Ancient Pop Culture is Dead to Me

The Guardian - home of the spoiler and the holier-than-thou BTL smart arses who think they're more intelligent than people who comment on the Daily Mail on-line - caused something of a minor cult controversy last weekend when it suggested that Babylon 5 had 'jumped the shark' (this was in a column about good TV gone bad and one that now seems to have to mine the deepest darkest past to be able to fill a page) at some point either during series four or with five (the final, often unknown whether it would happen, season).

Almost 95% of the comments posted lambasted the Guardian for suggesting B5 should even be considered a contender for the Jump the Shark column's ire; most everyone who is familiar with this now 25 year old series agreed that it should never have been granted a fifth season, especially as its complex stories had to be, hurriedly, tied up by the end of season four, but most praised it like it was a precursor to The Sopranos or The Handmaid's Tale.

Babylon 5 is remembered by a many people for differing reasons. Many compare it to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (a source of controversy and argument among both sets of fans for reasons I really can't be arsed to go into); others like to point out the wooden acting, the PS1-styled special effects or the fact that sometimes it was excruciatingly poor TV. The thing is, for all of its criticisms, B5 was a groundbreaking and prophetic SF series and in many ways is perfect for a re-imagining (the way Battlestar Galactica was brought into the 21st century).

But is it?

Most B5 fans you talk to will extol the virtues and brilliance of the Shadow War and tell you that if you thought Game of Thrones was a twisty and turny political drama with a fantasy backdrop then you missed the original. If you think Lord Varys was the arch-schemer then you need to meet Mr Morden. If you thought Jaime Lannister was the epitome of redemption, then you're not aware of G'Kar; or if you felt there were far too many tortured souls floating around Westeros then you need to introduce yourself to Londo Mollari - Babylon 5 was, at the time, the most sophisticatedly-plotted television series ever made but it was then enveloped in Pound Shop wrapping paper.

The truth is B5 was more than just a massive story arc about a space war between ancient races and the new kids on the block. For five series there was an underlying subplot about how Earth was actually not a very nice place; riven with corruption, hate and discrimination and despite being set in the same century as Star Trek, it was anything but a glorious utopia. B5 was not just about the United Nations in space, it focused on inequality while showing that equality was achievable.

The future isn't idyllic, the future is full of homeless disenfranchised people with no future, no hope, nowhere to live or call their own. B5 was about themes that current SF fan favourite series The Expanse focuses on such as xenophobia, the hate generated between Earthlings and those people born on colonies such as Mars or the Asteroid belts. B5 was rife with hatred, racism and other distinctly human traits. Whether the other alien races depicted in it picked up humans bad habits through osmosis or whether it was simply a universal thing wasn't really discussed; but the Narn, the Centauri, and the Minbari - the principal alien races other than humans, all had traits similar to their mammalian brethren. It sounds like it should be great...

The Shadow War, considered by many as one of the most original story arcs ever to appear in a TV series, is the thing many remember about B5, but as I said, all the way through the series it was really all about Earth and its inhabitants. It was about how Earth was not like Star Trek and the universe wasn't a nice homely Federation of Planets; how it was always extremely close to being a fascistic organisation and how it found going down that path extremely easy. It was about Psi Corps or the Ministry of Peace or the Night Watch. It was about assassinating the President of Earth so malevolent forces could dictate the agenda; it was about the hatred between Earth and Mars, especially after the latter ceded from Earth's control. It was about how massive inequality still existed below the surface and it was about corruption, massive fraud and genocide. The stories of 2258 to 2263 are the 21st century in microcosm and series creator J.M Straczynski either had a crystal ball or he knew that the drift towards right wing politics is something other generations of human beings are going to have to suffer...

I've recently re-watched chunks of the series and it amplifies the fact it was woefully made. The actors were poor; the sets were wobbly, the special effects were garish and infantile, but there was something about it; something under the surface that was allowed out every so often to remind us just how BIG 'the big picture' was.

The problem B5 had was those moments were few and far between and had it been produced in 2019 it would have dispensed with a lot of the superfluous filler; those dreadful Star Trek-lite episodes; or the ones made when all the budgets had been exhausted. It wouldn't be 22 episodes a series, it would be 13 and it would meld character building and the actual plot in a far more sophisticated way than was done in 1994. It would have state of the art special effects and actors who didn't seem like they were reading off of prompt cards behind the cameras. It would be wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am from episode one. But...

I'm not sure it would work in 2020. At first I put this down to logistics; in the 25 years since B5 first appeared thinking has changed. A space station is a stupid idea; it is essentially a sitting target. To believe humans would be the facilitators of a universal peace is also stretching it a bit. In fact, if you strip away some of the interesting things that make the series tick, you'd be hard-pressed to find any redeeming qualities.

The truth is it was made for a buck fifty; it was written by a man whose biggest claim to fame at that point was Murder She Wrote and however much you try and talk up the complexities of the series, if you watch it in the cold light of 2019 there are holes you could steer a star ship through. In fact, it's probably a damned sight worse than people who slagged it off in 1994 realised. A quarter of a century after it first appeared, the thing that actually hasn't aged is the struggle for the soul of Earth; probably because we're seeing a lot of the themes from B5 play out in real life - not quite with the melodrama or action, but some themes explored in seasons two and three of B5 would not seem too out of place in 2019, even if they're just updated versions of things that happened in Germany in the 1930s.

I approached the series the same way I approached it 10 years ago when I last watched it, with an open mind and devoid of criticism and I saw beyond the shitty production values for about 20 episodes. I was focusing on the episodes that focused on the Shadow War and for a while I saw a symmetry I'd not really seen before; that the Earth subplots were all loosely tied into the Shadows story. This was probably the only positive revelation I garnered, because for most of the time I was gobsmacked by how awful it was.

Any sympathy, empathy or association I might once have felt towards lead characters evaporated - the way TV has become more sophisticated over the last 20 years saw to that. Instead of laughing at the jokes or smiling at the interactions between central characters, I started to cringe a little - would people really be like that in 300 years? Obviously, for something made in the 1990s it's going to have certain anachronistic problems; I managed to see past that; what I didn't expect was to find myself tearing plots apart, with consummate ease, no less.

Looking back, I now believe the Shadow War was a brilliant idea that sometimes was executed perfectly, but at other times was contrived and simply makes me think that my once mad devotion to the series blinded me from glaring holes in the plot and story?

The thing is the Shadow War was actually at its best as a preamble - a subplot. It kind of lost all of its cohesion when it became the main story. But even in the episodes before it became the main crux, it seems that common sense was ignored in favour of tension, suspense and action. In 2019, looking at how fascistic some things are now, the naivety of the 1990s appeared to forget about bureaucracy, unless it was a necessary device. The word 'contrived' keeps springing up in my head, as well as the phrase 'a means to an end' and it seems that both of these things were prominent in B5. I appreciate in some ways, fantasy TV depends on these kind of things, especially when you're dealing with so-called prophecy, but the lack of genuine continuity - even when most episodes were written by the same guy - made it feel 'manufactured'; there is little or nothing 'organic' about it.

I got to the stage where I didn't actually want to carry on watching it. How I'd missed such glaringly obvious plotting mistakes three times previously really annoyed me. I used to explain the sometimes uneven feel it had to the production and budgetary constraints but words are rarely affected by budgets. I struggled to understand why - comic book style - it liked to give a precis of the general story whenever it could; having characters tell other characters who were as versed in everything what was going on and for every genuine bit of dialogue, there was a ham hock of wince-inducing bollocks.

The worst thing was the realisation that the Shadow War actually didn't make a lot of sense and its conclusion kind of contradicted itself... The Shadows believed in evolution through chaos; the Vorlons (the other ancient race still hanging around with the little kids) believed in a more peaceful way, through genetic manipulation and covert means and while the Shadows went around getting all the races to have wars with each other, the Vorlons stood around being cryptic and frankly not doing much at all (which you kind of understand at first). The problem was, when push came to shove, the war was all about the Shadows and Vorlons resurrecting an ancient war and getting someone else to take all the losses. The rest of the universe became collateral damage as they fought each other, forgetting their reason for being there. That might have been the plan, but for races billions of years older than us, it all seemed a little like the meeting of two bullies in the same school yard and the sensible teacher having them both expelled for the future safety of everyone else...

That aside, B5 has always been called a series that has equality at its very heart, but it doesn't. Women are still stereotyped in a 1970s fashion; aliens are often used as a substitute for race or culture and religion appears to supersede everything else - suggesting the discovery of aliens reinforces mankind's belief in God, not destroys it. In fact, in many ways, it was simply business as usual - human dramas played out with prosthetics.

Babylon 5 was every criticism levelled at it. It was like the US version of late 1970s Dr Whos. You felt the sets would eventually collapse in on themselves. The overblown dialogue would eventually spur someone into saying 'this is bollocks, no one would ever talk like this'. It pains me to say this, but B5 was a graveyard for has-beens, D-list actors and basket cases and with the aid of time were allowed to con us into believing we were witnessing something great. It might have been once or maybe it could have been, but if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. We don't need to know how it might be re-imagined. What we need is for people who remember it fondly to never watch it again (for fear of realisation) and to defend its corner, the way I once did. I feel it deserves that, if nothing else.

