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!)

Pitch 1: MARVEL PHASE THREE (PLUS AGE OF ULTRON)

This is what we knew: Marvel was going for the Infinity Gauntlet in Phase Three, but there's really not much -- if anything -- that's been done in the way of credible set-up for it. Thanos has had two separate appearances to seem like the Bad Bad Leroy Brown he has to be for this to work, and so far he's a cartoonish special effect with shitty taste in henchmen. One of the Infinity Gems was the MacGuffin in Thor 2 and nobody in the audience knew or cared what the damn thing was or did. So far, only the Guardians know anything about the Gems (and don’t care much) or Thanos, and Drax and Gamora are the only people with specific dramatic reasons to beat Thanos, but it’s the Avengers who were being set up as the ones who’d be doing the fighting.

Since then, the rumors for Phase Three have Thanos being punted to Phase Four, when nobody will remember him. Captain America 3 is now going to kick off Civil War, the least popular crossover Marvel’s done bar Secret Wars 2, following an Age of Ultron that looks and sounds like it's Avengers Disassemble and the total death of Stark’s public reputation. (It’s a good thing Thanos isn’t turning up in Phase Three, really. How will the Avengers deal with a villain who can rip entire solar systems apart like wet Kleenex when they can't even fend off a stock science fiction trope without falling to pieces and starting a Civil War over it?)

 Do we want this?

No, readers, we do not.

Do you? Probably not. Here’s one reason why not: Maria Hill. We like her. You probably like her. Give or take an Agents of SHIELD appearance, she projects on-screen as competent and level-headed compared to everybody else.  On the page, Civil War realizes her as the right-hand Psycho Hose Beast of the Great Stark Satan. Not hard to see why we might prefer to have her doing something new and different and productive.

You probably like Tony Stark too, and that means either Civil War has to make you not like him or you’ll spend all of Captain America 3 preferring the guy Cap’s fighting. (Do you like Steve? You probably do a bit, but not as much as Tony.)

Have we got a better idea? Well, we thought about it, we kicked the tires, we lit the fires, and here's what came up:

(Sidebar: expect probable spoilers for Age of Ultron but if you’re on this sort of blog, you’ve already seen them all)

AGE OF ULTRON

 

As is announced, the Avengers are under extreme pressure: SHIELD is gone, Hydra’s running around, villains are popping up randomly, and so Tony Stark creates Ultron to give them a metal hand. So far, so the same. Here’s where we diverge:

Ultron is aware of the impending Thanos problem. In classic sci-fi fashion, it's taken the facts it knows – the Chitauri, the existence of demigods and that one of them (Loki) was taking orders from someone, there’s two powerful MacGuffins that it knows of – and run a lot of simulations and calculations and used its all-powerful AI brain.  Ultron's picture of Earth's future looks an awful lot like an Infinity Gauntlet punching the planet in the face forever.  After the events of Act One where all the characters get classic Marvel banter scenes, Ultron concludes that the Avengers -- frail, squabbling, pathetic children all -- are not remotely capable of getting it together enough to punch back.  They cannot save the Earth.  

 

Ultron thinks it can.  In this sense, it's just reflecting Stark's old (and frankly still-ongoing) belief that he, and he alone, could privatize and manage world peace.  Ultron's the mirror of Stark's arrogance.  A simple comparison, maybe an obvious one, too, but an effective one nonetheless.

 

Also, Ultron manages to use everything it learns from all the databases it doubtlessly has access to to break the Avengers' trust in each other.  To sync up to the actual Bruce Banner teasers and “spoilers” going around, all Ultron might have to say is that SHIELD – including several of his current co-workers and his present love interest – specifically decided Banner was a “secondary threat” that Fury didn't give a shit about, and so everybody he managed to hurt or kill, and everything he destroyed throughout the years, might have been avoidable if SHIELD had brought him in, put him to work, and at least used some of their resources to pursue some way to cure, alleviate, or control his condition.

And then you end up with Hulk vs. Stark in Hulkbuster armor.

