Our TV has, since my last entry, been thin on the ground; or I've forsaken this usual format of discussing TV and film by going into a longer format, but there's a wee bit to cover here.
Ozark has finished and after an absolute rollercoaster of a ride for 3½ seasons, it was all kind of underwhelming. I had a good idea about how it could have ended, but that got shot to pieces in the final episode - literally and metaphorically.
The thing that really hit home about the series is how, eventually, everything was run by women and the power drove them absolutely bat-shit crazy, in one way or another. Ultimately, it was a series about victims - a vast slew of victims, spread far and wide. Apart from the general disappointment of the final half season, it did leave you thinking that these were just the first victims and there will many more to come in the fictional world of the Byrdes.
Overall, I'd recommend this as a 5-star entry into the must-watch box-sets. We watched it all over the space of six to eight weeks and it is best watched like that, in blocks with a break for a few days.
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There is isn't much I want to say about Fear the Walking Dead apart from - for the love of all that's sacred, stop it now!
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And following on from that sentiment, just what was the purpose of Picard season 2? The trailers made it look like a reworking of ST: The Voyage Home with added Borg and it ended up being a load of sentimental old shite.
Coming off the back of the absolute pile of wank that Disco Very has become/always was [delete as necessary], we hoped that Picard would at least live up to its hype and be a jaunt around time, like the much-loved episodes of Next Generation, but instead we got a jelly mould stuffed full of ick.
By the time we got to the last few episodes, I was doing it out of some misplaced loyalty and the wife was knitting. I've heard a rumour there will be a third and final series, reuniting the NextGen cast. I hope there isn't.
So, not knowing when we're beaten, I said, "Do you fancy watching ST: Strange New Worlds?" to the wife and she said, 'If we have to,' and I fell asleep three times in the opening 30 minutes, didn't really have a clue what was going on in the last 15 minutes and decided we wouldn't bother with it ever again, ever.
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Jodie Whitaker's penultimate Doctor Who caper came and went in a flurry of what the actual fuck? Moffatt's end can't come too soon and Whitaker is now as annoying as I can imagine Sylvester McCoy became to certain Whovian factions. It's just worse than awful.
I don't know who this new Doctor is, I'm happy, but slightly bemused, that he's black. Yes, it's absolutely time for a black Doctor, and I know we've already got one - a black one - but I feel we needed at least another woman so Whitaker didn't look like a nod to tokenism. I hope whoever replaces Gatwa will be another woman - a ginger woman - otherwise it loses something and frankly it can't afford to lose much more...
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I went into relative length about Moon Knight in another blog and have already given you my thoughts on Ms Marvel, which lands in less than a month and yet there has still only been two definitive trailers and neither was greeted with overwhelming positivity. I'm wondering about the viability of the MCU TV brand at the moment. We have some interesting things on the horizon, but something has to be pretty good for it to get out of this downward spiral of interest. Hawkeye is 'unlikely' to get a second series due to poor take up on it among Disney+ subscribers. I really think Loki's getting one because it ties into the build-up of Kang the Conqueror being the next big bad. Yes, I know he [Kang] is next scheduled to appear in the third Ant-Man film, which isn't the most auspicious of big screen debuts, but there's method in this madness. An old comic ploy of having an important character turn up in an unimportant comic book.
Kang will ultimately be the Thanos from 2024 to whatever conclusion they reach in and around 2027, probably with a fifth Avengers film. The multiverse isn't a McGuffin, it will play a central role in stories and will ultimately be the reset button Marvel will need to effectively reboot again in 2030. That is if they're still a viable product...
Marvel's problem, and I say this having read many reviews of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, some with spoilers, which I'm really not bothered about, was whatever Marvel did after Endgame they were onto a hiding to nothing, so whatever they turn out that makes money there's going to be the whiff of triumph. I expect the aforementioned film will end up being an interesting but somehow empty experience, or I might really like it. I have to say that I forecast in these blogs who the villain of the film would be two years ago and I was spot on; it was the most signposted thing ever.
I hypothesised somewhere else, in a different medium, how I would have solved the problem had I been Kevin Feige and I've made a few tweaks to it to share here:
The contractual obligation of certain films after Endgame obviously had to be addressed, however a more sensible approach to launch the next phase of Marvel films might have been not to have an Eternals film, but to have had a Captain Britain film instead!