I want to be able to say with the confidence I had in the late 1990s that B5 was something special; the problem is the only thing that elevated it above awful was the ideas it played with. It executed those ideas piss poorly, but it doesn't detract from the fact that JMS (and others) had them in the first place. To attempt to do something like B5 is far more worthy of praise than to actually critique the show. The fact they were allowed to tell such a strange story from start to finish, with so much interference, is something to be held in high esteem... 'In the face of adversity' should have been the series' subtitle.

The problem is, it is the memory of it that has grown in our minds. If you love B5 for all the reasons I thought I did then I urge you to never go there again. Lock your DVDs or illegal files away - burn them, if necessary; just don't be tempted to re-view something important from a period in your past that can't be changed, because under (not a lot of) scrutiny it falls apart and becomes something you wish you could unsee; it makes you want to remember it how you did, not how it is.

Pop Culture is Dead to me: The all-new, all-different X-Men?

Once upon a time, if you wanted to talk about mutants, explore the X-Men or find someone to champion something that was already big, I was your man. When I say I had a direct line to the man in charge of the X-Men in the 1990s, I wasn't lying. I even wrote a 'Beginners' Guide to the X-Men' for Marvel UK (which is a vignette for another time). I produced popular fanzines about them; I interviewed creators; my reviews were used as editorial tools. I even had an article in Time Out about... me and my mutant fixation.

There was a point in my comic collecting life where I possessed, not only every single X-Men comic, spin-off, one-shot and cross-over, I possessed every single comicbook that was in some tenuous way linked to Marvel's X-Men universe (which was part of their entire Marvel Comics Universe and not just restricted to what we see on the big screen). Every single comic - even comics which featured no mutants at all, but had characters in or stories that crossed-over into known Marvel Mutant History. I was that sad. The thing is, this was an attainable target in a world where collecting comics was extremely expensive and circumstances had pushed me into a collecting corner, so sticking with the X-Men seemed to be something I still connected with. The point is, by the year 2000 I had pretty much every single comic that I could shoehorn into my carefully researched (and various other peoples) Mutant timeline.

If truth be told, I started to fall out of love with the X-Men in the mid-1990s, when an arguably already bloated franchise of comics exploded into almost double the amount with a fraction of the quality. Because X was a family of comics, you almost felt obligated to keep up with what your third cousin twice removed was doing, even if it was as dull as dishwater and had cost you a couple of quid. The thing was, none of the spin-offs really addressed the reason I was an X-Men fan; they didn't do what this fanboy wanted, tie-up the loose ends of the last 30 years, instead they just added to something that didn't need adding to. They were prepared to change almost everything (yet again) for the of sake massive sales and the promise of a gold reprinted issue #1.

There was a time when I'd have to explain to people who the X-Men were; despite their comics being the best sellers in the USA and UK, this was pre-internet, CGI, video games and still sneered at as something losers were into. It's difficult in this day and age to explain the appeal for a comic with such a (behind-the-scenes) chequered past. The X-Men were created in the early 1960s by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the concept of the mutant was introduced to Marvel. Marvel had their superheroes, who became that way through cosmic rays, gamma radiation, radioactive spiders, super soldiers enhanced by serums and playboys in iron suits; mutants were born with a gene that made them 'better' than normal humans, therefore made them different. In 1963, the world knew profoundly of prejudice and the first appearance of the X-Men reflected this and as the comic limped along during its first few years, there were very few reasons to imagine it would one day become such a phenomenal success. The analogies to civil rights in the USA were an ad hominem at best.

By the time I got into the X-Men it had just been cancelled by Marvel, it had never exceeded a million sales, like many of the other books and it spent best part of its 66 issues as a bi-monthly (6 times a year). The X-Men wasn't the first Marvel Comic to be cancelled, but in an era where Marvel comics were like Marvel heroes - ever-present - it felt odd it had been. This is also where it gets complicated but only if I want to give you the ins and outs of a duck's arse - which I don't; the important thing was after March 1970 and for five years nothing new was published in the X-Men comics.

During the preceding years, with cancellation imminent, the X-Men started doing some unusual things. Initially, an innovative comics creator called Jim Steranko was given a couple of issues to have a play and the results were, for their time, quite staggering. For some people it gave a glimpse into how the X-Men look - somehow otherworldy. And then it was back to the same old average comicbooks which ultimately saw it get the axe. To cut a long story short, by the time Stan Lee's number two, Roy Thomas, took back over writing the book, it needed a miracle to save it from extinction. Arguably that miracle was delivered, even if sales at the time did nothing to reflect it. Thomas returned to the main theme - a bunch of teenagers with special powers in a hostile world fighting evil mutants and the rest of the world while staying decent people. This was the premise for the X-Men.

Thomas recruited hot new artist Neal Adams, and for the rest of the title's original run, we were treated to 9 comics of superior quality (albeit one of them wasn't drawn by Adams, his replacement was more than adequate). The way Adams (and Steranko before him) designed their pages was nothing like Marvel had ever done before and Stan Lee really didn't like it, but Thomas, who had been given more power after Lee withdrew from editorial duties, got it through and not only did the X-Men really begin to tell its story, comics changed as well; they began to grow up and reflect what their long-standing audience was thinking. The irony of those defining Adams X-Men was they looked fantastic but because Roy Thomas wasn't particularly 'adventurous' with a lot of his stuff, they were lightweight in the literary department. I think the Adams issues set a precedent with the X-Men; if they were ever to return they would need to be done differently.

For five long years (I was only young), the X-Men were off the menu - Marvel wouldn't even reprint the decent stuff as they produced issues #67 to #93 as reprints from the mid-1960s. Then something happened and as this isn't what this blog is about, I'll get back on track, otherwise I'll get bogged down.

In 1975, Marvel brought back the X-Men. And they did it in what was at the time a very risque move - they introduced us to a bunch of never-before-seen heroes and a couple of familiar ones and called them the X-Men. The familiar faces were Cyclops, Marvel Girl, now simply called Jean Grey and others popped in briefly before disappearing off to their own comic adventures (Iceman, Beast, Angel were all in other teams) and Professor X was there leading this new team of international X-Men against new and interesting villains, oh and there was a Canadian who had appeared in the Hulk once. It was a hit. In a pond that felt it had been stagnating throughout the 70s, the X-Men really was a breath of fresh air and because of accidentally shrewd promotion and a stroke of storytelling genius, it became a hit almost instantly.

There was a real buzz about the book on both sides of the Atlantic and by the time a writer called Chris Claremont and and artist called John Byrne were in the middle of their award-winning run, the X-Men was Marvel's runaway success; rivalling Spider-Man and the Hulk, but it required a path to get there and that sequence of stories needed to be special.

You know the story, you've seen the films. The background bollocks is something I've always found fascinating about the X-Men and why it took on an almost mythical status - this was the most successful English language comic book of all time. In a time when comics were at a real low, the X-Men almost single-handedly jump-started the entire comics industry. No shit. In business terms, the X-Men was what all comics aspired to be.

There is no coincidence that I pretty much stopped reading the X-Men around the year 2000. Trust me when I say I find it difficult to actually put a finger on it, but I must have made a conscious decision to stop buying the few remaining comics I collected. That whole period was ... difficult.

Also in 2000, the X-Men film came out. A big-budget superhero film. All-star cast. Patrick Stewart in the role he was born to play. What's not to like? Oh and in the intervening years Wolverine had became one of the top 5 superheroes in terms of $$$$. X-Men was going to be huge and with state-of-the-art CGI this was going to be the start of something big... I had the misfortune of catching a chunk of the first X-Men film recently on one of the outer ITV channels. It's dreadful. I mean, it's not, but it is. In terms of comparing the first three X-Men films to the last 6 or however many there have been, they're all fucking Citizen Kane, but compared to the battle sequences in say the Avengers films, the ones in X-Men are more akin to Batman 1966. The thing is it was 2000 and a lot was to happen in the ten years or so when the MCU got into its stride. Fox stayed as close to the real thing as we could have hoped, and while they buggered around with X-Men comic continuity to suit their film's narrative, in terms of authenticity it at least had a tide mark. By the time they basically ate themselves Ouroboros fashion, everything X-Men made little sense if you analysed it.

The other night, I knew full well what I was letting myself in for. The wife did. We both did. We watched X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

We'd suffered all the ones before this, we had to go for the full house. And watching it is the reason for this blog. The preamble was designed to show you that while the X-Men's adversity was from both sides of the fourth wall, it won through with good stories, soap opera-like plots and excellent art, plus it gave you a feeling of belonging to - as schmaltzy as this sounds - an extended-family drama. The thing is, that era ended in 1991, when X-Men ruled the world.

Without sounding like an X-Men elitist because whoever reads this and has read the X-Men will cite examples outside of this generalisation; let me explain. The X-Men started, in earnest in the late 1960s when imminent cancellation meant caution was thrown to the wind. That emergence continued through its mid-70s relaunch, when the writer - Chris Claremont - introduced a sense of family and soap opera.