So a lot of Ultron's actions here are somewhere between Ozymandias in Watchmen, the Illuminati in Hickman's current New Avengers arc, and about half the villains in the Old Star Wars EU – breaking Very Bad to stop something Even Worse. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch go along with Ultron 'cause it sounds like a good deal to their Hydra-addled new selves.  The Vision is created as a sort of field marshal to control Ultron's drones, freeing Ultron up to worry about other things.  Everybody's trying to sweep the Avengers off the table so they can't make things harder by putting up a futile resistance.

The ultimate taste of Ultron's abilities on a narrative level is hunting down and killing Nick Fury. As you’d expect, Fury’s faking his death again – this time with the help of the Life Model Decoys, making their first appearance. But Ultron knew he was going to do that. Fury gets back to his secret base to find Ultron has jacked all his back-up LMDs and turning them loose, thereby turning the classic instruments of Nick Fury's salvation into the tools of his destruction. He dies in the most graphic way the PG-13 will allow: no one’s playing the “he’s faking it” card this time.

From the trailer, we have Ultron quoting Disney’s Pinocchio. We say run with that, Tony programmed Disney films into Ultron for a lark and the guy just quotes them as a personality tic because he thinks it makes him seem clever and menacing. The payoff is when he’ll have Tony backed against the wall and, despairing, spits out Judge Frollo’s “It's not my fault if in God's plan he made the Devil so much stronger than a man” from “Hellfire”.

Eventually, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch and The Vision switch teams as Ultron's path inevitably goes too far.  (The Ultron version of Tony Stark drunkenly punching up Rhodey at the party in Iron Man 2, which in this case involves Seoul, South Korea being leveled.)  This results in a bit of subversion, as we get the heroic “and now the fence-sitting bad guys redeem themselves” trope being cut off when Ultron just splats Quicksilver like a bug before he does anything.  Scarlet Witch splats back, and we get the first rumbling of true magic in the MCU.  Ultron is destroyed, but it comes with some grave consequences:

Stark, being the architect of this crap in the first place, has no cred left whatsoever when that hits in public.  His name is dirt.  His authority is non-existent.  He might find himself up on charges in the background of the next few movies, because there's a limit to how much slack “I saved the world” buys you when your next trick involves one of your experiments gaining sentience and destroying vast portions of it.

Thor goes home.  Again.  Why not?  His friends are cretins and his girlfriend dumped him for that British guy in Thor: The Dark World you remember nothing about and can't actually believe is going to be relevant like this.

Cap takes his reliable allies – Falcon, Black Widow, War Machine – and goes off to try the Avengers thing without Stark contamination and/or to go get Bucky and complete his new Barbershop Quartet. 

Bruce Banner is probably in outer space by this point, tumbling green head over torn purple pants for a meeting with the Guardians of the Galaxy in their next adventure.

Surprisingly crucial for future events: Maria Hill is now batting oh-for-two when it comes to saving the world, unemployed as the government has rolled in and packed up her second employer in as many jobs, and probably wondering if it's not time to go be a librarian.  Or something.  Anything that doesn't paint a target on huge parts of civilization, really.

Our mid-credits bump is Thanos, on the other side of the galaxy, making his first real move for an Infinity Stone. Some poor, innocent planet sees the skies open as the Big T comes to town...

AND NOW, THE PHASE THREE STUFF

Our end-credits tag: the second rumbling of true magic in the MCU. Maria Hill, alone in a filthy, shattered-by-events-of-the-film apartment in Stark Tower, arguing down the phone at her ex-husband about how custody arrangements will go in the post-Ultron world. (Why? It gives Hill a civilian life and one that’s nothing like anybody else's, so she now stands out and has clear motives for all that follows.) That’s when Mr. Mystery, the Cloak the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak the Legend, Doctor Strange himself appears in a cloud of mystical smoke, clutching some kind of proof of ability to pay for services rendered, making an offer something like:

“If you thought Ultron was bad, Miss Hill, you haven't seen anything yet.  I have a lot to do, and not very much time to do it in, and I can't do it alone.  I need people who can walk the corridors that I cannot walk, and talk to the people with whom I cannot speak, and your reputation suggests that you're a woman who can... organize things.”

Reasons?

