Tag:

Marvel Disney+ series

Loki Season 2 — He Ends Up Holding Everything

by Hutch Morzaria November 21, 2023

written by Hutch Morzaria

Loki ends this season sitting at the end of time with the threads of every universe held in his hands, keeping all of them alive by will alone. That’s the best ending Marvel has written for anybody, and it’s the reason I’d put this character at the top of the entire franchise right now.

He’s the most powerful person in the MCU and nobody says it

Think about where this leaves him. The Infinity Stones don’t work at the TVA. Six objects the films built an entire saga around, sitting in a drawer as paperweights. Whatever operates at that level is already above the scale everything before it was measured on, and by the end of this season Loki is personally holding the structure of every timeline in existence.

That puts him past the Stones comfortably. I’d genuinely like to know how he now compares to the other cosmic-tier beings this universe keeps gesturing at. I’m honestly not sure whether the Celestials transcend individual universes or are contained inside them. If they’re contained, I don’t see how they beat what he’s become.

Nobody in the franchise seems to have registered this. He’s arguably the strongest thing in it.

The ending redeems the whole character

What makes it land isn’t the power. It’s that this is the correct destination for this specific person.

Loki’s entire personality has been built on believing he’s owed a greater role than the one he got. Season one told him his life was written to make other people’s stories work. The answer this season arrives at is that he does get the greater role, and it costs him everything he actually wanted: he gets a throne, at the end of time, alone, forever, holding the thing up.

That’s a real conclusion. It defines him and redeems him at the same time, and it’s earned by a decade of screen time. Hiddleston has been playing this part since 2011 and this is the payoff.

Kang still isn’t the villain this needs

Here’s my problem with the season, and it isn’t a small one. I was not a fan of Victor Timely. The premise gives us a variant who is nervous, stammering and out of his depth, and it’s a legitimate acting choice that also makes the supposed Big Bad of the franchise look small. After Thanos, after a plan that wiped out half of all life, this doesn’t measure up.

None of the iterations feel strong enough. He Who Remains at least had the scene, and killing him made sense as a way to keep the story moving. But that whole strand has always been the weakest part of Loki for me, and the weakest part of where Marvel appears to be taking all of this. I didn’t love that element at all.

I’ll go further than I usually would: I’m not sure Jonathan Majors is the right actor for this. He’s not amazing in it. There’s a lot of technique on display and not much menace, and menace is the entire job. The one place it works is the Council, where all the variants are visibly insane and playing off each other. That’s quite cool. As a single villain, though, he’s poor.

The TVA plot is a bit of a mess

The pruning question tangles itself up.

The organisation is trying to prune timelines, then trying not to, then trying to save all of them, and the rules keep shifting depending on what the episode needs. The Loom material is technobabble that exists to give people something to run towards, and by the back half I’d stopped tracking what the actual constraint was.

Some of that is the cost of a season built around fixing a machine. There’s a version of this that’s tighter and spends less time on corridors and consoles.

The good and the boring

Some genuinely good elements. Ke Huy Quan is a welcome presence, the time-slipping conceit produces a couple of excellent sequences, and the design work remains the best-looking thing Marvel does.

Some boring ones too. Stretches of the middle are people explaining machinery to each other, and the season is noticeably more interested in its plot than season one was in its characters.

Overall, not bad. I’ve watched it week by week and enjoyed doing that, which is worth something in an era where most of this arrives all at once and gets consumed in an afternoon.

Where it lands

I’d give the series a three. The ending is a five and quite a lot of what precedes it isn’t.

That’s a frustrating shape for a season to have. Everything I disliked is in the machinery and the villain, and everything I loved is in the last twenty minutes, where the show remembers it’s about a person rather than a timeline.

Whether the franchise does anything with where this leaves him is another matter. He’s now the load-bearing element of reality itself, which either means everything that happens from here quietly depends on him, or it means we won’t see him again and nobody will mention it. Given how much this universe is currently juggling after the multiverse got properly opened, I could believe either.

Best thing Marvel television has produced. It just took two seasons and a lot of exposition to get to twenty perfect minutes.

November 21, 2023 0 comments

Loki Season 1: The Infinity Stones Are Paperweights Now

by Hutch Morzaria July 27, 2021

written by Hutch Morzaria

The Time Variance Authority is a genuinely interesting concept, and it’s the first piece of MCU machinery that credibly explains how all these separate corners could eventually sit in one story. Whether that’s the intention or just a side effect, it’s the most useful thing this show does.