Claremont introduced and then wove a network of subplots into things of labyrinthine beauty, many of which may never have been concluded, that made other comics seem terribly stuck in a formula. The writer realised the audience wanted something more than just the illusion of change. Many of these subplots led directly into remarkable stories; the seeds of future stories were introduced; forewarning became common and the X-Men became a serial comic. I also mentioned good marketing and luck earlier, well, it was more likely editorial bravery and going against the accepted norm. What made the X-Men 'different' is in its first relaunched issue, made people sit up and go, 'Oh, hello?' was that one of the new team - Thunderbird, a native American - was killed, only 3 issues into his hero career. He was (and remains) properly dead, not Marvel 'dead'.

So it was always a case of expect the unexpected with the X-Men and this duly played out with the Dark Phoenix Saga. For a few years, this was the most cataclysmic comic event since the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man. Jean Grey, very early on in the relaunch had saved the lives of the rest of the team in the space shuttle and as this was #100 and we'd already had a death, when it appeared that Jean dies at the end, us comic fans were like - would they do it again and with, you know, one of the originals? What followed was a maze-like journey that saw Jean Grey become Phoenix - reborn from the shuttle crash - essentially a mutant bestowed with a shitload of cosmic energy. Just how powerful she was got hinted at, but we're talking the power to see off Thanos with his Infinity Gauntlet in the time it takes you to tie your laces. Planet destroyer strong.

With great power comes great megalomania and Jean's human psyche couldn't handle it. In a massive great galactic court room she's found guilty of genocide - she took her powers to the other side of the galaxy and destroyed an entire planet to see how powerful she really was. It all goes tits up when the X-Men decide to prevent the galactic court from executing her and after a big emotional fight scene, Jean sacrifices herself to save Scott and is blasted into atoms by the Ultimate Nullifier. End of. And for a number of years, Jean Grey stayed dead dead, not Marvel dead.

It was, at the time, the comicbook equivalent of The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter saga; the paper version of what we've just had with Avengers: Endgame, played out over and across 27 issues of a comic and taking over four years to complete, it was proper soap/space/opera and had The X-Men films followed that route from the off then I might not be sitting here writing this...

In many ways, this is when the X-Men stopped being a brilliant comic and simply became very good. I see little said about the following issues, which were equally as devastating for different reasons and as the team came to terms with life without Jean, the family grew and greater intrigue and stranger intergalactic hijinks ensued. It stayed top for nearly a decade.

But in terms of how the X-Men stories relate to the cinema, Jean Grey (aka Marvel Girl) is always pretty much going to be the lamest looking superhero in the entire comic publishers oeuvre. Visually she's a red head who stares at things; she might move her hands - or stand in a pose that is slightly odd. Oh and she reads minds... All great things to visualise in a visual medium. She wore a lot of short skirts and spent much of the '60s looking like a bemused Texan housewife forced to wear a silly costume.


And this is why I think the new and improved Marvel Cinematic Universe might have bitten off more than it can chew with the X-Men franchise. By all means play with the Fantastic Four toys; that's a given, but maybe leave the mutants to disappear into history or until it can be done properly.

Forgive me if this precis is incorrect, but we had three X-Men films, we then had a rebooted X-Men franchise utilising some existing characters but messing around with roles, characters, etc. Then we had a weird Wolverine sideline before we returned to three more utterly contemptible examples of how not to make a superhero film, that finished up at Dingy Phoenix with Sophie Turner proving once and for all she's Sansa Stark and only Sansa Stark. She can't act, she makes Rupert Grint look like Olivier. Building a film around a reasonably attractive red head with zero charisma, nil charm and no acting ability whatsoever is a tall order, which is why Dark Phoenix feels like an ongoing epilogue with periods of threatened, but unmaterialised, menace.

It felt like events happened so the next events can happen, so the next event... can you see where I'm going with this? It's held together with a flimsy nod to the comics and a race of aliens who SHIELD would dispatch between crap episodes. To call the film flimsy would be an insult to flims.

There's also this 'Dark' thing. In the comic, the Dark Phoenix destroyed an entire world; she manipulated reality, people and things for her desire; she placed the entire universe at peril and only her humanity saved us all. She was fucking Joan of Arc, in the end! Sophie Turner's Phoenix accidentally kills Mystique in a hissy fit; goes round being (not) menacing and blowing things up without actually hurting anyone and stuff happens and she sacrifices herself for the greater good. Yadda yadda yadda. It was such a colossal bunch of pants you could lose the Hulk in them.

It's like a long drawn out version - the X-Men films this is - of my single most horrendous visit to the cinema in the 21st century. Having read all of the Philip Pullman 'His Dark Materials' books, I went to the cinema to see the Golden Compass with such anticipation that the way it was mercilessly driven from my body has actually scarred me for life. It has almost entirely obliterated my expectation gland.

In fact, while I'm here, allow me to digress a little. I saw Godzilla: King of the Monsters the other day. Two days later, my wife says, "What did you think of Godzilla then?" My reply was, 'It was a big monster movie.' The thing is, it's a big monster movie with far too many humans standing around in awe like they're not part of an elite monster-chasing task force.

I wasn't expecting anything more than big monsters knocking seven bells out of each other and that's exactly what it gives you; the fact it levers a very post-modern husband, estranged wife and daughter situation into the film in a way that loses all of its post modernism is almost a joy to behold. This is Godzilla from the Bruckheimer school of film; it has people dying with smiles on their faces because they've helped the big nuclear lizard save the day is a throwback to a bygone age that never existed. We have a meeting with King Kong on the cards (these movies make money regardless of how blindly thrown together the human bits are) in what will obviously be the two of them teaming up to battle some really old gnarly titan who used to kick Godzilla's dad round the yard. Just using their strength, guile and atomic energy coupled with an oddly-paralleling-the-original-King-Kong subplot about the girl they both have to save while her beefcake boyfriend stands around gawping like a kid at the big monsters. It'll end with the entire world being consumed by sentient jelly. Red jelly.

But, the X-Men. How does Marvel introduce them to er... Marvel? One thing about the MCU at the moment is - as a viewer - it's as transparent as anything similar; Captain Marvel aside, most of the films didn't have anything a good 23-part TV series shouldn't have. However, the X-Men, as Dark Phoenix shows, in its glory, is that characters such as the Beast (original or furry blue-counterpart), Jean Grey, the original Angel, Magneto, Professor X - are all visually dull in the Marvel Age of cinema blockbusters. Much of the reason why the X-Men worked when it did was because comic books made you use your imagination more; they prove with Dark Phoenix that they can't really do much visual that really works on screen in the way an Iron Man, Hulk or Thor can dominate a scene. The thing that made the X-Men comic work was that feeling of family which I don't think can be replicated on the big screen, in a believable way. In the X-Men, it wasn't always the physical battles between good and bad. It had a history to allow itself to suddenly become grey, doing that in an extant MCU is likely to be as believable as The Inhumans and their less than lukewarm reception in Agents of SHIELD.

The other dilemma you have with the X-Men is with the Phoenix you have the perfect foil to create an event which maybe unifies a number of divulgent multiverses. We know the next Doctor Strange film is going to touch on the idea of a multiverse; different earths all slightly different. If I had to stick my neck out, I'd say that this is your gateway film into the next Real Deal. There will be people saying that Spider-Man: Far From Home is the beginning of the next story arc, but remember, there were several loose story arcs throughout the films and what ended with Thanos - plot and non-plot films, tied together with end credit scenes to keep us hooked and that is what all these new films and series are doing; they're filling the schedules with what they used to do in the comics; the sandwich filler (Oh and Spider-Man is no longer part of the MCU at time of writing).

Marvel/Disney's policy seems to be: introduce new characters, gauge the waters for three years and then begin the Thanos process again. If we haven't seen the Fantastic Four by 2022, I expect we'll at least be introduced to them via end credits or some device. I can see it; visualise it in my head... It will be done in a familiar way; this introduction will be through the streets of our New York. It will be full on introduction straight away - classic FF battling a villain above the streets of NYC. The crowds - typical New Yorkers - will be cheering them on; our current President will be adorned on some posters and everything will be the same as the MCU except the heroes will be different. I expect that after a totally-out-there opening 15 minutes, the plot device will appear - possibly a rip in the space time continuum - that's always a good one to play with, it gives you scope.

Switch back to the Marvel Universe and whoever is in charge of the Avengers now that all their regular Joes have pegged it, probably Professor Hulk aided by the girl from Wakanda and Captain Marvel, looking at the same thing from the other side, Cue fight between worlds, cue common ground: Reed Richards is this world's genius, he makes Tony Stark look like a dustman and there's also Reed's nemesis who's literally just as clever but also unfathomably evil. They all team up to fix the rift, but it's only temporary, at some point in the future it's going to tear again. Dun dun dun!

The you'll get another filler film probably featuring a geriatric Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, before...

The next bit. And that's where I draw a blank. You could easily have the two worlds of the FF and Avengers merge with little or no consequences. You could reintroduce the Iron Man and Captain America from their universes and bingo, you can reboot the franchise without ever having to end it. But the mutants. Hmm...

