Is Loki the perfect Christmas gift for villain-lovers?

Yes, OK, seeing as the show has been available on Disney + since spring, this title is a little far-fetched. I did try to find a more Christmassy and less geeky blog subject, but the film I watched in order to achieve this goal (A Boy Called Christmas) proved oddly blog-resistant – it wasn't great, nor was it terrible, it didn't hit the sweet spot for me, but I'd feel mean criticising it. So Loki it is.

As a whole string of blog posts testify, I did a lot of Marvel prep in order to be able to watch this series. So was it worth it? Yes – partly because I liked the Marvel films more than I expected, quite irrespective of their Loki content. Also, I enjoyed Loki the series a great deal (especially after a few episodes – I'll come back to that). All the same, given that Loki is my favourite Marvel character by a mile, I was just a little bit disappointed too. I felt more could have been done with a series which is supposed to focus on him, but doesn't always. In fact, I'm not sure I got that much closer to Loki as a person than I did in the Marvel movies.

The first two episodes were a bit of a slog for me. I found myself thinking "Is it bad that I enjoyed WandaVision more?" (yep, I've watched the much-talked-about WandaVision now, and I have to admit my geeky heart loved it). The premise is this: because of the Avengers' tampering with time, Loki got a chance to escape his fate as described in the Infinity Saga and nab one of the Infinity Stones for good measure. We saw this in Avengers: Endgame, but it was never addressed how it played out or how it didn't affect the heroes' plan not to disrupt time, especially not the Infinity Stone-related events. Now we know... sort of. The Time Variance Agency, the TVA for short, makes sure Loki's escape doesn't alter the course of events by apprehending him and "pruning" the timeline he created. Loki is taken to the TVA's headquarters to stand trial. He is told he is a "variant" who has broken out of the "Sacred Timeline" and will thus be "pruned" or executed in order to preserve the timeline in question. What saves him is that another Loki variant is causing havoc, and one of the Time Agents, Mobius, thinks Loki could be useful in apprehending this bigger threat. With me so far?

I don't blame you if you're not, because I'm barely with myself. The whole explanation of variants and The Sacred Timeline, although pedagogically relayed in a TVA infomercial narrated by the sinisterly cheerful Miss Minutes, had me scratching my head. Loki is needed for the whole Infinity Saga to play out the way we've seen it, so how is the TVA executing him going to fix things? The best I can make of it is that his time infraction, or the TVA's interference, means that another Loki – let's call him Loki Prime – is living out his life the way he's supposed to, while what we're seeing is a separate Loki who is no longer needed and can therefore be disposed of at any time. This could have been made a lot clearer, though.

That it takes two whole paragraphs to outline the premise of the show highlights one of its flaws. WandaVision was complicated too, but you could get into it without knowing a lot of geeky stuff upfront – it was handed out to you piecemeal as the series went on. The premise of WandaVision is easily summed up in a few sentences. Wanda and Vision are living a blissful married life that plays out just like an old sitcom. But they're not sitcom characters, and we know Vision is dead. So what's happening here?

In contrast, Loki hands us a lot of exposition in the first episode which is supposed to clear things up but doesn't quite manage to, while not being a blast entertainment-wise either. The TVA is a curiously boring setting. I can see that the analogue character of the bureaucracy we're seeing is a considered choice, highlighting the TVA's tenacity and un-hackability compared with our own shiny, digital, transigent world. But even I, a self-confessed bureaucrat, didn't get much of a kick of TVA's dreary corridors of power. Variant Loki watching videos of how his life would have turned out and the mistakes he made, though a useful "previously on"-ploy for the viewer, felt like a forced way to get the protagonist through several movies' worth of character development in one go.

And then the other Loki variant is introduced, who turns out to be... a woman, who prefers to go by the name of Sylvie. Now, I know (thanks to YouTube) that the series didn't come up with the female Loki idea – there was already a Lady Loki in the comics. Even so, the last thing I (and I suspect a lot of Hiddleston fangirls) wanted to see was the Marvel Loki we'd grown to know and love be slapped around by some female version who's supposedly cleverer and more competent. When Sylvie is introduced in episode two and hisses to Loki "This is not about you" (er... yes it is, or ought to be. the series is called Loki!) my heart sank. Loki seemed to be on the way to become the Useless Male Love Interest in his own series.

Luckily, there's a course correction as the series continues. The two Loki variants, when stuck on an adventure together, start to appreciate each other and indeed fall for each other. It was a relief to me that this was a mutual thing, not just Loki pining for Sylvie. All the same, and though they have some genuinely sweet moments, I couldn't quite warm to Sylvie: firstly, because there's still some unspoken assumption hanging in the air that she's the "better" version of Loki (she is not); secondly, because I never quite bought that she and Loki were versions of the same character. 

The high points to me were instead Tom Hiddleston being charming in the lead role, the growing friendship between Loki and slow-but-sure Mobius – like Thor, Mobius trusts Loki too much, and for that very reason Loki finds it difficult to dismiss him – and the fun over-the-top villain who's revealed at the end and knows how to make a lot of expositional gobbledegook a captivating viewing experience. This isn't the new Doctor Who, though Hiddleston's Loki has traits in common with both the Doctor and the Master. Given that travelling in time and space is literally what the TVA does, this has surprisingly little importance for the plot. But it's a fun show for geeky villain-lovers, and I'm excited for season two.

Still, I think WandaVision is my favourite Marvel TV show. And no, Marvel's Loki has not replaced Once Upon A Time's Rumple as my major villain crush. Nice try, though.     

It's worth talking about Bruno (and the rest of Encanto)

Is it just my imagination, or hasn't there been nearly enough hype about Disney's latest animated film Encanto? I keep waiting for my nerdy YouTube channels to provide reviews and analyses, but only one of them has stepped up so far with a short (if enthusiastic) review. And yet, I thought this film was really good – better than Raya and the Last Dragon, and I liked Raya a great deal. 

There are so many positives when it comes to Encanto. Mirabel, who provides the focus for the film, is Disney's most engaging heroine for quite a while: she's warm, sweet, fun-loving and just flawed enough to be human. I preferred her not only to stoic warrior Raya, but also to, say, Moana, and to both of the Arendelle girls as portrayed in Frozen 2. The animation is stunning, the characters are charming, and the songs (penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame) catchy, sometimes extremely so – I've been humming We Don't Talk About Bruno for days. I watched the film on Friday, when it premiered in Sweden, and was, beforehand, disgruntled that I'd booked a matinée, thus dividing up my whole day. Afterwards, I was grinning happily. This is a real mood-lifter of a film.

The story takes place in a remote spot in Colombia (time period uncertain) and revolves around the family Madrigal, three generations of it living under the same roof in a house full of magic. The house (casita) isn't the only magical thing in the village: since the community settled, each new member of the Madrigal family has been given a magical talent or gift which they have then used for the common good under the watchful eye of Alma, or Abuela (Grandmother) as she is called by everyone. Mirabel is the exception: she never got a gift, much to the disappointment of Abuela (who has no magic either, incidentally, though she does watch over the family's magic candle). Although the Madrigal in-laws – Uncle Félix and Agustín, Mirabel's own dad – are also magic-free, Mirabel feels more and more left out. Then one night, she sees cracks appearing all over the family's beloved casita. When she alerts the rest of the family, though, they are gone. But Mirabel remains convinced that the magic is in danger and that she's the one to save it.

