How Does the MCU Go Forward From Here?
We've now reached the end of the first set of Marvel's Disney+ shows, extending the Marvel Cinematic Universe to include television shows which will shape the films events. If you've tried to avoid spoilers and you haven't finished Loki, WandaVision and The Falcon and Winter Soldier, this is going to be full of spoilers.
I haven't written about the MCU much, in part because there is no shortage of writing about the MCU, and because up to now, I've been pretty content to enjoy them on a relatively superficial level as popcorn films. No shade to popcorn entertainment either. Good popcorn entertainment was my gateway to a love of film in a more general way. I also read Marvel comics with some regularity as a kid, and came back to reading some a few years ago. Chances are your local library has an agreement with either Kanopy or Hoopla, and you can get a wide variety of comics titles in both of those, if you feel like doing some deep diving on some of the MCU characters and don't have a mint to spend.
Now, though, with the Loki, WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier having all concluded either their full run or their season (Loki is the only series getting more than one season, so far), these shows are taking the MCU in a new direction. The nature of storytelling itself, the stories we believe, shape for ourselves or are taught are central to all of the MCU Disney+ series. We're also getting a pretty heavy dose of moral and ethical dilemmas, presented from different perspectives related to whether or not doing the right thing for the wrong reason makes it good or whether doing the wrong thing for the right reason makes it good. I'm also a sucker for stories about characters struggling with identity, and these three Disney+ shows have been chock full of that. Given this, as well as the finales suggesting the reality warping aspects of these shows are going to continue into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, as well as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Of course, Sam and Bucky are going to be back in Captain America 4 too.
WandaVision and Loki take opposing perspectives on the morality of removing free will. One of them putting portraying the removal of free will as an obviously bad thing when done for selfish reasons, and the other portraying it as a thing which might not be so bad when it's for a "greater good." They're both presenting two different ways of essentially rewriting reality from opposing polls as well, which seems headed for a clash in storytelling at some point in the coming MCU films.
By the end of WandaVision, it's clear that Wanda has been a monster. Writer, academic and all around bad ass public intellectual Tressie McMillan Cottom aptly likened Wanda to a slave master. Wanda removes the free will of this entire town of people, as a horrific attempt to hide from her grief. It's a wholly self serving motivation, and even as I've seen some folks try to skim some amount of sympathy over it by referring to the idea Wanda didn't necessarily know she was doing it at first, it's still monstrous. Having a villain whose motivation we can empathize with, doesn't make them less villainous. There's a subset of fans who take umbrage at this description, but just because we may have a fondness for a character, doesn't mean we shouldn't appropriately identify their actions. The show missed some opportunities to do this, and certainly seemed to let Wanda off easily, especially where Monica Rambeau's reaction to her actions is concerned, but we can still call it what it is.
On the other hand, we have Loki, where at this point it seems a Kang variant (He Who Remains) is being presented as having built the TVA, essentially removing the free will and right to exists from trillions of people across multiple timelines, in order to prevent a war which ends all of existence. As of now, the way it's presented in Loki, Kang is being presented as having done a terrible thing for the best possible reason.
These are the central drivers of the events in these two shows, the "big ideas" which have consequences for the future of the MCU. Now, the other characters have their motivations as well. Loki, Sylvie, and Agatha all have their own motivations, which become contrasting, overlapping, and messy from a moral standpoint.
Loki's motivations change over the course of his series, but by the end of the series, as he and Sylvie are about to confront the person we find out is Kang, the man behind the curtain, his motivation is toppling the TVA because they are removing the option for free will from all the people in all the timelines they "prune," as well as believing this is what is going to bring Sylvie peace. When presented with the Kang's explanation for creating the TVA, Loki sees the rationale for this greater good. His perspective changes to that of believing the protection of existence outweighs the free will of all those who have been and would be pruned in order to keep the timeline intact. Sylvie, on the other hand, doesn't change her perspective, and in some combination of a desire for revenge, a desire to give the people on all of the pruned timelines the ability to express free will and an inability to trust anyone, including Loki, she kills Kang. It seems, for now, doing so dooms the entirety of existence to a war of timelines or at least a war of Kang's from different timelines. Where it stands now, it seems Kang was telling the truth.
