Pitch 2: Daria 2015

DARIA 2015

So long as there are bright, sullen teenagers who think their classmates are imbeciles and that they know better than their parents and their teachers and everybody else, there's gonna be room for a Daria on the airwaves.

And that brings in a specific

MOOD AND HUMOUR

The original Daria traded in black humour and barbed words. We plan to take this further than the show used to. We already know the market can have darker humor than 1997 would allow – Adventure Time has running gags about Princess Bubblegum running a police state, Bob’s Burgers is upfront about the Belchers having a loveless marriage of convenience, even Scooby Doo was able to do a straight-up Saw pastiche. The way is clear.

Why go for broke? In this we’re going back to the first season of Daria, the original plan for the show. The show got less nasty as it went on and more prone to give characters some dignity, but S1 was acidic. This is the one where Daria and Jane are laconic about a woman having a hyperglycemic shock in front of them; where the Morgendorffers don’t always seem to like each other that much; where Jake Morgendorffer mutters that he hopes all his military school peers died in ‘Nam; where the kids are taking bets on when their history teacher will have a heart attack. This was the foundation of the show. This was the worldview that Daria’s pessimism was built for, and S1 had episodes like The Lab Brat, Road Worrier, and The Misery Chick, which are seen as the top eps by fans.

And that was in 1997! The original Daria also aired during a period of economic growth for the United States, while 2015 is a time of economic recovery many people aren’t feeling. Daria groused that college applications were about money and what clubs you’d been in, in 2015 kids like her are grousing that they’ll end up with hideous debt for the chance of a ‘good job’. The future hasn’t looked bright for a few years now.

In this kind of soil, black humor’s got to be blacker yet.

And black humor is all you can do in the face of

THE MORGENDORFFERS

Daria is pretty much as she was on the old show: irreverent, sarcastic, outright misanthropic, and someone who’d be a really unpleasant person to watch if she wasn’t very funny. Despite the passage of time, there’s no appreciable change to her character – sarcastic cynics are always in fashion – or clothing – which is always out of fashion.

What has changed is the mass proliferation of the Internet since the original series.  This provides Daria with opportunities to write fanfiction and connect with other people who aren't immediately in front of her. So we now have the room to consistently poke and prod and scrape at her insecurities about the future profession in which she seems most interested in a way the old show rarely did.  Today, Daria can put up some form of her writing for all the world to see, maybe even flog some of it cheap as an e-book, if she wants.  Hell, she could just be grinding out certain kinds of fanfiction for Kindle Worlds. 

But when we meet her, she’s not. What’s stopping her? The answer is that if Daria actually made a stab at it, she might fail. Her identity is built around being smarter and better than the venal idiots she’s surrounded by. She’s smart and has some ethics deep down somewhere, but she’s also lazy.

If she hadn’t met Jane Lane (of which more to come), she’d spend most of her time reading and posting on Sick Sad World (which is an unholy combo of Cracked and conspiracy theory sites). Well, more of her time. Jane is the first friend Daria had in meatspace. Jane can take her to places outside of her room and isn’t going to commiserate about writer’s block. She’s the kick up the ass that Gotham needs right now. Over time, Daria will do things.

Deep down, Daria has a rather harsh sense of right and wrong. Mainly a sense of what’s wrong. Hypocrisy is the Great Satan. This judgmental streak is both a weakness – she often refuses to see, or care, why someone fudged their values, and she won’t bend even when she should – and a strength, as Daria will not bend when she shouldn’t either.

Her parents, Helen and Jake, have basically despised each other for years, but instead of splitting up like wise people, she got pregnant and the “OH SHIT LET'S BE ADULTS!” gene kicked in.  They accidentally spawned a second daughter a year and a half after the first.  They're in too deep to turn back now, yo. 

They met in the early '90s, a time we’ll occasionally flashback to.  Helen was kinda like Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, while Jake was kinda like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites.  If that coupling always seemed to you like it was doomed to go bang on some back desert highway and leave both parties hiking back to civilization in sullen silence, well, have some more material to support that idea. By 2015, they sleep in different rooms most of the time – at least sometimes lying to themselves about the real reasons why -- and are, in a very real sense, just running down the clock until both girls go to college and they can pull the plug on this miserable-farce marriage while they're both still young enough to regroup. (They may not last that long…)

Helen's type-A personality led her from a brief period of post-graduation slacking to LSATS, law school, and (eventually) a high-stress, high-workload lifestyle that keeps her from her family.  She’s guilty for taking work that keeps her from her children and also guilty that she isn’t guilty about doing even more work. High-stress, no-sleep cases are her cocaine. This has led her to recently make partner at a corporate law firm -- Vitale Horowitz et al. -- with a lot of clients in D.C.  As a result, the Morgendorffers have picked up stakes and moved cross-country to Lawndale, an up-ish class suburb in south Montgomery County, Maryland.  In-family response to the move has been mixed. Helen's breakneck legal schedule is also a great excuse for her to not come home or be around Jake, as it does keep her reliably Busy With Other Things. 

Jake's Alternative Nation disdain for sincerity and doing things with meaning, and his ironic embrace of pop culture detritus, has kept him employed as a pop-culture blogger with a regular gig at cutesy-trendy site Buzzdome.  He gets to rant about how stuff these days doesn't mean anything, man, and revisit old stuff, which is always cooler now than it used to be. The rants are vapid and facile, which is why he’s one of Buzzdome’s hottest properties. His other target for rants is his father, a controlling, emotionally abusive bastard – rants his family tune out because they’ve heard it so many times before, and he always gets distracted midway through, anyway. Every time we hear a rant, it’s darker than the last one. (Eventually, Daria's gonna sit up and go, “What?!”) Deep down, he knows there are problems at home so he spaces out and talks about inane things as a way to pretend it doesn’t exist. 

Having these two as parents has had several impacts on Daria. The first is that they’re usually absent and when they do show up, it’s usually to prod Daria into doing things in a misguided, guilt-driven burst of Parenting!  Daria learned to dismiss and distrust authority – and how to sneak around it without it noticing – at an early age. The second impact is that Daria’s not the only writer in the family. That’s something for Jake to bond with her over. It also means 2015 Helen’s going to be warning her off the profession on principle.  "Do SOMETHING with your life, Daria, that isn't sitting around on the couch all day watching old commercials and blogging about why they're better than today's.” 

 

Helen has two sisters, Amy and Rita Barksdale; one is uncannily similar to an older Daria, the other is into traditional marriage and she’ll keep having them until she gets it right. None of them have ever gotten along. Middle-class resentments built up throughout the Barksdale family line like a very whiny tumor and it’s only gotten worse with time as Amy has turned out to be the rich one. And she's made it look easy, so – like – Helen, who works sixty to hundred hour weeks on behalf of some of the worst white-collar fuckos in America, is just even more furious.  We hate it when our friends are successful.  We hate it even more when our smart-assing, mouth-offing, shit-disturbing baby sisters seem to cash in like nothing and don't care about being generous with it for all of her other relatives.

Amy loves that this drives the rest crazy.  It's elevating family duty to the level of master-class trolling. Daria rarely sees Amy and when she does, she wants to be her. Wonder what happens if the two of them are stuck together for any length of time, or if Daria ever wants more from Amy than Amy seems willing to give…?

