Episode 29: The Marvel[ous] TV Shows
- Links to this episode: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.
Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.
Transcript
[00:00:06] Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast. Hey guys, how's it going?
[00:00:10] Unidentified speaker: Hi, Bruce.
[00:00:11] Bruce: Hey, Tracy. This week, we're gonna talk about the Marvel shows. This was actually Cameo's idea.
She suggested we talk about WandaVision, and we kind of expanded out to be all three of the current Marvel shows, which are, pardon the pun, Marvelous shows.
They're really good.
[00:00:30] Cameo: Can we go ahead and start this whole thing back over and not have you tell that joke?
[00:00:36] Unidentified speaker: I'm kidding.
[00:00:37] Unidentified speaker: It actually was pretty funny.
[00:00:39] Bruce: I had to fit it in somewhere.
[00:00:42] Unidentified speaker: That was the real reason why you wanted to have this topic.
[00:00:47] Bruce: I've been dying to tell that one for years.
[00:00:54] Cameo: Okay. Well, then, yeah, I think the reason I wanted to talk about it is I'm not actually traditionally a huge Marvel fan. The movies have definitely been getting better, but the TV series have really impressed me with the maturity of storytelling and the complexity of things that they're going to bring to the forefront and then wrap into really great storytelling.
And this was a little bit inspired by a post you made on Facebook about WandaVision. And I think that that's a really natural place for us to start the conversation.
[00:01:35] Bruce: All right. So first of all, if you're listening to this episode, you're consenting to massive spoilers. So do not listen to this episode if you haven't seen these shows that we're talking about, or you can listen to it if you haven't seen it, if you don't care to see them, or you don't care if they're spoiled.
But we're going to not in the slightest hold back on spoilers as we analyze these shows. So, and I should probably mention just a little background. Obviously, these shows take place after Endgame.
Actually, there was one movie that was after Endgame. That was the last Spider-Man movie. So it takes place after that movie.
And they don't hold back from the assumption that you have seen the movies, which is an interesting creative choice. They kind of know that their fans have been fans all the way along, and I would also throw out there, we did an episode on Star Wars. Marvel just has not suffered from the same problems that Star Wars has, even though both are done by Disney.
Marvel movies started off pretty good. The first Iron Man was hardly a bad movie, and they just kept getting better. They did a very, very good job of building tension until finally they had a massive event on their hands with Endgame, by the time Endgame came.
[00:02:54] Bruce: And even though this episode will be about the shows, Endgame was a very impressive creative choice. And I think people often miss just how risky it was to take every single superhero character imaginable in the Marvel universe, all of them, and to make not an action movie, but a heist movie. With saving all the action to basically the last hour of the movie.
There's almost like two movies there, where the first two hours of the movie is a heist movie, and then the last hour is a standard over-the-top superhero action movie. I mean, you just don't do that, right? You don't make big mix-up, let's do crossovers with all the superhero characters, and then not make it an action movie.
And I'm surprised they even chose to do that. And I'm even more surprised that they completely made it work.
[00:03:45] Cameo: And I hadn't even realized that until you just said that. That's really interesting. I don't know that I've seen much discussion about that as a creative choice.
[00:03:57] Bruce: It's a very weird creative choice. It's like on paper, like if I was in charge of Disney, I would have vetoed it immediately and I would have been wrong. It's very strange that they made that choice and they had enough confidence to make it work.
If I could use another analogy, Batman versus Superman came out at the same time as Civil War. Those two movies are almost identical movies. They're plot-wise, they're almost identical movies, right down to each plot point.
But one of the movies completely failed as good storytelling and the other movie completely succeeded as good storytelling. And in fact, the one that completely succeeded actually had to introduce way more characters than the one that failed. Both movies were a risk because of how many characters you're trying to get into a single movie and characterize all of them.
And it's just too many. The Marvel one had probably, you know, six times as many characters to worry about.
[00:04:54] Cameo: So many new characters. It's baffling the amount of new characters that they were able to introduce in that one movie.
[00:05:00] Bruce: They literally somehow made that movie, a Captain America movie, an Iron Man movie, a Black Panther movie, and a Spider-Man movie all at the same time. I mean, it was literally Spider-Man's origin story, Black Panther's origin story. And whenever I go watch that movie, I'm in shock that they're able to do all those things simultaneously, and it's still an only hour and a half long movie, and you don't feel rushed.
[00:05:26] Cameo: Yeah, wow.
[00:05:28] Unidentified speaker: Very interesting.
[00:05:29] Unidentified speaker: I hadn't thought about that either.
[00:05:30] Bruce: Well, and compare this to Batman versus Superman, which in its best form would be the Snyder Cut version. I don't call it that, the extended version, which is like a three hour long movie. They really only introduced Batman as a new character, and I guess Alfred and, you know, it's Lex Luthor.
They don't introduce any more characters than the Marvel version does, than Civil War does. And they don't have to deal with this mass of other existing characters that the Marvel movie has to deal with. And yet that movie just feels, it feels long.
It feels drawn out. There's some really good parts of that movie. And I don't mean to completely bad mouth the movie.
My official stance on Batman versus Superman is that it was a movie definitely worth seeing at the Dollar Theater. And I don't mean that as an insult. I think that's actually a compliment.
[00:06:21] Cameo: Right, you're saying it's still worth seeing in a theater.
[00:06:24] Bruce: Yeah, I mean, if a movie is worth seeing for free, that's impressive, right? And this one's worth at least a dollar. You know, I mean, it's that good.
It's really that good, right? But it's nothing compared to the Marvel version, right? The Civil War, which was absolutely, you know, I wanted to go see it in theaters first run.
I didn't mind how much I paid for it. I wanted to go see it again in the theaters.
[00:06:48] Unidentified speaker: And then wanted to see it at the Dollar Theater too.