There’s something quietly funny about the fact that the different film universes we’ve been carrying around for years, the ones split across different studios and different rights deals, now have an in-universe framework that could account for all of them. I doubt that’s an accident.

The Infinity Stones as desk clutter

My favourite gag in the whole series, and the one that tells you exactly what kind of show this is.

Six objects that the films spent more than a decade building an entire saga around, that people died for, that wiped out half of everything, and at the TVA they’re paperweights. Kept in a drawer. An employee uses one to hold papers down because they simply don’t work here.

That’s a brilliant piece of scale-setting. In one shot the show establishes that this organisation operates so far above the events of Infinity War that the most powerful objects in the universe are office supplies. It reframes everything the films have done without saying a word about it.

Hiddleston and Owen Wilson are the show

The casting works better than it has any right to. Tom Hiddleston has been playing this character since 2011 and knows exactly where the edges are, and Owen Wilson’s Mobius is the perfect thing to bounce him off, an unflappable bureaucrat who has read Loki’s entire file and is therefore completely unimpressed by him.

They play off each other beautifully. The interrogation scenes are the best material in the series, and they work because Mobius isn’t trying to beat Loki, he’s trying to bore him into honesty. That’s a much more interesting dynamic than another villain-being-menaced sequence.

It helps that this is the 2012 Loki, the one who escapes with the Tesseract during the heist in Endgame. He hasn’t had the redemption arc yet. He’s still the character from the New York invasion, which means the show gets to do that growth again from scratch without undoing anything.

The central wound is good too: being told his whole life was written to make other people’s stories work. For a character built on believing he’s owed more, that’s the right knife.

Sylvie doesn’t quite work for me

Here’s my main reservation. It’s odd that every other Loki variant we see is male, and the single female one is Sylvie, presented as a one-off. If the premise is infinite variants across infinite timelines, there should be plenty of others, and the show never addresses why there aren’t.

The romance between the two of them is also a bit forced. I understand what the series is going for, the ultimate narcissist finally finding someone worth caring about, and that someone being a version of himself is the joke, but it doesn’t land emotionally the way it needs to for the finale to hit. It reads as a plot requirement rather than something that grew.

Sophia Di Martino is good in the part. The writing around her is where it slips.

The variant at the end

The final episode introduces someone who has been running the whole thing, and I’m not sold.

He’s interesting in the moment, mostly because the performance is committed and the monologue is well written. But he doesn’t feel strong enough or violent enough to be positioned as what comes next after Thanos. Thanos worked because he was physically overwhelming and completely certain, and you believed both. This is a talkative man in a chair who explains his reasoning at length.

My guess is he’s a Fantastic Four antagonist, or possibly an Avengers one. Either way, if the plan is to build the next arc around him, I think they could have picked a better villain. The statue at the end is an impressive image and I still came away unconvinced by the person it’s a statue of.

To be fair, that’s one episode of material. There’s time.

The bureaucracy is the best joke in it

The design work deserves its own mention, because the TVA is the most distinctive-looking thing Marvel has put on screen in years.

It is all mid-century office beige. Wood panelling, filing cabinets, forms in triplicate, waiting rooms with uncomfortable chairs. An organisation that operates outside time and controls the fate of every reality, run out of what looks like a tax office in 1975. That contrast does more comic work than most of the actual jokes, and it makes the horror underneath land harder when it arrives.

Miss Minutes is the sharpest version of this. A friendly cartoon mascot explaining, cheerfully, that your entire existence is a deviation to be corrected. It is the sort of idea that could be too cute by half and instead lands as genuinely unsettling.

The reveal that the Time-Keepers are animatronic props, and that every TVA employee is a kidnapped variant with false memories, is the season’s best turn. It reframes the whole organisation from sinister authority into something sadder: a bureaucracy of prisoners administering their own captivity.

The variant idea is doing more than it looks

The premise buried in all this is that Loki has been written as a loser to make other people’s stories work, and that is a sharper idea than the show gets credit for.

He is confronted with a file of his own life, told the ending, and shown that every apparent choice was scripted. For most characters that would be a horror-movie beat. For this one it is an accusation, because his entire personality is built on believing he is owed a greater role than the one he got. The TVA agrees with him and tells him the greater role is not coming.