The infamous Quinn is pretty much as she was on the show but the internet has made her even more Quinn than before. Social media is her fiefdom and she’s an absolute ruler: she has followers across the Earth. Thanks to advertising and print-on-demand merchandise, she gets an income for her vapid utterances. She’s everything Daria loathes and the fact she’s successful –despite Quinn’s media being genuinely bad – makes it worse. In this, Daria is her mother’s daughter. Amy greatly loathes Quinn too, more than is probably healthy for an aunt, even though Quinn is actually closer to her (successful and go-getting re: money) than Daria is. That’s likely why Amy has a problem with her. 

Rita likes her though and Quinn likes Cool Aunt Rita! Her boyfriends are cool!

Being a media producer also means Jake has common ground with her, just as he does with Daria. That’s another point of conflict. Helen looks at Quinn’s success in all fields and pushes Daria to be more like her sister – what we’ll only later learn is that Helen pushes Quinn to be more like her sister academically and Quinn responds to that the same way Daria does.

She’s actually of above-average intelligence but she never uses it because she never has to. Quinn doesn’t want to use her intelligence because she’s built up Brain =/= Popular in her head. This will not last. Age will challenge her.

Quinn is constantly on dates, which are passionless ways for her to get material gain and extra popularity. There are charts on which boy gets the best tactical gain. Quinn is actually gay but, much like with thinking, she never had to think about this so she didn’t; she’ll work it out eventually and then have the problem that if she’s ever openly gay, she’ll have to rework all those charts.

With Quinn comes

THE FASHION CLUB, a streaming video collective – they’re Channel Awesome discussing how R-Patz’s girlfriend isn’t good enough for him and did you see the polka dots on Princess Kate's maternity dress?  Tack-ee!

Sandi Griffin is the alpha bitch of the gang or was until Quinn showed up, being more charismatic and less (openly) nasty than her. Sandi’s not popular because her personality gets in the way and, since she wants Quinn inside the tent pissing out, likes to kick downwards. (Quinn is very carefully and nicely-nice trying to snag the top spot from Sandi without it being obvious – because in Quinn’s ethical code, it’s okay to do that and to mess with Sandi but openly being mean and shanking someone? That’s gauche.) Her mother Linda, one of Helen’s social rivals, is constantly pushing Sandi to not be so nice and fluffy.

Tiffany Blum-Deckler doesn’t get kicked because Tiffany Blum-Deckler is dull and apathetic – because looks and money meant she never had to get a personality – and there’s no fun in kicking her. Stacy Rowe has an undiagnosed mental condition and is easily pushed around, so she gets a lot of kicking. Quinn doesn’t kick Stacy (much) so Stacy idolizes her to a really creepy extent. Stacy isn’t gay too, she’s just one of those fans.

(Tiffany is actually out-Dariaing Daria and out-Quinning Quinn, which is one of our never-explicitly-stated consistent background jokes.  She's a very bright kid who thinks this is the shallowest crap ever, but it's an easy and undemanding way to get some media profile and have something to point to for extracurriculars.  Furthermore, it leaves her time to read or pursue things she likes doing in a way that, like, being a cheerleader never would.  Her deadpan Steven Wright sarcasm reads as dull-witted apathy to people like Quinn and Sandi, who are too busy alpha-warring to notice that Tiffany's been right about every major fashion trend since this experiment began.)

Daria's best friend at Lawndale High School is Jane Lane.  With her, we get

THE LANES

who are still hedonistic bohemian wanderers.  The difference is now we have to be honest about the fact they're loaded.  If you couldn't logically afford that much random roaming -- or the evidently-canonical "here's a stack of blank checks, kids, you pay the bills whenever" trait -- without being loaded for bear in the mid-'90s, think about how much more money you'd need to do that now.  And THAT'S how much money the Lanes have.

Or “the Lawns”, as they were until a 19^th century family member changed the name. Keep that in mind…

  

There's an open question whether anybody told Jane or her brother if they’re loaded or if they're such latchkey kids -- with one or both parents reliably being Somewhere Else Completely, where Somewhere Else is often another state, country, or continent altogether – that all they really know for sure is the blank checks and each other. Both they and all their siblings are half-siblings 'cause Vincent and Amanda have what might be charitably termed an open marriage.

Jane draws a webcomic posted to Deviant Art.  The art's great for a sixteen year old but the writing's going nowhere fast.  (Daria is notably not going to ask to have a crack at the writing, even as the writing being poor comes up again and again in Season 1 – either S1’s end or S2 brings this to a head) Her art is constantly being influenced by new styles, and constantly ripping said styles off, as she tries one out and gets bored and moves on and then back again. She’s the more adventurous of the Daria-Jane duo, forcing Daria to go outside to places because it’ll be good for a laugh.

Her genetic destiny is to become another privileged wandering bum just like the rest of them, unless something shakes her out of it. Daria, despite herself, is going to shake her and Jane is not going to be too happy about it. There will be barbed snark at dawn.

Trent is the decently talented guitarist and somewhat dubious vocalist for a King 810-style throwback aggro-nu-metal band named Mystik Spiral. Outside of music and “keeping it real”, Trent’s favorite things are narcolepsy and weed (which isn’t helping the Spiral much). Jane and Trent are unusually close for Lanes and have been, and still are, raising each other. The fact Trent and Jane are the only two around most of the time, and that Jane turned out halfway like a decent, normal person, tells us something about Trent.

Daria famously has a crush on Trent. It very rapidly goes away as she’s exposed to more of Trent.

Mystik Spiral can actually play their instruments, as the YouTube era has forced them to keep up with that much, but their songs are iffy, their lyrics are infamously terrible, and they've hitched their wagon to a non-starting musical style in the year 2015.  Drummer Max Tyler is from a nice, comfortable background and that’s terrible for him. He’s embraced self-destructive arseholitude, in the fashion of Geoff Tate, in the desperate hope it will make him a legit rocker. (It’s not working.) Nicky Campbell is their rhythm guitarist and keyboard player and DJ mix guy and basically any instrument that the others don’t want to do (he’s just about passable). He’s a single dad with loans to pay, from the dark side of the tracks and the spectre of a drug habit; Max loathes him because he wants to be him. Jesse Moreno is the bass player, Trent’s oldest friend, and co-founder of the band; handsome but dim. Very dim. He’s the one Trent actually hangs out with outside of the band as they’re on the same lazy wavelength.

Max the drummer keeps insisting on Spiral having a “criminale” image, again à la King 810, but as tough-guy crooks, they're about as believable as a giant pink unicorn crapping rainbows over Riyadh. Jake Morgendorffer thinks they rock because they remind him of an old garage band he was in and he keeps trying to hang with the cool young band kids.

Trent's on-and-off girlfriend Monique, on the other hand, is Going Places.  Her doom metal band, Darkest Dawn, has a contract and enough online buzz that they actually press limited-edition stuff for Record Store Day on real vinyl and people buy it.  She may or may not also have a bedroom/laptop solo black metal EP released under a mysterious pseudonym which got a big marketing blitz and focus from The Cool Kids. It's an academic question whether or not Trent was involved with the recording, but it's probably a source of contention between them she now has MULTIPLE record deals – and can, and does, actually tour a bunch – while he has a meme built around one of his crappy lyrics, of which nobody remembers the source.

Jane doesn’t think much of Monique – whenever she’s with Trent, drama ensues and Jane’s fed up of the reruns.  Daria is quietly jealous of her because Monique is putting effort into creative work and finding success, and that doesn’t reflect well on Daria!

