Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase 4 & Beyond (and a chance to change your vote)

oh shit did they reveal ULtron was really Rosie the Robot

Speaking of the end credits, the initial animation sequence with all the old electron gun/phosphor bits is really lovely.

This week's mid show advert was grim stuff

yeah that was morbid!

I wasn't sure what its point was. Was this the first fake ad that took such a surprising turn?

I loved it, what a perfect combination of tonally OTM ads from the time and...something else.

things are breaking down

even the theme song was kind of curdled and strained, a kind of desperation in the chorus to “keep on going” or whatever

The ad had some magic yogurt that was supposed to save the guy on the island, but it didn't.. I guess the point was to subconsciously suggest Wanda's "magic" ultimately can't save Vision the way she thinks it will.

theme song lyrics btw

Don't try to fight the chaos
Don't question what you've done
The game can try to play us
Don't let it stop the fun

Some days it's all confusion
Easy come and easy go
But if it's all illusion
Sit back, enjoy the show

Let's keep it going
Let's keep it going
Through each distorted day
Let's keep it going
Though there may be no way of knowing
Who's coming by to play

life is unfaaaair

hahaha

lol

As a big Legion (the show) fan, I would love it if Wanda was actually being controlled by Farouk. Was Legion part of the MCU at all?

when Wanda uses the toilet are the people temporarily freed from enslavement

amal farouk is too interesting and charismatic to be an MCU villain, sorry

Oh cool, didn't realize Shadow King was in Legion. Really should get around to watching that someday.

And no, Legion is mutant-related and aired prior to the Fox acquisition so it was separate from the MCU.

I've just temporarily freed the townspeople from enslavement, I wouldn't go in there for a while if I was you.

Nailed it. Seriously, nailed it.

🥺🥺 pic.twitter.com/KPnoEYj1Qd

— nick | wandavision spoilers (@fitzbarnes) February 14, 2021

so she's going full Captain Marvel (II) in two episodes, yes?

If Monica Rambeau is getting superpowers from going in and out of the hex. Wouldn't it make sense for all the people trapped in the hex to get powers too? There has been speculation about who various characters from the town who might actually be supervillains that are responsible for this but couldn't it be the other way around and this is actually the origin story for a bunch of future MCU characters?

One storyline I haven't seen referenced amid all of the speculation is the recent Standoff, which features a prosaic little town whose residents are revealed to be supervillains who have all been changed (via Cosmic Cube fuckery) into upstanding citizens by SHIELD.

As I said ^^^^ there's lots of speculation that Monica's "aerospace engineer" is Reed Richards and a flurry of suggestions at the weekend that this is going to be the FF origin story and them crossing the boundary will power them up.

If Monica Rambeau is getting superpowers from going in and out of the hex. Wouldn't it make sense for all the people trapped in the hex to get powers too?

well, if the people are trapped in the hex then they're kinda by definition not going in and out of it, so probably not

Yeah, you'd think that creating lots of people with powers would be a possibility, or a set-up for a "Wanda *creates* mutants" twist or something, but again, I think that's just too much heavy lifting and, um, too many people with super powers. We still don't really know who most of the people in the town are in "real" life, before they were captured or transformed. Clearly if you can go from a SWORD agent to a clown then we really have no idea who they are/were. (And then of course there's the matter of all the kids that suddenly appeared. Did Wanda do that? Where did they come from? And if Wanda *did* do that, does that mean she can just import more people into the town at will? Seems ... unlikely.)

Loose introduction of Fantastic Four seems a better, more manageable possibility. I bet they show up as guests in a future movie, a la Spider-Man in Civil War. A stand-alone F4 movie seems several years away, so it would be weird to formally introduce them now and then just sit on it. Is there any indication that Marvel is even planning to spin a big arching event again out of their Phase Four rollout? I don't know much if anything about some stuff on the loose schedule, but Black Widow prequel (we assume?), Thor 3, Eternals, Shang-Chi, Spider Man 3, Guardians 3, Dr. Strange 2, Captain Marvel 2, Ant-Man 3 seems a pretty diverse hodgepodge. Which of these are done? Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi? And Spider-Man, Dr. Strange and Thor have at least done some filming?

Marvel has been very "individuals matter" about superpowers though - even widespread things like the Terrigen mists, it's not everyone who gets affected, only those predisposed. And the predisposition on the part of Monica Rambeau would be "exposed to weird alien shit as a young child". I also think this is the most likely source of the astrophysicist, but I might well be wrong.

Sorry, yes, "aerospace engineer"

I would laugh if Rocket showed up

would the hex turn rocket into a person, or a talking dog or something?

A rabbit, obvs

Bradley Cooper

Crouched and speaking over the shoulder of a mocap-suited Sean Gunn

well, if the people are trapped in the hex then they're kinda by definition not going in and out of it, so probably not

Well presumably they will get out at some point, but yeah I guess at the end of this they could just dissipate the hex somehow and these people will just go back to normal without any consequences

they all have superpowers but unfortunately they are all related to flatulence

xpost Except all the kids in the Halloween episode... where did they come from? Did they come from outside? If they did ... where/who did they come from? If they belong to the parents inside the hex, does that mean they had been without parents for days? Seems unlikely. Which would mean that identified or no, the people in the town may or may not have been taken from somewhere else, too.

they came from France

it was explicitly said, both in the episode and in this thread, that all the kids were asleep until they came out for halloween

I was going to say, didn't they explicitly say that? Seems like a lot of weird speculation itt that is pretty directly discussed in the show itself.

I'm guessing that Pietro is some kind of externalised part of Wanda, partly a brother that she misses (who sees his job to "... and ultimately give you grief") and partly someone to validate that she's doing the right thing - it's possible that he's the one who's Running The Show (either someone external #nomephisto or still part of Wanda) but I'm not sure what would be gained by him drawing her attention to the fact that she doesn't know how this works.

xp have you met Josh

Oh, they've just been asleep, that explains it then. Makes perfect sense and doesn't raise any more questions at all.

Wanda's accent vanished between movies too

― Wrong Screamed Barney (Neanderthal), Wednesday, February 3, 2021 8:56 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Loved the dig at this in the latest episode.

there has to be some multiverse angle to it since she doesn't recognize him at the door until he clearly implies he's Pietro by calling her his sister, remembers details of a prior shared event differently, asks him why he looks different, where his accent went (lol), though clearly in his universe he died the same way.

xpost lol yeah I laughed out loud. I'm glad too, her accent was bad and distracting in Ultron.

Just watched it again. First, the stuff about the kids comes from Pietro, who is an unreliable character at this point. Second, he kind of slyly, rhetorically asks "where have you been hiding all these kids? Probably just keeping them asleep to prevent trauma," before talking about the ethics of the situation. So ... really we don't know, any more than we know for sure where he came from, or who he really is.

i'm pretty sure everybody's frozen at the end of the street for reasons similar to that one episode of Rick and Morty, the program 'uses a lot of memory' so she's not able to keep the ancillary characters busy/doing things, they're like the crowd in RBI Baseball basically

I guess we'll see what happens now that she's expanded the bubble by hundreds of feet.

how can we ever know anything, rly

makes u think

i'm pretty sure everybody's frozen at the end of the street for reasons similar to that one episode of Rick and Morty, the program 'uses a lot of memory' so she's not able to keep the ancillary characters busy/doing things,

Westworld used this trope too

What is a movie or TV show if not a simulation itself?

fuck that, what if we're living in a simulation and that simulation is just a passing thought in the mind of a vast and incomprehensible cosmic consciousness

On the back of a turtle.