[00:06:51] Bruce: Right, exactly. Okay, so I did not hate Batman vs. Superman, but it is just nowhere near, and it showed flashes of genius.
That movie has some really good aspects to it.
[00:07:02] Cameo: I haven't, I kind of gave up on their whole franchise.
[00:07:09] Bruce: I don't blame you.
I don't blame you. Okay, so with this in mind, Marvel goes in to finish up their phase three, which ends with Endgame, and then the Spider-Man's kind of the epilogue to the story. And in many ways, they've wrapped up their storyline, which is again, a risky creative choice, although a good one in my opinion, to actually create closure on the storyline and before you start something new.
They kill off the most important characters, right? They basically, for all intents and purposes, they've killed off Iron Man, literally killed him off. Captain America didn't literally kill him off, but effectively, he's gone.
Thor, I don't know that they have, like we can expect to see Thor again, but it's not really super clear if he's going to really be one of the main superheroes anymore. So they've gotten rid of their three characters that are really carrying the franchise. Again, that's a risky move, although they didn't really have much of a choice that there's contracts in place with the actors and the actors don't want to do this forever and things like that.
So the Marvel shows pick up at the end of this phase three, and they are the introduction to phase four. There are no Marvel movies in phase four yet. Well, I guess there is now Black Widow's out.
[00:08:25] Bruce: But these shows are the introduction to phase four. They're done as a TV series, they're done on Disney Plus streaming. And one thing I just have to throw out there, when did TV shows special effects become so good that I almost can't tell the difference between a TV show and a movie anymore?
[00:08:43] Cameo: When between Disney and Amazon and Netflix, they started just pushing money into TV. It's about budget always. I mean, they're just spending money on these TV shows that doesn't compare with the kind of money that has been spent previously.
[00:09:04] Tracy: It seems like the bigger, better business is, you know, going to TV, that seems to be kind of where it's at.
[00:09:11] Bruce: I agree that that's the way it feels. I wonder why that is though. Like, I mean, like does streaming get way more views than television ever did?
I don't even know the answer to that question.
[00:09:22] Cameo: I don't know that that is true. It might be, but right now, it might be as much about competition as anything else. They might be losing money across the board, but it's because they're having a cold war of attention.
[00:09:41] Bruce: That's a depressing thought, Cameo.
[00:09:48] Cameo: You know, Netflix's budget for creation, I think last year I read, was 22 billion dollars.
[00:09:58] Bruce: Oh my gosh.
Are you serious?
[00:10:00] Cameo: Oh, yeah. The amount of money that all the big players are flooding into creation is boggling.
[00:10:10] Bruce: Do you guys even remember that Netflix used to be a DVD service that you got in the mail?
[00:10:16] Unidentified speaker: Yes.
[00:10:17] Bruce: I mean, it's hard to even believe it's the same company. In fact, it isn't the same company. The DVD service Netflix is still around.
It's an entirely different company that just uses the Netflix name, but they're still around. Nobody even knows that because they're so unpopular at this point. But Netflix is just not even the same company it was when it got started.
They've completely transformed themselves at this point into being mainly a content creator.
[00:10:42] Cameo: Mainly a content creator, yeah.
[00:10:44] Bruce: Okay. So this is our background. Let's talk about WandaVision.
So how many episodes are in WandaVision? Is it six or eight? You always either have six or eight, it seems like.
[00:10:56] Unidentified speaker: I think it was eight.
[00:10:57] Bruce: Eight, okay. And they're half-hour episodes.
The first day they released episodes, they released two episodes together, which I think was a really smart move. I think if they hadn't done that, they may have had a problem because you didn't actually figure out enough about the show to be interested in just the first episode.
[00:11:15] Cameo: I absolutely agree. If I hadn't had the ability, if the first episode had been longer, and then if I hadn't had the ability to turn around and watch another one, they would have lost me. Because it wasn't clear what they were doing, and it was weird.
[00:11:31] Bruce: Okay, and this is-
[00:11:33] Tracy: According to Wikipedia, sorry, it was nine episodes, just-
[00:11:36] Bruce: Nine episodes, okay. So, and this is the thing that, again, you can see the riskiness that Marvel's willing to take. Nobody knows what this show is about, and it's just weird.
It's, for some reason, two superheroes are living in a sitcom suburbs in the 50s. One of the superheroes is dead. We know he's dead.
We watched him die in the movies, and there's no explanation for why he's suddenly not dead. They're not acting like superheroes. They do have powers, but they're in typical sitcom fashion.
They're trying to hide their powers from their neighbors, because like in Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, the neighbors can't handle the truth, so they're trying to keep their powers hidden. Other than that, it might as well just be a sitcom. And it's not just any sitcom, it's a 50s sitcom.
Each episode changes genre. So the first is always a 50s sitcom, the second episode is a 60s sitcom, and they move up with each episode until they reach modern times.
[00:12:43] Cameo: But they perfectly adhered to all of the stereotypes.
[00:12:47] Unidentified speaker: They did.
[00:12:48] Unidentified speaker: It's gorgeous.
[00:12:49] Bruce: They hired Dick Van Dyke as a consultant, from what I understand.
[00:12:53] Cameo: Oh, interesting. I didn't know that.
[00:12:55] Bruce: And they went with the directorial style of the 50s sitcom, except for one scene, which I'll talk about that in just a second. And they start the show off, and so when you're doing a spoof of a sitcom, which you've probably seen many times before, sitcoms often spoof themselves. Typically, what they do is they're not funny.
They'll have people, they're making fun of the tropes of a sitcom. Like they'll make some little wisecrack, and then this giant laugh track goes off, and everybody's laughing. And the joke wasn't actually funny.
And they're getting you to laugh at how dumb sitcoms are. Okay. I've seen this done multiple times on multiple shows, where they're kind of making fun of the tropes of sitcoms.