All of our losers live in

LAWNDALE

Lawndale is where DC workers who are too good to live in DC live. Originally it was Launders Dale, founded by the Launders to transport tobacco (and profit off all those soldiers passing through wanting whores and booze in the Indian Wars). Illiteracy changed the name into Lawndale and the Launders into the Lawns. Told you to keep that in mind.

The modern town has housing clustered around the south, for ease of reaching DC. To the west, nearby but also a handy barrier between them & the next town of Oakwood, is the commercial area: the mall, the (remaining) local shops, and the local nightclub, the Zon. Halcyon Hills Corporate Park splits the middle. It isn’t actually on a hill and is a sad remnant of its former pre-2007 self. Most businesses left years ago and even after a recovery, nobody cares. Putting Halcyon Hills in led to the dreaded Seven Corners road network, the county’s most confusing intersection.

The town tends towards middle-class and upper-middle, with some very rich people in their own clusters. Rich-kid school Grove Hills is part of the town, looking down on everyone. In 2015, Lawndale is still mostly white but there’s more ethnic diversity than in 1997 Lawndale (because if it stays as white as that in the 2010s, it raises questions about what’s going on in Lawndale).

The public schools are south-east to be near the houses and keep the little bastards out of the way of the work commute. Most significant of these is

LAWNDALE HIGH

On the surface, it’s an up-to-date, glittery middle-class high school with strong sports teams and extracurricular. Underneath, the school budget has been stretched to breaking point and there’s a lot of stat massaging to keep the school looking good. Corporate sponsorship has been on since 2000 so welcome to a canteen sponsored by Ultra Cola. Lawndale High also boasts that it’s the safest school in the country because there’s somehow enough in the budget for bulletproof skylights.

The football team is good though! Those Lawndale Lions reflect well on the school, so Principal Li will do anything she goddamn can to ensure the team looks good and can keep playing. Gridiron is a minor god in Lawndale and only Mammon outranks it.

THE FACULTY are a complete mess.

Ruling the roost is Principal Angela Li. As in the original show, she believes in order, discipline, security measures Ingsoc would approve of, and finding whatever source of funding she can. These days, that funding obsession is going to play a lot differently though – the school needs that cash. She’ll always keep funding for security because her career dovetails with things like Columbine and the War on Terror, so she’s obsessed with the need for the school to be ready for an impending apocalypse. When Daria gets in the way of Li’s trains running on time, Daria’s gonna suffer.

Anthony DeMartino is the same old highly-strung, hypertensive, rage-fiend history teacher we know from before.  He came in with high ideals and the job has worn him down.  Him, we don’t need to change.  The only timeline update is that if we suggest a war helped screw him up, it was Iraq I instead of Vietnam.

The other significant teacher is Timothy O’Neill, who so wants to be the kindly, understanding mentor who really gets those troubled kids but unfortunately he’s a total idiot. With the passing of time, his New Age nature doesn’t quite fit. Instead, he’s trying to be trendy: he wants to talk with the hip lingo, reference things The Kidz will understand, and totally understands their trouble. (If any distraught teenager ever took him up on it, he’d have no clue what to do) Daria is someone he wants to help and, more venally, become her writing mentor because then he gets to be a mentor for a talent. Daria busts on him for fun and profit. He may be the most recurring antagonist of them all because Daria has to go his classes and there’s no escape. 

 

The third recurring teacher in the show was Janet Barch, who was a bitter strawman feminist after her husband left her. The strawman feminist angle was a bit iffy in the late 90s and it would look very dodgy in 2015, so we’ll drop that angle. Instead, her attitude has curdled into full-on depression and cynicism with life: there’s no hope, nobody’s coming to love you, only the void exists after death. She’s what Daria could become if Daria gets too into her angst.

The first episode introduced Mrs. Manson, the school psychologist. In 2015 she’d be a much bigger presence in the school and a character we’d keep seeing, as Li or O’Neill (or a pissed off PE teacher) try to label Daria as depressed and in need of counseling. As in the show, Manson’s going to be pushing Daria’s buttons and vice versa. She’s a recurring antagonist, pretty sure Daria’s not got problems but damn well going to find some because something about that girl just pisses her off. For Daria, Manson is a banal evil that, unlike Li, she can’t avoid. Manson forces her to stand and fight back.

As for THE STUDENTS, we have a confederacy of dunces.

Chief among them is Kevin Thompson, the quarterback. He’s much like Quinn in that he’s never had to be smart so he never tried. Being good at sports rewards him with friends, sex, and fixed grades, so sports is his whole identity. He’s actually good-natured and friendly – “the BMOC is Colonel Klink”, as the original character bible said – rather than the standard jock-bully character, but Daria would prefer he stop being friendly. To reflect the news stories we see more and more of, poor Kevin’s got genuine brain damage from all the football he plays and is going to get ‘dumber’ as the show goes on. (When we reveal what’s up, Daria’s going to feel like shit for busting on him)

Attached to Kevin is Brittany Taylor, bubbly and vapid head cheerleader. As with Kevin, she’s also cheery and friendly to Daria and it is pissing Daria off. Brittany treats her like a charity case. She’s not a bully, as she can’t fathom a school where she’s not popular.  Kevin and Brittany regularly cheat on each other, as in the original series. The original series also had Brittany repeatedly whacking Kevin – hard – and manipulating him at points, which we can either scrub or run with and say “yeah, Brittany’s an abusive girlfriend”. Coin toss!

Charles “Chuck” Ruttheimer III makes the leap from sleazy Hugh Hefner copy to being a full on Pick-Up Artist and Men’s Right Activist (complete with fedora). Chuck knows what the ladies like, which is bad lines and negging! When the ladies say “piss off Upchuck”, he sneaks off to rant about how bitches don’t appreciate nice guys like him. Daria is both his Lolita and his Satan, someone he is constantly trying to attract and constantly hating on for being a frigid bitch.

Jodie Landon and Michael “Mack” Mackenzie are unique in being smart kids, not creepy, and popular! Well, Mack’s popular since he’s the head jock. Jodie is perfectly nice and civil to everyone, engaged in all the clubs, has top grades, and is popular in the sense that everyone thinks she’s alright but don’t care too much. This time round we’ll give Mack a personality: his family are on the poorer end of the Lawndale school and to get where he wants to go, he knows he needs either an academic or football scholarship. (As was eventually stated in 2002) That means behaving and getting things done and, as a young black man, not seeming threatening or ‘bad’. In this, he’s a lot like Jodie but she’s got all this extra pressure coming from her parents: Andrew and Michelle Landon are high-stakes, high-achieving, high-income alphas and they expect Jodie to do twice as well. (Her parents are blue dog Democrats; they’d like to be Republicans but the not-so-hidden racism over Obama got noticed) Her time is monopolized for achieving.

This pressure is slowly driving Jodie to a nervous breakdown – she reaches out to Daria because Daria’s a smart girl she can work with, and because on some level she wants to be her and say “No I’m not doing this”. Mack is also going nuts as he represses every bit of anger and every frustration with a football team of idiots he hates (ESPECIALLY Kevin who thinks they’re best bros and keeps calling him “Dawg”), and it all festers in there like cancer. He doesn’t like Daria because she’s so fucking bitchy and why can’t she shut up.

As a nod to the older series, we’ll bring back the recurring (but silent) background character in Burnout – a background character modeled on the original character designer, Karen Disher. Burnout is the school stoner, silently walking about and reacting to things in the deep background; the Morn to Daria’s Deep Space 9.