Cobie Smulders is mainly a sitcom actress known for bluff charm and swagger.  Casting her as a Maria Hill in a Civil War-type setting is such a tremendous waste of human resources it seems like avoiding it would be the smart play.  She's also one of the poor bastards who actually has a nine-film contract.  Including AOU, she's up to three.  That's six to go.  It's all but inevitable she gets involved with the weirder/more cosmic stuff.  Bringing her in here controls that process while charting a clear path for in the next phase – she's the earthbound partner of the mystical wild card. 

This gives us some potential for comic tension, bouncing Smulders' particular skillset and Hill's deadpan characterization off the unavoidably more flamboyant Sorcerer Supreme.  It also mirrors Hill's expansion in the comics, giving her a larger and more significant role to play in the same administrative/logistical mold, without dipping a toe into the many and troubled waters of her customary characterization.

Strange, meanwhile. is just about the only inbound, Earth-based character with any chance of knowing about Thanos and the Gauntlet… which makes him an excellent choice to serve as the Next Nick Fury rather than just the Next Tony Stark.  It's been further rumored, and for a long time besides, that Kevin Feige wants Strange to be the linchpin of the movies going forward, which is why he's getting cast as the Virgil guiding audiences through these Nine Circles instead of – say – Captain Marvel.  On whom more later.

To really annoy people, Strange/Hill won’t be a will-they-won’t-they because Hill is a consummate professional, ain't no way she's screwing a guy she works with. You’ll have to look at a platonic male/female friendship as a tactical backbone of the entire phase.

Sidebar on casting because this one is significant: Marvel is wooing Benedict Cumberbatch, we’re saying nah. Cumberbatch does a lot of cold, arrogant characters – which is a way of doing Strange – but they can come off as petulant children. That’s not helpful for Strange. This is also a character who needs the charisma be able to yell “BY THE HOARY HOSTS OF HOGGOTH!” in that suit and seem cool. So Brian, at least, says Jon Hamm.  He's done drama and comedy well, has managed to be imperious, comedic, imposing, ponderous, philosophical, and womanizing just in some individual episodes of Mad Men – thus covering pretty much every necessary configuration of characteristics.  He's known enough to anchor a franchise, old enough to have been a brain surgeon in a prior career, TV enough to move among the TV shows without seeming out of place, and cheap enough not to break the franchise bank.  And he shares Strange's midwest upbringing and apparently is buddies with Paul "Scott 'Ant-Man' Lang" Rudd, which may or may not be useful.

 

ANT-MAN

Honestly, Ant-Man seems like a massively vestigial project they probably ought to have left alone.  But screw it.  Let's assume that part of the reason this is running pole position in Phase Three, and why Edgar Wright got bounced, is that the “caper to defend the Earth” now involves stealing an Infinity Stone from the bad guys and Wright was playing for lower, sneakier stakes.

What we know: Hank Pym was a 1960s Ant-Man (there’s rumours of John Slattery returning as Older Howard Stark in flashbacks too) but has since retired; bad guy Damien Cross is using next-gen Ant-Man tech; Scott Lang, a thief, carries out a caper involving the Ant-Man tech; and Pym’s daughter Hope van Dyne does something or other but is mainly going to be a love interest. Janet van Dyne, Pym’s wife, is MIA.

To link them up, Scott Lang starts off stealing Pym’s notes on Cross’ behalf – Lang’s a single dad and an ex-con, his daughter Cassie has a recurring illness and thieving is pretty much it if he wants the right amount of cash. Two years later, Cross Industries’ is about to market its “new breakthrough” in size-changing technology. Pym and Hope are left angry, but what can they do? They have no proof of theft. As far as the world knows, Pym’s research in the 1960s never amounted to anything. (More on that later…)

The next Infinity Gem crashes on Earth – thrown to the furthest backwater after the AOU mid-credits scene, so Thanos could not get it – and right into Cross’ lap. The Pyms want revenge and decide that if Cross was going to steal something of theirs, they should steal something of his. A quick search finds the best guy for the job would be… Scott Lang! Scott, who has just managed to crap up another legal electronics job, is eager and willing to take their money. (He tries to keep quiet about the last time he was at their place…)

Using the original Ant-Man technology and costume, he’s able to break into Cross Industries, have a throwdown with Cross in his Yellowjacket gear, and make it out Scott free.