The show actually starts doing that. The first couple jokes are lame, and they have this massive sound laugh track. And they made me at least think that this was going to be a spoof of a sitcom.
That it wasn't, I shouldn't expect it to actually be funny. I shouldn't expect it to actually be like a sitcom. It's only going to be funny in so far as it's making fun of sitcoms.
Within, after those first two jokes, where they played it that way, the show started becoming genuinely funny. My family was literally busting up out loud, laughing at the jokes. Honestly, the show worked at two levels, at least.
[00:14:22] Bruce: I'm going to say three levels eventually, but two levels as both a spoof of a 50s sitcom and as an actual 50s sitcom. They actually nailed the humor of a 50s sitcom really well. They start with this joke where they have an important date on their calendar and it's an anniversary or something, they're not sure.
Neither of the husband and the wife, so Wanda and Vision, neither can remember what that date is important for, but they're too embarrassed to admit to the other that they don't know, so they're pretending like they know what the date is. It's very standard 50s sitcom fare, where you get these growing misunderstandings and neither wants to admit that they don't know what they're talking about. And yet, there's this little edge to it that you don't even notice at first, where Vision says, I'm a robot.
I can't forget things. So of course I remember what the date is. And yet, you can tell he's forgotten what the date is too. And so this is played for humor, but later on it becomes an important plot point.
Why can't Vision, a robot with perfect memory, remember this date? And they're just barely pushing in there at once they're having this straightforward 50s sitcom humor that's actually funny, but they're making you feel a little dread at the same point, at the same time, because something's just off with what everything going on. And then there's kind of, they go through this series of misunderstandings, they have the boss come over, there's these fairly funny, but standard 50s sitcom tropes that they're going through.
[00:15:57] Bruce: And everything's a little bit different to keep you on your toes, but it's pretty close. She's trying to use her magic powers to make dinner, and we're afraid the boss is going to see and Bewitched-type stuff. The scene that really hooked me though, was when the boss started to choke.
Do you guys remember that? Or do I need to remind you?
[00:16:17] Cameo: Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:16:18] Bruce: That scene is where they dropped the 50s directorial style, and they move it to be the directorial style of a modern drama, where they're right up in the person's face, and the camera's not back anymore, trying to show the whole set. They've suddenly switched the scene to not be a 50s sitcom anymore, as this boss starts to choke. The boss's wife, she's a sitcom character.
She continues to be a sitcom character, even while her husband may be dying. And she keeps saying, stop it, stop it. She doesn't have a clue.
She's just a sitcom character. She doesn't have a clue how to deal with an actual dangerous circumstance. And because dangerous circumstances like that don't come up in 50s sitcoms.
And as a stock 50s sitcom character, she isn't imbued with the necessary intelligence to know how to deal with an actual drama.
[00:17:15] Cameo: I disagree with that assessment of that.
[00:17:18] Bruce: Okay, go for it.
[00:17:19] Cameo: So I believe that her reaction isn't because she's a sitcom character. Her reaction is because she is [controlled] by Wanda. And this is her moment that she's actually breaking past her character for a moment.
And the only thing that she can get past the controls that Wanda has in place is this desperate begging for Wanda to stop it. She knows Wanda is controlling her. She knows that Wanda has set up this storyline within this prison that Wanda has put them all in.
And she's begging Wanda to stop the story before the story kills him.
[00:18:02] Bruce: Okay, you just made my point.
[00:18:03] Cameo: Oh, I did? Oh, great. I love it when [overlapping speech unclear] and I'm still right.
[00:18:08] Bruce: Because what you just said is what we find out later is going on, episodes later.
[00:18:12] Tracy: Initially, what you were thinking, Bruce, is correct. And then later Cameo, yeah, it becomes obvious. Oh, that's what that moment was.
[00:18:19] Bruce: They actually successfully did it at two levels. That's the beauty of it.
[00:18:24] Cameo: No, you're right. They did successfully, curse you, Bruce, of course you're right.
[00:18:29] Bruce: So there's a really good explanation. When you're just watching, so I wrote my review of it when I hadn't seen the rest of the shows, it hadn't been out yet. There was this certain level of understanding that was available at that point in that episode, which is she's acting like a sitcom character.
She doesn't know how to respond to this. Later on, you find out why that is the case. It wasn't, it seems at first like it's just a throwaway, right, that she's behaving in a weird way.
Later on, you find out exactly why she can't seem to break out of being a sitcom character is because Wanda's got controls in place. And then to your point, once that character manages to say, stop it, she seems to be saying it to her husband, but as you argue, she's really saying it to Wanda. That gets Wanda to finally tell Vision, save him.
And up until that moment, Vision was playing the standard incompetent sitcom husband. And at that moment, Wanda allows him to be the superhero that he actually is. And so he immediately grabs the guy, uses his powers, saves the guy from choking.
And then we go right back to 50s directorial style, right back to being a sitcom, and there's no explanation offered at that point as to what's going on. The explanation comes episodes later. And that's like the first episode, and it ends.
[00:19:49] Bruce: In the second episode, they jump to the 60s. They're doing a spoof of Bewitched, literally to the point where the opening is the little cartoon style of The Bewitched show, right? The first one is probably closer to Dick Van Dyke.
The second one was probably closer to Bewitched. In that episode, they're doing a magic show together. Vision gets drunk.
I can't remember, what does he get drunk on? Because he can't really get drunk, but something happened. I don't remember.
I think it was like he chewed gum or something like that.
[00:20:20] Tracy: At one point, he does swallow gum.
[00:20:22] Unidentified speaker: Yeah.
[00:20:23] Bruce: And it mixes up in his gears, which is silly, right? Doesn't even make sense.
And so they're doing this magic show, and he keeps revealing that it's real magic, so she has to keep making it look like it's not real magic. And by the way, they don't even bother to explain to you why her powers are magic now, because they weren't magic in the movies. In the movies, they were telekinesis and telepathy.