With their best story having been done one and a half times already and neither occasion with much justice, you're kind of stuck for a starting point with the X-Men. The problem with straightforward integration is how has it been kept a secret for so long and how come the Avengers weren't aware of it? That means reintroducing them possibly in a similar way to the FF (in my above scenario), this would require two things; a starting point and a cast that can believably be seen as part of the MCU. As far as I know Marvel wants to distance itself as far away from the Fox X films as possible and this is the best possible start. Don't even acknowledge their existence and start with Wolverine, but one from the past. Forget the origin nonsense, just reintroduce the plucky little Canadian, maybe in the way he was in the comics, by bumping into a Hulk (his universe's Hulk not ours). Make his adventure somehow linked to the existing MCU but really all about his universe and end it, maybe with the introduction of Professor X.

The next X outing could be further down the line; an older Prof X is assembling a new task force to try and find out the origins of a strange rift in the space time continuum (see what I did there?) and he assembles a new team of X-Men, with flashback references to an older team that went to investigate and several were lost through it. Cut to several members of the X-Men in a world almost identical to theirs, but with an entirely different set of 'heroes'. It's up to the other two universes to try and come up with a solution to save all of them and the only thing they can do is merge the three together to prevent, say Galactus from devouring it, so we can can shoehorn the Silver Surfer in there.

The three earths merge into one, heroes and villains who didn't exist in some now exist in the only and only the superheroes involved know it has happened. Fully integrated universe and a blank slate to boot. And I'll be happy with just one million dollars (at current exchange rate) for solving the dilemma for them.

You have to make a decision about whether the X-Men are heroes or outcasts in their own universe and I think they have to be the good guys fighting the bad mutants, which, in itself, breeds an unhealthy relationship. You have your built-in prejudices almost immediately, you don't need to use a sledgehammer on it. If you make them outcasts from the word go then you miss the opportunity of an entire subplot of who is and who isn't a mutant...

Once you have an integrated Marvel Universe, albeit ridiculously huge and cumbersome you can move your toys whatever way you choose. If Marvel/Disney treats this like an ongoing experiment it will live on longer than most of us. As the first story arc in the MCU showed; using actual comicbook stories as a template is the way forward. The best comicbook stories took place in the comic books, so mine them for their rich veins of history; just so long as whenever Marvel chooses to bring the mutants back, they consider looking at Alans Davis and Moore's Captain Britain run for inspiration on how to produce bizarre, massive yet insignificant and terrifying all in one story. It would open a world of opportunity if they did and give them a couple of really brilliant villains.

As an exercise is humiliation, X-Men: Dark Phoenix was something of a nadir. Rumour has it that a lot of it was reshot, which suggests it was either considerably worse than it turned out or Marvel/Disney wanted to ensure that nothing they do in the future could possibly be confused with this mess. The fact that Fox made (was it 9?) X-Men films suggests that there's money to be made from it even now and with the full force of Disney's marketing machine behind any reboot, I expect they can treble that amount of money by simply having Nick Fury meeting Charles Xavier, covertly. The problem is down to what they do, how they do it and what story they can come up with that will be original and worthy of introducing the X-Men to a cinematic universe that isn't broken and doesn't need fixing.

Pop Culture is Dead to Me 6: Avengers Addendum

Concluding my trip through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as usual well after the Lord Mayor's Show, with some comments about the double-fisted Avengers films that tie up the first (three) phase(s) of this sprawling introduction to the Marvel comics characters in film form.

Avengers: Infinity War
I tried to explain this film to someone who hasn't seen it without spoilers. It is essentially a Marvel film; the Avengers are in it, but this is really all about everybody that's been seen and how they fit into - they're all Avengers and they need to battle Thanos, who has sped things along at a tsunami pace after dawdling his way through the preamble like a man with no real motivation. The Infinity Stones were the be-all and end-all of his purpose, yet he seemed to treat it like a side project. The urgency of why he's now desperate to retrieve them all seemed slightly rushed and, you know, Infinity Stones in the singular make the bearer really powerful and Thanos kicks Thor and the Hulk's arses inside the first 10 minutes of the film and still has an army of subservient subordinates doing most of his wet work and he only had one stone. These stones on their own are powerful enough to need several heroes to contain them - as we've been shown - Thanos is still taking Thunder Axes in the chest after collecting all six and winning the free gauntlet.

The thing is, it's Marvel's Empire Strikes Back (yawn, boo, hiss at the use of the reference) and it's all the better for it and the pay off, while not as shocking as they might have hoped did what all good comics need to achieve, to be as good or better than the ones before it and to set a bench mark for the one that follows.

It's rare that films of this ilk feel like they need to be longer, but Infinity War probably did need to be a bit longer, or maybe, with hindsight, some of the other films needed to lay down more than just teaser moments about things to come.

Over all though, Infinity War is a fun film with some glaring omissions and some good set pieces. As the first part of a double header, it flicked 90% of the right switches.


Avengers: Endgame
After managing to avoid 99% of the spoilers, I went into this film knowing that [spoiler] dies, but no one else and that time travel would be involved. I even hypothesised about the film in the previous edition of this sub-divided themed blog and I might have got some things right. Yahoo to me, but it has been loosely following an original comic or comics.
Endgame is... No, hang on a minute, I need to quantify my right to have this judgement of this film. Part of me despises the idea of Doctor Who, especially when the 'laws of time' are conveniently written for the benefit of the story rather than in a consistent manner. I love time travel stories, films TV series. It's my little obsession hidden inside a general liking for the genres where time travel might appear.

I am, oddly, in the same mind as Stephen King when he wrote The Langoliers, that the past doesn't exist any more so it's impossible to return to it because it simply isn't there to go back to. Going into the future - apart from the fact we're all doing it - is a concept that I have more ease with. That said, I enjoy a good time travel romp like the best of you, not so much ones that are playing with it in such a way that it gets difficult to follow or so easily-achieved.

We'll get to this in a minute because I want to talk about the first hour of Endgame. It was... unexpected. Incredibly well put together and devastating and yet there's this beacon of hope just popping back after 5 years in the twilight zone and what follows that is mumbo-jumbo; throwaway soundbites saying that fictional time travel is nothing like the real thing, yet no one really bothered to explain how it would work; how they would be able to navigate the quantum realm so easily and more importantly none of them realise that they are actually creating a time loop by actively removing things from their place in time, using them to alter reality before returning them to the exact point in time they were stolen to fulfil their original destiny, which in turn creates the situation that requires that to happen again. Not to mention what peripheral continuity errors they've now built into the entire franchise.

Let's not even try to figure out how pre-Endgame Peggy Carter and post-Endgame Peggy Carter fit into a universe, at the same time, never and for always...

What actually happened? Well, for those of you who don't want to know, you'd better be ready to bale out. Because the invigorated Avengers reunited with a weak and feeble Tony Stark and powered up by the presence of Captain Marvel are now on a mission to change things back, so they track Thanos down only to discover he's destroyed the stones and there's nothing they can do. Thanos gets dispatched really quickly and easily and the rest of the first hour is five years later and how the world is not coping at all well with what happened. Up pops Scott Lang from the Phantom Zone and within 30 seconds we're talking about navigating the weird time zones Michelle Pfeiffer casually mentioned at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp and changing time. Scott Lang is a petty criminal with a magic suit, he's struggled to understand most of what Hope and Henry Pym have told him and here he is inventing the Tardis.

Oh and the Hulk is now Bruce Hulk or maybe Hulk Banner; he's big green and intelligent and a little cocksure of himself, as you'd expect. He has his moments, but he's largely underused. Hawkeye's become a samurai wielding Punisher clone with good aim and the rest of them are just the same but a bit older and tired.

Then we're off again, this time to the past for a chance to relive old moments, except we don't really. There's a lot of the first Avengers film and the first of the problems in that the way the stones will eventually arrive back where they are stolen from and that has changed in a number of ways from the original films - it wasn't fully or possibly even generally explained what consequences it might have for the future if things prevented that time from happening the way it did/does/is.

The events in space essentially mean the Guardians of the Galaxy shouldn't exist, especially as Quill never steals one of the stones, Gamora isn't in custody with the Nova Corps, there's no reason for Rocket and Groot to get themselves arrested and do you see where I'm going here? Unless there was something like months between Quill obtaining the stone and getting detained then the events of this film prevent that from happening. Gamora was ever-present in a period where she should have been in custody.

There's also the matter of War Machine disappearing in the Time Tunnel but Nebula being taken over by 2014 Thanos, but both of them reappearing at the same time. But gripes aside, (apart from the fact that as much as I lust over Karen Gillan, she really can't act to save her life) they recreate the Infinity Gauntlet, Professor Hulk puts it on and then comes weird bizarre thing number 2. Tony's asked Bruce to ensure that his relatively happy last five years are retained; he has to bring everyone back, as they were, but five years later. Did I hear that correctly? How come all of Peter Parker's fellow schoolfriends seemed to be the same age and still at school? Is it 2023 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe now?

Or how about when Loki disappears with the Tesserac in the cock-up in 2012; how does that now impact on the Marvel Universe, especially as other things become clear.

