out loud. Plenty of people have rated this thing five stars and are perfectly happy, but the one-star reviews on my own feed are almost all making this same complaint rather than complaining about the story, which tells you something. When the criticism clusters that specifically it usually isn’t people being fussy.

Because the ideas are good. That’s the frustrating part. There’s a real book in here and it’s wearing prose that keeps holding it at arm’s length, and the shame of it is that a fortnight of proper editing would probably fix most of it. The bones don’t need changing. The sentences do.

Whether that’s a dealbreaker depends entirely on you

I don’t raise any of this as a dealbreaker, and I want to be clear that it didn’t stop me enjoying myself. Some people genuinely will not notice or care. Some people will care an enormous amount and won’t get twenty pages in.

The thing that decides it, honestly, is how you’re paying. I got this on Kindle Unlimited, so it cost me nothing extra and the trade was easy: good idea, rough prose, no real downside. Somebody handing over ten or twenty dollars for a physical copy is making a very different bargain and could reasonably end up disappointed. Which feels worth saying plainly, because the concept is strong enough to sell the book to people who might then feel a bit stung by the execution.

I’ll be reading book two. I said at the start that I enjoyed this and I meant it, and this is a style of story I’ll keep coming back to, whether it’s this or something like Hell Mode at the other end of the genre where the grind genuinely is the engine and the numbers are the whole point. I’m just hoping that by the second one it reads a little more human.

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MarvelTelevision

He’s Still Up There Holding It All Together

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

In my 2023 review I said the ending was worth a five and quite a lot of what preceded it wasn’t, and I wondered whether the franchise would ever do anything with where it left him. Three years later the answer is: not really, and also everything. He hasn’t appeared since. He’s also the reason any of what’s about to happen in December is possible at all.

That’s what the rewatch makes unmistakable. The multiverse is intact because Loki is personally holding it together. Every timeline that survives, survives because a man sat down at the end of time and took the threads in his hands and decided to keep doing that forever. When three universes collide in December and the story treats that as a crisis rather than a flat impossibility, the reason there are multiple universes still standing to collide is these last twenty minutes. That is an enormous amount of weight resting on a Disney+ finale nobody talks about much any more, and whatever else this season fumbled along the way, it built the door that everything since has walked through.

Which is also the sadder reading, and the one I keep circling. Marvel wrote the best ending it has ever written for its best character and then declined to follow up on it in any meaningful way. Three years of films and series, several of them explicitly about the multiverse, and the person keeping the multiverse alive simply doesn’t come up. I understand the argument for that — the ending is perfect and closed, and going back risks cheapening it, which is genuinely true and I’d rather have this than a lazy return. But there’s a real difference between not undoing something and behaving as though it never happened. A sacrifice only means anything if the story acknowledges the cost, and so far it mostly hasn’t bothered.

Was I right about Kang? Yes, and it counts for very little

I was blunt in 2023. I said none of the iterations were strong enough, that after Thanos this didn’t measure up, that Victor Timely made the supposed saga villain look small, and that I wasn’t sure the actor was right for the part. The plan was abandoned, Doom took the throne, so the call held.

I’ve said this elsewhere in this project and I’ll repeat it here because it matters: being right for the wrong reasons is still mostly luck. My objection was about drama, the outcome was about circumstance, and those pointing the same direction doesn’t make my reasoning better than it was. What I’d defend is the narrower version, which is that a villain built out of infinite interchangeable variants dilutes itself by design, and that was visible on screen well before anything else happened. The Council remains the exception, all of them visibly insane and playing off each other, genuinely unsettling in a way no single version managed. That was the good version and it’s the one that never got made.

My 2023 verdict was that the ending is a five and the machinery around it isn’t, and that’s held with the gap widening rather than closing. The Loom material has aged badly. It’s technobabble propping up a countdown, and knowing now that the whole Kang framework it was propping up got discarded, those episodes play as elaborate scaffolding around a building that was demolished before anyone moved in. The TVA’s pruning logic still tangles itself up, still shifts to suit whatever the episode needs, and still never resolves into a rule you could state out loud. The last twenty minutes have gone the other way entirely. Loki walking the stairs, understanding what the job actually is, choosing it anyway. Hiddleston has never been better and the show finally stops explaining things and starts meaning something.

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Season one or season two?

Season one, and I’ve changed my mind about this. At the time I’d have said season two on the strength of that ending alone. On a rewatch, season one is the better run of television: it’s about a person discovering his life was written for him, it has the Mobius interrogations, and it does its worldbuilding through character rather than through consoles and countdown clocks. Season two has the better ending and the worse everything else. If you’re only watching one before December, the mechanics you actually need are mostly in the first.

Do I want him in Doomsday? Honestly, no, and I’ve gone back and forth on it more than once. The ending is complete. He got the throne, the purpose, and the loneliness that comes with both, and the story closed with real dignity. Pulling him back into an ensemble film to throw daggers at Doom would be a downgrade regardless of how well it’s staged. What I’d want instead is acknowledgement: somebody in that film knowing why the multiverse is still standing, and saying so out loud. A scene, a line, a single shot of the man at the end of time doing the job. Honour it without undoing it. If December does bring him back properly, it needs to be for something only he can do, and it needs to cost him, because anything less turns the best ending Marvel has written into a pause.

A three for the series, unchanged. Some good elements, some boring ones, and a conclusion better than the show around it deserved. The reviews were kinder than mine and I stand by the gap. What’s changed is my sense of its importance: in 2023 this was a well-liked show with a great finale, and in 2026 it’s the wall holding up the entire current era. The fact that it carries that weight so quietly is either admirable restraint or a badly missed opportunity, and I still can’t decide which. I still think he’s the most powerful thing in this franchise, and I still don’t think anybody in it has noticed.

Next in the rewatch, and the last of the 2023 run: The Marvels.

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