There’s another school in the area and that school is

GROVE HILLS

It’s a fine old establishment school, an old money school. To keep its academics up, it offers scholarships to the best of the plebs. On the surface, all is calm and respectable and look at those grades! Just like Lawndale High, it’s 90% assholes – but these assholes are elitists who consider themselves better and smarter than you.

The original series mention an old money school called Fielding Prepatory Academy and a academic hothouse called Grove Hills – as Grove Hills is the one that got shown in an episode and had characters in it, we’re merging the two and using it as a recurring source of outside antagonists for Daria. Chief among them is Graham, a scholarship kid consumed with the desire to make millions from his brains & connections and his never-ending resentment for all the jocks at his junior high, but he’ll show them, oh yes. (Obviously he needs to run into Kevin.) Daria looks down on him, partly because she could easily be him and yet isn’t. He wants to look down on her for not being as good as him but first, he’ll have to prove it.

Who’d send their kids to a school with Graham? That’d be

THE SLOANES

They’re old money, the sort of old money that has some seedy origin but so far back that it got whitewashed. Angier Sloane used his money and school connections to become a lobbyist, then a government functionary in the 2000s, then right back to the family firm (that managed to whether the recession quite nicely, thank you) and working as a lobbyist again to keep the government functioning. At the same time he does this, he teaches his children to obey the law, be proper, and pay their dues.

Tom Sloane is smart, which means he knows his dad is playing silly buggers and it’s turned him cynical. He slums it in cheap clothes down the Zon, trying to separate himself from his background – but never so separate he can’t go back when he needs it. He’s clever, charming, easygoing, and has a massive paternal streak because that background tells. When there’s an argument, Tom will be calm and reasonable about how he was right and you were wrong wrong wrong.

As we know about Tom before we’re halfway into the series and we know how the Jane-Tom-Daria love triangle drama worked out, we’re going to dump that shit. Tom shows up as Jane’s casual boyfriend because they’re attractive cynics who click – they don’t last long as a couple because, well, look at the two of them but they still click enough to hang out. Daria and Tom pair up as we go along (but see below). The one thing that bonds Daria and Tom together is mutual disrespect and disillusionment with their parents and everything they ever taught them about morality, as from their perspective their parents don’t live up to it. Grumping all round!

The Landons sniff around the Sloanes too, as Andrew wants into the country club. Angier and Andrew got on quite well (until Angier says something iffy and then Andrew laughs uncomfortably).

Katherine Sloane dresses down, wants to help the local town, and asks everyone to call her Kay. She doesn’t let money and class get in the way of things; she knows those middle-class people are just like everyone else! She’s fine with Tom hanging out with Daria and Jane! “Kay” is nice but patronizing with it, like an elderly relative at your graduation who thinks you did so well even though you didn’t do a real degree. Daria, Helen, and everyone else in her way put up with it, as rather nice-but-patronising than “get a job and sort your life out”. (Jodie’s mum thinks Kay should be saying “get a job and sort your life out” more often)

Elsie Sloane is Tom’s fraternal sister and is the Quinn to his Daria. She’s jaded. She’s very jaded. She won’t, in fact, shut up about being jaded and how bad things are and how she’s above things. It’s all really a front and she’s doing it to seem more worldly than, deep down, she really is. Elsie believes Tom isn’t really rebellious because she isn’t and, therefore, he can’t be. For a while, she believes Daria and Jane are just part of this “faux-rebelliousness”. When Daria’s around too much longer, Elsie gets hostile: here’s someone who is actually jaded and means it. Nobody likes being shown up as a poseur. (Tom hates Elsie because he has to live with her all day, but Daria doesn’t actually care – which just ticks Elsie off more)

THE STORY PITCHES

1)      A photo of Daria ends up on the internet and she wakes up one day to find she’s the new popular meme (Grumpy Girl). Daria cynically attempts to make money off memehood only to find that requires skills she lacks, i.e. communicating to people. If she wants to make money, she’s going to have to seek help from an expert: Quinn. In the end, Daria sticks with her principles – hating Quinn – rather than selling out. In a B-plot, Mystic Spiral (with Jane as Greek chorus) discuss selling out. This plot ends with Max secretly trying to sell out but no one’s buying.

2)      Jake and Helen end up in an argument about who stops whom inviting whose relatives. Bluffs are called and the whole extended family shows up, keeping the Morgendorffers trapped with judgmental near-strangers they hate. (Except for Quinn who everyone loves and adores!) Jake and Helen see their relationship improve, briefly, as they gang up to fight off Rita and Jake’s brother-in-law. Daria meets Aunt Amy here and the two collaborate in trying to see who they can reduce to a screaming fit first.

3)      Trent and the band buy so much beer that Jane’s able to boost some. The popular kids find this out and suddenly Jane’s being invited to every party, dragging Daria along with her “because they don’t want you there”. Unfortunately, Jane’s starting to drift more and more into the popular circles and away from Daria – well, that’s unfortunate for Daria who starts debating whether to “sabotage” things to resume status quo. In the B-plot, the threat of Daria showing up is stopping the Fashion Club from getting Jane’s supply which means nobody shows up to their parties. Drastic measures must be taken…

4)      When the school stoner Burnout gets busted again, Ms Li goes all out to prove the school is drug free – which means Dr Manson has an opening to ‘investigate’ if Daria’s on drugs and ‘prove’ she needs help. Daria works with Jane to make out that she really does take drugs, hoping to give Manson enough rope to hang herself with, but backfires when she runs into the B-plot: Burnout was Barch’s supplier and she needs a new one.

5)      Our only straightforward remake: Daria and Jodie, as in S2 of the original series, are invited to Grove Hills. They’re both interested in going to a place with other smart kids until they meet the smart kids and decide better the devils they know. Why this episode? We get Daria and Jodie interacting properly for the first time and playing off each other; we introduce Grove Hills and its cast for later; and Tom goes there in the remake, so Daria gets to hang out with him separate from Jane for the first time. This will be useful later.

6)      Reality show mogul Val has come to Lawndale to film a pilot and the Fashion Club were meant to be the subject. Then Val decided that Daria was going to be a more interesting figure to follow. Daria goes along with it to piss Quinn off, only to find herself losing privacy and being pushed into a narrative that can be more easily sold (“can you argue with Jane?”). Her and Jane’s only hope is to be so mind-numbingly boring that Val never wants to come back. Meanwhile, Quinn and the gang are going all out to get attention back on them.

7)      The comedic misadventures of several students who are not our regular cast but have been showing up in the background in several episodes. (Plan it out in advance, we can arrange for several episodes to be playing out in the background here) Aside from being a fun gag, it shows us new angles on established characters and exactly what other people think of Daria – which is that they don’t actually notice she exists. (Quinn, they notice! Quinn is a monarch that bestows favors)

ARCS

We don’t have them in the sense you’re thinking of, except for THIS one:

Daria and Tom’s relationship will be hinted in S1 but pick up fully in S2. In the last episode of S2, Tom and Daria break up because… well, if you’ve seen the show, you’ll know the reasons. When the break-up happens, we start playing the mournful jazz cover of Say Something by Postmodern Jukebox and Hudson Thames https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZYGPn9iN1Y . “Say something, I’m giving up on you” as it’s clear what’s happening. Silence throughout the scene – Tom walks out on “feeling so small / I was over my head, I know nothing at all”. Daria close-up as she eats her pizza and tries to stay deadpan during the chorus. “Now I’m saying goodbye” and the credits start to roll. And no dry eyes – and if the series stops at S2, nobody will be forgetting that ending.