I didn't expect [spoiler spoiler] to die and in what seemed both a heroic and pointless way and makes you wonder how a film featuring [spoiler spoiler] now will fit in with the direction Marvel might be going? But if someone returned the stone at the point it left - to ensure no multiverse is created (or something like that), how come [spoiler] is still dead... This is supposed to be a fun film why is my head hurting?

That bit when you know who snaps his fingers and the threat from 2014 simply disappears is also perplexing in that this means that technically as 2014 Thanos is dead there isn't a 2015 thru 2018 Thanos to cause any problems. The stones are wherever they were before he got any of them.

If you take out the melancholy, the nostalgia, the tributes and the comedy it's just a big bombastic explosion of... actually, it isn't. There's not a lot of action; there aren't really any set pieces until the final battle which, truthfully, felt more Lord of the Rings than the Avengers Last Stand.

The thing is Infinity War felt more... large. It felt like Thanos's lackeys were kick ass and mean and could handle the likes of Thor and Iron Man. In Endgame, Giant Man is trampling all over the Doomsday lookalike the way a child does with a toy. He's also not getting light-headed and faint, like he did, very quickly, last time he tried that stunt.

And there was this feeling that we'd missed some things. Gamora and Nebula growing up was something briefly touched on in earlier films, but mainly through anecdotal exchanges between the two, yet in Endgame there's this feels like a bit of rewritten history has been inserted to allow the events to happen the way they did. A lot was made of their growing up which felt the opposite of what we'd been led to believe. And when the future Nebula kills herself - so to speak - something else should have happened and... the paradoxes this film creates is unparalleled.

And there's this weird relationship between Stark and Peter Parker that seems to have escalated considerably since Homecoming. It also felt contrived and exaggerated to enable parts of the plot and the next Spider-Man film. It would have been nice to have had some kind of explanation for Pepper Potts's Iron Woman suit and frankly if you'd come in cold you would have been as lost as a blind man in Hampton Palace Maze.

It is in my opinion a complete mess and it's a real disappointment of a film. If the plan is to sort out continuity or just leave it as it is, I'm not sure I want to know. The most interesting characters have finished their respective stories - after a fashion - and the new breed are simply not as... iconic. I'm sure that will become obvious over the next few years.

Another thing is at 3 hours (well, 2 hours and 48 minutes, there's 13 minutes of credits and no post credit scene, so if you sat through it at the cinema then I feel for you) it didn't feel overly long, but it did feel as though it had been edited badly and some of the scenes blending the past with today felt... a little like being clever for the sake of it rather than the necessity. Also while it felt like it rollicked along at a decent gallop, there were times when I wondered if anything remotely interesting might happen. It was like an over-produced album that can't find its way out of the tracks because of engineered bits.

I am also, as I said, really quite disappointed because I don't think the finale has been a fitting end to what, on the whole, has been a well-built inter-connected labyrinth of stories leading to one place. As a franchise film series, it has re-invented 'event cinema' to conclude these events they appear to have opted for schmaltz over sense (and excitement). The overriding feeling is 'Was that the best they could do? After all that build up?'

I'm not even sure I liked the make-up of the film either; they didn't feel like a team but so much time was spent with them as a team it felt like papering over the cracks. Perhaps this was intentional, but if it was it made the tone feel... wrong. There were too many looks and expressions that told much about the previous five years coping with the loss with none of them ever really being explored, giving it a slightly surreal feel, like we've wandered into something armed with no more than a rudimentary knowledge.

Oh and Captain America with Thor's hammer - the original one that has been snatched out of time - was bordering on ludicrous. I actually winced and continued to wince every time he wielded the power of Thor. It was like in this reality Captain America versus Thanos was like an ant versus a JCB; he'd had his moment in Infinity War, that wasn't going to work against a more ruthless, vengeful Thanos, but they needed Steve to have his moment in the sun.

Plus, the what I can only describe as 'Home Run' sequence was just ... there in the film, like any number of giant staged bits that felt like the time could have been better used between scissors. It was a spectacle without substance, or if it had substance it wasn't rounded and whole.

I wonder now if Marvel are going to be clever or if they're going to forget that a convincing narrative, regardless of how fantastic a setting, is essential to something staying both relevant and interesting. I'd like to see some time spent, in some way, explaining how this post-Thanos reality works; what did and didn't happen as a result of the climax and some way of introducing parallel universes that have the estranged Marvel characters in them as well, in some cases, existing Marvel heroes and villains as a way of eventually merging them all and giving us a new generation of the heroes and villains we're unlikely to see again.

In conclusion; expectation is often a bitch and I think I've entered into the last half dozen Marvel films with far too much and have ultimately been found wanting. I can now look at the previews for Spider-Man: Homecoming for fear of spoiling my upcoming enjoyment. Don't get me wrong; there were some genuine tear-jerking moments in the film, but it felt hollow and slightly fake. People will take from this what they want; I've taken very little.

PCIDTM - Xtra Xtra Read All About It!

Here's a Pop Culture is Dead to Me Extra...

It was early 1995, I'm sat in my office in my Wellingborough house, I'd just had my modem installed and I'd got a CD off the front of a computer magazine with a new-fangled thing for the masses of new computer users. E-mail.

Now, it had existed, but not as a web-based thing and Yahoo were at the forefront. 24 years, I've had my email account, Yahoo's changed hands more times... The thing was, I didn't really have anyone to email. In the days of ignorance and treating the internet like a big place full of friendly nerds, it should come as no surprise that in the pages of this magazine was an interview with fantasy writer Terry Pratchett and at the end it actually invited people to email Terry and gave out his email address. Yes, I know...

I sat there and decided to email Terry Pratchett (I believe one of my friends was there when he replied, but we'll get to that). I introduced myself - News editor of Comics International - and asked if he'd seen the glowing review I'd given to Mort, the comicbook adaptation drawn by Graham Higgins. His reply thanked me for getting in touch and yes, he had seen the review and thank you very much, kind regards. I was chuffed to bits until my mate reminded me that my glowing review of Mort began - "I've never read any Pratchett; he's just never interested me..."

Aghast, I swore I'd never contact Pratchett ever again (like he would have even known?) and returned to my ignorance of Pratchett. Several years later, after connecting with an old friend from comics dealing days, I discovered she was friends with Pratchett's daughter with the name only Fleetwood Mac could spell. It was the kind of fact that fills up 20 seconds at a dinner party.

But that was it. Pratchett was just a little too... I dunno. I simply never got him. I should have. It mostly sounded like the kind of thing that would float my boat, but the few times I tried, we just didn't click. So when Amazon announced Good Omens, I was virtually surrounded by many people making noises you'd possibly associate with orgasms. For me it was simply something else to add to my un-watched watch list; maybe the wife would want to watch it.

We watched it in 3-parts over the last 3-nights. Here is my review, of sorts: Camp. Reeking of nostalgia. Dull. Never gripping. Forced. Not very funny. 3 unnecessary swear words otherwise it would be fine for kids. I fell asleep for ten minutes in episode two. I struggled to stay awake for most of episode four and something was starting to happen by then. A big enough budget but could they make the general special effects look better than Bedknobs and Broomsticks? Could they fuck. Ham, lots of ham. The first four episodes felt like information films and God really wasn't the most... effusive of narrators.

Don't get me wrong, it has some fine moments, but they're so few and far between it doesn't feel worth the wait. The Hellhound - albeit quite brilliant - was sign-posted almost a nanosecond after the Hellhound concept was introduced. Satan was ace, but the payoff was lame. Both lead actors chewed the scenery up and looked like they had fun, but I don't really know why? The script was plodding and so many of the characters essentially spoke in the same voice - I can understand why; angels and demons etc etc - but it was heavy-handed and slightly overblown in a pantomime way and I understand that was probably the point; I just don't get it; they could lose an entire episode by simple expunging Michael McKean from this mess. They could have done it without duly affecting the plot. Perhaps I fell asleep when it was revealed Miranda Richardson was a psychic, so imagine my surprise when her character managed to suddenly be the ideal psychic shoehorn into the story...

I didn't like it. Okay, I'm probably wrong. I've never seen lots of the TV everyone raves about, or if I have I've usually wondered why they were so enthused. The wife really liked it and despite berating her over dinner tonight (well, berating the series in a 'I can't understand why you liked that heap of shit' way) and picking holes in it you could ride a Satan through, she still likes it.

I'm done with Pratchett now though. I know I never really did anything with him, but what I have hasn't really made me understand certain nerds better or enhanced my days or enriched my life in a deeply silly way. It should also be noted that aside from DC's The Sandman and a half decent DC Secret Origins issue (Poison Ivy?) I wouldn't let Gaiman near comics ever again.

I just made a comment to a mate about wondering what's wrong with me. I'm finding all TV is a bit meh - so much promise, so much disappointment. If I could remember them, I could probably count the number of films over the last two years I've thoroughly enjoyed on one hand. I decided I have enough music to last me an extra lifetime, sooo... unless something arrives that really floats my boat, I'm sticking with what I've got. I don't do computer or games consoles and I've restricted my social media usage to less than 1 hour a day (I'm averaging about 27 minutes, although today I checked in on it a lot as I'd asked a question of my friends).