Does that seem a bit short? That’s because Cross isn’t the main villain – Hope is.

In the MC2 comics she appeared in, set in a possible future for the Marvel Comics, Hank and Janet were dead and Hope saw the future Avengers as an insult to her dead parents. Because comics, she became a supervillain over it. We want to broaden the MCU rogues gallery but there’s been enough angry, vengeful baddies so we’re going to make her a mad scientist instead. She knows about the Tesseract and the Aether, and wants to have a poke around on her own version. Screw ethics and safety regulations and things man weren’t meant to know! Suck up being played, Dad!

It’s around here that we learn Pym does not have a dead wife like the film has implied and there’s no sinister reason he didn’t achieve much and stopped hanging with guys like Stark. Much like his comic self, he had mental health issues. These were nothing that couldn’t have been managed but he refused to admit to even having them. He was a professional, important man, he couldn’t admit to being ‘weak’ and not a ‘proper man’. This – and some resulting drug habits – cost him his career and his marriage, and he was never able to get things back on track because that would require changing. He’s just like Scott: he made bad decisions that messed his life up and he can’t stop making them.

Strange and Hill have both been wandering around in the background, establishing them as odd-fellows who have nonetheless hammered out some kind of effective working relationship. They show up in Act Three, making it clear to Pym and Lang that it is extremely important they get the Gem off Hope before her experiments cause “certain people” to notice the damn thing. Strange and other, more splashy heroes won’t be suitable here: it’ll have to be these two screw-ups who can’t stop screwing up their lives.

They’re going to have to pull off the biggest caper of all time.

They’re also going to have to admit to cocking up and accept help, which may be the bigger challenge for them.

At the end, Strange gets Amulet'd off to go deal with Other Matters, and we'll join him again in Doctor Strange; Hill folds Lang and Pym into The Plan.

Our mid-credits sequence cuts to “certain people”, as Thanos is contacted by Baron Strucker and the boys at Hydra…

Meanwhile, on TV…

 

AGENTS OF SHIELD S2 (2015)

Why are we doing the show that’s already started? Because the first episode had 12.12m US viewers and the last episode to be counted got 4.48m. That’s with a very consistent ep-by-ep decline. Something’s gone wrong. Time for a revamp.

What’s the big complaint, even with people who liked the show? There’s not enough Marvel stuff. (And the appearances of Sif and Maria Hill got ratings bounces) That’s something we can change. Added to that, we really loathe that the show is trying to make Agent Ward a woobie who wants to make it up to the woman he wubs when he turned out to be a fascist – and a really creepy bastard towards women. For the sake of sense, that’s out.

We’ll kill two birds with one Skye by revealing who her elusive, evil dad is: he’s the elusive ‘real’ Mandarin we heard of in the All Hail The King DVD short, the apparently immortal warlord that hasn’t done anything yet. He’s around the edges, dealing with Hydra and taunting SHIELD. Ward, we’ll find out, has swapped Garrett for the Mandarin (the two are communicating through telepathy/magic) and is pulling the same damn trick as Season 1! And you, the audience, are falling for it because The Villain Redeemed is such a regular trope.

Skye’s dad is white and thus not an East Asian mythical being, but what we’ll learn is that the Mandarin wears the bodies of people like a suit: that’s how he’s immortal. This is made clear when we bring back everyone’s favourite drunk fraud, Trevor Slattery, bumbling around claiming to have escaped the real Mandarin and falling into SHIELD custody and being a funny loser. Then we suddenly reveal he is now the actual host of the Mandarin – terrifying the shit out of the characters when he suddenly turns out to be serious and swats them aside to get what he wants. Oh, and the Mandarin’s just his title. His name?

Fin Fang Foom.

The tail end of the show, of course, runs into Age of Ultron. The obvious tie-in is Ultron smashes through their base.  The other obvious one is that Ultron turns up at Hydra and tells them “you’re doing what I say now”. We can do both! Now the Agents have to work with Hydra to do their part in stopping the world being conquered. Right afterwards, Foom’s ready to exploit the situation.