Agatha, does a good thing, pulling Wanda out of her horrific "self care" session, for the worst of reasons. She wants power, Wanda's power, because as we find out through the course of WandaVision, Wanda is one of the most powerful beings in the MCU. She is able to remake matter and reality through the force of her own will, and if Agatha is correct, Wanda's destiny is to destroy the world. Agatha, even as her motivation to take that power is pretty terrible, but she does a good thing in being the driving force in Wanda letting the town of Westwood go free. Agatha, in her past, killed her coven in the drive to gain their power. We're presented with the opposing perspectives of Wanda having taken the free will of the people of Westwood unknowingly (at first, at least) and Agatha who knowingly killed her coven to take their power. Wanda's final decision to leave Agatha in Westwood, as the person she forces her to be, Agnes, is certainly questionable as well. There's also the question of free will in the idea that Wanda is "destined" to destroy the world. If destiny exists, and all of her choices lead to the same point is Wanda responsible and has it been free will?
Another common thread to WandaVision and Loki is that they deal with the narrative one believes. This is a thread which also comes up in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. All three of the Marvel television shows dealt with the nature of belief based on the stories we are taught about ourselves, each other, the nature of the world we live in and that we tell ourselves.
WandaVision was pretty direct, in Wanda's world being represented by the form. The episodes each being drawn from the sitcoms of different decades, pivoting to being very specifically about the narrative Wanda wanted to believe, whether or not it was real. Wanda needs to believe the version of the story which is in sitcom episodes. Agatha shows up and tells her the story she's been telling herself isn't real, and she doesn't even know herself. The story for Vision is dealing with believing the story as Wanda is telling it, and finding out it's not the story of who he is, and he's not who he believes he is. On top of all of this, there are the people of Westwood, who are having their identities rewritten by the hex.
As for Loki, timelines are nothing if not intertwining, intersecting storylines. We end up with a Kang variant as the one in charge of insuring there isn't a cadre of of Kang variants creating a war of timelines, essentially making sure the story never involves a war of timelines. Loki's character spends the series trying to understand who he is, which is wrapped up in what his story means and being presented with a variety of different possibilities of what who he can be and what his story can be as he faces variants of himself. Sylvie is consumed with her story having been unwritten, stolen essentially, and seeking vengeance. There's also the aspect of the Loki related to free will, which is nothing if not the power to decide the how and what of one's own story, which is the foundation of Sylvie's vendetta.
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier deals with the story about the symbol Captain America was, as embodied by Steve Rogers. There's Sam, struggling with what the symbol means for him, without Steve Rogers. Sam is a Black man, in a horribly racist world, and in a country which treated Isaiah Bradley like a criminal and a lab rat, because he essentially was a Black Captain America. Isaiah Bradley's crime was doing the exact same thing Steve Rogers did to be declared a hero and given command of his own team in Captain America: The First Avenger. There's Bucky, who's struggling with his own story, what it makes him, even if he wasn't consciously responsible for the creation of that story, who he wants to be going forward and how that shapes his actions in the present. Then there's John Walker, a man whose story as it's told to the public is in the context of metals for valor. We come to find out Walker feels very differently about this story. Walker is also chasing and trying to embody a legacy, the story and symbol which were Captain America, as Steve Rogers embodied it. The weight of being John Walker, who in his own eyes isn't the war hero the newspapers say he is and who isn't living up to the legacy of Captain America, corrupts and breaks him. Karli Morgenthau believes in the story she's telling herself to the point it corrupts her, even within the context of the story itself, aside from the discourse around the show, much of which held Morgenthau is the closest thing The Falcon and The Winter Soldier has to a real hero.
It isn't an empty criticism to say Marvel films and now the Disney+ shows might not explore their themes and subtext in the most profound ways, but this is something different and new within the context of film and television. Of course, it's been part of the world of comics to have similar themes being explored from so many different perspectives, so many different characters, in many different ways. This isn't something which can just be written off as being without its artistic merit. One of the beautiful things about storytelling as an art is its ability to help us practice changing perspective, and imagining the world from the perspective of others. The MCU being what it is, this gigantic interconnected set of storylines, which are all contributing to one more expansive story, creates something different and new in these mediums. Each particular show may not explore them all that deeply, but the collective work does make for something more intelligent, with more depth, given the number of different ways they do explore those themes than the "superhero genre" is generally given credit for. It does lay the groundwork for thoughtful, interesting discussion.
Beyond all this, there are the implications for the slate of upcoming Marvel projects. It's already clear there are going to be connections to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. We know Wanda Maximoff is going to show up in Doctor Strange, there's going to be some variety of multiverse connection to No Way Home and Jonathan Majors was first announced as Kang in Quantumania.