I really appreciated the family dynamics in the Madrigal household. I've always resented that Tolstoy quote about all happy families being alike while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (though no doubt it's quoted out of context). Besides being patently untrue – how many unhappy families aren't unhappy in exactly the same way? – it makes happy families sound boring. The Madrigal family is happy, in the main: they are close-knit and loving. The cousins are like siblings: shapeshifting scamp Camilo chaffs his female cousins in the same way a brother would, and Mirabel comforts her little cousin Antonio like a big sister would. The family's marriages are a success: moody Aunt Pepa and enthusiastic Félix make a surprisingly well-matched couple, and Mirabel's parents both do their best to bolster their youngest daughter's self-worth. But that doesn't mean that there aren't rifts and room for drama: For instance, Mirabel is especially envious of her sister Isabela, who has the gift of being able to produce beautiful flowers and who likes to flaunt her seemingly perfect life. And yet, having a magic gift may not be all it's cracked up to be. The film has to keep a balance between keeping the Madrigals likeable and yet making us sympathise with Mirabel's frustration. Sometimes it falters: I didn't think it likely the Madrigals would forget to include Mirabel in a family photo – wouldn't her parents notice and protest? – and Mirabel's solo song about wanting a magic gift didn't tell us anything we didn't already know about her state of mind, and comes across as a bit whiny. But for the most part the balance is kept, and you can sort of see where everyone's coming from (though it's hard to sympathise with Abuela at times). 

I promised to talk about Bruno, so I will. He's the black sheep of the family with the power to see into the future, though mostly the bad stuff (Isabela is the only one who claims to have had a completely positive prophecy about her life from Bruno, much to her little sister's irritation). Bruno is a shoo-in for my favourite character by way of being a villain fake-out. After his apparent disappearance years earlier, the family's kept quiet about him, and when Mirabel asks questions about him they paint him in sinister colours. He's designed to look faintly sinister too, yet when Mirabel meets him he turns out to be a shy, well-meaning bloke freaked out by his own gift and still full of affection for his family. It's no spoiler that Bruno isn't the villain: that's made pretty clear by the trailers. I was half expecting there to be a double twist where it turns out that he's villainous after all ("this is why we don't talk about Bruno"), but the film didn't go there, and though it would have been rather neat I liked non-baddie Bruno enough to be relieved. Another favourite of mine is Mirabel's big sister Luisa, whose magic power is super strength, and who's expected to be "the strong one" of the family both mentally and physically in a very big-sisterly way. (As a little sister, I feel a little sheepish when listening to her song Surface Pressure.)

Are we back to Golden Age-standard Disney, then? Well, maybe not quite. They've still not tackled many of the problems I've had with the latest Disney films, like (again!) the lack of a memorable villain, or indeed any villain this time around, and the fear of giving the heroine a love interest. I say fear, because there's something cowardly about the way Disney avoids romantic plots, so their female protagonist won't be perceived as "weak" by an over-censorius public. (We do get a love triangle with the side characters, so that's something.) Also, the story is rickety, in large part because the magic element of it is never explained. I know that this is supposed to be magical realism (a genre with which I'm unfamiliar) where magic is part of everyday life and you don't make a big fuss over it. But there still has to be cause and effect, hasn't there? If the casita had suddenly had normal cracks, there would have been an explanation, so why isn't there one for the magical cracks? If cracks in the house equal cracks in the family, why didn't they appear when poor Bruno was ostracised? Why does the magic grow weaker when Mirabel has had an important heart-felt conversation with one of her family members, but stronger when she has an important heart-felt conversation with another family member? Why wasn't she given a gift? Is she Abuela's future replacement, and in that case, couldn't she at least have been given a room? What does the magic want? I wanna know!

All in all, though, Encanto – like Raya – is a step in the right direction after the slump of Ralph Breaks the Internet and Frozen 2. But if Disney wants to step away from European fairy tales as source material, they need to up their game when it comes to inventing original stories. A colourful setting is not enough.

The strangely sideways-told story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

I had been warned (by a Stevenson fan) that Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is not, in fact, very good. All the same, I was curious: it's usually interesting to read the original of something that has been adapted and retold countless times. A good compromise seemed to be to try an audiobook version of the story, read by Martin Jarvis, no less. I did enjoy it – it's not very long, a comparatively easy listen, and has a Victorian-novel atmosphere which I was ready for after having read (and listened) to a row of modern, not very demanding books. But it's certainly no Treasure Island, and I would probably have been sorely disappointed if I'd started off expecting a masterpiece.

One of the problems with the novella is that by now, everyone knows the twist. It's quite hard to imagine what effect the story would have if you didn't know that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are one and the same person. After all, it's set up as a mystery: why is the reputable doctor protecting such an unsavoury young man, even going as far as to make a will in his favour? The story's first readers must have experienced a rug-pull which modern readers miss: it's not that easy to figure out what's going on if you don't already know. Yes, there are clues, but there are also a number of things pointing against Jekyll and Hyde being the same person. How come, for instance, that the doctor is a fairly large, middle-aged man, while Hyde is younger and smaller? A mysterious elixir could account for hairy hands, a villainous countenance etc. but not that, one would have thought. These things are explained at the end, though, and as twists go, Hyde being the "bad" side of Jekyll is quite a good one. Shame that, to us, it's not a twist at all.

Another problem is the curious way the story is told. I quite liked the way it started with two side characters on a walk, one telling the other of an encounter with Hyde: the sideways way into a story feels very Victorian. But then the book continues in the same vein, as we see the events largely through the eyes of Jekyll's lawyer Mr Utterson. Not until the end do we get Jekyll's side of the story. As, again, the mystery Utterson tries to figure out is no mystery to us, this feels oddly unbalanced. Various adaptations and retellings mostly focus on Jekyll, but in the original we don't learn that much about him. There isn't even a romance in danger because of the whole personality-splitting, something most Jekyll/Hyde-inspired stories manage to work in somehow. What's more, we don't learn much about Hyde either (more on this in a bit).

When it comes to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson faces what one could call the Tolkien conundrum: if you invent a concept that proves so popular it's aped over and over again, it's easy for people to forget how original your ideas were to start with. It's a bit unfair to state that more could be done with the Jekyll and Hyde idea when it was Stevenson who invented Jekyll and Hyde. There are some intriguing wrinkles to the story, too: for instance, the explanation of the youth and stature of Hyde is that Jekyll's evil side isn't very well developed, so it looks smaller and younger than Jekyll as a whole. I found it noteworthy that the tale of Jekyll and Hyde isn't about a man split into one good and one bad side; instead, Jekyll is still a "compound" of good and bad, like he always was, whereas Hyde is only bad. This means Jekyll as himself is still quite capable of doing bad things. His whole motivation for creating Hyde isn't particularly admirable: apparently, he uses him mainly as a get-out-of-jail-free card, a way to live out impulses he's ashamed of. Another interesting detail is the reason given as to why people take against Hyde right away: as human beings are a mixture of good and evil, they feel the instinctive wrongness of someone who's just evil.

But how evil is Hyde? Perhaps, if Stevenson's story is a bit underwhelming, it's partly because we don't really see Hyde doing that many terrible things. Yes, he commits a brutal murder – mostly, it seems, out of impatience with a passer-by he doesn't want to be bothered with. We also hear about him unfeelingly trampling a child underfoot (the child recovers). But these are more the actions of a boorish delinquent than a creature of pure evil. We don't see him taking delight in other people's misery. As for what he gets up to when Jekyll releases him for recreational purposes, one supposes it's mostly a question of indulging vices such as drinking and womanising, which isn't that awful. (How does Hyde manage to pull, though, if people find him so instinctively repulsive? Surely even prostitutes would try to give him a wide berth.) I came away from the story wishing I got to know more about the titular characters: but then, there are plenty of other writers who have been only to happy to expand on them.