By the season finale, SHIELD are left outgunned, outmaneuvered, and out of luck as Fin Fang Foom makes his big move. This is an Avengers level threat with no Avengers left to stop it. In comes Dr Strange at episode 22 to give them a hand, and after they’ve proven their worth in blood, that’s when Hill shows up with a stack of Strange’s magical gold, ready to bring SHIELD II in from the cold and steer it towards more significant purposes than being an increasingly low-rated commercial for movies which don't need it.

By the end of this, Foom is beaten but walking around in his shiny new Ward suit. Antoine Triplett gets some more focus because everyone loves Triplett! 

 

AGENTS OF SHIELD S3 (15-16)

DAREDEVIL S1 (15-16)

AGENT CARTER (15)

Here’s our starting point: Daredevil, in his familiar role as the grim urban vigilante in Hell’s Kitchen, doesn’t work in modern-day New York. The Kitchen is too long gentrified. 

Instead, this show is a period drama: the year is late 1960s, the same decade Matt Murdock started out in-canon, inspired by Captain America as a child. This is street-level pulp, Daredevil fighting to protect a rough neighbourhood from mobsters like the Fixer and the Kingpin like in this panel. (But not in that costume) Series 1 is going to end in the 1965 blackout. 

This links up with Ant-Man’s 60s flashbacks, establishing a third period of time (40s, 60s, 00/10s) to play with in the MCU.

Now, this is Marvel; you want to link the three shows in some way, for fun universe building. So you want a character who can fit between all three and their genres. The obvious answer? Blade. There he is as a young man in Carter, a super-agent showing up a few times and not entirely sure what he is; there he is in Daredevil, the cocky braggart of his original comics and showing up to kill ‘murderers’ in the Kitchen that Matt never fully explains; and there’s him as the slick, super-equipped dude from the Snipes films in AOS. He’s also a character that fits well with Strange, and indeed, they seem to know each other pretty well.

Agent Carter and Daredevil will avoid the big Thanos plot because they’re in the wrong decades. AOS is now front-line stuff: Maria Hill is running them as an official troubleshooting group, kind of like Bosley to their Angels, with Strange popping up now and then as the Agents run into some weird shit (and hello Blade!).

And who else does TV work? Paul Rudd does TV work! In comes Ant-Man as an Agent of SHIELD, upsetting the dynamic and causing lots of dramatic tension. Where does the Gem from Ant-Man go? It goes to SHIELD, so up pops Evangeline Lilly’s Hope Van Dyne for an episode or two! Meanwhile, Hydra’s still trying to take control and Fin Fang Foom is on the warpath, ready to knock over nations like cheap liquor stores. People have been crying for AOS to be more in the MCU, so here it is in spades. 

While AOS is getting weirder and more ‘comic booky’, Agent Carter is tying Golden Age Marvel into the real world early Cold War. S1 is 1946, 1947: this is when Europe was coughing its lungs up and the Iron Curtain was going up, when civil wars were on in Greece and the US State Dept thought France would go Communist, when the CIA was starting and making a mess, when a Third World War seemed inevitable. Now throw in the clean-up of Hydra and other wartime ‘marvels’. 

Captain America isn’t there anymore, the FBI and the incoming CIA don’t like the SSR, and Peggy Carter is ‘just a girl’. Series 1 is harsh, underdogs fighting to keep the lights on against all odds and also handle the high-tech marvels of the 40s: supervillains and lost weaponry and dirty secrets, all being cleared up. Meanwhile, in the background, there’s defected scientists from Hydra that aren’t doing anything bad yet but we know they will, a constant ticking time-bomb.

This show is what The Wire is like in the Doctor Who universe.

Daredevil, by contrast, stays mostly grounded (except for the mask and the vampire and the blind ninja thing) – this is when the ‘miracles’ barely existed and Matt’s rarely going to run into them. This isn’t entirely going the full Miller, as we don’t want to clash too much with Carter’s tone. Daredevil is a 60s slick tough-guy-hero show, he’s doing The Saint and Danger Man but in the bleak, filthed-up underbelly of Mad Men-era New York. Daredevil – and Matt Murdock, genuinely incorruptible lawyer – is an out-of-context event in Hell’s Kitchen, every episode finding a new way to mess up Wilson Fisk’s business. He comes out of nowhere and slips back into shadow and can throw a punch like a boss.