Hiddleston plays that well. There is a stretch in the second episode where he stops performing entirely, and it is the most honest the character has been in ten years of screen time.

The show does not fully cash this in. It gets distracted by plot in the back half, and the existential material gives way to running down corridors. But the idea is there, and it is the reason this works as a character piece rather than only as worldbuilding.

The pacing is uneven

Fair warning if you are coming to this after WandaVision, which was tightly constructed throughout. This one sags.

The middle stretch, particularly the apocalypse-hopping and the extended sequence on Lamentis, spends a lot of time getting two characters to trust each other and not much time advancing anything. It is pleasant enough and the performances carry it, but you can feel the season stretching four episodes’ worth of plot across six.

The first two and the last two are excellent. The middle is where I would expect people to drift.

Where it sits

Good show. Not as good as WandaVision, which had more to say and took bigger formal risks, but a more useful one for the wider franchise.

And I’ll say what I always say about Marvel television: the Netflix run set a standard that none of this has matched. Daredevil and The Punisher remain some of the most genuinely impressive things anybody has made in this universe, and Jessica Jones got there first. Those shows had weight, consequence, and a willingness to be unpleasant that the Disney+ series keep gesturing at without committing to.

Loki doesn’t reach that bar. What it does instead is give the whole enterprise a rulebook, and that turns out to be worth a lot. Whatever comes next has to work inside the framework this show just built, and for the first time in a while I genuinely don’t know what shape that’s going to be.

July 27, 2021 4 comments

poster the falcon and the winter soldier

Marvel Television

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — Muddled, and I’m Still Not Sold on Sam

by Hutch Morzaria May 6, 2021

written by Hutch Morzaria

Six episodes to decide who carries the shield, and I finished it unconvinced by the answer. It should have been Bucky.

Not one of my favourite Marvel shows. I’d put it at a 2, maybe 2 and a half, and the problem isn’t any single episode. The whole thing just feels muddled.

This isn’t about Anthony Mackie, who’s perfectly good, and it isn’t about the idea of Sam taking over, which the show argues for seriously.

It’s that Captain America needs to be physically exceptional and Sam isn’t. He has technology. He has wings and a very good suit. What he doesn’t have is the serum, and I don’t think you can do this job without it.

Think about what that shield actually requires. Throwing it hard enough and precisely enough to ricochet off three surfaces and come back, and then catching a lump of vibranium travelling at that speed without it taking your arm off. That’s not a skill issue, it’s a physics issue. Steve could do it because he was engineered to. Sam is a very fit man in a flight suit. It doesn’t make sense to me, and the show never addresses it because addressing it would undermine the ending it wants.

Bucky has the serum. Bucky has seventy years of experience. Bucky was Steve’s actual partner. The show goes out of its way to explain why he shouldn’t have it, and I never bought the reasoning.

The bickering is half good

Sam and Bucky can’t stand each other, and the show mines that for most of its comedy.

Some of it works. They’re a genuinely funny pairing when the writing lets them be, and the therapy session where they’re forced to stare at each other is the best comic scene in the run.

A lot of it is a bit stupid, though. These two have history. They fought alongside each other in Civil War, in the airport scrap where Spider-Man turned up and comprehensively demolished the pair of them. They had a relationship already. It wasn’t a warm one, but it existed, and the show resets them to open hostility because it wants an odd-couple format more than it wants continuity.

Walker is the best thing in it

John Walker is meant to be hated and Wyatt Russell does a great job of making that happen.

What I appreciated is that he isn’t simply a jerk. He’s a decorated soldier with three Medals of Honor who has been handed an impossible job and no explanation of what it is, and he’s aware every second that he’s being measured against a legend and coming up short. That’s genuinely uncomfortable to watch.

The public square killing, when he takes the serum and murders a surrendering man with the shield in front of a crowd of phones, is the strongest moment in the whole show. Bloody shield, silence, credits. That’s the one image from this thing that’ll stay with me.

The Flag Smashers don’t work

Here’s where the muddle is worst. The show wants Karli and her people to have a legitimate grievance and it half-commits.

The premise is decent. During the Blip the borders came down and resources got shared, and now that half the population is back, those people are being forcibly resettled and are worse off than they were. That’s a real idea with a real argument inside it.