And you could see that her powers, they were red or scarlet. And suddenly that's not what her powers are like anymore. Vision's powers are exactly the same.
Her powers are completely different. They're now, she's effectively a Bewitched witch or an I Dream of Jeannie genie. And there's no explanation offered as to why her powers are somehow suddenly far more versatile than they used to be.
And again, they'll explain it later, but they don't explain it up to this point. By the end of that show, that show was also, again, it was really hilarious. And I think it was in that episode where the most chilling scene takes place, where she goes to be with the other ladies in a women's meeting.
During that, they turn on the radio and the Beach Boys is playing, I think. And suddenly she hears a voice, Wanda, who's doing this to you, Wanda? And within context, everything's just wrong, right?
[00:21:42] Bruce: There's this loud noise, you can hear something's wrong. The woman that she's with, who's the bully, is behaving strangely and is angry with her over something and we're not quite sure what. And suddenly you hear this voice and then it all stops.
She makes it stop, then she ignores it all. And you're like, what the heck just happened? And at this point, my family had been laughing all throughout the show.
My wife, who is still laughing all throughout the show, she's telling me, I don't like this.
[00:22:16] Unidentified speaker: She's laughing. [Overlapping speech: ...suddenly got sinister.]
[00:22:18] Bruce: Yeah, she's laughing.
[00:22:19] Unidentified speaker: My kids freaked out too.
[00:22:20] Bruce: And she's freaked out, which is the third level that I think they succeeded at. Not only was it a spoof of a 50s sitcom, while being a sitcom, it was also a Marvel show, a Marvel drama with scary stuff going on. And then at the very end of that episode, I believe is where we see the beekeeper, which is another just weird, out of the blue, what the heck is going on here type situation.
And again, Wanda is the one that makes it stop. She literally says no, and then you see her rewind. And the show continues from a point, a moment ago, she's actually somehow edited the show.
Like you're watching the show and she, the character in the show just edited the show for you. And you just, at this point, my head's exploding. I've got no idea what's going on, but I'm intrigued.
And the other thing that I noticed by this end of the second episode was their beds were separate, which makes sense because they're in a 50s, 60s, right?
[00:23:21] Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I noticed that.
[00:23:22] Bruce: And then, so they don't do the spoof trope.
They don't say, why are our beds separate? We're married, okay? They stick with being characters in a sitcom, who just don't even question why married couples are in separate beds.
And it never even occurs to them to ask the question. And then there's something outside that's scaring them. Again, a standard sitcom type situation.
So they end up pushing their beds together because they're scared. So in other words, they get their beds together against the trope of 50s sitcom, but they do so for a reason that makes sense within a 50s sitcom rather than jumping outside of the genre. And then to make matters worse, you find out what actually was outside their window the next day, and it's kind of creepy.
It's the little helicopter that was a drone that was spying on them that we later find out comes from the organization that is trying to watch what they're doing. What was the name of the organization? SWORD. So by the end of the first couple episodes, I was just confused, but I really, really, really wanted to know what was going on.
And I was already hooked on the show. I knew it was fun to watch. I knew that my family was going to be enjoying it.
It was making us all laugh. How often do you actually laugh out loud during a sitcom? It's not really that common, right?
It was, its level of funniness was really quite good, right? I wouldn't say it's the funniest thing I've ever seen, but-
[00:24:48] Tracy: Like amusing, but not laugh out loud, typically.
[00:24:51] Bruce: Right. They were hitting quite high in several categories, in several genres at the same time. Again, if someone told me, Bruce, go write a show that is somehow simultaneously successful at all three of these levels, I couldn't do it.
I wouldn't even know where to begin. I mean, this is a real creative accomplishment that we're talking about. That's my initial analysis and that more or less summarizes the blog post I made after watching the first two episodes.
[00:25:20] Cameo: And that was only the first two episodes.
[00:25:22] Bruce: And that's only the first two episodes. What are things you guys liked about the rest of the show? And was there anything that you felt could have been better?
[00:25:30] Cameo: So I really liked the fact that one of their superheroes became a supervillain. Wanda enslaves this entire community, then uses them like puppets to work through her grief. And it's evil.
It's an evil thing she does, you know? And I think that I hope in the future in the storyline, there's more repercussions for that across their world. Because the problem with heroes is, what do you do when somebody who's as powerful as Wanda goes bad?
[00:26:13] Bruce: By the way, that's very consistent with her character. She started off as a villain, even in the movies. She started off as a villain.
[00:26:20] Unidentified speaker: Sure.
[00:26:20] Bruce: Switch sides. But her loyalties have always been a little, we're not quite sure. I think we can see that she tries to be a good person.
Even when she was a villain, she had at least a good understandable reason for why she was a villain. And maybe didn't even realize she was a villain.
[00:26:40] Cameo: Well, that's what's scary about her. She enslaved all of those people without even realizing that she was doing it.
[00:26:48] Bruce: Right.
[00:26:50] Cameo: And so that's concerning.
[00:26:53] Tracy: Quite a power. I was actually listening to a couple of therapists talk about it. They have a show called Cinema Therapy.
They broke down the WandaVision stuff, and it was really interesting. I've never heard of this before, but basically said that she has this condition. Because of so much grief and things happening to her, it's called maladaptive daydreaming.
And that is one heck of a maladaptive daydream.
[00:27:18] Bruce: So, okay, so to put this, maybe summarize this. This is a show. I mean, like I just mentioned three levels.
There's actually a fourth level that this show is about. In a very straightforward human sense, it's about dealing with grief. Even though everything going on is so fantastical, because we're inside the Marvel Universe, and this happens to be Wanda we're talking about, her grief is recognizably human and even in some sense, realistically done.