I also am fully aware that when I do Pop Culture is Dead to Me blogs that someone reading it probably won't have seen what I'm talking about, so my own righteous indignation at having things spoiled by inconsiderate people might also play a part in my general feeling about popular culture output devices... It still happens; a couple of people have really tried to ruin Endgame for me. If it gives them a workable erection then someone's happy...

I'm actually nowhere near as stressed and when I get stressed I switch off whatever distraction is on around me, because you know that's going to probably be the cause. I have only seen about 10 minutes of TV news since June 1st.

After Good Omens we cracked open the NOS4A2 box set... I loved the book; probably one of the best books I've read in a long time. The TV series feels so abridged - in all the wrong places - and feels so hammy and seems to be cramming 13 years into 13 days. Serves me right for actually looking forward to something.

Zoneless

At about 9.40pm on Saturday night, I switched off BT and BBC Sport and sat here in my office and did nothing for almost two hours. My team had effectively lost the cup final they were playing in and I didn't really want to see what was said and done about it, so I switched the computer and mobile phone off and went to bed.

I got up about 8.45 Sunday morning. Fed the boys (the girls only get one meal a day now), read The Guide from Saturday's Guardian. Drank some coffee. Switched the computer on; opened Word; wrote 50% of June's quiz, carefully only using Goggle as my on-line presence and for what it was originally designed for. I didn't open Facebook. Didn't look on Twitter. Avoided the news sites. Avoided all human interaction on a computer and have done for the last 48 hours. It has been strangely enlightening and oddly peaceful. What has also been cool is that I've also avoided any watching of the news; I have switched the TV off or over if the news has so much as been near being seen. I have wanted to be inside my own personal bubble.

As a result the number of words out of my mouth has decreased by at least 50%. I don't think I've talked about anything much in the last two days. General chit chat, some small talk, much commenting on the dog's arse. Stress levels are ridiculously low and the dogs are behaving themselves, but partly because they know their dad is feeling a bit low.

I've been tinkering with an idea for the last couple of months; nothing I want to talk about, but it's a possible way of motivating me to look at The Imagination Station again, especially as I have had some ideas how to improve parts of it, but still find myself locked out of the box - mentally. So this new idea, which fizzles and pops every now and then, is up to 21,000 words and is a bit different for me in that I'm writing it in bits and then filling in the gaps when I want to write, but feel more workmanlike than creative. I probably got down 4,000 of those words in the last day. I can't say I've been particularly productive, but a lot of that is down to the fact most of what needs to be done is a bit beyond my scope unless accompanied by an adult.

I haven't seen a meme in two days. I haven't been asked to share something. I've not used a hashtag. I've not spent pointless time writing pointless statements or even pointless time writing meaningful statements. I'm finding it surprisingly liberating not knowing what my friends have done or are doing or are planning to do. I've discovered somewhere new to take the dogs for a walk and get a decent bit of exercise without killing myself or coming home with half a beach or pine forest. I also have a list of things that I need to investigate and a social calendar that's consistent. I could probably do without frivolous communication with the outside world quite easily. I've certainly not missed the news or views of or from said news.

I do know the Ginger ManFat Splash is over and what better reason than to avoid watching TV? Sometimes or a lot of times for some people, media, especially the social kind, becomes the ... centre of existence and it's easy to forget about the world next to you. We need to make sure we can function without it for periods of time, because I think that makes things... calmer.

I think me and social media needed a well-earned break from each other. I'm going to see how long I can resist. It's easier than stopping smoking.

Pop Culture is Dead to Me: The Umpire Strikes Back Again For the Second Time

Several months ago, I wrote an appraisal of the first bunch of Marvel Cinematic Universe films. I stopped my progress at Captain America: Civil War - essentially an Avengers film with a story wrapped around it. This has spoilers but I reckon I'm a fair way behind the rest of the people who are likely to read this, so please, no spoiling it for me in any comments.

Next up was Doctor Strange (recently shown on TV). I stated in the last blog I couldn't understand why they put Cumberpatch into an ill-fitting New York accent. My understanding was Strange was a Bostonian but would have been better suited to a Niles Crane kind of Mid-Atlantic accent. His squeaky Bronx-like lilt kind of allowed the pathos to die a little.

I thought it was me, but several people I've spoken to thought Doctor Strange was longer than its just under 2 hours. It certainly felt like it the first time round - not in a bad way. Watching it again it felt short, abridged in places and nowhere near as sophisticated as it felt originally. In fact, in many ways, it is a slight film based on a similar premise to Iron Fist without fists (although it does predate it by a decade or so). The casting of the ubiquitous weird looking androgynous female actor to play the Ancient One felt like it was done deliberately and the Time Stone being in the possession of a bunch of mystics, hidden in a cloak seemed to suit the rapidly advancing MAJOR plot running through all the films. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun film and fits in nicely; it just felt contrived and unoriginal - oddly. I'm not sure Doc Strange has ever been anything other than a good part player - his comic struggled for many years to sustain decent sales; it was all a bit weird for mainstream comic fans and probably not weird enough for its target audience - the film sat between that.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is in my opinion much better than the first film and also a load of shite. It was a story because of a story tale which felt like a lot of jolly wheezes strung together with a flimsy story draped over it. It managed to introduce, subtly, what's around the corner for the MCU while not really moving things along. The Guardians are like those blokes you sometimes see down the pub; at times they are the best company, but at others you just want to sit on your own or with some less exuberant people.

Second watch was better than the first - as it was with the first film - I just struggled a little with the team and found Ego to be both puzzling and nowhere near as menacing as he was originally portrayed in the comics. It also upsets my sense of original Marvel continuity when characters and things are introduced in 'comics' they didn't originally appear in... if you know what I mean? They do things to appease the likes of me, but it sometimes feels as though Marvel is addressing issues they know old fans will question or are different from comics continuity - this feels especially true of Guardians. I suppose when you have a wise-cracking raccoon and his sentient tree sidekick, you need to wrap a few other characters around them to try and squeeze a film sub-franchise out of it.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is in need of a explanation. Like Batman, I find Spider-Man just a little too much. The MCU without him (or the X-Men) was easy to live with (not so much not having the FF for reasons mentioned in the above paragraph). The first bunch of five movies were... okay. A couple were bearable, I never saw the last one - I caught ten minutes of it on TV a few weeks ago, it didn't make me want to go and watch it. For any comic fan growing up in the 1970s Spider-Man was everywhere. Batman in the 80s. Wolverine in the 90s; you kind of feel happier without them...

Homecoming is a film I enjoyed immensely and also found reminiscent of the first Iron Man film in that it almost felt like an anti-climax - in hindsight. The first Iron Man film is pretty lo-tech compared to what followed; a deliberate low key beginning because the sequels always have to be bigger and better. Despite this being technically the 6th Spider-Man film, it felt underwhelming in its action scenes and that actually helped the film. What I didn't like was how the period after the origin was handled or the fact that Aunt May was now some hotty rather than a wizened old woman. But I did like how Iron Man shoe-horned Spider-Man into the MCU and the development of their relationship. This film was too long by ½ an hour.

Thor: Ragnarok is a bit of a puzzle; it is both brilliant and utterly crass. Ridiculously funny and devastatingly brutal. History may well look back on it and declare it to be the best Marvel film ever; personally I think it's a load of fun with lots of problems and is one of the most disjointed, badly plotted, Marvel films so far. The tone of this film is wrong. It throws up villains capable of destroying a realm which has never looked as grand or impervious as it did in the first Thor film and tried to be a mix of Game of Thrones and Spinal Tap. Comedy gladiators meets Auschwitz with a big demon thrown in for good measure. Ultimately it is just a scene setter - a set up for the final Easter egg - the positioning of players in a bigger game. Was it me or did this film seem just a tad ... convenient?

Black Panther did wonders for multi-culturalism, the use of BAME actors and crew and is about as dull a film as I've ever seen come out of Marvel's studios. For all the brilliance of Wakanda it simply stank of privilege, power and isolationism and as for an action adventure film? Yawn... T'Challa makes Steve Rogers seem like a Vaudeville showman and his back-up crew of jazzy hiphop scientist sister, Walking Dead reject with shaved head and girlfriend who can kick butt against tattooed villain with a power trip was considerably less exciting than watching a Groot grow. There's going to be a second one. I can wait.

And then there was The Avengers: Infinity War where lots of things happened most of the time and then half the population of the universe were gone... It's an intense, full-on film jam-packed with plot holes, which I'm sure will be addressed in Endgame. Other than that, I need to watch it again (probably in the next few weeks) because so much happens.

Ant-Man and the Wasp was all about the post credit scene really. I understand why these films are made. It is amusing and some of the effects tickle the 6 year-old inside me, but they're like the comedy episode in your favourite TV drama - there's one every season to lighten the mood before a big revelation at the end. This film ticked all those boxes. Snap!

And that brings us to Captain Marvel and me as up-to-date as I can be, living in isolation. I won't see Endgame before the end of July at the earliest, so seeing this gave me the chance to see what the preamble to the big show was going to be like. I'd seen reviews expressed about the film, but I had been careful to avoid the main spoilers - not that there were any - so my enjoyment wasn't really impacted on that way.