Then the show gets nervous about it. They start bombing buildings and killing people, so the argument gets abandoned rather than answered, and Karli ends up neither a persuasive radical nor a proper villain. You can feel the series trying to have a political position and flinching.

Zemo is around for a chunk of it. Meh, kind of okay. He’s funnier than he was in Civil War and the dancing bit is good, and he doesn’t add much beyond a convenient way to move the plot.

Isaiah Bradley is the real material

The one thread with actual weight. A Black super-soldier from the Korean War the government experimented on, used, then imprisoned for thirty years and wrote out of the record entirely.

Carl Lumbly is superb in it, and his refusal is the hardest question the show asks: no Black man should ever pick up that shield, given what the country that made it has done. That’s a proper argument and Sam has to answer it rather than dodge it.

Getting Isaiah into the Smithsonian at the end is the right ending for that thread. I just wish the six episodes around it had been as focused.

After WandaVision this is a step down

Nowhere close, honestly.

WandaVision had a formal idea and committed to it completely, and whatever you thought of the ending, it knew exactly what it was doing week to week. This is a fairly conventional action series with a serious theme it keeps picking up and putting down, and the six-episode shape doesn’t suit it. There’s too much plot for the character work and not enough plot to sustain the running time.

The finale being a speech rather than a fight is the right instinct, at least. Sam telling a room of politicians they can’t ask people to do better while behaving like this is the most coherent the show gets.

Where it lands

A 2 or a 2 and a half. Nothing amazing. Some good performances, one outstanding scene, one thread that deserved its own show, and a lot of material that doesn’t cohere.

The bigger issue for me is that it’s the show that had to sell me on Sam carrying the shield after Endgame handed it over, and it didn’t. There’s a Captain America film with him in it coming at some point, and it’s going to have to answer the question this series avoided. Until somebody explains how a man without the serum does what that shield requires, I’m going to keep watching the wrong person hold it.

May 6, 2021 2 comments

Marvel Television

WandaVision Set the Bar for What Marvel TV Could Be

by Hutch Morzaria March 16, 2021

written by Hutch Morzaria

An excellent show, and I think the first Marvel series that wasn’t a Netflix production to properly justify itself. It set a high bar, and I’m not sure anything is going to clear it soon.

The opening stretch is deliberately confusing, and that’s the point. We all knew Vision died in Avengers Infinity War & he didn’t come back in Endgame. What I hadn’t considered, and what took me embarrassingly long to land on, was that Wanda had turned to the dark side and brought him back herself. That’s a genuinely good twist, and it works because the show trusts you to sit in the discomfort for weeks before explaining anything.

The sitcom structure is doing real work

Each episode advances a decade of television history, from a black-and-white 1950s setup through to a 2000s mockumentary, and the period detail is accurate enough that the jokes actually land as jokes rather than as pastiche.

Underneath it, cracks keep showing. A beekeeper climbs out of a sewer. A voice comes through the radio asking who is doing this to her. Wanda rewinds moments she doesn’t like, which is the tell, she isn’t trapped in this, she’s running it.

Outside the town, S.W.O.R.D. has Westview surrounded, and Monica Rambeau, Darcy Lewis and Jimmy Woo work out that Wanda has enclosed roughly three thousand people in a reality-warping field and is holding them inside a sitcom. Awake. Aware. Unable to speak.

That’s the show’s real nerve: its protagonist is doing something monstrous, and the series doesn’t soften it.

Agatha was too big a casting for the part she was playing

I called this one early, and I suspect a lot of people did. Kathryn Hahn was playing “nosy neighbour Agnes” with far more energy than the role needed, and it felt all along like too big an actress for that small a part.

The reveal is still excellent despite being guessable, and the song is the reason. Putting the villain reveal into a purpose-written earworm is exactly the kind of swing this show keeps taking, and it’s the moment the series stops being an experiment and becomes confident about what it is.

Agatha turning out to be a centuries-old witch steering events to work out what Wanda actually is gives the back half its engine. Her verdict, that Wanda is the Scarlet Witch, something out of prophecy with more power than the Sorcerer Supreme, recontextualises everything from Age of Ultron onward. Wanda has always been the most powerful person in most rooms she’s in. Nobody had bothered to say so.

Vision finally gets a proper send-off

This is what I appreciated most. Vision died in Infinity War and it was brutal and rushed, two deaths in a row, no time to sit with either. The character deserved better than being a plot device for the Mind Stone.