Little Women (2019): Is romance out of fashion?

Right, time for something girly. Recently, I finally watched the 2019 film of Little Women, the latest adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel, this time written and directed by Greta Gerwig. I've had the DVD for quite some time, but kept putting off watching it as I'd heard rumours that Gerwig had made changes to the ending I wasn't likely to approve of. As it turns out, the film as a whole was good in many ways, but yes, I did resent the changes at the end, not least the coquettish, "post-modern" way they were served up.

To start positive, I enjoyed this version of Little Women a great deal more than the 2017 mini-series adaptation of the same novel. Whereas the TV version concentrated on the hard life of the March family and their ability to cope, the 2019 film re-introduced the importance of imagination and creativity in the March sisters' lives, which was also a big part of the lovely 1994 film with Winona Ryder. Here again, we see the sisters performing amateur theatricals and hosting their own version of the Pickwick Club. When Laurie gets his first glimpse of the March household, he is thoroughly charmed by the warmth and closeness of the family. I was relieved that this film allowed itself sunny, light-hearted scenes and wasn't dead serious all the time: after all, Little Women the book wouldn't have become such a success if it had been all doom and gloom. 

The casting of the protagonists works very well, though I mostly prefer the cast of the 1994 film. Saoirse Ronan can overdo the tomboyishness of Jo in a take or two, but she is convincing as an energetic and driven young writer. Florence Pugh makes adult Amy surprisingly likeable (though she's not as convincing as young Amy – I think the 1994 film made the right call when they had two different actresses as Amy, even though the one playing the little minx Amy risks putting the polished young woman Amy in the shade). Emma Watson acquits herself well as Meg – and she needs a win after the lacklustre Beauty and the Beast –  and Laura Dern delivers as Marmee, even if it's hard for her or anyone to compare with Susan Sarandon. Timothée Chalamet looks so young and clueless as Laurie you can sort of see why he'd be too immature for Jo. I actually preferred Eliza Scanlen's sweet Beth to Claire Danes in the 1994 film: Danes was very convincing, but there was something slightly passive-aggressive about her Beth ("maybe we should give the Hummels our bread").

I had mixed feelings about the chopping and changing from present to past in this version of Little Women. True, if you're almost over-familiar with the story, it does feel refreshing not to have to sit through the same scenes that always make it into the adaptation in exactly the same order as always. Nevertheless, even if you know the story it can be a bit hard to know where you are in the plot, and I did wonder if someone who hadn't any knowledge of Little Women beforehand would be able to make sense of it all. But mostly, I thought this was a perfectly acceptable way to shake things up and keep the viewer alert.

What was the problem, then? I had a few other quibbles but my main objections all relate to one storyline: Jo's romance – or rather non-romance here – with Professor Bhaer.

Now, I'm not that big a fan of Bhaer as a character. I confess that I have only re-read the first part of Little Women in adult years, while I haven't re-read the part published in Europe as Good Wives since I was a girl (when my mother read it to me). Then, I had no idea why Jo would turn down Laurie's proposal and thought Bhaer was a sad comedown for her, seeing as he was something of a bore who had moral objections to her writing sensational stories. The thing with Bhaer, though, is that he needs to be older (and possibly wiser) than Jo, and someone she can look up to. She falls for someone who can guide her, rather than have to be guided by her, like Laurie. The 1994 film did an excellent job of making Bhaer appealing – I mean, they cast Gabriel Byrne! – while preserving the difference in age and experience between him and Jo, and the contrast between him and the boyish Laurie.

In this film, Bhaer looks more like a glamorous young student than a professor. Louis Garrel could just as well have played Laurie. There is no discernible age gap between him and Ronan's Jo, and his accent sounds more French than German. Byrne as Bhaer made us swallow his criticism of Jo's writing with his gentle, measured manner – you felt he was trying to be constructive, because he sensed that she could do more with her talent. Garrel's Bhaer blurts out "I do not like them" (Jo's stories) and "they are not good", which is effective in that we realise why Jo becomes incensed: those are the very last things you should say to an author. But he doesn't offer any constructive criticism, and there is no reason, on the strength of this conversation, why she should value his opinion. And why does a man who can read and understand Shakespeare express himself so clumsily?

It gets worse, though, when Bhaer re-enters the story towards the end. Here, if the film followed the book, he and Jo should finally get together and get married, after a sweet scene under an umbrella. We do get some romance between them, but it is undercut by a scene with Jo and her publisher spliced in right in the middle of it. Jo is explaining that the heroine in her book does not marry either of her suitors, and her publisher insists that she change the story. We then cut to the umbrella scene – bathed in the same warm, somewhat unreal glow as the film's flashbacks – and then we hear the publisher commending it. It is therefore heavily implied that the romance between Jo and Bhaer and their subsequent marriage only exist as fiction in her novel, while the real Jo remains unmarried. Getting her novel published is her real happy ending.

Now, you could argue that Jo simply didn't want to put her own romantic experiences in her novel – there's a difference between her and her character after all. But she doesn't sound like a happy bride-to-be when discussing the plot change with her publisher (she talks about "selling" her heroine into marriage). The ending is unclear enough for there to be some debate over how it should be interpreted, but from what I've read, Gerwig meant the unromantic interpretation to be the right one. Alcott allegedly wanted Jo to remain single initially but altered the plot to make it more appealing to readers, and Gerwig thought she would honour the writer by giving the film the ending she'd really intended.

Here's the thing, though: whatever Alcott may or may not have intended for Jo to start with, she ended up granting her heroine a love life, and that was the smart creative choice. It's certainly better than some half-baked affair where a male character's only function is to serve as a romantic red herring. Given that Bhaer in the book (as far as I remember) was no Gabriel Byrne, I'd had preferred it if Gerwig had written him out of the story altogether. I could live with that. But where there's a Bhaer, there's a way for him and Jo to be together. Also, there's something self-congratulatory about playing around with the book-within-a-book conceit. Together with rather too many speeches about how the only way a girl in the mid-nineteenth century can make money is to marry rich (though I liked how Aunt March's motive for taking Amy to Europe rather than Jo was that Amy was the most likely to make a good match and save her family's finances), the tinkering with the ending lends the film an air of modern condescension.

We seem to be getting less and less of of romantic plots nowadays, at least from creators of culture and entertainment who want to appear morally irreproachable, and it's starting to get me down. Romance is frowned upon, especially romance between a woman and a man who is older and/or in any way in a position of power in relation to her. I can't help feeling this is hypocritical, to say the least – because, newsflash, quite a lot of women (including me) do find power attractive, however improper it may be to say so. And anyway I like romance, even the blander kind with male protagonists who take their lead from their womenfolk à la Laurie. It's quite true that a woman doesn't necessarily need romance to be happy, but she can still want to experience it through fiction.

A reasonably up-to-speed villain-lover's guide to Marvel - Phase Three B (Infinity War to Endgame)

The final Marvel stint for a while. I have already made inroads into the phase four stuff – including Loki! – but it will keep.

Avengers: Infinity War

So, is Loki in this one? Actually, yes, for the first ten minutes or so. Then he dies.

But that's a fake-out, right, like the other times he "died"? I mean, they made a TV series about him and everything! The TV series is about an earlier version of Loki. It's complicated. Anyway, this time the death is for real, and a way for Loki to redeem himself.

Ugh, always these Redemptive Deaths. If it's a comfort, it's the sneakiest Redemptive Death possible. He's killed by Thanos while trying to doublecross him.