I know the Eternals was a stepping stone to the next galactic adventure/story and doesn't really touch on the Multiverse, but had it instead been a film about Captain Britain and specifically how he's the Captain Britain of Earth #whatever and he's called into action to help prevent a multiverse-spanning villain called Mad Jim Jaspers from destroying the fabric of space and time, then it might have been an absolute stonker. Imagine the fun you could have with Jaspers causing a warp across the multiverse allowing things to wander in to worlds they don't belong, or that he is going from one to another changing them into his image. He is able to do this because he has already created the ultimate superhero killing machine, the Fury, who wipes out all resistance in the wake of Mad Jim. Imagine that?
In my idea, our Captain and a team of other heroes (Black Knight, some others known, some not) manage to vanquish the Fury after it decides that its creator - Jaspers - is a bigger threat than the heroes it was programmed to despatch and as a result the world is subsequently changed... Except, here's the sting in the tail and the thing that Marvel could have done and really shook things up; throughout the film, you get the impression that it's set in the no-too-distant past, possibly around the turn of the century. There are very few indications when it's actually set, but at the conclusion, those watching will see the events of the film took place in 1989. Was this the MCU or a story from another multiverse?
Yes, it's essentially Alan Moore and Alan Davis's story that ran through a number of Marvel UK comics in the 1980s, but it's an almost perfect story to change everything but leave it essentially the same. It introduces you to a different aspect of the multiverse - a champion for each level - and concludes with the warp having affected the MCU. What were the Warpies in the comic become Muties - mutants.
Then, when Kang comes along and starts manipulating time, because that's what he does, you have a doorway into aging your new generation of muties, possibly by something he does that merges the two realities.
You can still have your multiverses of madness and your No Way Homes, but instead of some magically contrived method of making it happen, you have a physical entity explaining it and why, and introduce some new characters to the MCU without a) it feeling slightly forced in the wake of Endgame and b) you give everything else a common thread even if people choose not to watch other films or TV.
It would have given Marvel an easier way into doing films that don't appease the die-hard superhero fans because they could sew Easter eggs throughout the films, which wouldn't detract from the casual viewers enjoyment (or lack of) but would give them something to rant about on YouTube for a few months.
But they didn't and we're left with something that resembles Marvel Comics in the 1970s. I now think of the MCU films as everything up to Endgame was before Marvel increased their cover price to 20¢ - circa 1970 - and everything after doesn't seem to have the same... feel. There's some people out there around my age who will understand that analogy, for those of you that don't; when Marvel increased the cover from from 15¢ they also redesigned the entire cover, with a jazzed up 1970s feel, which I now look back at and wish they'd never changed. I don't dislike the 1970s redesign; it's classic, but it felt strange because the content seemed to change; it seemed to become smaller, less rich. It felt more contained, which is why I look at pre-1970 comics with more of a fondness than any other era. The films feel a little like that; like one era has ended and the next one isn't quite my cup of tea.
They're not making them for me, but they do need repeat audiences and if you're going to have another sprawling Thanos-linked type story, at least make it coherent from the start; this isn't a TV series, despite some of the obvious connections. I sense an air of trepidation around Thor: Love & Thunder, like it needs to be both a massive hit and get things on some kind of track.
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However much I might hypothesise about the MCU, it is absolute Shakespeare compared to Sony's extended Spider-verse. Having sat through the 96 minutes of Morbius wondering why they even made it, all I can think is that some day soon, Sony's utter horse shit comics film making will cease and we will not be subjected to them again.
To be fair, this wasn't the utter shite I expected it to be, it was actually a whole different load of shite with substandard, fuzzy and almost unintelligible special effects. Jared Leto really can't act and someone should realise this very soon. Matt Smith makes a Matt Smith-like villain and these films could really do with script writers who can, you know, write, preferably stories that make sense.
The 'thinly-veiled' multiverse reference/allowance/made-no-common-sense-bit at the end just posed more questions no one wants answered and leaves you wondering if Sony will be allowed to play with the actual Spider-Man and if they can or do, how will they be able to look themselves in the mirror in the morning...
And this on the back of the second Venom film, which felt more like a dark and broody remake of The Mask than a realised feature film. The Sony Spider-verse films - with the animated one as the exception to the rule - all feel a little as though they're there to cash in on a tenuous link rather than with any artistic conscience. Looking ahead at planned features and given the quality of those so far, one has to wonder why they're even considering it.
The Sony Marvel franchise is simply defiling the already waning name of superhero films.
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