The finale gives him that. The best scene in the whole series is two Visions arguing philosophy, the Ship of Theseus, what continuity of self actually means, whether either of them is the real one, instead of just hitting each other. In a franchise where problems get resolved by the biggest available fist, a climax settled by an argument about identity is a genuine risk, and it pays off completely.

It’s also the correct ending for Vision specifically. He was always the character defined by thinking rather than fighting, and letting him win by out-reasoning himself is the most respectful thing the show could have done.

Where I’d push back

Wanda overwhelming Agatha and trapping her in a false identity is a bit hypocritical, given that Wanda is the one who started this whole sequence by imprisoning an entire town in exactly that way. The show notices the parallel and then does very little with it.

I can understand her wanting to punish Agatha. I’d just have liked the series to sit with the fact that the punishment is precisely the crime she spent nine episodes being condemned for.

I also didn’t love Monica Rambeau. Teyonah Parris is fine in the role and I can see the character being built for something bigger later, but she’s the least interesting thread in a show full of good ones, and every minute outside the Hex with S.W.O.R.D. is a minute I wanted back inside it. Jimmy Woo, on the other hand, is always welcome. Randall Park has been quietly excellent in everything and the card trick is a lovely bit of business.

The show is honest about what Wanda is doing

The thing I keep coming back to is how little the series lets her off the hook.

There is an easy version of this story where the townspeople are asleep, or unaware, or somehow not really suffering, and Wanda’s grief is tragic rather than monstrous. The show refuses all of it. The people inside Westview are conscious. They know what is happening. They can feel her controlling them and they cannot speak about it, and when the Hex finally comes down they look at her with undisguised hatred.

That is a difficult thing to do to a protagonist you want the audience to keep caring about, and the series pulls it off by never asking you to excuse her. It asks you to understand her, which is a different and much harder request.

Elizabeth Olsen is the reason it works. She has been the most underused actor in these films for years, handed grief after grief with no room to play any of it, and given nine episodes she delivers the best performance anybody has managed in this franchise. The scene where she explains what grief is has been quoted to death already and it earns every bit of that.

Darcy and Jimmy are doing more than comic relief

A quick word for the outside-the-Hex cast, since I was hard on that material.

Darcy Lewis coming back after nearly a decade is a genuinely nice piece of continuity, and Kat Dennings plays her as the only person on the S.W.O.R.D. side treating this as fascinating rather than threatening. She is the audience surrogate, and specifically the audience surrogate who is enjoying herself, which the show needs given how bleak the inside material gets.

Jimmy Woo is the same trick from a different angle. Randall Park has been quietly excellent in everything he turns up in, and the card trick is a lovely piece of business that pays off a running joke nobody expected to be paid off.

Where the outside-the-Hex material fails is not the characters, it is Director Hayward, who is a thin antagonist doing thin antagonist things so the finale has somebody to punch. The show did not need him. It had a much better villain in the house next door and a genuinely uncomfortable one in its own protagonist.

The weekly release was part of it

Worth recording while it is still fresh: watching this week by week mattered.

The theorising between episodes became half the experience, and a lot of it was wrong in ways the show clearly anticipated. People were convinced about cameos that never arrived and villains who never appeared. The series was quietly building something smaller and more personal than the internet wanted, and the gap between those two things generated a great deal of noise.

I suspect it plays differently binged, and probably worse. The rhythm of a week between episodes is what let the sitcom conceit breathe. Four hours straight through and the format might grate.

Against the rest of Marvel TV

The comparison that matters is Netflix. Jessica Jones proved Marvel television could be genuinely adult and genuinely good, and it did that on a fraction of this budget with none of the film-tier cast.

WandaVision is doing something different. It’s the first one that feels like it belongs in the same continuity as the films rather than running alongside them, and the first with the confidence to be formally strange. Nine episodes of escalating television pastiche is not a safe pitch.

The ending leaves Wanda in a cabin, studying the Darkhold, hearing her children calling. I have no idea what that book is or what it does to someone who has just lost everything twice over, but it isn’t a happy image, and I doubt it’s meant to be. Whatever’s next for her, I don’t think it’s recovery.

Best thing Marvel has put on television that wasn’t on Netflix, and the first sign that the Disney+ shows might be more than filler between films.

March 16, 2021 2 comments