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 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.
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.
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!)
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