clack

Chuck Berry, anyone?

Brent is no more awful than were Tahini or Eleanor when they first arrived in the Good Place. Difference is, the show didn't despise them. It despises Brent. I'm trusting that eventually something interesting will eventually be done with the character.

Fair point. I guess my disappointment lies in how stale and flat they are as antagonists. John and Brent seem to be conceived as people who would rub someone in the Hollywood bubble the wrong way -- as caricatures of people a scriptwriter might encounter only online. The blogger who writes mean gossip about the scriptwriter's friends. The dude who tweets about how much he hates the Captain Marvel movie. I don't know, John and Brent seem like such insular, niche targets.

John and Brent are charmless and unimaginative creations. I expect better from this show. The original four were freshly conceived, quirky, fun. There's nothing fresh about John : a bitchy gossip blogger? Not exactly an original conception. And Brent? Another cliche, distanced from the scriptwriters actual experience of "toxic masculinity". Plenty of Hollywood examples of Metooed men, men with all the proper, approved political views.

Spiderman 3 is back in the MCU, to be released 7/26/21. That's cool, but after that it looks like Sony will have him for good. I would have liked to have him on the new Avengers.

It probably was ASP who was a Bangles fan. She gave them a shout-out in a previous episode, perhaps she heard back from them, and she then indulged her fan-girl self by writing an episode featuring the band. In other words, my guess is that she wanted to bring the Bangles on the show, and then wrote the episode to feature them, rather than writing the episode first and only then go looking for a band to bring on. Besides, Rory and Lane would totally be into the all-girl bands of the 70's and 80's -- the Runaways, the Go Go's, the Bangles.

The way in which ASP worked out the Harvard/Yale arc seemed to me to be contrived. Three seasons of Rory is special -- she has ambitions of going to Harvard! Only for the showrunners to realize, as the time came, that Yale would work better for their story needs, so let's cook up some implausible plotline of Richard doing some last minute string-pulling, etc. If ASP wasn't, at the time, so committed to her concept of Rory being the most special girl ever, ASP could have more simply resolved the matter by having Harvard reject Rory. A Harvard rejection, besides being a simpler and more plausible resolution, would have had the bonus feature of introducing some character complications that GG would later go on to develop anyways. Such as, Rory can fail! A person sometimes has to adjust her goals. Etc.

I don't know. Rory struck me as an academic self-starter. Rory has her own taste in literature, for instance -- I don't see Lorelai reading Tolstoy, Faulkner and James Joyce. Or even reading the New Yorker, for that matter. 'People' seems more in her wheelhouse. I think it more likely that Harvard would have been Rory's precocious idea, and only then reinforced by her proud mother. But again, a Yale ambition would have made cleaner story-telling. Yale is in-state, the Gilmores have a history there -- it fits the story better. I think ASP chose Harvard quickly, without giving it much thought as to how it would play out.

I don't think that ASP gave any thought at all to what Rory aspired to. The obsession with Harvard stood in for Rory's academic ambition, but had to be dropped as the show went along because Rory needed to be within Stars Hollow commuting distance for plot reasons. If ASP had thought ahead, she would have had Rory obsessed with Yale. Same thing with Christine Amanpour. She was meant to represent a glamorous, adventurous, pioneering role for a young feminist to aspire to, never mind that it made no sense for Rory's personality. ASP didn't think ahead to Rory actually having to find a career.

I don't know, something to do with time travel? It doesn't matter, it's all comic book nonsense. Time travel is impossible, Captain America is impossible, even Clint and Natasha couldn't exist in real life. Steve's ending either lands with you on an emotional, dramatic level, or it doesn't. If you try to think through all the logical implications, it falls apart. But then again, if you try to think through all the logical implications of the MCU, the whole universe would fall apart.

Eh, Steve retired his Captain America role in the comics a good half-dozen times, including once for a romance with Agent 13. Steve retiring to be with Peggy is totally in character. Killing him off in the same movie in which they killed off Tony would have been a bit much -- retirement was the better option.

People have weird ships. Some ship the brothers from Supernatural. That's what slash fiction is for. Because Feige and the Russos failed to cater to the Stucky shippers doesn't make them homophobes, anymore than the Stucky shippers are racists for preferring Steve and Bucky as a couple to Sam and Bucky, or misogynists for not wanting Peggy to marry Steve. Anyway, Chris Evans wanted out, and Sebastian Stan wanted to continue in his role. No choice but to have Steve and Bucky go their separate ways. But here's a quibble I do have -- I think Bucky is more deserving of the shield than is Sam. Captain America needs superpowers as much as Spiderman does. Peter couldn't just hand over his suit to a friend and tell him that he's the new Spiderman. Likewise, a suit and a shield doesn't make you Captain America.

