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!)
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