[00:27:48] Cameo: I would agree. And I actually think it's interesting because in The Winter Soldier, grief is also a big theme that kind of goes throughout the whole thing, the grief of these people who feel like, you know, their lives have been taken from them by the return. And the grief that they have and all of the people who should be happy with the return, you know, or, you know, that the return should be a great and glorious thing, that it results in all this grief.
[00:28:22] Bruce: The return being undoing Thanos' snap.
[00:28:25] Unidentified speaker: Yes.
[00:28:26] Bruce: Yeah, I agree. And so let's talk about Falcon and the Winter Soldier now, which was, again, a shockingly good show. Not at all what I—
I had heard rumors it wasn't very good. The buzz had come out, that they had really struggled with that show, and that it hadn't come out very well, and that they were trying to figure out how to fix it. I do not see the slightest sign that's true in the actual show.
[00:28:52] Cameo: Yeah, I don't either.
[00:28:53] Bruce: So one of the things that Marvel does that has been very smart, and let's talk about Marvel movies here, is that every single movie is a different genre. So the first few movies were superhero movies. But then after that, they didn't want to keep doing superhero movies because that would get boring.
So they started to mix the genres up. So like the second Thor is a fantasy movie, the Ant-Man is a heist movie, the Captain America and the Winter Soldier is a spy thriller. And so they actually started to take other genres and meld them with the superhero genre so that they could make the new movies feel fresh, even though we're dealing with characters we already know, we're dealing with the, I don't know, 50th superhero movie in this universe.
[00:29:43] Cameo: In like three years or five years.
[00:29:46] Bruce: Right, right. And so they switched genres. So the Marvel cinematic universe contains every genre of movie in real life effectively, right?
Very interesting, again, creative choice that makes sense, because then it allows you to do all sorts of different interesting things in your shared universe. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a spy thriller, similar to Captain America in the Winter Soldier, the movie. Whereas WandaVision was a sitcom.
Marvel had never really done a true sitcom, but some of their movies are comedies. The third Thor movie is a comedy.
[00:30:22] Cameo: Oh yeah, absolutely. And a really well done comedy.
[00:30:26] Bruce: Yeah. So WandaVision was the first time they had gone all the way to doing a sitcom, but now the Marvel universe includes the sitcom genre. So Falcon and the Winter Soldier was an intrigue.
First of all, one of the things that I kept wondering before the show came out was why it was called Falcon and the Winter Soldier instead of Captain America and the Winter Soldier. And by the time the show is done, you know why. And in fact, that seems to be the new name of the show.
The show season two will now be called Captain America and the Winter Soldier. Did you guys catch that at the end of the final episode?
[00:30:57] Cameo: I guess I did. I haven't really thought about it explicitly.
[00:31:01] Bruce: They changed the title. The title at the very end said Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and then it changed, morphed into Captain America and the Winter Soldier.
[00:31:09] Cameo: Oh, interesting.
[00:31:11] Bruce: So they made it clear the name of the show has changed because of course this first season is about Falcon becoming Captain America and the struggles both internally and externally for him to deal with trying to become Captain America. And Cameo, this is where you made a point offline. You said that the Marvel shows, and I assume you meant in particular this one, dealt with some really modern issues really skillfully.
[00:31:42] Cameo: Yeah, I mean, the fact that they made race the primary part of his struggle, and kind of had to force a little bit that that was already there as a struggle kind of for the country in their imaginary world. But the fact that they made him have to come to terms with the racism that he had been dealing with and that was kind of... Race is such a big part of all of the conversations that are happening in our country right now, and they didn't shy away from it at all.
[00:32:33] Bruce: And they did it well. I mean, people could probably, there's probably some things to be criticized. I'm not saying they necessarily did it perfectly.
I doubt anyone can do it perfectly. But I've seen so many attempts by modern shows to work race into the storyline that are so obviously, they started with the racial issues and then slapped story together around the issue they wanted to talk about. I did not feel that way at all with this show.
The discussion of racism flowed naturally from the storyline first, from what I could tell. In fact, I have a hard time even thinking of examples of shows that have handled race well recently other than this one. I mean, it would be very easy to find examples if you went back far enough in time.
I mean, like, is there any doubt that To Kill a Mockingbird handles race better than this show does? No, right? But in terms of recent examples, the Star Wars movies tried to handle kind of modern issues, and they did it so unskillfully, to the point where it was just grating and turned a lot of people off.
This Marvel show, maybe there are people who are turned off by it, but it never felt grating. It never felt even preachy to me. It kind of just laid out, this is the situation, and then it never gave you any easy answers.
[00:33:57] Cameo: Because there aren't any, right? I mean, that was the maturity that I feel like they brought to it. They didn't try and make it easy, and they didn't even, you know, even for him to become Captain America and move forward in the storyline, I suspect that they will spin this, some of these concepts back up again, because there continued to be challenges for him.
[00:34:20] Bruce: Yeah, he's told by the first Black Captain America, who back when that happened, back in the 20s or 30s or whatever, America couldn't handle a Black Captain America and kind of buried his legacy. He's told by the first Black Captain America, they will never accept you. They will keep you from doing it.
And he's wrong.
[00:34:44] Unidentified speaker: He is.
[00:34:45] Bruce: Yes, he's wrong. Things have actually changed, and they make it very clear that the, I forget the character's name, but the first Black Captain America, he has this view that's understandable given what happened to him, but they make it clear that he is wrong. And at the same time, he's not completely wrong.
You know, there's very genuine challenges. Some people do struggle with the fact that there's now a Black Captain America with the Falcon becoming Captain America, but a lot of people embrace him. And this is also shown.
And he ends up using his stature as Captain America and effectively saving the refugees, basically. We have to work refugees in there somewhere. In this case, the refugees come from Thanos' snap, right?
So at the one hand, it's this completely fantasy circumstance, but one that makes complete sense within the fiction of this world. And it's almost odd when you think about it that nobody really thought that much about, well, how would the world be affected by Thanos' snap really prior to this show, right? I mean, granted, Spider-Man addressed that to some degree.