Exactly. The major plot point here is to retire Steve from the active list of available MCU superheroes, so that when the next emergency comes along people aren't asking for his whereabouts. Other than that, we're free to imagine whatever we want to. If you're invested in the Steve and Bucky relationship, then perhaps they are now free to continue their bromance, which maybe just doesn't get mentioned on-screen again, because Bucky is too busy superhero-ing.

I think it's more that what was once understood to be mere fanfic sexual fantasy -- the two heterosexual male characters going gay for each other (Spock and Kirk) -- has transmuted into what some people now want to see made official, made canon, played out on screen, and get angry when that doesn't happen. But Steve and Bucky ending up as a couple was never in the cards, and feeling betrayed (and harmed!) because a character who was always portrayed as a heterosexual man ends up married to a woman is, imo, unreasonable.

I liked Gaiman's run on the Eternals. Kirby's run was a bit of a mess -- intriguing, but a mess. But neither run gives me an idea how the Eternals are to be incorporated into the MCU. Is the movie going to be a self-contained one shot? If they continue past their initial appearance, will they remain earth-bound and interact with the Avengers, or will they be sent into space and become part of the cosmic side of the MCU?

Until Endgame, we never saw Steve taking a piss. Doesn't mean he wasn't doing it several times daily all along. Natasha was trained as an assassin since childhood. She refers to herself as a "monster". In her "red ledger" talk with Loki, there is an ominous reference to a "hospital fire" incident. That's what I mean by "broken inside" -- she's a damaged person., damaged by what has been done to her, and what she's done to others.

Romantic love isn't rational. Steve was a lonely guy. Women didn't give him the time of day. Suddenly, this beautiful, intelligent, capable, strong-willed woman comes into his life. I get why he would carry a torch. Is there for Steve a more worthy potential mate? Pepper might come close, but she's taken. Natasha is broken inside.

Even scrawny Steve is as big as most of the MCU female superheroes. And even without superpowers, Steve's tactical skills and leadership qualities would still be highly useful to the team. A more tragic end for Steve would not fulfill his character: A loser with a big heart is given a serum that transforms him into a super-soldier. He then spends the next dozen years in combat before dying young, having never known happiness in love. That character arc doesn't seem to be a satisfying one to me. Too sad for Marvel.

That was the intention at one point. In Winter Soldier mourns Peggy, acquires a potential new love interest in her niece, exchanges his old job in the army for a new, equivalent one working with SHIELD and the Avengers, and begins learning about 21st c. culture. His arc: letting go of his past and acclimating to his new surroundings, while integrating his old-fashioned values of loyalty and patriotism into his new world. An immigrant's story, if you will -- bringing the best of the old culture into the new. But that arc doesn't work once Chris Evans decides to leave the role. Or rather, it works only if Steve dies. Otherwise, every MCU from now would 1st have to get out of the way, "hey, where is Captain America? Why isn't he helping out?"

They gave the 3 departing characters endings that completed their arcs. Tony : an egotist who learns to sacrifice himself for others Natasha: a killer who redeems the red in her ledger by giving back life to trillions Steve: the man from the past who, having completed his mission in the present, gets to return home I suppose they could have killed Steve instead -- soldier who believes in sacrificing himself for others sacrifices himself. Maybe that would be more "in character". I prefer the ending we did get. As to the fan-fic alternatives to his dying or returning to the past : Steve is de-serumed and returns to the shrimp he was, Steve just mysteriously disappears,etc. -- they are all terrible ideas.

The MCU is fantasy. Time travel isn't real, it's magic. Trying to parse the logic of Steve going back to 1950 and living a happy life is like parsing the logic of how being bitten by a radioactive spider can give you superpowers, or being exposed to gamma rays can turn you into a green giant when you're angry. It's all as magic as the magic in Game of Thrones. Sure, if you think about the logistics of it all, it falls apart. Know what else falls apart if you think about the logistics of it all? The entire MCU.

The same writers who wrote all 3 Captain America movies also wrote Endgame. While writing those initial movies, they didn't know when or how Steve would finally leave the MCU. I'm sure there arose some character inconsistencies as they went along from movie to movie, because they were adjusting Steve's arc on the fly. There are some things you can't plan far ahead for, such as when an actor wants to leave a role. This we know as canon : Steve was in love with Peggy. When given a second chance at living his life with the woman he loved, he took it. That is Steve's character as portrayed by those who created it.

As late as April 2018 Fiege was saying that the rights to Namor were "complicated" -- implication being they were not as clear cut as the Hulk's. That said, with so much money to be made, I imagine whatever contractual holdups there might be can be ironed out. And for a Wakanda vs. another nation plot, that would seem to narrow the choices down to Namor/Atlantis or Doom/Latveria. “

Marvel doesn't have the rights to Namor -- I believe Avi Arad does.

We got that conclusion when Steve said he was going back to 1950 to return the stones, and Bucky said goodbye -- knowing Steve was going back for good. They both had a little moment of mutual understanding there. And really the understated emotion fits the men of their generation. Better a slight nod of the head, than falling blubbering into each other's arms.