We call that arc “the first relationship”. Our ‘arcs’ are a deliberate, semi-planned version of what the show accidentally did (and Adventure Time has deliberately done), that the characters get older and that means things get more complicated and messy. Hence, the First Relationship and its outcome.

Beyond that, we just have our framework – Daria is aging – and our characters and our themes. That’s what keeps going forward. For Daria on her own, a recurring theme is that she claims she wants to be a creator and do things, but she does nothing while other people do. Daria’s going to have to put up or shut up. And once she makes her choice, she has to keep making it.

One recurring theme for everyone is that it’s hard to deal with the reality of daily life, so people just don’t. It’s much easier to be a smart ass (Daria and Jane), or avoid thought (Quinn and Kevin), or focus on the trivial (Jake), or make it someone else’s fault (Upchuck and Graham), or try to cover it up (Mack and Jodie), or just give up entirely (Barch and DeMartino). This doesn’t really work for anyone. Eventually, Daria has to stick with a flawed plan or try something else. 

What happens after Daria makes either of these big decisions? I dunno but it’ll be a lot of fun finding out!

A Note on Our Schedule

Now that we've posted the mammoth two-part pitch, we of Scratching the Pitch are preparing to settle into our standard update schedule.  Starting this week, and continuing until or unless we say otherwise, we update on Fridays.

Now you'll have something to slack off reading on the last day of your work week, and we'll have enough time to make sure what we write doesn't suck.

Everybody wins!

Pitch 1.5: MARVEL PHASE THREE, THE SECOND

You know what’s weird? When you plot out your fan-pitch over weeks and then, just before you do your second post, Marvel announce their Phase Three plans and they have the same films appearing in the same slots as your fan-pitch. But how?! 

DOCTOR STRANGE: JULY 2016

When we started this, word on the street was that Marvel was bypassing the origin story entirely. Now the word is that they’re back to explaining how he goes from arrogant surgeon to Sorcerer Supreme, while taking time in the press to demonstrate an apparent inability to distinguish between nature and supernature, comprehend quantum physics, or get what Arthur C. Clarke's maxim about sufficiently advanced technology was on about.

Either way, we plan to touch on the origin, but this isn’t a film about that. This is a film about some magical weirdo that goes on insane adventures: that’s the image that will be in the audience's collective head. This is what Strange does – and, more crucially, the kind of person he is – when he’s not mingling with all the other important heroes.

When we left off last time, Dormammu and Strange had both located an Infinity Stone.  It may be referred to here as the Soul Gem for various and sundry reasons.  For those who came in late or just don't care, of course, it's relevant solely as another Big MacGuffin of Vast Power which Dormammu – His Flaming Headness, Screaming Lord Flame, etcetera – can use to do all sorts of really horrific things to any number of people and places. 

He sends his minion Baron Mordo to retrieve it.  Mordo happens to be Strange's arch-nemesis, one of those classic “that guy's better than me I will never get over it and let it go” types, who goes out of his way to antagonize Strange on this very simple mission because he can't help himself.  Thus, he drags the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth directly into his master's scheme before Dormammu's ready for it.  (Dormammu.  Dormammu Dormammu.  Sounds funny, doesn't it?)

Strange and his crew have to stop him from doing that.  Pretty typical, in that sense.

Maria Hill shows up in the early scenes.  She and Strange touch base just long enough for people who don't hang on Marvel's every whim, but want to see the wizard, to comprehend that they're partners – and for us to establish that he's found one of the Stones and she'd love to tag along but mystical realms and magical creatures aren't really her bag.  And she's got custody this weekend, so maybe Little Daughter Hill's riding around on Strange's shoulders and trying to steer him with the points of his cloak while they're talking in his downstairs library with a ton of take-out cartons stacked up on a table. 

They're also talking about how they've pretty much hit the limits of what they can do out of The System, and it's not enough.  Hill has a couple of ideas she's going to try to put into play – some of those things she can do he can't which, as she reminds him, he hired her for – while Strange is off being, er, strange.  

The other thing going on in the background, suggesting a real torch is being passed? Tony Stark's been convicted of a bunch of charges in connection with the Ultron affair.  He's going to federal jail for a very long time for the Ultron mess.  He could probably try to beat it along Bucky lines, but crucially, he's not fighting it.

The main supporting cast for our adventure: Wong, Strange's long-term assistant; Scarlet Witch, his current apprentice, still dealing with how she's changed since Hydra got her, and since Age of Ultron happened, but taking pretty well to Strange's meditative approach in sorting herself out; and Clea, Strange's canonical love interest and protege – “disciple and lover” is the common refrain in certain eras.  As with more recent comics, she's his now ex-wife and ruling over the denizens of her home dimension, thereby allowing her to exist independently of Strange and us to carefully tiptoe around the often very queasy implications of that relationship.

The humans of our tale are going to be hard-working, ER-style doctors and nurses at Strange’s old hospital. Apart from a few minutes at the start of the film, we learn about Strange’s origins from his ex-colleagues' response to his return.  They remember him as a completely arrogant, high-handed son of a bitch who condescended to everybody, lost a few patients on the table but always had a reason it wasn't his fault because He Never Lost Patients, and when he busted his hands drunk-driving, he refused to take any of the other duties offered to him because they weren't good enough for Lord Strange. (Yes, ER fans, we're now saying he was worse than Rocket Romano, who made emergency medicine's life hell but took the job.) 

And now he's back in a giant cape with a huge medallion, dragging around a girl half his age everybody remembers from news coverage of that horrible Ultron business a while ago.  Oh, and he's saying weird things and making weird gestures with gloved hands.  Double oh, and he looks like he's ordering around some random Chinese-immigrant manservant.

They think he's as big a shit as he used to be and he's completely lost his mind.  To Wanda, and to the audience who just saw him getting piloted around a library by a six-year-old, it's an uncomfortable shock to find out this guy used to be that bad.  And the best is yet to come!

Mordo, of course, is also at the hospital, using it to send the Stone to Dormammu – and taking the hospital with it, all the way to the Dark Dimension. Maybe it's some kind of Ghostbusters made-of-the-right-materials deal.  Maybe it's ley lines centered under the hospital.  Either way, it's Spook Central, Basically, we go from Poltergeist-meets-ER to a grand old Ditko-era adventure to the farthest reaches of perspective and solid outlines.  Ideally, we’d start with practical effects and ER-style filming to give the real world a gritty-feeling verisimilitude and then go fully CGI, eye-popping green screen sets for the Dark Dimension so it looks and feels like somewhere else.

Dormammu’s plan, it turns out, has nothing to do with Earth.  Right now, he doesn't give a shit about the Earth or about besting Strange, who – bear in mind – is only here 'cause Mordo had to taunt him.  He wants to use the Infinity Stone to take back control of the Dark Dimension, at which point the Mindless Ones will be unleashed and it's bad times for the locals while the vile dictator reconsolidates power and makes the locals pay for their insolence. (Mussolini made the trains run on time.  Dormammu holds the Mindless Ones back.  Etcetera.)