So, is this Thanos any good as a villain? Can't say I like the sound of him so far. Credit where credit is due, Thanos is pretty darn great. Villain fanboys often tend to go for the flashy bad guys, the Beagle Boy kind who revel in their villainy. But this time, they got hyped over a more complex villain, and with reason. The script-writers, directors and not least Josh Brolin who motion-capture-acted the "Mad Titan" expertly should all be lauded for making something interesting of him. Thanos's plan is perfectly bonkers – he wants to wipe out half of everything living in the universe – but the film sells you on the idea that he thinks he is doing the right thing. Obsessed with concerns over over-population since the fall of his own planet, he harbours the extreme-Malthusian belief that the half of the universe's population that remains will flourish once he's done his bit. (Mind you, Malthusians want to curb procreation in order to handle over-population: they're killjoys, not killers.) Thanos is even prepared to make personal sacrifices to achieve his goal. Of all the misguided idealists in the Marvel Universe, he's literally the big one.

But you don't tend to fancy murderous idealists. That's right, I don't fancy him. But I am impressed. And I like Ebony Maw, his devoted follower, very much the Saint-Just to his Robespierre.

Overall impression: Like Thanos, this movie is big and awe-inspiring. Despite its length, I was at the edge of my seat during the whole thing, and that's in spite of the fact that I knew how things would pan out (it's been years since the film aired, and I haven't tried to avoid spoilers as I thought I'd never see it anyway). However, you really have to have seen most of the other Marvel films in order to make any kind of sense of it. It presupposes that you know all the characters already and can't wait to see them fighting someone almost impossible to defeat. One for the fans.

The Ant-Man and The Wasp

Loki still dead? This movie takes place briefly before and to some extent during Infinity War, but... yeah, he's not in it.

So who are the villains? Anything interesting? The main antagonist in this film, the "Ghost", is hardly a villain at all – she only wants to cure a horrible condition she contracted as a result of some advanced quantum-portal-nonsense experiments. The problem, as with the comic side villain from the South, is that it would have been very easy to level with them. The "Ghost" wants to be cured now – to which the answer would be "sure, hon, just wait until tomorrow when we've got my wife/mother out of the quantum realm". The Southern faux-gentleman wants to sell Hank Pym's mobile, shrinkable lab for a billion dollars (with a cut to him) now – to which the answer would be "that sounds like a great offer, give us a week to think about it while daddy extracts my mom from the quantum realm". But as the heroes are so unclear about why they only need a couple of hours more without interference, they need to contend with an awful lot of avoidable hassle.

Overall impression: Plotting isn't this film's strong point. There are many contrivances and plot holes. But like its predecessor Ant-Man this is a fun film with charming and likeable characters. If you discount the bleak mid-credit scene (which seemed a bit unnecessary – couldn't they have worked it into Endgame somehow?) it's the ideal light-hearted pick-me-up after the, er, intensity of Infinity War.

Captain Marvel

So, I can't help noticing that this film takes place in the Nineties. Before Infinity War. There is a guest appearance from a former Marvel villain, but not Loki – rather Ronan from the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

So, does he have any character development in this film? Nah, he's only there to have his cute blue butt kicked at the end.

Ah, well... Any other villains of note? In a movie containing shape-shifters and a heroine with amnesia, it's not always easy to know who the villains are... Or else it's really easy. What can I say? I knew of one of the film's twists beforehand, and from that it wasn't hard to unravel the rest. I don't want to give away too much, but overall the threats that Vers, aka Carol Danvers (it's not made entirely clear why she ends up with the moniker Captain Marvel) face are a little on the underwhelming side.

Overall impression: The problem with Captain Marvel is Captain Marvel herself. She is given little by way of personality, and what she has isn't very appealing; she comes accross as conceited and humourless. Things aren't helped by Brie Larson's curiously wooden performance. She doesn't really have any chemistry with any of the other characters, not even Nick Fury, whom she is supposed to care about (in a best-buddy kind of way, I'm almost sure). There are some very clunky "go feminism" scenes, which make me (as a woman) cringe. In one, a biker condescendingly tells Vers/Carol that she should try smiling. A minute later, she's stolen his bike. That's him told. I could see his point, though: I got really tired of Larson's mulish I'm-not-going-to-be-ingratiating look.

For all that, the film's not terrible. I enjoyed the Skrulls and their shape-shifting shenanigans, it's nice to see a younger, more mellow Nick Fury, and the kid who plays Carol's best friend's daughter is great. Also, in terms of preachiness, it doesn't hold a candle to the phase four TV series The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. They do try to "show, not tell" in Captain Marvel, they're just not very good at it. And it's a bit galling that Captain Marvel is so ridiculously over-powered that she can supposedly take down any of the other MCU heroes and heroines – the ones we actually like.

Avengers: Endgame

I guess Loki isn't in this, as he's really dead this time... Actually, he does make a couple of brief appearances as his former, unreformed self –  there's time travel involved, you see.

Ah, that's something I guess. And Thanos is back, which is... good? It has to be said, he's not a patch on Infinity War Thanos. The Avengers end up being pitched against a Thanos from the past, who somewhere along the way realises that half of the universe will never thank him if he rids them of the other half, even if it does mean more natural resources and stuff. But the plan he comes up with instead is so obviously mad and wrong, even compared to the old one, that the complexity is lost.

So, are you saying they didn't stick the landing? No, they did stick the landing. But I have to admit this film belongs to the heroes rather than the villains. It is overlong, and I have no clue how the time travel actually works in this film. Apparently you can't change the past, but Steve kind of does it anyway at the end? And how can fighting and killing people from the past not have any impact on the timeline? I was thoroughly confused. Nevertheless, there are thrilling action scenes, sweet character moments and a moving, satisfying finale, even though sacrifices are made on the way. Even Captain Marvel becomes more bearable.

But do I really have to see all these movies just to understand what's going on in Loki the series? Honestly? No. If you watch the Thor movies and the first Avengers film you will probably be able to follow it fine, though the exact circumstances of Loki's death and why this earlier version of him has fallen foul of a sort of time police will be a bit of a mystery. However, if you appreciate the nerdiness of Loki the series, you will probably quite like the Marvel movies as well. Give it a go. But if you say to yourself after the first Avengers movie "what a load of rubbish", then you'll know it's not for you.          

A not-quite-as-ignorant-anymore villain-lover's guide to Marvel - Phase Three A (Civil War to Black Panther)

Yeah, I'm sorry I can't do all of phase three in one go – but it's nine films! Including some pretty important ones I might want to go further into. So I'll save the two big ones, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame (along with a couple of others) until next time. 

Captain America: Civil War

So I'm catching on by now... A Captain America movie means no Loki, right? Right. Though this is only nominally a Captain America movie. It's essentially an Avengers movie minus Thor and the Hulk who are off having adventures elsewhere.

OK, so what do we have on the villain front? Maybe I was charmed by the fact that we finally had a villain who could speak flawless German, but I did have some time for Daniel Brühl's understated Zemo. He is bright and good at coming up with complicated schemes. The problem is his motive. It's a great motive for hating someone – he lost his family when Ultron was raging around in the fictional, much-tried country of Sokovia – just not the Avengers. They were trying to save as many Sokovian civilians as possible, as well as the rest of the world, and if they didn't manage to rescue everyone it's hardly their fault but the evil robot's. That Zemo doesn't realise this, but is trying to split up the elite team who was fighting the Big Bad who killed his family, is what prevents him from being a great villain.

