Before anyone gets up in arms about this one, let me ask you this question: what was the last
marvel movie that you watched that you were really excited for? Not watching so that you had
background and context for a future Marvel project, but actually excited about?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
For me, personally, it was Avengers: Endgame, which came out in 2019. What many thought to
be the final installment in a well thought-out, compelling story, turned out to be…well, not that.
The twenty-second movie in the modern day Marvel timeline broke records at the box office,
depicting the death or retirement of many beloved pillars of the franchise, like Iron Man and
Captain America.
(As much as those were unsatisfactory, few things are worse than Loki’s extremely anticlimactic
death in Avengers: Infinity War. Yeesh. Plot device, much?)
The movie was revealed to be the closing of a chapter on the Avengers but just the beginning for
what fans believed would become the Young Avengers like in the comics. Characters like Kate
Bishop (a young woman trying to follow in Hawkeye’s footsteps, who eventually picks up that
moniker after Clint Barton’s death in the comics), Billy and Tommy Maximoff (Wiccan and
Speed in the comics), Peter Parker (Spider-Man), Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) and Cassie Lang
are just a few of the names that had been introduced prior to Endgame or in post-Endgame
spinoff series’. These characters will allegedly usher Marvel into a new era.
But does anyone really, ya know, care?
Now, listen, we all have our favorite characters. Spider-Man has had a series of great movies, not
just the most recent ones tied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Kate Bishop’s spinoff
series showed great promise, bringing in a witty, intelligent, and incredibly skilled female
character in the wake of the death of Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow. However, the other
characters feel somewhat lackluster.
I can’t imagine a potential connection between all of the new characters that have been
introduced to the franchise. In the same way that Nick Fury and Phil Coulson were the first links
between the original Avengers, the Young Avengers need a link, a common cause to rally
behind. I mean, yeah, saving the world or certain death would technically be a common cause,
but where’s the heart in that? I mean, we all know that’s the general premise of most of the
Marvel movies: certain death, world’s in danger, blah blah blah…heard it before, honestly.
Storylines that don’t make any sense are also abundant. For example, in Dr. Strange: Multiverse
of Madness, you have an…odd movie, in and of itself. I think one thing that really strikes me as
weird (besides the supposed killing off of Elizabeth Olson’s Scarlet Witch) is at the very end of
the movie. Dr. Strange keels over and starts screaming, and when he stands up, the audience sees
that he has a third eye, right in the middle of his forehead. I’m sure this is supposed to be a
reference to some sort of consequence for messing with the alternate universes seen in the movie,
but so far, we don’t have an explanation in any of the Marvel media for this ending.
So yeah. Weird. I don’t mind a good cliffhanger, especially if it’s done well. This was just…oof.
Lazy, almost? Random? All of the above.
However, hope and quality do remain for some of the smaller Marvel projects. For example,
Agatha All Along, the spinoff of Wandavision, followed Agatha Harkness after the events of
Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness. With the death of the Scarlet Witch, the spell keeping
Agatha trapped in Westview and stuck going through the motions as a character in her own tv
show (within a tv show? Television-ception!) broke. The story follows Agatha as she gathers a
coven to travel the Witch’s Road, the path said to grant a wish for those who survive it. Perhaps
the best episode of all is the final one in the series, where we get to see Agatha Harkness through
the ages, the viewers learning about her fabricating the story of the witch’s road with her son,
Nicolas. It provides an abundance of context and meaning to previous episodes, as the name
“Nicolas Scratch” is mentioned several times throughout the show, a sort of trigger for Agatha.
However, it’s just rife with enough questions to prompt fan theories and full of enough lingering
gazes between Agatha Harkness and Death to suggest that Nicolas is their child.
Which, if so, is just perfect. The relationship between Agatha and Death is illustrated several
times throughout the show, suggesting a less than happy ending on either side. It’s found out that
this is because Death let Nicolas live after he was born, but took his life peacefully in his sleep
when he was a child. Nicolas seems to know Death when he goes, as if he recognizes her, and
seems at peace. Death even prompts Nicolas to kiss his mother goodbye before he must depart
for whatever dying has in store for him.
Give us more stories like this. Give us relationships done well. Give us context. Give us
lingering glances, enemies that will never be at peace if the other remains in their lives, give us
questions and answers that are right there but we just can’t reach. Give us a weekly episode to
keep us on the edge of our seats, and for goodness sake, give us something we’re excited to see,
instead of the same plot recycled with different characters.