We now have two different elements which can essentially remake reality. The first being the technology of the TVA and time travel. The other being Wanda Maximoff becoming The Scarlet Witch, wielding her chaos magic to it's fullest capabilities. Having left her in the post credits scene from WandaVision, reading the Darkhold, with what we learned about her powers from the rest of the show, namely her ability to completely remake matter, and to some degree create with sheer force of will, as she did with the Vision in the series. Agatha even suggests in the finale that she will be more powerful than the Sorcerer Supreme, meaning Doctor Strange. Wanda Maximoff was already an exceptionally powerful character. As is referenced in the midseason episode of WandaVision when Monica Rambeau decides to enter the Hex, Captain America, Thor and Iron Man were collectively struggling when Wanda took all of 30 seconds to so thoroughly thump Thanos he could only call in a volley of missiles, sacrificing his own troops, to save himself. At this point, it's likely Wanda is the most powerful character in the MCU.
Having both of these loose in the MCU is a variety of chaos which is a storytelling nightmare. As long as both of these story mechanics are part of the universe, they have the capacity to rewrite anything. Anything done can be undone. At this point, it seems it wouldn't be possible for both of these things to end up somehow being part of the same film and plot. It doesn't seem possible for a two hour or even two and a half hour film to be able to handle the weight of both of those elements. Essentially, given what we've seen of the capabilities of the Time Variance Authority technology, and that magic is written as a technology through the Marvel universe and science fiction more generally, these are two technologies which are going to have to have a fair level of exposition, and demonstration.
We know we're getting Spider-Man: No Way Home first in the triumvirate of films which have already been revealed to be related to the multiverse. We can intimate it will be the film to lay out the way one of these technologies will effect the MCU, beyond the show it was introduced in. We'll get Doctor Strange a few months later, and there's an expectation the two films will be related, but we've known little about how.
With the leaks surrounding No Way Home revealing the plan to bring a number of the villains from the previous Spider-Man film series, the explanation Kang conveys at the end of Loki now makes sense of how this could work. With Sylvie's decision to kill Kang, the MCU is headed to an endless number of concurrent timelines, and a war of these timelines is inevitable, if we can trust what we've been told by He Who Remains (a Kang variant), at the end of Loki. Given this, and the way the MCU built the foundation for the cataclysmic conflicts with their big bad when Thanos was playing this role, it would make sense to see No Way Home laying the foundation for the Kang variants where one or more of them is orchestrating a number of different Spider-Man villains from other timelines being dropped into the MCU's current timeline to do Peter in. Doctor Strange getting involved in this also makes sense as being the Sorcerer Supreme made him responsible for the Time Stone. The Ancient One broke it down during the sequence in Endgame when Banner Hulk was trying to get the Time Stone, as it was the Sorcerer Supreme's job to protect the Stone because of its importance in protecting the MCU timeline. During that discussion, The Ancient One specifically mentions a threat of a branching timelines opening up the universe to the "forces of darkness," which was why The Avengers needed to put everything back where they found it, when they found it. "Without our chief weapon against the forces of darkness, our world will be overrun. Millions will suffer," is the exact quote.
With what we now know about Wanda's powers, it's conceivable she could just rewrite any timeline, so how she's going to fit into Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is a significant question. From the post credit scene of WandaVision, we're given the impression Wanda hears her children calling for her as she's reading from the Darkhold, the very bad book Agatha detailed as foretelling the coming of The Scarlet Witch who destroys the world. Given this, and Agatha referencing that the Scarlet Witch would be more powerful than the Sorcerer Supreme, it's quite possible Wanda will be the antagonist. Being charged with protecting the world of the MCU from inter-dimensional and other worldly threats, Wanda messing around with the Darkhold would open the MCU to any number of threats, not least of all the god Chthon, who was responsible for writing the book in the Marvel comics. All of this would certainly fall into Doctor Strange territory. Whether this means Wanda is going to be the villain of Multiverse of Madness remains to be seen. Given the events of Captain America: Civil War, I'd hesitate to believe Kevin Feige would want to hitch another project with implications for the whole of the MCU on Wanda making a mistake where the use of her powers is concerned. Wanda Maximoff has essentially been a villain, at points in the Marvel comics.
It could be interesting to see the MCU dealing with Wanda in a way in which she may not exactly be a villain, but that she has neither the understanding nor the control of her powers that is necessary for her to a "hero." To see how other MCU characters deal with a scenario where the central question comes down to someone who has an immense power set, and maybe isn't necessarily a villain, but also can't control or has repeatedly shown an inability to use their powers responsibly could be very good storytelling, and some interesting moral conflict between characters which isn't necessarily simple and straight forward, similar to the idea of the Sokovia Accords. With the post credits sequence of WandaVision being what it is, it's not completely out of left field for Wanda to possibly do something incredibly dangerous and destructive in the pursuit of finding what sounded like her children calling her, and given that we're now in a mulitverse, who knows what dimension/timeline that is or if it was even her children and not some kind of decoy to get Wanda to release a Big Bad.