Overall impression: The problem with the villain's motive is the problem with the whole film. The premise which leads the heroes to fall out in the first place – should they or should they not submit to scrutiny by an independent body such as the UN (not perhaps overly famous for its efficiency) – feels forced. The idealisation of vigilantism is one of my problems with the superhero genre, yet I can't really fault the Avengers here: they only tend to deal with oversized threats that are plainly too much for the police or military, such as power-hungry Asgardians, AI beings bent on destruction etc. We don't see them being reckless with civilian lives, either: Civil War shows the first clear case of an Avenger "killing the patient" i.e. straight up causing civilian casualties, and it shakes her. Yet Tony Stark feels guilty when a grieving mother – much like Zemo – blames him for her boy's death in Sokovia. Stop feeling guilty about Sokovia already!

Apart from the shaky premise, this is good action fun with some dark undertones. Though I imagine fanboys who at some point have set their hero action figures against each other will enjoy it most of all.

Doctor Strange

Magic, huh? You know who else can do magic? Like illusions and stuff? What, are you hoping for a Once Upon A Time crossover now?

Chance would be a fine thing... No, I mean Loki! You're not that obsessed with Loki. Isn't this framing device getting old? Anyway, he's not in this movie.

So who are the villains, then? Any good? Good news: the main antagonist is Mads Mikkelsen as Kaecilius (yes, I checked IMDB). Bad news: once again, someone forgot to write an actual part for him. All right, it's not quite as bad as in Casino Royale. His wish for eternal life is easy to understand, though allying himself with a powerful being from the Dark Dimension (yes, it's actually called that) in order to bring it about isn't the smartest move. Once again we see misguided idealism at work: Kaecilius and his followers truly believe that everything will be great if the Earth surrenders itself to the tender mercies of Dark Dimension overlord Dormammu. Which is not the case, no.

Overall impression: I was looking forward to this one, and it's always nice to see Benedict Cumberbatch, though hearing him speak in an American accent is... strange. But I have to admit, this movie felt a bit formulaic storywise. We've already had the arrogant protagonist who has to learn humility the hard way and finally uses his talents for the Greater Good. In many ways, Doctor Strange is just wizard Iron Man, only not as funny. Also, adding magic to all the other crazy stuff going on in the Marvel world is a bit of a strain. But the acting is good and there are some cool CGI effects.

Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2

It's in space, but I've stopped hoping... Be patient – Loki will be in the next film on the list.

So, any memorable villains? Common wisdom dictates that Marvel didn't offer much in the way of villains – excepting Loki – until now, when it starts to get good. And I have to admit that common wisdom is right. The setup for the film is that Peter Quill is united with his long-lost, unknown father, who turns out to be an ultrapowerful celestial called Ego, played by a Kurt Russell shining with bonhomie. The whole Guardian gang is invited back to Ego's home, and Peter and Ego settle down for some serious father-son bonding. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Ego is the villain: the question is more what he has in mind, and what it will take to turn a besotted Peter (who has already lost a parent) against him.

Overall impression: I have a soft spot for the zany sci-fi feel of the Guardians films. The Guardians should be annoying but somehow aren't. The depressing beginning of the first Guardians film really pays off in my case: I'm constantly rooting for Peter Quill and get a little upset when shade is thrown at him (which happens quite a lot). With a charismatic villain present, this movie – in my view – is even more enjoyable than the first one. I chuckle whenever I think of "I know it sounds bad..."

Thor: Ragnarok

Finally! Yes, there is plenty of Loki in this film, and as in Thor: The Dark World, the main villain is to be found elsewhere whereas he is the "wild card".

So any other good villains? Hela, Thor's and Loki's sister (though not by blood in the latter case), is a splendid villainess played with great panache by Cate Blanchett. There's also the Grandmaster, the hedonistic ruler of a faraway planet where Thor is forced to become a gladiator, but he is more of a side antagonist than a villain. 

What, Hela, Loki's sister? You mean Hel, Loki's daughter, surely? Nope. I already told you, Marvel plays fast and loose with Viking mythology. The only thing reminiscent of the myth is that the Fenris wolf (so cute) is present. Also, I don't recall the original Ragnarök having anything to do with a demonic-looking creature called Surtur.

Overall impression: This movie is a full-blown comedy, in spite of the ominous title. Hela is fun. The Grandmaster is fun. Thor and Loki squabbling and occasionally bonding is a joy to watch. I can understand why some find the tone shift from the first Thor movie, which was quite serious, jarring. But this is my kind of light entertainment.

Black Panther

OK, obviously not a Loki film... So what else do we have? You said things were getting good villain-wise? Yes, indeed. The villains in this movie are undoubtedly strong, though not exactly something for someone like me to swoon over. The lesser villain, who gets defeated about half-way through the film, Ulysses Klaue, is played by Andy Serkis in his usual energetic, way-out-there villain style. Think Serkis as Rigaud in Little Dorrit, but possibly even crazier. The main villain, nicknamed Killmonger, is something completely different: he is quite complex and has a compelling private motive for resenting the hero T'Challa, aka the Black Panther, and his family. When T'Challa has an otherworldly chat with his dead father I thought it a bit unnecessary and Lion King-ish, but it sets the stage for a powerful scene where Killmonger communes with his dead dad, not in some misty panther-strewn savannah form of the ancestral plane but in their old shabby apartment back in the US.

Aw, a leader of the pack villain... You love those. So what's the problem? Killmonger doesn't only have a personal motive, but a political one as well.

Ah, politics. Yep – it's not spelled out in so many words, but I know what he means we he talks about arming "the oppressed" against "the oppressors". I found it a pity to mix politics into Killmonger's motivation, what with the personal reasons being quite enough, but it does raise the stakes, and forms a contrast against T'Challa's wish (as voiced in front of the UN in the mid-credit scene) to unite the world's people in "one tribe". (Twenty years ago or so I would have scoffed at such talk and called it well-meaning waffle, but nowadays I'm quite grateful for a bit of one-tribe-speechmaking.)

Overall impression: This movie was a smash hit at the box office, so it's clearly many people's cup of tea. For my part, I have to admit I found it a bit slow; I don't think it's a film I'll revisit in a hurry. T'Challa is underwritten as a character – it's as if the scriptwriters were afraid of giving him any flaws – but the late Chadwick Boseman gives him quiet likeability, and his scenes with Letitia Wright as T'Challa's tech-savvy, scene-stealing little sister Shuri are really funny and sweet. So the hero's all right, but his love interest is a boring goody-two-shoes (it would have been more fun to see someone so nice and idealistic as T'Challa teamed up with a bad girl). The premise of a technologically super-advanced African country which has to decide whether to reveal its secrets to the world is quite interesting, but would they really decide on who becomes their leader with trial by combat? And what exactly is CIA agent Ross's role? There's no need to include Martin Freeman just to keep us whiteys happy. Just don't call me an oppressor, and I'm good.

An ignorant villain-lover's guide to Marvel – Phase Two

"The sooner you're into it, the sooner you're out of it", was Mary Poppins's advice in Mary Poppins Returns when her sidekick was worried about recounting a rather long anecdote in song form. So I'll just push on with my Marvel movie overview (for the background, see previous post), where I've reached phase two. This was a rather mixed bag, and there was little to cheer villain-wise, but the general entertainment level was high enough, with a movie or two which stood out among the rest.

Iron Man 3

Third time Loki lucky? Nope, still no Loki in standalone Iron Man movies. Use this as a rule of thumb: if there is no hope of seeing Thor, then there is also no Loki.