But this show really made it further and turned it into, it's not just some little plot point that we're throwing on there because this is a comic book. They're making the consequences real, from a realistic...
[00:36:13] Cameo: Yeah, which gives them, I think, a lot of nice opportunities going forward to canonize how massive the impacts from that are. Because, well, for one thing, it takes them a little bit away from our... I mean, they're already well away from our real world anyway, but it gives them a lot of variety on potential storylines.
[00:36:40] Bruce: Yeah, I felt like Falcon Winter Soldier also worked well as a buddy cop show, although I thought it would be solely a buddy cop show, and it wasn't. It was very different from that in many ways.
[00:36:52] Cameo: They did bring in some of that kind of concept, but then I think because they also let the race thing infuse that relationship, I think, and it's interesting because a lot of the buddy cop shows, over the long history of buddy cop shows, it's been very common to pair a black person to a white person as part of that trope. But then in general, never have race be part of that conversation.
[00:37:29] Bruce: Okay, so let me take that point and let me run with it. So you have the other Captain America in the show. So you've got the new one who is now called US Agent, who's a well-known villain from the Marvel universe.
He's made the new Captain America because Falcon gives the shield up. So the government makes their own Captain America, and that Captain America has a sidekick who is Black.
[00:37:56] Unidentified speaker: Right.
[00:37:57] Bruce: And they play it completely straight-faced. There's no doubt that they're playing the trope you just mentioned. But they play it completely straight-faced.
These two guys are actually buddies. They're actually real close friends. They love each other.
They're going to turn out to be the villains. We kind of know that, but we can see kind of their heroic side too. They're trying to do this for good reasons.
At one point, someone refers to Battlestar, the black sidekick, as a sidekick, and he skewers them. He says, I'm not a sidekick. They show that he's actually every bit as much a superhero as the Captain America.
He does half the work. He literally does half the work. And yet everyone comes up and gets signatures from Captain America and not from him.
And they have a little joke about him saying, I've got my own little Battlestar logo I was going to use. Without ever saying anything, they just basically laid out why there is a racist trope, why there is some racism infused into the trope you just mentioned. By playing it entirely straight-faced and never even directly calling attention to it.
I thought that was interesting. I thought that was really well done.
[00:39:08] Cameo: It's a fascinating way to play with that in a broader environment where they're taking race head-on for them to ignore it across that particular relationship. Now, let's move to the last one.
[00:39:29] Bruce: Loki. I have one big problem with Loki. Tracy is going to argue with me over this one, but I don't like the fact that it ended with a cliffhanger.
I dislike cliffhangers at the end of TV shows where I have to wait years to find out what happened.
[00:39:44] Tracy: I'm not saying I love that part, but what I do love is that it's going to continue, and I know that so I'm comforted. If it ended there and there was no hope of finding out more or what happened, that's when it would bug me.
[00:39:55] Bruce: Just to maybe set up what this show is about, in Endgame, we had a quick scene where Loki from the first Avengers movie in an alternate timeline, so thus in a multiverse, has escaped. Whereas the Loki we normally know is still dead. He was still killed by Thanos.
And so we've got... So he's a more mischievous, malevolent version of Loki. Although they didn't really stick with that.
They have a scene where he gets to find out what happened to the real version of himself. And so somehow he's an infusion of the two Lokis. He's not quite the evil Loki of the first Avengers movie, and he's not quite the good Loki that sacrificed himself to try to stop Thanos.
He's somewhere in between and we're not sure where, which maybe that isn't realistic, but as a character in a show worked really well.
[00:40:56] Unidentified speaker: Certainly a variation, so why not?
[00:41:00] Bruce: Yeah, you used the word variation. I noticed that. I didn't miss the joke there.
So he's a variant of Loki is what they call him. There's this time agency that is bringing him on to try to hunt down other variants of Loki, because apparently Loki variants are some of the worst variants that are the hardest to deal with. So they want the help from one Loki variant to try to outthink the other Loki variants that are causing problems for the timeline.
I thought this was a good way of utilizing the God of Mischief. And then he effectively, this show is Marvel does Doctor Who. Loki is in many ways the Doctor, maybe a slightly more malevolent version of the Doctor, more self-interested version of the Doctor, slightly less heroic version of the Doctor.
But he behaves a lot like the Doctor, at least certain incarnations of the Doctor. He says funny things, he acts all smart. Ultimately, he can't control himself.
He has to kind of be himself, even when maybe he shouldn't be. He's got many Doctor-like qualities to him, and yet it still always feels like we're dealing with a Loki. He never really stops feeling like a Loki.
Thoughts on that?
[00:42:15] Cameo: So, I'm really glad that they played him that way. It is very, very Doctor-esque. I think the humor especially has a very Doctor Who feel about it, which I think is a perfect, like you say, the God of Mischief, it's the perfect way for them to play his character.
[00:42:37] Bruce: Which, by the way, we now have added to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the genre of Doctor Who.
[00:42:44] Cameo: I've never actually heard that referred to as its own genre, but okay.
[00:42:50] Bruce: You know, we could talk about what is the genre of Doctor Who, and obviously maybe that's the wrong thing to call it, because that genre existed prior to Doctor Who. I would argue that the first really archetypal Doctor Who was Sherlock Holmes. Maybe I'm wrong about that, because there were characters similar to Sherlock Holmes prior to Sherlock Holmes.
But in many ways, if you ever watch the modern show Sherlock, nobody misses, which is done by the same guy who did Doctor Who, nobody misses the fact that Sherlock is the Doctor, and the Doctor is Sherlock. And this seems to be quite intentional. They have companions.
The shows are very similar, and yet one is clearly Sherlock and one is clearly the Doctor. And you could easily have the two meet up and do a crossover, and it wouldn't even feel that weird. They're very similar sorts of shows.