This is how we meet Clea – a wise, noble ruler (and Dormammu's niece) who's in the process of being completely overrun when Strange and his gang drop out of the sky.  (Some of the cast will be a bit surprised Dormammu doesn’t want Earth; Strange says “it’s not all about you”)  Clea, of course, is giving Strange the side-eye when looking at Wanda 'cause she knows what Strange was like with her... and is probably pleased to find out he's learned from past experiences.

This ends in a big magical throw down but the key bit is going to be when Strange starts thinking of some rather dark methods – really nasty black- and blood-magic spells, mind-control spells to strip the will of some of Dormammu's guys to turn them into prospective assassins. This is Strange doing some real Phoenix Program shit, and he's clearly Going Wrong with it. Wong isn’t going to speak up against his friend and boss doing nasty shit, the hospital staff aren’t going to be in the conversation, Clea’s as desperate as Stephen and not at all surprised he's talking about it. It’s Wanda, having had a few looks inside his head with her powers, who stands up and says “No I don’t like doing this, it smacks of Ultron”.

This is a guiding point and theme: METHODS. Strange has become a better man not just because he wanted to be – we’re going to bring up that, in fact, he was a bit of a wanker after learning magic too.  Look at him fucking Clea when she was his first pupil!  What makes him a great man, what makes him a superhero and not just a guy with magic, is the way he uses that power. He’s not about the scary smack down.  He’s about minimal violence and smart work and looking out for people who haven’t got his power because his is so great it scares the pants off of him.  If Banner's story is about anger, then maybe Strange's is all about fear – fear of irrelevance, fear of ineptitude, fear of failure, fear of not being the best... and now it's fear about failing to save people, fear about the Asshole Within getting back out, and he didn't even realize it because he was too busy thinking about that Breaking Very Bad for the Greater Good crap which somehow never seems to work quite right.

Wanda is someone with the experience to call this out.

In the end, of course, Dormammu is defeated, the hospital is restored to the proper point in space-time, the Stone is back in Strange's lock-up, and when Maria Hill asks how it went down, Stephen Strange just says “went okay”.

In our mid-credits, we see Strange tracking down where the Orb of Agamotto is – and we all know from Thor it’s in Odin’s vault. Only Odin died in Thor: The Dark World and is being impersonated, so Strange finds himself unwittingly talking to… Loki.

In our other mid-credits, we see what Hill’s been up to: calling in every favour she has at the UN and former World Security Council to get a meeting with Councilwoman Hawley, who's very much landed on her feet as an even higher muck-a-muck at the United Nations.  Hill shows up with a massive stack of documentary evidence and a story about how honestly, with her track record, she wouldn't believe herself without proof, either. 

Hawley, convinced, hits on an idea and tells Hill she'll be put in charge of a secondary program the United Nations set up after Thor and the Chitauri hit in the space of two years: the Sentient World Observation and Response Directorate.  S.W.O.R.D.

Hill's last word on the matter is, in effect, why can't any of these agencies have a normal name?

THOR: RAGNAROK: MAY 2017

We were going to call it that because of that fake logo that had been floating around, and then Marvel does it too! But how do you do a Thor series and never do the Twilight of the Gods…?

There’s been an accident down in Hel. The Disir are loose. They’re undead cannibal Valkyries that were cursed by Thor’s grandfather Bor for oath breaking; they say if you speak their name, they appear and claim you. Now Heimdall sees that they’re devouring the souls of the dead, a horror greater than death for the Asgardians.

Thor decides he’s going to go into Hel in a solo mission to stop them. He’s Thor: he’s not going to risk anyone else. If he can find Bor’s shade in the underworld, he can learn how to defeat the Disir and bring that information make to Asgard. Strange, meanwhile, has shown up to get the Orb and he pushes himself into coming along as support. Navigating strange, dank, weird Other Realms is his metier, after all.

Down they go into Hel, all shadowy and creepy and desolate, as creepy as it can be on PG-13, and the Disir keep attacking out of nowhere. This is Sinister and Nightmare On Elm Street if The Warriors were in it. Strange and Thor are separated fast too, upending how the audience thinks they will go.

Unfortunately for all concerned, nobody knew the Orb of Agamotto wasn’t the only thing in Odin’s vault. So was the Infinity Gauntlet.

Now Loki, wearing his little Odin charm, doesn’t trust Thor or some mortal to stop the Disir (and at this point in the film the audience may feel he’s got a point), but once he was the subordinate of Thanos and he trusts that guy to be able to monster anyone he wants. So Thanos makes his first real appearance since Guardians of the Galaxy, and an appearance that marketing won’t tell you about. He has one Infinity Stone now (the Collector couldn’t stop him taking the Aether) and he wants the Gauntlet. Loki gifts him the Gauntlet and the Tesseract in exchange for aid…

…and Thanos uses these to completely destroy Asgard.  Just like that, Hello Great Evil, all the waffling and chumpery of the previous films is forgiven and forgotten.  Dude just blew down Asgard like it's a house of cards.

Down in Hel, Thor has this idea that something terrible's going on because his friends keep showing up. It’s a moment of grief and horror.  Up until it becomes clear that they're dead up above but they're helpful for this task below. The cast unites for one last battle for their souls.

This is when our theme kicks in: things coming back to haunt you. The oath the Disir broke? They had sex behind Bor’s back – acknowledging other men at all – and he thought they deserved an eternity of pain & degradation for it. That one act will doom the kingdom he made and his tasty soul. For Loki, every mistake he ever made has come back to haunt him.

Now, Loki makes the only sacrifice he can to make amends: the Disir curse can only be lifted if someone willingly sacrifices their soul to them (a dick move Bor did to ensure it would never happen) and a remorseful Loki does just that. They’re left clean of their curse and can finally move on. Loki’s body remains, with a new, younger soul that’s cleansed of all his crimes and doesn’t really remember much of anything since he was a child. (In this, we use part of the plot of Kieron Gillen’s Journey Into Mystery and its recent follow-ups)

The Thor trilogy ends with Thor and Loki as brothers again, and the last survivors of Asgard, exiled to Earth and never going home in a reverse of the first film. In the name of justice, they agree to help Strange bring Thanos down.

Mid-credits-the-first has Loki and Thor visiting Dr Selvig, one of the few humans they know, because you go to friends when you need a place to crash.

Mid-credits-the-second – Thanos makes his plan clear, to get all the Stones and kill every living thing in creation.  We see him giving the Ebony Maw, one of his recent minions from the comics, some orders about how to do it.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2: JULY 2017

Our pitch here is “whatever James Gunn wants to do”. Let’s face it, we want to see whatever he does here and so do you. 

For the sake of unification, Strange makes an appearance to talk to Nova Prime – he may or may not bring Maria Hill, Director of S.W.O.R.D., along because she and Nova should meet; at this point, it really depends on how much Smulders wants for some additional appearances – and keeps missing the Guardians.

We also introduce Captain Marvel herself, Carol Danvers.  The Kree picked her up on Earth because that planet’s starting to get noticed and they want to learn more, the Guardians rescue her, and in the process she gets Magnatronned and spends the rest of the film working out these weird powers she has.

Bruce Banner ended up in space at the end of Age of Ultron, so we’d like him to show up too. Ideally, since it’s been two years, he’s already established in the galaxy and nobody’s that bothered he turns into a big green guy when you piss him off. Out here, he’s weird, but he's not that weird.  It might even be seen as a pretty awesome party trick in certain circles. The Guardians know him as some guy they go to for science advice.