Again though, we have the science fiction/technology based aspect of Kang, the TVA and the timelines, but we also have this mystical, magic based technology which is Wanda, The Darkhold, and Doctor Strange. How these are going to be woven into anything like a connecting and streamlined story is anyone's guess. I do not envy the people whose job it is to make all of this make sense to an audience who may have little or no familiarity with these characters in the comics. Marvel has done a great job, so far, of adjusting what needs to be adjusted for the jump from comics pages to the screen, but the chances of this getting very messy and very complicated are very high. It would be really easy to make this complicated to the point it alienates a whole lot of the casual audience.
Since we're getting into the more mystic elements of the Marvel comics world, I'd love to see Ghost Rider making his way to the MCU, but there hasn't been even a whisper of him or her appearing. Ghost Rider, being canonically a mantle, it would even be cool to see a female Ghost Rider pop up on the MCU, though I imagine a thunderous fan backlash if Johnny Blaze isn't the first Ghost Rider introduced to the MCU. Even as it boasted a great cast, Mark Steven Johnson being given the responsibilities for writing and directing the 2007 Ghost Rider film, was a mistake. Hopefully, Marvel can find a way to bring the character back to the screen in a way which audiences forget the existence of that hot mess.
With Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania being the film Jonathan Majors was first announced to play Kang in, we can be pretty sure this whole multiverse/timeline problem isn't going to be solved in No Way Home or Multiverse of Madness, even as it's the last of the MCU projects we can be sure is dealing with multiverse and is the last scheduled for release. It's logical to ask if the quantum technology born out of the Ant-Man series, giving The Avengers the ability to travel through time in Endgame is treated as a precursor to the technology which leads to Kang (He Who Remains, as Loki referred to him) and the TVA. It also makes logical sense this would be where Kang is revealed to be behind the events of No Way Home and somehow involved in whatever the conflict is at the center of Multiverse of Madness. If they follow anything like the setup from the first three Phases of the MCU, and Kang is going to be the new "Big Bad", he'll be behind a number of the events which create the central conflicts in Phase Four, which officially began with WandaVision.
Since timelines and time travel are becoming central to Phase Four already, it would an interesting narrative trick to reveal Kang was also somehow involved in the events we've seen in WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier or even to revisit events of the first three Phases of the MCU. We don't know whether or not we're going to be seeing Loki or Sylvie in any of the upcoming Marvel projects, even as it's clear the multiverse concept is going to figure prominently in it. Will we see Owen Wilson or any of the other TVA characters showing up in one of the Marvel films? Given Ravonna Renslayer's connection to Kang in the comics, essentially being his right hand and main squeeze, and her disappearance at the end of Loki, it's logical to think she'll show up before Loki season 2.
With Kang obviously being set up to play a central role in upcoming Marvel projects, there are other interesting connections which could lead to introductions of characters we know are coming. In the comics, Kang is presented as points as being the grandson of Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic of The Fantastic Four and at other points as the grandson of Dr. Doom, the primary nemesis to the Fantastic Four. Given we're in a multiverse, we could end up with different iterations of Kang, one being Richards grandson, another being Doom's grandson, and this connection could help set up a Fantastic Four introduction and a Dr. Doom introduction. Marvel has announced The Fantastic Four are coming to the big screen, and the "4" symbol being used for Phase Four is the iconic Fantastic Four logo. As of now, Jon Watts, who's helmed this generation of Spider-Man films, is set to direct a Fanastic Four film.
Personally, I'd like to see Dr. Doom introduced later on, because as a character, he's kind of an inversion of Tony Stark, with unlimited wealth, less of a need for recognition, a genius for technologically advanced weaponry, a significant talent for sorcery and he could conceivably be a "man behind the curtain" Big Bad responsible for events across a number of different storylines, even it were constrained to Fantastic Four storylines and the Fantastic Four films. We haven't had mention of Latveria, the fictional country Doom is autocratic monarch over. Often in the comics, Doom is using the bureaucracy of diplomacy as part of his plans against whatever heroes he's up against. Also, introducing the primary nemesis in the first film a Marvel character or a team of characters like the Fantastic Four are starring in, leaves so little on the table for the following installments. The Dark Knight Rises is a great example deploying the most recognized and dangerous villain too soon. Once you've seen Batman go up against Joker, it's hard to get as excited about where story goes because you've already seen your protagonist survive or defeat their greatest foe. Kang being the Big Bad for Phase Four, in a role like what Thanos took in the first three phases of the MCU, could be used to set Dr. Doom up as the Big Bad in Phase 5, and Doom is the kind of villain which could keep the entire MCU interesting that far into it's existence.