So maybe what we're really talking about is the genre of the enigmatic, mischievous genius that is an antihero. Or I don't know, right? I mean, it's what is that genre?
And yet it does exist as a genre, right? Even if it's hard to give a name to it, this is a common trope that comes up, and it's a very interesting set of shows that you can start to think of fit into this category.
[00:44:10] Tracy: This is interesting. I hadn't actually made any kind of a Doctor Who connection until you said it. Now I'm kind of quiet because I'm thinking it through.
[00:44:17] Bruce: So the other thing is that it was also a buddy cop show, although a humorous one. So you have Mobius, who is teaming up with Loki. And I really liked their relationship.
I thought that it was really well done. There's a kind of love-hate relationship going on there. Things switch up.
You start thinking of things one way, and by the time you're done, everything's being thought of in a different way. There's also a relationship being built between two variants of Loki. Of course, it's a female variant of Loki and a male variant of Loki.
And there's hints of romance between the two of them, which is, by the way, actually somewhat Doctor-esque. Not that they've ever done romance with the Doctor, but the relationship between the two Lokis, and later on, some of the other Lokis, was very reminiscent of the relationship of the Doctor with himself. They have these crossover episodes of Doctor Who, where the various Doctors that are played by different actors meet up and have to interact.
And you get to see how similar and different they all are at the same time. And that's what they did with these Loki variants all meeting up, particularly with the two most important Loki variants, the one that is the main character and the female one that he's trying to track down. I also thought it was interesting how sympathetic of a character she was.
She was actually in many ways far more sympathetic than the Loki that's the main character that is the one we're more familiar with.
[00:45:43] Unidentified speaker: Yeah, she was.
[00:45:45] Bruce: She's never really done anything benevolent [apparently meaning malevolent] insofar as she is the enemy of the time authority.
It's for good reason. It's for a completely understandable, even we see eventually valid reason that she's trying to take them down. And she was kidnapped by them as a child.
She never had a chance to grow into being the mischievous Loki that we normally think of. She's in some ways just a kind of a straight heroic character, but you don't know that at first. You think that she's the villain.
And then by the time you're done, it's not really clear if she was the hero or not. She certainly meant to be, but she may not have made the right choice because of the cliffhanger ending. Which by the way, from what I understand, that new character that they've introduced, the one that got introduced at the very end of the show, that's Kang the Conqueror from the comic books.
And he is a villain from the upcoming Ant-Man movie, which each of these shows prepared us for one of the movies. I don't know if you had caught on to that or not.
[00:46:46] Tracy: I'd only just recently caught discussion about who that character actually was. And I admit some ignorance. I have some research to do.
[00:46:55] Bruce: I haven't heard of Kang the Conqueror prior to the show Loki. My son is the one who told me that that was Kang the Conqueror. I'm very proud of my children, that they are nerdier than me.
I have succeeded as a father.
[00:47:06] Unidentified speaker: That's [saying] a lot, Bruce.
[00:47:10] Unidentified speaker: Are you sure?
[00:47:12] Bruce: The WandaVision was a setup for Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Obviously Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a setup for the new Captain America movie. And Loki was a setup apparently for Ant-Man.
[00:47:26] Cameo: Interesting.
[00:47:27] Bruce: I'm not really sure where they're going with Loki. Like obviously it ended with a cliffhanger, so we're going to continue the storyline with Loki. But like, will he or Sylvie, the female Loki, will they ever become characters in the movies?
Or will they always just be this little side plot line going on in the background? I'm not really sure.
[00:47:47] Cameo: I suspect they will show up in the movies.
[00:47:51] Bruce: I think the big risk that they've taken is that they've cheapened the heroic death of Loki from the movies.
[00:47:58] Cameo: Oh, interesting.
[00:47:59] Bruce: And so by keeping him separate in a separate multiverse, in a separate timeline, in a separate circumstance, they haven't really cheapened the death of the heroic Loki yet. If he shows up in the movies, that would be really difficult for them to pull off and not cheapen his death. Maybe they'll still do it.
Maybe it's worth it because, honestly, Tom Hiddleston is just awesome.
[00:48:23] Unidentified speaker: Yeah.
[00:48:23] Bruce: Or maybe they won't. Maybe they'll decide we're not going to cheapen the death of Loki. We're going to keep him a background character just in the TV shows.
And there's going to be tie-ins, but only going one way.
[00:48:35] Tracy: Is it a redemption piece? Do you think that would be the tack they're going for?
[00:48:40] Bruce: You know, I thought that was where they were going to go with it. And they acted at times like they were going to do a redemption arc for Loki. By the time you're done, you're not sure.
You're not sure what Loki's, if Loki's really on a redemption arc or not. He ultimately does the right thing and tries to stop the emergence of Kang the Conqueror while Sylvie causes it. But he doesn't have a heroic motive.
He's just kind of thinking, is this really going to be in my own best interest to do this? He definitely is close to Sylvie. He sincerely wants to protect her.
He doesn't, and I think he's close to Mobius. I think he sincerely wants to protect Mobius. I don't think we've seen any signs he cares about anybody else.
They're just pawns in his game as far as he's concerned. Maybe you could argue that he was also close to the older Loki. It was played by the famous actor.
I don't remember what actor that was. But the older Loki was a very interesting character. But yeah, at this point, I'm not sure where they're going with it, to be honest.
I don't know if they are moving towards a redemption arc for him or not. I was going to liken this to Agents of SHIELD, where you had Coulson return, but to not cheapen the death of Coulson from the movies, he could never show up in the movies ever again. So they had to keep making up excuses for why it was always a one-way street.
[00:50:05] Bruce: The show could reference the movies, but the movies couldn't reference the show. I don't think they're going to do that this time around. I think that these new shows are so central to the ongoing plot of the cinematic universe that they're going to start having reverse references.