Any other interesting villains, then? Not really. As with the other Iron Man films, the main antagonist is someone who is personally connected to Tony Stark in some way – this time around, a guy he slighted at a work function way back. It's not so much a question of the villain getting revenge, more that Stark's snub spurred him on to become successful whatever it took. That's an OK motive, but there are no real villain fireworks here. As for The Mandarin... Not having read the comics, I was in a better position to guess a twist connected with this character. Let's just say, I'm pretty sure he's not like in the comics (but Ben Kingsley has fun).

Overall impression: This is pretty much a standard Iron Man movie. If you liked the other two, you'll like this one. If you're not that much of a fan of them, there are still things to enjoy. Tony is witty, his interaction with a kid manages not to be too cloying (the boy tries to guilt-trip him into taking him along on an adventure at one time, and when Tony doesn't fall for it mumbles "it was worth a try") and it's heartwarming to see that Tony's lumpish bodyguard loves Downton Abbey because it's "classy".

Thor: The Dark World  

Loki time! Yes indeed. Loki isn't the main threat this time around: instead he's the classic villain wild card, sometimes working with Thor, sometimes against him, and all the time looking out for himself. The sibling banter is easily the most enjoyable part of the movie, and it's exciting to see which way Loki will jump.

So who is the main villain? Any good? Alas! He's a missed opportunity. A Dark Elf with a nicely sinister look played by none other than Christopher Eccleston, he has no discernible personality and no motivation besides... unleashing darkness. Because he's a Dark Elf. With a little more effort put into this character by the writers, this could have been really good. Instead, we just see flashes of what might have been from Eccleston.

Overall impression: I quite liked watching this, but I can see why it is considered to be the weakest of the Thor movies. It doesn't quite gel, and some of the humour doesn't land – I thought Jane Foster's intern Darcy was charming in the first Thor movie, but she gets on my nerves here, especially as she acquires an intern of her own, which makes no sense whatsoever. Jane's and Thor's romance is built up like a really big thing, so it's a pity there isn't any follow-through on this in later films (maybe in Endgame – I haven't watched it yet).

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I'll not even pretend I believe Loki's in this one. So what else have we got on the villain front? The Winter Soldier isn't really a villain: he's Steve's best friend Bucky (Sebastian Stan) who has been brainwashed and frozen down, only to be thawed up at regular intervals and used as an expert assassin by Hydra. Hydra has survived Nazi Germany to become a classic evil organisation that wants to Take Over The World. That may sound tired, but it is remarkable – in this and other Marvel movies – how much loyalty Hydra inspires in its followers. Even the self-serving scientist sidekick of the first Captain America movie is shown to have been more committed than one would have thought, uploading his consciousness into old-style computers and everything, all to further Hydra's goals, which are to... erm... rule more efficiently than those democratic clowns? I don't know.

Come on! We can't just have a collective villainous entity. There must be a leader or someone who stands out! Was there? Oh yes. Now I remember. The friendly-seeming authority figure who says he wants to help Cap & Co. get to the bottom of it all. It's as standard as it sounds, even with some star quality behind the part.

Overall impression: I must be one of the very few people who prefer the first Captain America movie. But this one has good action, and likeable leads in Steve and Natasha aka Black Widow who really starts to come into her own here. Plus you really want Steve to get through to Bucky – especially if, like me, you know Sebastian Stan as the Mad Hatter from Once Upon A Time. There, as here, he is in continual need of a break.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Galaxy? So they're in space? Where Asgard is, somewhere? Loki doesn't show up, no.

All right, then... are there any other memorable villains? Again, there is wasted potential. We see glimpses of how Ronan, the main antagonist, prepares his ash-on-blue-skin look, and I oooh-ed a bit. But after that, he's more of a villain place holder, if a cool-looking one. It's a little interesting that his motive isn't gain: he believes he is fighting a righteous war against the enemies of his father and grandfather. Taken together with Hydra and later Thanos, we do get quite a lot of idea-inspired villainy in the MCU, which gives me some satisfaction. (I can't abide it when people equate good old selfishness with evil: it's not at all the same thing.) But it's not as if we ever dive deep into Ronan's psyche: he's a space terrorist, mostly. Nebula the disaffected daughter of Thanos is fun, though.

Overall impression: They've reeled us in with MCU movies that aren't that crazy compared to normal action films. Time to get a little more comic-booky: by now, even we regular viewers can take it. This isn't action as much as outlandish sci-fi. Still, somehow they get away with it all – including the talking raccoon and the living tree. The start of the film is really depressing: we see a flashback to the later leader of the gang Peter Quill's aka Star-Lord's childhood, when he loses his mother to cancer and then promptly gets kidnapped by aliens. This morose beginning pays off well when it comes to understanding Peter both in this and later movies, though. Stick with it and you'll soon get to the light-hearted part and (hopefully) have a good time. But if you generally have difficulty getting into the spirit of wacky sci-fi, this will probably not convert you.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

So I can't help noticing by the poster picture that Thor is in this one. But not Loki, I'm afraid.

Bother... So what else have we got? Who is this Ultron? He's a sophisticated artificial life form created by Tony Stark in order to protect the Earth. But something goes wrong, and he ends up believing the best way to ensure peace is to get rid of all the people.

I see, an evil robot. Fun. He is actually quite funny. He's got some of Tony's wisecracking personality, much to the irritation of both of them (Tony ironically calls him "Junior" at one point). It's not the same as a complex, human villain, true, but aside from Loki, I believe Ultron was the phase two villain I had the best time with.

Overall impression: This is pretty much what you can expect from an ensemble-Avengers movie. It's mostly action, but there are some quieter moments too, and they work well. If you liked the first Avengers movie, chances are you'll like this one, even if there is no Loki present. It also introduces some new characters, so if you want to get what's going on in later MCU films you had better not skip it.

Ant-Man

Sorry, what? Ant-Man?! Don't you want to ask about the villains in this one?

Should I bother? I mean, Ant-Man! No way are they going to make it work. Actually, they do.

All right, then. What about the villains? No Loki, but the villainous businessman (yes, it's time for one of those) is above average. He has a decent personal reason to resent his old mentor Hank Pym (a cranky inventor played by Michael Douglas) as well as a hefty profit motive, and I like his style. "They're not what they once were... they do a lot of good", he quips when it turns out Hydra is his prospective client, as if they were a mildly scandalous political party that's cleaned up its act.

Overall impression: I use the word charm a lot when it comes to the MCU and its characters, and here it is in evidence again. This is a charming heist movie, with many well-known ingredients, but served with some verve. Ex-con Scott Lang is another hero it's easy to like, nicely self-deprecating and a good father. You can skip this film and still follow what happens in the greater MCU saga, but I'm not sorry I saw it. 

An ignorant villain-lover's guide to Marvel - Phase One

All right, if you can't beat'em, join'em. As I've already touched upon, I'm not generally a fan of the superhero genre. For years and years, I've stubbornly refused to get involved with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which means that a lot of pop culture references in other media have passed me by. I have also had to bear, with irritating regularity, that my favourite geeky YouTube channels dedicated time not to interesting analyses and theories about Disney, Pixar, Doctor Who or Star Wars, but – Marvel. Fricking Marvel, again and again. It became really bad when the series WandaVision first aired on Disney +. I wanted some theories about Raya and the Last Dragon about then, over-analysing of the trailers and so forth, but no – it was all WandaVision, WandaVision, WandaVision. Still I didn't consider giving in and discovering what the fuss was about. Not until now.