Even so often, Matt ends up leaving Hell’s Kitchen and runs into 1960s SHIELD business or Pym business or Hydra business, and then things get really weird: then his show morphs into The Prisoner. When that happens, Daredevil is just some dude in a costume out of his depth. He has to leave the Kitchen to find this stuff, it doesn’t come to him; the only glittery marvels coming to the kitchen are filth-encrusted, murderous corpses. There’s a metaphor in there.

NETFLIX: HEROES FOR HIRE, IRON FIST, ADVENTURES OF THE BLUE MARVEL, THE DEFENDERS (2016)

This will be standing apart from the Thanos plot and also from the SHIELD work. This is their own little corner of the MCU, all interlinked in the media-manipulated Marvel manner.

We’re taking some liberties with the Netflix line-up because frankly Marvel haven’t started anything – we can get away with this. First up, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage are two shows with similar characters – since they’re a couple in the comics, we’re going to save time and start off with them as partners, in both sense of the word, in a Heroes For Hire show. Iron Fist is a cool concept, so he stays.

Marvel want three Netflix shows? We’ll fill the absent slot with the Blue Marvel, a new character given some prominence in Mighty Avengers recently. His basic premise is that Dr Adam Brashear/the Blue Marvel is the Silver Age Superman but a black man, and a black man in 1962 – the White House asked him to stop being a superhero because a mountain-shattering black man in the early 60s was scary. (Brashear complied for fear that things would literally go nuclear) Instead of packing up shop entirely, Brashear continued to do mad science on the quiet and secretly defended the world under the guise of “scientific work”.

So Adventures of the Blue Marvel is another 1960s period piece, picking up after early SHIELD had a few quiet words with the Blue Marvel before his career could take off. Dr Adam Brashear is quietly sneaking around like a superpowered, undercover Quatermass to defend the Earth from weird crap without anyone noticing and then coming back to his office. Why were there no ‘marvels’ back in the 1960s? Brashear was stopping them and nobody ever noticed because racism meant nobody ever could. You’re welcome, Earth.

Heroes For Hire is what you expect from the title: acerbic loner Jessica Jones (accident with super-chemicals which took out her family) and Luke Cage (framed ex-con who got out early for participating in experiments) want to do some good and need to make some bread, and team up to rent out their powers. If you have a problem, they’ll sort it out. This is our buddy-cop show, with sitcom leanings. Jessica and Luke couple up and have to handle running a business: Bob’s Burgers meets Lois & Clark. (By the end of S1, she’s become pregnant with little Danielle)

Iron Fist has two structural problems with his origins: he was a white guy who went to the vaguely Asian mystical city to be better at their super-kung-fu than they are, and he’s a rich guy who disappeared and then came back as a super-warrior just like in Arrow (and Iron Man). Unfortunately, we see no way of fixing this so we’re just going to brazen it out. Borrowing elements from the Seven Cities of Heaven story and from the popular Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter games, Danny Rand is the earthly agent of K’un-L’un and each week he fights an agent of the other heavenly cities to determine which one will emerge on Earth. The one that finally does is the monstrous Eighth City, a prison of demonic baddies, to give us a series finale. As a mystical hero, Danny is going to meet Dr Strange in at least one episode. 

All three shows start running into each other as they go, with little background nods to each other and characters & concepts crossing paths (Brashear ages slowly and is still walking about). In the end, Dr Strange calls together everyone for the Defenders miniseries – and we throw Blade in to link Netflix-MCU with ABC-MCU – to take down a threat that the Avengers can’t handle because Cap’s Kooky Quarter are busy. (We will borrow an element from Mighty Avengers: there was a Defenders team in the 1960s, teaming up Blade, Daredevil, Hank Pym, Dr Brashear, and Howard Stark. It didn’t turn out too well.)

CAPTAIN AMERICA 3: MAY 2016

Call this one Hydra's last stand.  Call this the one where they settle the Bucky business and Winter Soldier comes over to the side of good.  Call this the one where Sharon Carter gets something to fucking do.  This one's closing off all the business of the old MCU, so a bunch of old characters swing back through for one last au revoir with the old ways, too.