They must because we know Wanda is going to show up in the Multiverse of Madness. We know the Multiverse of Madness has something to do with the fall of the time authority. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a multiverse.
So they've already shown really strong signs that the TV shows impact the movies now, where that didn't used to be the case for Marvel TV shows. The movies could impact the TV show, but the TV show could never impact the movies, which always made them feel a little bit cut off from the movie, the movie verse. Have you guys actually seen Agents of Shield all the way through?
I think I've seen only the first five seasons. I didn't even watch the last two seasons.
[00:51:01] Cameo: No, I haven't.
[00:51:02] Tracy: No, I had a hard time getting into it.
[00:51:04] Bruce: Yeah, so did I. It wasn't a bad show. It was a fairly well done show, but it never really grabbed my interest to the degree that the movies did or to the degree that these new shows do.
And I think part of it is that you knew they couldn't make a difference. They apparently, at some point, the communication between the Marvel TV studios and the Marvel movie studios broke down. The movies didn't care about the TV shows anymore, so they stopped communicating to the TV shows what was going to happen in the movies.
So the TV shows didn't know where the movies were going. So I think it was at the end of the fifth season of Agents of SHIELD they mentioned Thanos. Thanos has arrived, and at the same time, the Agents of SHIELD are dealing with another threat that's maybe even as threatening as Thanos.
So the Avengers are off taking care of Thanos. The Agents of SHIELD are off taking care of this other bad guy, Graviton, I think his name was. But they mentioned that Thanos has arrived, and they've been building up to the arrival of Thanos all throughout the season.
If I understand correctly, in the next season, season six, they didn't know what Endgame was going to do. So they set the show two years in the future, apparently hoping that that would be far enough that they wouldn't have to explain what happened in Endgame. But Endgame actually took place five years after.
[00:52:28] Bruce: So without explanation, Agents of SHIELD takes place during Thanos' snap, without ever even once mentioning it. Because they didn't know it had taken place when they were writing the plot lines.
[00:52:44] Cameo: Yeah, that makes for messiness. I bet they won't let that happen again.
[00:52:49] Bruce: Yeah, I don't think so. It's clear that the TV shows are now as much a part of the Marvel Universe as the movies. And don't even get me started on like Daredevil, which was a great show, but there was about as little crossover with the rest of the Marvel Universe as could have been humanly possible.
[00:53:08] Cameo: Yes, yeah, that one we'll have to save for a conversation for another day.
[00:53:13] Bruce: All right. Final thoughts, guys.
[00:53:17] Cameo: I love the direction that they're going in. I love how they're... You know, I'm not a big TV movie person.
I never really have been, partially because I think that a lot of modern shows have really struggled to show, have really complex and thoughtful storylines that are compelling, and they're just nailing it again and again. Great, great stuff. I'm really pleased.
[00:53:47] Bruce: And Tracy?
[00:53:49] Tracy: I agree. Can I just echo you, Cameo? That was...
It's just... Yeah, it's intricate. I love that they can take their time to actually tell an in-depth story, so you really get pulled in and care, because I think we like that.
It's a nice format to be able to really... Like reading a book. You really can get deep and just chew on it.
[00:54:10] Bruce: One more point, and then we'll wrap it up. Out of the most recent Star Wars stuff that has come out, both the movies and the TV shows, what's the best one?
[00:54:19] Cameo: Lego Star Wars.
[00:54:22] Bruce: Cameo, which one have you enjoyed the most of the different movies and TV shows that have come out? Do you enjoy The Mandalorian?
[00:54:32] Cameo: Oh yeah, I really enjoyed The Mandalorian. It was fantastic.
[00:54:35] Bruce: I think most people would say The Mandalorian was by far the best Star Wars to have come out since Disney got the property. It's the only one done by the Marvel guys.
[00:54:45] Cameo: Oh, that's funny. I don't think I realized that.
[00:54:49] Bruce: Yeah, Jon Favreau.
[00:54:52] Cameo: I knew it was Favreau. I guess I just didn't think of Favreau as a Marvel guy.
[00:54:57] Bruce: Oh, he is specifically the Marvel guy. He is in charge of all of the Marvel movies.
[00:55:04] Cameo: I'm glad that he gets to do that. I've been a Favreau fan for a long, long time. For years, I think Favreau really struggled to find his place in the world.
I would love to know how he got the opportunity to direct the first Iron Man. But he's just fantastic. I just think he's fantastic.
[00:55:29] Tracy: And a great chef to boot.
[00:55:31] Bruce: He's a chef? I didn't even know that.
[00:55:34] Tracy: Check out The Chef Show. I wouldn't say—he's not a professional chef, but he's an extremely skilled amateur.
[00:55:41] Bruce: This is a very talented guy that we're talking about. There's videos on YouTube of him geeking out over Marvel, obviously. So he was like a genuine, genuine Marvel fan before he became the banner holder for Marvel.
And then they have other ones of him geeking out over Star Wars. So he was a genuine Star Wars fan, too. I think that's where he really...
And it wasn't just Jon Favreau. He brought in the team of Marvel people to do The Mandalorian. So he brought in his people to run that show, from what I understand.
So what we're talking about, at some level, they used the Marvel crew to try to save Star Wars with The Mandalorian. Because we were clearly not headed in the best direction anymore with Star Wars. There was...
I don't know how much interest was lost, because we're still talking about a very popular property. But there's definitely a feeling that there was starting to be a slippage of interest in Star Wars, that they were trying to get The Mandalorian to pull that back, which I think they did a good job of doing that.
[00:56:45] Cameo: They did. They did. It's really...
It's good TV again. I mean, it's wonderful. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation.
A lot of fun.
[00:56:57] Bruce: All right.
Well, thank you, guys.
[00:56:59] Unidentified speaker: Thank you.
[00:57:01] Bruce: See you next time.
[00:57:02] Unidentified speaker: Bye.
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