Neither Bruce nor the Hulk are bothered about going back to Earth, to be honest. Sure, he misses Natasha, kind of, but that was also an embryonic thing which clearly died before it had time to really flower.  Otherwise, he likes it out here.  There are places he can Hulk out where nobody dies and nothing gets broken and that's okay with him.  So he does, of course, end up stuck on the Milano for most of the movie, tucked into the cargo bay and praying he doesn't lose his shit in transit.

Other than that… Guardians! Doing Guardian stuff! Huzzah!

THE ASSORTED TV SHOWS

This one we need to be vague on because we’d have no idea of knowing which shows would last and which will not. However, we can pitch a few things:

Agent Carter has all sorts of real world Cold War fun to run into: the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Berlin Airlift, and the Korean War. We also have all the 1940s and 1950s Marvel concepts to work from, and we will make damn sure Agent Carter will one day skip ahead to 1953: the year that Commie-bashing 1950s Captain America made his debut, dealing with Communist plots for the FBI. And just like in the comics, he’s going to go a bit mad from a defective super-soldier serum. For Peggy Carter, this is going to be the emotional A-Bomb.

Iron Fist and Heroes For Hire will share a supporting character (buy both shows, viewers!) in Victor Alvarez, the current Power Man. He’s a normal kid until he finds he can channel the chi of New York and decides, of course, he wants to become a superhero; that puts him in Luke and Jess’s orbit, as they both clash with and work with him, and Danny’s as Iron Fist helps train him in using his powers.

If Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has enough ratings for a fourth series, this is when we really bring it into focus with everything else with a reduced episode run.  The most popular characters get shunted off to Hill’s new agency.  Hello, big rebranding as Agents of S.W.O.R.D.!  Coulson and a small team, thanks to Strange’s magic, have been sent across space to a Xandarian frontier world to liase with a team of Nova Corpsmen to keep an eye on things and get necessary training.  (Which means they take orders from Hill or from Nova Prime as necessary, because Glenn Close also does TV!)

The Nova folks are unquestionably the senior members of the partnership, as they know what they're doing, which may or may not chafe with the former S.H.I.E.L.D.ies.  It would be funnier and/or more dramatically useful if this is the case. Imagine Fitz and Simmons running around, living out their wildest Doctor Who fantasies, and while the Nova people take it with bemused tolerance, a lot of the other non-human species are starting to get tired of the stupid Terrans who are super-amazed by the technological equivalent of light switches.  This is Deep Space Nine stuff, with a specific setting and recurring prosthetic aliens and lots of spy work. (This may be their last turn of the wheel.)

Any of our shows might need to be phased out and replaced. Our go-to replacement is Runaways. Every teenager has thought their parents must be evil; these kids learn it’s true. And if your parents are powerful, hidden supervillains that control Los Angeles, the only decent thing you can do is run. This would follow the arc of the original comics – diverse kids who are offspring of different iconic villains, trying to be heroes and not realizing their own leader, Alex Wilder, is secretly trying to help his parents. What nobody in LA knows is that Victorious AKA Victor Mancha, the new local kid hero, is unwittingly the ‘son’ of Ultron and at the worst possible moment, Ultron’s mind is going to wake up in Victor’s and make a new play for the Earth…
 

THE BLACK PANTHER: NOVEMBER 2017

This is a deliberate break: MCU gets to expand a bit (and make extra merchandise), and show that not everything is about Thanos and Gems or big cosmic stuff. This is back down to Earth with a punch to the face.

Our model here is Coming to America meets Death Wish. We open with the assassination of T’Chaka by persons unknown. Wakanda is thrown into chaos. People are scared, the nation looks weaker in the eyes of the world, and the new king T’Challa is young and emotionally rattled.

You know what else T’Challa is? Smart and extremely damned pissed off. The Wakandan intelligence services are able to identify the killer as physicist Ulysses Klaw but T’Challa doesn’t want to simply contact the US and request an extradition – someone put Klaw up to it and wants to handle this more directly, so the world remembers you don’t fuck with Wakanda. 

And so T’Challa’s off to America on a “diplomatic visit”. The US State Department stick him with the hapless Everett K Ross as his go-to guy – and unwitting front man for the CIA agent working as his ‘assistant’, because they’re not stupid. Neither are the bad guys, who send a variety of assassins as a distraction while they cover their tracks and Klaw goes on the run.

The enemy is Damien Cross from Ant-Man, now working at Roxxon: Marvel’s go-to evil corporation, which did a friendly merger with Cross Industries. They want Wakanda destabilized, just a little, so they can schmooze up to it and get at the vibranium. Klaw is a racist prat who resented having to deal with Wakandans to get at the metal, he was easy to put up to it – now all they have to do is remove any evidence and ensure Klaw has an ‘accident’.

T’Challa has to stay alive, find enough evidence, keep the US from finding evidence of what he’s doing, and carry on the usual head-of-state jazz, which includes talking politely to Cross when he’s damn sure the guy’s dirty. On top of all that, this Hill person keeps trying to talk to him about a potential alien invasion.  (Hey, just like Coulson way back in Iron Man!  Could T'Challa be the next Tony Stark? WHY NOT?). The pressure is on and people are questioning if he’s up to it, and finally it turns out he’s not. Klaw is driven to suicide before he talks to anyone. T’Challa’s failed.

Klaw’s suicide was by explosion. The kind that leaves no body. The kind that T’Challa had faked, with his father’s killer in a dark room somewhere being interrogated. Klaw is then ‘found alive after faking his death’ and the extradition is requested, giving T’Challa the cover he (and the US, who want to save face) need for what he’s dug up. Roxxon play their Plan B, the “some bad apples” card. Cross is hung out to dry. Nobody can prove it goes up to the top but there’s enough for Wakanda to save face.

In the background of the film, T’Challa’s spent some time talking finances. Now is when he plays his trump card: he’s been getting agents and front companies to buy up Roxxon shares and cause a bit of a boost in them. He’s got so much, under so many ‘different shareholders’…

That he can crash their share value and leave Roxxon with a large, humiliating loss.

Don’t fuck with Wakanda. 

Now, in the mid-credits bit, he has time to talk to Hill. S.W.O.R.D. and Strange – who has an amusingly ironic title in the S.W.O.R.D. hierarchy for political expediency's sake – need Wakanda’s science base and vibranium because all estimates are that Thanos is coming in a few months and Earth’s one shot is to try to hit him first.

Credits-the-second is a very tired Everett Ross turning on the TV to see news about some blonde woman being spotted in orbit…

CAPTAIN MARVEL: MAY 4 2018

Carol returns to Earth, creating an obvious bridge between Earth-Marvel and Space-Marvel.  Like Guardians of the Galaxy, this is another big, wild, spacey adventure.

Based on the jaunty yellow letters of the official logo, we feel like this one should probably be suffused with the music and the feel of the '80s as a sort of extension of the Marvel Space flavor being steeped in other periods – going backwards to go away forward, don't you know.  (Brian, at least, argues for Def Leppard's “Armageddon It” to be the prospective “Hooked on a Feeling” for this movie.)

The debut of Captain Marvel is a gamechanger for Earth and superheroes. This is an attractive blonde woman with iconic superpowers showing up to save lives – this isn’t a wartime legend, a mobile weapon, a god, or a rage-monster.  This is a person with a face who can do cool stuff. People like Carol. She’s instantly a global superstar, one requiring a publicist (Sarah Day from the mid-00s Ms Marvel run) to keep on top of all the media work.  Carol can handle villains and dangerous situations, but the sheer weight of everything else and the lack of people she can talk to about it, that’s wearing her down. Being a superhero is tiring.