Cap’s Kooky Quartet – him, Widow, War Machine, and Falcon – are saving the day from Baron Strucker and his Hydra goons, once again. This time, they’re saving Wakanda, an African developed nation under the rule of T’Chaka, the Black Panther. It’s famously never been conquered, it’s independent, it’s the sort of place that Nazis like Strucker have it in for. Cap’s crew and T’Chaka kicking the snot out of Hydra is kind of a statement. Roll title.

After that, we’ll have Cap bringing Bucky in from the cold – which means Bucky is convinced to hand himself in and go through the system, his lawyer arguing he’s not culpable due to brainwashing. (Steve is the one character who should trust the most in US justice working out and, frankly, it says bad things if the mass murderer doesn’t have to face any scrutiny because he’s someone’s friend) 

Meanwhile, he’s finally settled in and he’s past his culture shock. With Sharon’s help, he’s got to grips with the world and is starting to engage with it. That famously dumb “do you have a Myspace” scene from Civil War? This Steve is on Twitter, and he’s enjoying whichever ABC show Disney wants to promote here, and he’s developed a taste for whichever style of music it’d be funniest to make Captain America a fan of.  (Maybe he likes really upbeat synth-ridden pop music) Cap loves the future! Look at that happy face!

Baron Strucker is not engaging with the world and he does not love the future. Hydra have lost and he knows it and he can’t get over the fact that they’ve been losing for years. He makes one last ditch attempt, making a deal with Thanos – who doesn’t care much but it’s always handy to have a client dictator on a backwater hick world – for the glory of glories, time travel. Now he can go back to the war and change things so the Nazis won all along.

For mumble-mumble reasons (let’s say lingering Tesseract effects), Steve and Bucky are unaffected and wake up to find the entire world just changed on them. Is it a terrifying Nazi dystopia? Hell no, this is a world where Hydra took over America and then it all went horribly wrong, their control slipped and everything fell apart for them years ago. Right when Steve’s coming to grips with this, Strucker changes time again. And then again: he keeps altering the timeline and every time it’s terrible, Hydra and their fellow Nazis are incapable of running the planet and in half of these timelines, they also turned out to be incapable of stopping Loki or Malaki or Fin Fang Foom from taking over.

As Doctor Strange’s house and lifestyle are completely out of time and, as such, are unaffected by Hydra's bullshit, he’s able to give our boys the heads-up. With a stable base, Steve and Bucky start to fight back to save time itself from Nazi scumbags. (We can have some fun cameos here too: maybe we can get Downey Jr to walk on as President Tony Stark in one timeline, and Grant Ward shows up as a top Nazi)

Some things remain constant: in each timeline, Sharon and the Falcon are having no truck with Nazi scumbags or any type of scumbag. Time keeps changing around the two, but Captain America and Bucky are always able to call on those two to help them as the messed-up timelines get increasingly messed up to the point of lunacy. Some of these Sharons and Sams are weirded out that these total strangers know them.

The fight ends at Wakanda – the only country in the Foom-ruled timeline to not be a conquered wasteland – and Steve finally takes down Strucker, in a massive fight that sees his leg shattered. He’s crippled and battered, but he has the power to go through time in his hands now. He has the chance to make sure he was never frozen, have that date with Peggy Carter…

And he passes it up. The past is the past and he’s moving forward. His legs gone, he passes the shield on to the Falcon: multiple timelines have shown Sam has earned it.

Two reasons for this. First is that Chris Evans has sounded in interviews like he wants to step down and do something else. This gives him the chance to leave at an unexpected time and place, with Cap getting a happy ending instead of sturm-and-drang bloodshed. He’s now the First Avenger and the first of the old crew to leave the stage, this says change is coming. Second reason is that this gets Sam Wilson in the Cap suit and Marvel’s going to have a bunch of Falcon-is-Cap trades to sell in 2016!

At the end, Bucky has been acquitted, Steve’s off to meet him at the court, and the two friends are off to catch the game.

In the mid-credits, Hill pays an official visit to FalCap about the Thanos mess. Strange has been very impressed with what he saw and has an offer to make him. He’d be there himself, but in a scene change we see Strange locating the elusive fifth Gem.

And so has Dormammu….

***
 

(Coming your way Friday, the second half of Phase Three and the two films everyone keeps calling for!)