Disney found a way to maximise the brand I couldn't resist. They announced a whole TV series about Loki. I know I've been a bit sniffy about Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager, but that doesn't mean he isn't seriously foxy as the mischievous Asgardian. And I mean, it's Loki! I may not know much about comic books, but I know what I like mythologically. Plus, the series was hailed in some quarters as Doctor Who done right. As a villain-lover with a geeky streak, clearly I had to check this out. But I haven't yet done so, as I figured I needed to see the Marvel movies (or films, but they are American, so...) first. At least most of them. And there are... quite a lot.

The good news is, they're actually good. It didn't take long before I stopped thinking of my Marvel movie of the week plan as homework and started enjoying them. And since I'm watching them, I may as well milk them for blogging content. Get ready for the pig-ignorance of a casual viewer with next to no knowledge of the original comic book stories. At least I can give other villain-lovers some pointers. The list of Marvel movies I'm watching is the one available on Disney + in Sweden, so there will be some omissions (The Incredible Hulk and the Spiderman movies). Let's start with what the powers that be on Marvel/Disney call "phase one":

Iron Man

So is Loki in this one? Not likely – this is the origin story of Iron Man i.e. Tony Stark, not Thor. They're not going to hit us with mystical realms in space/another dimension or something and their inhabitants yet.

Any other interesting villains, then? What can I say? They're not bad. They're... functional. You understand why they do what they do. There's nothing here for a villain-lover to get very excited about, but the grounded motives of the villains match the almost-realistic feel of the movie. Of course a terrorist would want extra powerful weapons, and it makes sense that he wouldn't have a lot of comic-booky eccentric traits but simply be a very tough and intimidating guy. And I can really understand Tony Stark's business partner being none too pleased when Tony, severely shocked after a stint as a hostage, announces that Stark Industries will stop making weapons, as it's impossible to make sure that they're only used by the US. (The US using them is fine – Stark's no pacifist.) What the hey? Stark Industries are primarily arms manufacturers. How are they going to keep making money then? Clearly, judging by Tony's lifestyle, they find a way, but even now, many movies later, I don't know how.

A terrorist villain and a business villain, then, who do what's expected of them. Their names? Sorry, no idea.

Overall impression: The wisecracking, arrogant Tony Stark as played by Robert Downey Jr. is an endearingly flawed hero, and the film doesn't feel very "out there" at all. If anything, it was a bit too gritty for my taste. It's like a tough action movie where the protagonist happens to invent a super-powerful iron suit. Possibly something for Die Hard fans.

Iron Man 2

So is Loki... He's not, is he? Nope.

Any other interesting villains, then? I did think Whiplash aka the Russian guy aka Ivan Vanko had potential (at least enough for me to bother to look up the name on IMDB). He has a good motive: his father, an inventor who worked with Tony's dad Howard Stark, got exiled because of Stark and died in misery while the inventions he worked on at Stark Industries kept generating money for little Tone. It's almost refreshing that Tony doesn't feel the least bit bad about this: it's all "Well, Vanko's dad was a spy, so...". On the other hand, this leads to the theme of the hero's and villain's dad working together not being properly explored, and the potential of Whiplash, in spite of a cool performance from Mickey Rourke, remained pretty much wasted. And we never found out what the deal was with that bird.

Justin Hammer, Tony's business rival, is another villain with a grounded, believable motive. Of course he's envious of Tony Stark both on a professional level and a personal one: Tony isn't what one would call a gracious winner. But a character who's set up to be a pale copy of the hero can't pull a lot of villain weight. Hammer gets effortlessly played by Whiplash, who in many ways remains a mystery.

Overall impression: The standalone Iron Man movies aren't really my cup of tea, in spite of Robert Downey Jr.'s undeniable charm and the funny quips. As an action movie, the first one is better. On the villain front, Iron Man 2 is slightly more interesting, though.

Thor

So is Loki in this one? You bet! He's the main villain.

Wow, finally! So does he live up to the hype? I'd say yes. He's funny and clever in a so-sharp-he'll-cut-himself way which is actually slightly reminiscent of his mythological counterpart, and I love the slight and pasty look. Don't expect the Thor movies to follow Viking mythology, though, because they don't – not at all. In this story, Loki is Thor's (as it turns out adopted) brother, and is resentful of standing in his heroic but dim beefcake sibling's shadow. And then he finds out the dice were loaded against him from the start and gets really mad.

OK, promising. Any other villains around? There are some Frost Giants who make their presence felt. They and their king look satisfyingly Dark Horde-ish, but as with the other Thor movies any villain not belonging to the Odinson clan has little to do except to look mythically intimidating and occasionally destroy stuff.

Overall impression: This film is a little unexpected, as there aren't nearly as much in the way of fantasy-style shenanigans as one would have thought. (Asgard is a place in outer space somewhere, plus possibly in another dimension, but the inhabitants aren't actually gods.) For a fair space of the time Thor, who has been banished to Earth, is simply getting his bearings and confusing a team of scientists, including his love interest Jane Foster. Story-wise, it's not the most thrilling Marvel movie, but it does set up the characters of Thor and Loki nicely for future adventures. I don't usually like dim-witted beefcakes much, but Chris Hemsworth's Thor is unexpectedly charming, so I could bear his presence well.

Captain America: The First Avenger

So, is Loki in this one? That would be a no.

Any other interesting villains, then? Not on paper. The main villain is literally a mad Nazi – in fact his secret organisation Hydra (it's never "Little Butterfly", is it?), dedicated to questionable research experiments, is so extreme even the other Nazis are shaking their heads and thinking the whole thing's a bit rum. But I do like the way he's set up. He's introduced as plain Johann Schmidt, but it's clear from the start there's more to him than just scientific knowledge. He can easily shove aside a tomb stone a band of soldiers couldn't budge. He's been through some kind of terrible ordeal. There seems to be something wrong with his face. His Nazi masters call him "Red Skull" for some reason... It's a really effective bit-by-bit villain reveal. Hugo Weaving, whom I dimly remember as a standoffish elf in the Ring trilogy (it's a long time since I saw it) is a good choice to play Schmidt. Personality-wise, however, Toby Jones's self-serving scientist sidekick makes more of an impression.   

Overall impression: I didn't expect to like this movie, but I really enjoyed it! This was when Marvel prep started to be fun in earnest for me. The building up of the villain is only one example of how well-constructed the story is. As for the hero, the movie addresses all the things superhero sceptics could ask themselves – why the ridiculous name, why a special suit, what's so great with that shield anyway? – as well as making Steve Rogers a sweet-natured and surprisingly engaging hero, for all that he's a bit of a boy scout.

The Avengers

I expect Loki isn't in this one? Yes, he is. He's the main villain again.

Really? Yay! So the whole ensemble of heroes is fighting Loki? Yep, that sort of sums up the movie, to be honest.

Any other villains? Nah, an anonymous army of alien soldiers. But Loki's enough.

Overall impression: This movie is a good test, if you're considering catching up with Marvel's stuff but not quite sure if it's for you. If you enjoy it, push on. If not, then you probably won't like most of the Marvel movies to come, either. I liked the banter between the characters better than the grand action set pieces. You can just about follow what happens without having seen the others films – I'd say it's the last Marvel movie, at least the last one starring an ensemble of heroes, where you can "go in blind" – but it does help to have seen the others, because you'll be more invested. The movies have made a good job of setting the heroes up as likeable in their separate ways, and it's fun to see how they learn to work together in spite of their wildly different personalities. This isn't a deep film – it's the quintessential "popcorn movie". But it's entertaining, and there's no humourless, pompous justice warrior with a "secret identity" (the kind of superhero I really don't care for) in sight. Though there may be the odd cape.

The birth of Cosmo (as we know it): Is this really modern feminism talking?