It's rare I will sit through an entire Marvel movie without some conscious nod of approval, burst of laughter or exclamation of some kind of amaze or amusement. I think it happened with Black Panther (although I did bemoan the fact that Klaw was really poorly used and would have been a much 'better' villain) and when the main credits of Captain Marvel began I realised my only reaction was 'meh'.

Meh? It was a huge hit. Fans loved it.

My Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't the team you see in the cinema; mine was Charlie 27, Vance Astro, Yondo and the other crystal guy - they were the intergalactic heroes of Marvel's late 1960s...

Carol Danvers is Ms Marvel - a maligned and short-lived superhero series in the 1970s by Chris (X-Men) Claremont and John Buscema. It was ace and one of the last comics series I got rid of. It was a vitally important cog in the wheel of Marvel and so much was introduced in it that had bearing on the future of Marvel's comics universe.

Captain Marvel or Mar-Vell was a noble Cree warrior and rebel against his own race, who was also instrumental in the events of the future, but would eventually die of cancer in one of Marvel's best graphic novels - Jim Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel; seek it out; it's stunning (and Thanos is in it). Captain Marvel was also inextricably linked to, among others, the Incredible Hulk, although no Rick Jones exists in the current MCU. And I'm just scratching the surface, I can be really nerdy about this specific corner of the Marvel comics universe.

So, while there are elements of comics history in Captain Marvel, I thought it was an awful film. I mean really dreadful.

Let's start with that epilogue in Infinity War, the one where Nick Fury presses the pager. That's fine. I liked that idea. The one problem I had with it was if I'd been writing this or at least 'show running' it, Captain Marvel would have come out before Doctor Strange. I just find the idea of introducing a major character on the eve of the defining film in the series smacks of deus ex machina and a lack of imagination - so obviously Captain Marvel is not going to have the desired effect in Endgame or be as important as she is being made out to be, otherwise, you know... god in a machine.

As for the film... Brie Larsen wasn't awful, but I'm not sure she's a superhero actor. I found her glib, flippant and almost devoid of any character apart from slightly wise-ass. Nothing happened in that 2 hours that made me want to like Carol Danvers (the film version) and not since Black Panther did a Marvel film feel as staged and as deliberate. The mid-90s were rammed down your throat - look how primitive we were!

Let's get on with the plot/story... there was a story, I'm sure of it. Ace, never-give-up, wannabe fighter pilot Carol 'Avenger' Danvers can't fly combat missions in the late 1980s because she's a girl, so she can only fly top secret light speed missions with a scientist - natch! - until one day an alien craft blows them out of the sky. Carol then destroys the light speed engine and is imbued with the power of the Tesseract which makes her a super-powered bad ass. So the Cree kidnap her, wipe her memories away, turn her into one of their own elite fighting squad - because that always works out for the best - and set her against the evil, nasty, shapeshifting Skrulls, who are bad and evil and need wiping out. Stranded on her home planet and teaming up with a young Nick Fury, Carol discovers her true origins, defeats the bad guys she thought were good guys and returns the good guy who she thought were bad guys to a safer place. The end.

It's shit. Everything from the Blockbuster video store to Fury's eye felt so stage-managed it was unreal. The post credit scenes were both excellent, the first one felt really rushed though and pretty much blows a lot of theories out of the window as to when Captain Marvel will turn up in Endgame.

I have managed to avoid most Endgame spoilers; I am aware that some characters won't be coming back from this next film; although I'm not totally sure who they'll be. I have some nagging feelings about Endgame that I'll share on the understanding that I don't know and don't want to know until I see it.

The strongest feeling I have is that Spider-Man isn't going to be in it. I do know that time travel is involved; you don't have to be a genius to work that one out and I think Tony Stark is going to prevent Parker from following the path he does in Infinity War - maybe putting something in the suit that prevents him from reaching that floating disc. With the next film being a Spidey film, I don't think the MCU are allowed to overkill him that much.

I also expect the Hulk is going to be considerably different from the last time we saw him because he has been conspicuous by his absence in trailers. I expect they're going to get their arses kicked in the first half an hour or so, leading to 2 hours of time travel shenanigans around past Marvel films, altering the time line or preventing whatever happened from happening, before a final showdown with Thanos where people die and the world mourns its heroes.

I think Marvel has been clever in their use of the Hulk since the failures of the first (second) film, but I think they've missed an opportunity by not scheduling another film.

But all of that is to come in the months ahead. I have to avoid all the trailers for the new Spidey film now...

So, 22 films across 11 years and by and large the majority have been great fun - a worthy franchise in many ways. My biggest worry however is the disappearance of my sense of wonder. I accept I'm not the age range the people at Disney are aiming at, but I am the silver generation of comics; I represent the new grandfathers who can introduce their bunch of kids to the delights of comics and comicbook films. I'm not even sure I've got that excited about many of them; possibly the reason I was so disappointed by Captain Marvel was my sense of expectation was destroyed inside ten minutes. I'm trying to wrack my brains for the last Marvel film I genuinely got excited about? I don't feel a nerdy sense of ownership; I can live with the necessary changes to stories and history, in general I've been more than happy with how characters I was never fond of have become integral to everything and have excellent actors making them believable - it's why Captain America, Iron Man and Black Widow have been so powerful and important to theirs and others' stories. It's how they fit into a world of Thunder Gods, rampaging gamma monsters and universe-bending Titans.

The problem I'm having is I'm not even sure I'm enjoying them as much any more. Part of the reason I fell out of love with comicbooks was over exposure mixed with the realisation that I'd subscribed to a never ending story; like a drug I was hooked on reduced to a decreasingly lower quality, massively diluted. I go into each film hoping for something that blows me away and it doesn't really happen any more. Have I reached peak blockbuster movie? Is there just too much superheroness everywhere and not enough on the page, where it started?

To be fair, for me, the next Spider-Man film holds slightly more interest than the next Star Wars film. I just hope that the Marvel films success doesn't end up making them as meaningless to me as other film franchises I can't fathom.

***

Game of Thrones? Meh again. It was all right. Not everyone I disliked died and some I liked did. It was a reasonably satisfying conclusion if not a bit rushed. Like Brexit, not everybody was going to be happy with the conclusion.

Lucifer returned to Netflix with a 10-part series and yet another cliffhanger ending - ish. It kind of crossed the Moonlighting line in the penultimate scene of what was an entertaining, if a little rushed, series and one wonders if another series will happen. If so, I'm betting this season's hellish ending is soon brushed over and we return to crap murder of the week. It's great fun for all its faults.

Doom Patrol - watch it; just watch it. Series of the year.

Shameless US - Fiona left. I said she'd be better off gone and she finally went. It should have been the ending of the series because in a way it felt like the logical conclusion - pretty much back to how it originally started but totally different.

Next up - expectations to be dashed by Godzilla: King of Monsters. Or possibly Stranger Things crossed with a kaiju version of Strictly. I never knew Millie Bobby Brown was British; that rather blew me away (more than Captain Marvel, anyhow...)

The Boys which could be the nail in the superhero series coffin or take it somewhere new.

And catch up on the ½ dozen things we've procrastinated about over the last year: season 3 of Mr Robot and Daredevil and eventually Agents of SHIELD when I'm sure it won't spoil Endgame. That Good Omens looks like it should be great, so I expect it'll be awful - that kicks off on Friday.

The most important TV of the century so far is on BT Sport on Saturday night. I expect it will define the rest of my life or shatter it for the summer, at least...

Pop Culture is Dead to Me 5: Some Things and another Thing

It's time to wander through the trichome-lined walls of my brain once again as I open my occasional bag of opinions on current televisual and cinematic wassnames...

Indulge me. Sometimes I simply need to kick back and do something I used to do for a living - speculate about trivial bollocks. It doesn't happen very often - I fancy playing golf more often but I don't do that either - and I wondered if I still had it in me and if I haven't it might be fun to speculate...

Now the Disney/Marvel/Fox 'merger' has been finalised it means the return of certain properties into the MCU or Marvel Cinematic Universe. This means that (Disney) Marvel can now use the X-Men and all related characters and The Fantastic Four and (I believe) most of the related characters; this would include Dr Doom, Galactus, Silver Surfer, but probably not She-Hulk (I don't know why, I might be wrong, I watch so much shit on You Tube).

Historically, the FF were the start of the Marvel Universe, so in an attempt to introduce them into an extant MCU would possibly be a bit of stretch (if you'll pardon the pun); also the X-Men's existing (but soon to be defunct) universe is most definitely not part of the same universe that houses the Avengers; the X-characters are fundamental elements of their reality.

To confuse purists, the MCU has The Inhumans yet the FF was the comic the Inhumans were introduced in and the one I used to associate them with the most. The MCU can use the Peter Parker Spider-Man and related characters, but other characters belong to Sony (Venom, Black Cat, certain villains). The waters are already muddy without really adding to it by introducing new elements that simply can't be... new.

I expect at some point - it might have already been hinted at in Avengers: Endgame (but I haven't seen it so no spoilers) - where all these different realities will merge into one and it won't only change things, it'll allow back stories to be told, new origin films and return any heroes no longer in the films to return, as new-look.

