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

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.

steady on, that's just stupid

we're all living in a butt

Balthazar Getty's butt

living in a butt / living in a cardboard butt

kudos

Please be around more, bg, yr wisdom is missed.

otm

Thank you for picking up my slack, bg

she doesn't recognize him at the door until he clearly implies he's Pietro by calling her his sister

I definitely didn't read the scene this way - she's just stunned (because he's Pietro and because she wasn't expecting him)

how would Wanda know what that version of Quicksilver looks like? it definitely wasn't a "we called Evan Peters because Aaron Taylor-Johnson was unavailable" type situation as Darcy notes that it's a 'recast'.

or is your thought Wanda did intentionally recast him with someone else (and the fact that it's Evan Peters is more coincidental)?

i kinda assumed, given the way that he's picking at the edges and asking a lot of leading questions, that nu-Pietro is a super-powered mole by Hayward/SWORD and not a figment of Wanda's imagination

yeah he seemed to want to know how the sausage was made way more than a normal person would

and well he knew sausage *was* being made

lol friend of mine is telling ppl on FB that merely saying you loved or didn't like an episode = 'posting spoilers' now

pietro reeled off a list of plot/character functions to wanda that he assumed he was there to provide to her world - at her behest - but it all seemed like it was news to wanda.

I think she's also in willing denial as to what her idealized world is doing to the very real citizens.

better call Jon Taffer in

I binged all of this on Saturday and I can safely say it is the most enjoyable MCU related thing in recent memory (except for maybe the Holland Spiderman movies).

From the kids to Wanda's new powers, it read to me like nu-Pietro was fishing for answers himself.