Still Watching podcast: Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki s1 / Multiverse of Madness

[erinptah]

Still working through the Marvel episodes of the Still Watching podcast!

Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Their FATWS commentary was pretty in line with my feelings, and they got some great interviews. Isaiah Bradley’s actor talking about how “no self-respecting black man would want to carry that shield” was, deep down, the character admonishing himself for ever getting his hopes up — whoof.

There’s a chat with the head writer where the podcaster mentions the scene of Sam getting hassled by random cops on the street, before they realize he’s an Avenger. She asks if that was based on [news-making incidents of this happening to IRL famous black men]. And he’s all “hadn’t actually heard of those, it was just based on the universal experience of Being A Black Man In America.”

Double whoof. (She takes it with a reasonable “…yeah, that tracks.”)

Loki

Got to the Loki episodes next (looks like this is the final Marvel series they watched in full). They started with a “theories/teasers/predictions” episode, now I’m into the broadcasts.

Loki s1 was Jonathan Majors’ big Kang debut, and these episodes are from 2021. Which means the podcasters are talking about what big fans of his they are, and how he seems like such a kind and charming guy. Sweet summer children. I wonder if the Majors news is part of why they didn’t come back for s2.

…and there’s an interview with a main writer talking about how Marvel recruited him off Rick and Morty, and he’s not the only one, and then he moved from there to Multiverse of Madness?

Not breaking news, I know, but wild that this is the first time I’ve heard it! Because wow, it explains so much about why MoM is Like That.

 

The rest of this post is just about MoM being Like That

Okay, first — the whole “killing a team of traditional heroes, in a series of creatively gruesome ways” sequence is Rick and Morty all over. That’s what happened to the Vindicators (parody Avengers/Justice League), the Tina-teers (parody Planeteers), a squad of Secret Service (just regular Secret Service), at least one squad of Rick variants…

None of the MCU villains have operated that way before. Wanda’s scariest power, no matter what side of a fight she’s on, is her ability to get in people’s heads. But the splattery Chaotic Mean rampage is what the R&M writers are good at! So that’s what we get.

To be clear — I’m a Rick and Morty fan. Not the level that wades into the online fandom, but the level where for the past few seasons I’ve watched every new episode as it came out, and binged through the whole series at least twice.

Which means I’m not saying any of this to imply “this kind of scene is always bad and nobody should write it”! Or even “this kind of scene is personally unpleasant and I never want to watch it.”

Just, wow, the MoM version makes so much more sense if you stop thinking in terms of “how well did this follow logically and thematically from all the MCU stuff before it?” and just think “how well do R&M writers know how to do this?”

And, second! That one creepy gag where a hapless AU!hot dog vendor tells America she has to pay for her food, and Strange magic-zaps him into hitting himself in the face, which he’s still doing as they walk away?

That is a pure Rick Sanchez move. That’s out of nowhere for Strange’s own character arc, he’s just channeling Rick.

The arc the movie wants Strange to have is “struggling with his own supervillain-adjacent traits.” MCU villains are mostly in the mold of “I have identified a Problem, now I’m going to go commit some atrocities, and that’s justified, because it’s in the service of solving the Problem.” Other characters call Strange out: wasn’t that exactly why he gave Thanos the Time Stone back in Infinity War? Is it fair that humanity-at-large has offered post-Endgame Strange so much more grace than, say, post-Westview Wanda? He meets Variants of himself who have definitely crossed the villain line; what makes him think he’s not on the same path?

…But then the movie also wants him to do a Rick gag, and have us laugh about it.

(Obviously Rick would do it with a sci-fi gadget, not magic, but you get the point.)

There’s this thing where…Rick and Morty, as a series, is about living in a fundamentally mean multiverse. Rick himself is a mean, nihilistic person, who leaves a planet-sized genocide in his wake about once per season. It’s no fun if you stop to really think about that! It’s a dark comedy, and for the humor to work, you gotta meet it on the level where it’s at.

The MCU is sincere. It wants you to care. It wants its people and relationships and worlds to matter. Even the villains mostly have things that are important to them, so there’s a core of sympathy, because you get why it’s important. You don’t want them to win the movie, but you’ll read a bunch of fics about their redemption arcs.

(There’s a What If…? episode where Thanos gets converted into a non-genocidal ally of the GotG offscreen. And it’s mostly a joke about T’Challa being the best at space diplomacy, but you can still see how it works!)

So. It’s rare to have an MCU villain with no sympathy. The kind that’s just gleefully, pointlessly cruel. I think most of them are from the grittier, demoted-from-fully-canon Netflix TV shows.

Like Kilgrave from Jessica Jones s1, remember him? Near-absolute mind-control powers, zero morals?

Remember the scene (I just looked it up, it’s in s01e06) where he casually orders a guy who annoyed him to start hitting himself in the head, then strolled away?

Yyyyeah.

Rick Sanchez in the Rick and Morty world is a comedically terrible person who’s entertaining to watch. Rick in the MCU is a Kilgrave-tier villain. Nobody wants his redemption arc! Everyone is happy and relieved when he dies!

You can’t tell your audience “Strange is having a deep, meaningful struggle with his sympathetic-but-villain-adjacent impulses” and then also be all “lol wouldn’t it be funny if he pulled a Rick?”

Those are not two great tastes that taste great together! You can have one or the other, but you can’t drive in both those lanes at once. It doesn’t work!

(I can see a different movie finding this balance… if it had a comedic/irreverent tone overall, maybe following the Thor: Love and Thunder model, and if the Kilgrave-style move was for a gag funny enough to be worth it. But this movie didn’t, and this gag wasn’t.)