Carol’s arrival also leads to very serious government meetings about these planet-killing aliens she’s mentioned. The UN was already setting up S.W.O.R.D. in a very slow, measured, budget-obsessing manner – dragging their heels 'cause how long's it gonna take this, uh, Thanos character to find us out here, Director Hill? – but now they’re freaked and rushing the Peak, its observation space station, into commission. S.W.O.R.D.’s top Earth-based spook Abigail Brand and a handful of astronauts, spies, and our old friend Dr Selvig (one of the few scientists with direct experience of other worlds) find themselves stuck on a half-complete, clunky space station which is at least pressurized.

The watchword here is pressure and expectations: both Carol and the people at S.W.O.R.D. are drowning in it, and not sure if they’ll crack.

Now, one issue with Carol is her rogues gallery are either part of the X-Men franchise, or are a bit crap, or are Marcus from that creepy rape story in Avengers #200. Luckily this film is going to be setting up the big fight against Thanos, so the villain here is one of Thanos’s top agents. If Carol and S.W.O.R.D. were worried about the pressure before, here comes the spearhead of an incoming threat that can clearly smack Earth in the chops.

Our go-to here will be the Ebony Maw, shown in the Infinity comic tie-ins a creepy guy who can mind-control and manipulate people through voice alone. We’ve spent quite a few films showing how powerful Dr Strange is and how prepared, setting up all these superheroes; every damn one of them is mind-whomped by the Ebony Maw. Earth loses in five minutes. Maw stomps right into Strange's place like it's a 7-11 and steals all the Infinity Stones. 

And this is just the front man.  The worst is yet to come.

By sheer fucking luck, Carol is on The Peak when Maw comes to town: it’s now them and the poor buggers on the International Space Station having to save the planet with minimal resources, facing a man who can talk Captain Marvel into kneeling.

Carol and S.W.O.R.D., of course, are going to win or the next film would be highly depressing. They were tested under the highest pressure and came out stronger. Captain Marvel is someone who does not break. (We may or may not set up that aneurysm thing out of DeConnick here, too, though, as a kind of check against Marvel's powers being too much and as a thing to follow across the next couple of Danvers movies.)

We end with Thanos on the march towards Earth, our collective heroes aware how doomed they are, everything resting on a single roll of the dice. In the mid-credits sequence, Strange and Hill are in front of Hawley, and Hill testily admits there's someone else they need to win --

Cut to Tony Stark in his federal prison cell.

DUN DUN DUN.

THE DEFENDERS II (NETFLIX)

This starts when The Infinity War does. All the film heroes are off into space: the miniseries event on Netflix is that the Defenders must come back together to keep the Earth safe in their absence.  This, we may come to understand, is why Hill and Strange took the time to put them together – they wanted people to keep home safe from all the other terrible shit going on.  They're the front line when the front-line can't work.  Are the Earthbound villains like Foom and Hope van Dyne etc making their big plays? Of course they are!

(We might consider renaming this one the Mighty Defenders and have a couple of other people surface – cough, Spectrum/Monica Rambeau, cough.  WHY NOT?)

If Runaways is around, they’re dealing with the same thing – against their parents. This is the point where the status quo shatters.

THE AVENGERS: THE INFINITY WAR (JULY 2018)

Everything pays off in extraordinary, giant-massive-Hollywood fashion.

 

Thanos has all five Infinity Stones and a Gauntlet ready to punch the planet Earth in the face forever, just like poor Ultron knew he would all those years ago.  Earth’s cinematic heroes are taking a Wakandan/Stark spacecraft and going off into space to join the Guardians & Nova Corps and try to shellack him with a massive surprise attack he shouldn't see coming.  They hit first and hope like fuck the first hit's going to do it.

Pro-Tip: it doesn't.

Two movies? We don’t need two movies: the plot is kept light and breezy here.  Thanos bad.  Superheroes good. We all know the draw is seeing every hero in one film, teaming up in cool ways, like a feature-length version of that scene in The Avengers:

-         Carol and FalCap America leading armoured-up Nova Corps!

-         The Hulk and Drax bro-fisting before they charge at minions!

-         Hill snarling “Hoary hosts of Hoggoth!” as an oath in mid-battle, Strange saluting as he flies by!

-         Coulson getting to see his old friends, leading a team of Nova Corpsmen to save their asses and then unmasking himself when they're out of immediate danger!

-         Loki tricking Thanos and his mooks with style and panache!

-         Rocket getting his hands on Iron Man battle-armour!

-         Bucky and Sharon Carter!

-         Starlord really enjoying that there’s some humans who know less than him!

-         The biggest version of Groot that CGI can possibly do!

-         Scarlet Witch throwing down against back-from-the-dead Nebula, and I don't even know why that makes sense to me!

-         Strange telling Wanda the apprenticeship's over 'cause after this, she's clearly learned everything she needs to know

-         The mother of all card games!

-         Starlord gets a DVD of Footloose and finally shows Gamora what he’s talking about!

In the final stand, Tony Stark, the start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the man whose actor is definitely at the end of their contracts and unlikely to get more cash out of Marvel, dies like a total boss. He shows up, Han Solo-like, when the chips are completely down and redeems his fucked-up name after the Ultron disaster by wielding Thor's hammer in battle against Thanos, the ultimate proof of worthiness. He dies swinging, the assist that lets Gamora and Drax bring the fucker DOWN.

And then we can go into Phase Four with the older heroes at rest – retired, dead, or busy with other things.  They get a succinct but extended epilogue, like Lord of the Rings but with fewer fade-outs and pillow fights:

-        Natalie Portman's Jane Foster getting a cameo to tie Thor's story off as much as it's gonna get tied off now that he's a permanent exile from an obliterated homeland

-        Starlord visiting his family and his mother's grave at long last

-        Hill taking time off from S.W.O.R.D. duty to fill Pepper and Happy in on Tony's death

-        Strange preparing Wanda to be the new Sorcerer Supreme.

And we end with the new team of official Avengers – definitely Captain Marvel, Black Panther, FalCap; maybe Thor, maybe New Loki, maybe Wanda as the New Strange, maybe our (Mighty) Defenders getting promoted for going way above and beyond the call of duty – going out into the bright, shiny Earth to continue the heroic traditions that have brought them here. 

They've learned from the mistakes of their predecessors.  They know what they're doing.  And from here on out, we may call them the Defenders officially because they no longer feel there's anything to Avenge.

There's finally a post-script with Maria Hill and Stephen Strange.  If by this point we've determined massive 'shipping trends in the fanbase, they may as well hook up – the job is done and he's resigned his S.W.O.R.D. position in preparation for taking a break.  They're no longer colleagues, so it's not unprofessional for her to make a move.  And besides, she already knows her daughter likes him, so that's one dating problem right out of the way. 

If not, no problem either way.  The actual point of this scene is our two buddies – the partnership that glued together the alliance that saved the entire galaxy – talking about what's going to happen now that they're the veteran titans still in the game. 

We get two end-credits bumps to answer that question:

The first: The Inhumans.

The second, well, that could depend on how rights shake out.  'Cause you see, there could be this kid in Brooklyn who gets bit by this experimental spider while visiting his uncle's apartment...

Next Time On: What is it good for?  Absolutely nothin'! (Say it again, y'all!)