This would have been longer but I wrote it before Captain Marvel came out and I figured several months later I should be as superficial as any good click bait...

There have been some standout TV shows this year, so far, many with a superhero tinge and rammed full of humour done in a way that works. The Umbrella Academy was unknown to me and it didn't do anything I thought it would. It's an exasperating series - without giving any spoilers away - that delivers more than enough to keep you hooked, but leaves just a little too much for a sequel which I'm not sure has been green lit yet. It's bloody awesome, but it leaves you with a shit load of questions.

The Tick opened his wings again and became more grand. The almost theatrical (as in stage) feel to the first series was replaced by something much bigger and bolder. There was the return of familiar jokes and it meandered its way through 10 episodes like a bull on acid in a cushion shop while introducing an entire Tick universe to ogle at. It is brilliantly absurd and I highly recommend it, but you need to see season #1 or #2 will make no sense at all.

Old favourites in our house are having a hard time in many ways; the latest season of The Walking Dead really feels rudderless and could soon become the 21st century's version of V. Remember that? By the time they got to the end, extras had stepped up to play lead characters, the main cast were like rats from a sinking ship. The series needs to die and in many ways so does the franchise. Fear the Walking Dead was better than its parent last season, but that's because it unshackled itself from the angst and got a bit black comedy. There is literally no future for these shows.

Game of Thrones is coming thundering to a conclusion and while I thoroughly enjoyed the later seasons for the spectacle alone. As a fan of the books, I know I'm never going to read them because it isn't going to finish, so this has been fun - after a fashion.
I'm puzzled by it and I don't think there will be resolution. I'm still none the wiser as to the motives of the Ice King or even who he was, really. The mystical side seems to have been underplayed to the point of it being a tedious side story that needed completion. The dragons do not appear to be much of an asset unless it's frying innocents and so many good characters have had their stories curtailed by the need for completion. This final season so far - I have one to watch - seems... convenient, almost an unjust finale. I have no idea what will happen, I don't think I care, I do think Jon Snow (err nerr, Jon Snerr) will go back to the North and that's as far as I'm going with my predictions. It's been too quick, shoddily written and kind of jumped the shark in odd ways.

Lucifer is back and looking far more lavish, with a bigger budget and the same cheap, tackiness I've grown to love about this utterly dreadful series. All ten fell last week on Netflix and reaction is positive. As for resolutions, part of me wants this to be it, even if they could really go for it and do something really weird. I also want someone, at some point, to point out that Lucifer might be the angel of death, but he was once simply an angel and a very important one at that. There's a great scene in the second episode of the new season where Chloe asks him how he could be who he was and he replies, 'It was my job.' The thing that makes Lucifer possibly one of the best crap TV shows for yonks is Tom Ellis; he is simply brilliant and this new series seems to have remembered the charm he had in the very first season, which gave the show its character.

As usual there are a stack of things we haven't got around to watching and things we're finally getting through now it's the summer. I sometimes wonder what my fellow TV nerd friends must think when they learn that I don't watch one of my all time favourite TV series as soon as I can - hey, I haven't seen Captain Marvel or Endgame yet and I'm avoiding most spoilers; I have ideas based on snatched headlines and if I can keep it that way... In many respects, we've embraced the box-set culture and as a result we have everything from Fleabag to last year's second season of Flowers to catch up on. Over the last couple of weeks, we've been working our way through season #9 of Shameless US. It has consistently been one of my favourite series since its second season and I know that it's been renewed for a tenth season. It has become a grower in the US and now has a huge following thanks to syndication.

This ninth series has felt like it's time to stop and the first cracks in the cast are showing. Every season, the character Lip has pretty much had the best stories; he has been one of the most likeable rogues TV has ever created and in the US version he sticks around and as a result he has really become the central character - flawed, brutally human, alcoholic at 20 and an absolute pillar of decency and he's driven this latest season. It has been good to see the two youngest finally get interesting stories, far more enjoyable has been Liam's travails than his whiny sister Debby. But the main reason for the decline has been the two main reasons for its success. Fiona and Frank Gallagher played by Emmy Rossum and William H Macy have dominated this show from the start, but as the years have gone on, the devilishly brilliant Chicago Frank Gallagher has slowly been morphing into his UK equivalent. He has had more and more outlandish stories in a series that seemed to only have one every year - one slightly inexplicable unlikely event - but now has him lurching from one comedy set-up to another. He has had his moments this year, oddly enough mainly with his daughter Fiona, two actors who are rarely seen in the same scene for the last few years. The best line in the series for years was when he told her at the bar, "The difference between us is simple, I'm a happy drunk, you're a mean drunk. You're just looking for a fight." As he watched his daughter finally descend down the path he chose many years before.

However, all of this is just a preamble...

I watched the 13th (of 15) episode of a new TV show on Saturday and for the following fifteen minutes or so I considered that it was possibly my favourite show on at the moment. It shouldn't be; in many ways it's slightly more ludicrous than the Umbrella Academy; it's definitely not The Tick, even if it out-weirds the Tick by a country mile; it is something of an enigma, especially for me and I think it might be one of the best things to hit the screens for a long time. It has problems, but I don't know if they are problems or just part of the journey...

I'm not a fan of DC TV series. I don't watch Gotham. I'm not into Arrow or Flash. I stopped watching DC-related shows with Smallville. Nothing I saw from the few episodes I've watched held any interest. So when Titans came along I simply ignored it and probably would anything else that came along. DC TV for me = meh.

You ever get that feeling? It's happened with music and books; where I've judged it by its cover or title or simply because... When I saw that DC was releasing a Doom Patrol series my initial reaction was meh. But when it was released, I was quick to get hold of it. I'd had a feeling that it was probably going to use the Grant Morrison template rather than the Arnold Drake one and while I'd never read an issue of that, despite being right in the middle of my comics period, the idea of it being weirder than average appealed to me.

Before I continue; people who watch Titans will have been introduced to the Doom Patrol in the fourth episode of that series. Forget that ever happened because this is not the group of individuals who appeared in that (and I can't understand why they did it that way and then changed it so much unless it's another Doom Patrol and this one exists in a reality where Titans don't...).

Doom Patrol loosely is:
Cliff Steele's brain encased in a robotic body. Cliff Steele was a boorish NASCAR driver and minor celebrity. He's voiced by Brendan Frazer, who, in the flashback scenes he's in is looking fat and oafish. Robotman is loud, tactless, bombastic and a little bit mad. His story is dealt with in an very interesting way, partly involving a rat gaining revenge.
Rita Farr - former B list Hollywood actress who was a bitch of a bitch is like the team's Margot Leadbetter. During the filming of a blockbuster, an accident means she has no control over her body and can simply turn into a puddle of ... well, her. She now has a degree of control, but is haunted by her past. She is Elastic Girl.
Larry Trainor is a closeted gay test pilot who has an accident that should have killed him but he walks away badly disfigured and connected to a negative energy being. Larry is also riddled with guilt about his own past and having to accept that the energy being is actually part of him.
Crazy Jane has 64 multiple personalities and it seems that every single one of them has a superpower, although that isn't clear and we've only seen a few on the surface. She's a blindingly brilliant character played by an actress who takes on each personality extremely well. Jane is possibly very, very powerful.

Then there's Dr Niles Caulder, their mentor - of sorts - and reason all of them were together. Caulder is really a man of mystery who appears to have several sides and has as many enemies as friends. He plays a big part in the series but is only in it for a few episodes because he's abducted by...
Mr Nobody is the chief antagonist, a devious, scheming manipulator with a fragmented body and mind who is also extremely powerful. He has been pulling the strings, in more ways than one, since the opening episode.
He was also the reason that a character who isn't on the Doom Patrol roster in comics was brought in (or was he?). Cyborg, from the Justice League feels like the only character that has been shoehorned into this series. From his debut in episode #2 to his complete ineffectiveness throughout the series, despite putting himself up as some paragon of virtue, may well have been a manipulation by Mr Nobody - but I think he's unwanted extras.

There are other characters: Willoughby Kipling - a chaos magician; Cyborg's dad Silas Stone, who has been made deliberately obtuse and potentially nasty, Flex Mentallo, the original Doom Patrol, The Bureau of Normalcy, Danny the Street, a donkey that vomits other dimensions, King Ezekiel of the cockroaches (literally), Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, the Beardhunter and enough weirdness to make you know with all your heart you aint in Kansas no more.

It is just totally wrong for a superhero series. It's definitely 18 rated in places; deals with issues you would never expect to see and it's hammed up to the eyeballs, yet it's quite brilliant. By the time you get to the 13th episode you will have become hooked or given up. My wife gave it one episode and decided it wasn't for her. I was almost ready to join her after the second because Cyborg was such a jarringly wrong presence (which might be key to why Mr Nobody doesn't want him there), but I stuck with it and it just got under my skin. It's like no other superhero series I know; especially one where the baddie essentially ignores the fourth wall.

Long may it stick around if it's as odd as it has been.

Anything else wasn't worth mentioning or I haven't seen it.