It's been a while since I've seen Cosmopolitan in the news stands, but I remember eyeing the covers of it when I was younger and, time and time again, deciding not to buy it. Buying a woman's magazine was an act of pure self-indulgence (and still is), which would have made it natural for me to go for the most garish and unashamedly shallow of the bunch. But some particularly lurid headline would always put me off. The magazine made sex seem like a competitive sport, and the sultry glamour pusses on the cover signalled that awkward bookish girls weren't exactly Cosmopolitan's target readership. In short, I was never a Cosmo girl.

With this background, I felt torn when reading the novel Park Avenue Summer by Renée Rosen. Its focus point is the transformation of Cosmopolitan in the Sixties, from failing if respected magazine to what it still is today, at the hands of its new editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl. The events are seen from the point of view of a fictional character, Alice Weiss, who becomes Helen's secretary and is very loyal to her. In a novel, it's often a good wheeze to view a significant character from the sidelines like this – novels told directly from the point of view of some fascinating figure we want to know more about, even a great villain, tend to disappoint. The trick works well here too – Alice is sympathetic to Helen but doesn't always agree with her and can see her flaws. Nevertheless, we are clearly meant to root for Helen and wish her success in her endeavour.

Which is where my feeling torn comes in. On the one hand, Helen Gurley Brown did turn Cosmopolitan around from a newspaper about to fold any day to a success story. On the other, she turned a middlebrow magazine with a good reputation (which actually sounds like the kind of publication I wouldn't mind buying now and again) into a sex-obsessed rag.

As with the TV mini-series The English Game, Park Avenue Summer got me thinking about the advantages and drawbacks of a "based on actual events" drama. Julian Fellowes and his co-writers tried to frame the events described in The English Game as the triumph of the underdog – so it was a little embarrassing for them when the working-class heroes of the tale decided to switch teams because of the better pay. Rosen frames Park Avenue Summer as a tale of female empowerment, but as with Fellowes and Co., the real events don't quite gel with the narrative. On the upside, the grit in the fictional machinery makes the story told less predictable and in many ways more interesting. The downside is you're less inclined to be led where the author wants you to go. 

Helen Gurley Brown is a fascinating character, in many ways resembling an eccentric teacher: quirky, strong-willed and convinced she is fighting not just for herself but for "her girls" (the expected new readership of Cosmo). Seeing as she is based on a real person, she is allowed to do things that a fictional counterpart probably wouldn't, such as burst into tears (secretly) when she has been attacked and use feminine cooing as a way to get ahead. It's also intriguing to see that as early as 1965, when the sexual revolution hadn't even properly got underway, she apparently turned Cosmopolitan to exactly the kind of magazine I saw in the news stands as a young girl a couple of decades later. She certainly had a vision, whether you agree with it or not, and plenty of personality – and personality is what I have been wanting to see in female characters of modern fiction.

At the same time, I did find it hard to root for her, as she dismisses any too-ambitious content as "dull" and "boring", not even seeing fit to use it as filler in an issue of the magazine she's already giving up on, cutting out short stories by Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and instead accepting things like an article about crash diets which reads "like a child wrote it". She pushes for sexy, sultry cover girls, as she thinks women will buy the magazine in order to learn how to become more like them. And her ideas for magazine features are often cringeworthy. At one time, an internal memo from Helen to female staff asking them to share how they like their "bosoms" to be fondled during foreplay is leaked to a rival magazine which makes fun of it. Helen is furious about the betrayal and realises how bad it looks – but if you don't want your rivals to slate you for writing bosom memos, don't write bosom memos! It was all going to be a part of a feature anyway, so the reaction would have come then if not sooner – though one of the bigwigs of Hearst (owner of Cosmo) points out that they would never have greenlighted such an article. In fact, I couldn't fault the Hearst bigwigs at all for being sceptical of Helen's approach.

Alice, the fictional heroine, is pleasant enough and acts as a good foil to her boss, and parts of her story were really affecting. It is a more streamlined story than the one based on real events, though, especially where her love life is concerned. If anything surprised me about it, it's that Erik Masterson, a guy at the office (hostile to Helen) with whom she has a fling and who is clearly Mr Wrong, accepts being pushed around by her as much as he does. Their affair is supposed to be no-strings, yet she forbids him to see other women, and he accepts (though if he really keeps his promise in this regard is open for question). But is that really what's meant by no-strings? We're supposed to wonder why Alice sticks it out with Erik for so long, but I was kind of wondering why he sticks it out too.

Park Avenue Summer is what I hoped it would be when I impulse-bought it: a light read set in a glamorous work environment in New York. But as to the Cosmopolitan make-over, I remain unconvinced that it was really such a great win for the sisterhood. There was obviously a readership for the new Cosmo, and the magazine was going to fold anyway, so it feels perfectly OK that things panned out the way they did. But when it comes to the magazine's content, I can't help thinking of a song from Mean Girls: The Musical where daft hot chick Karen praises Halloween because then she can change her look and disguise herself "as someone else who isn't me but is still hot". "I can be who I want to be and se-e-e-e-xy" is the refrain. This, Karen claims, is "modern feminism talking".

I also come to think of a scene from the TV adaptation of Judith Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan. Judith Krantz actually wrote for Cosmopolitan, which adds interest (Nora Ephron was another Helen Gurley Brown hire, so yes, she had some good writers at her disposal at least). In I'll Take Manhattan, Krantz's heroine Maxi bemoans the state of the women's magazine market: the magazines are a depressing read, always extolling their readers to change in order to become slimmer, prettier etc. In contrast, Maxi aims to make her magazine one that makes women feel good about themselves the way they are.

I can't know for certain, but I have a feeling that Cosmopolitan under Helen Gurley Brown was not a magazine that made women feel good about themselves, unless they were already confident and attractive. The Cosmo girl could be who she wanted to be – as long as she was sexy.                        

Grown-up thrillers and unsatisfying endings

Yes, I do occasionally watch stuff on TV that isn't meant for kids and/or nerds. Mostly, though, I have to say, these trips into grown-up land remind me why I usually prefer TV shows for kids and nerds. The slowness and portentousness of "mature" TV can be a trial, and the payoffs resulting from the slow build-ups aren't always worth the wait.

The Undoing on HBO is a case in point. In some ways it reminded me of another six-part thriller relying heavily on relationship dynamics, Behind Her Eyes on Netflix. Admittedly, the ways they tackled the ending of the drama were very different. In Behind Her Eyes, there was a big twist based on a wacky premise, whereas in The Undoing, there - wasn't. But in both cases, the pace was glacial, and I was close to quitting at times. Perhaps writers of thriller series should consider putting a three-episode restraint on themselves. They'd have one episode for the set-up, one for the build-up and creating of tension and atmosphere, and one for the conclusion. That is quite enough. Now, in The Undoing, we basically get a whole episode about the female protagonist Grace Fraser freaking out because she can't reach her husband after a mother of a kid at their son's school is brutally murdered. I liked Nicole Kidman in Big Little Lies, but a little of her neurotic Grace goes a long way. It's no wonder the cops find both her husband and herself suspicious; she claims she hardly knew the victim while at the same time acting like a nervous wreck.

Much of the time spent on Grace's anxiety could have been cut without harming the tense atmosphere. And yet, it's not the build-up of this series that has been criticised as much as the ending. And yeah - it's not great. But then, thrillers like these have a tough job when it comes to pulling off the ending. Their viewers are mostly seasoned consumers of crime drama and fiction and very hard to surprise, let alone in a good way. The ending of Behind Her Eyes was surprising, but it did rely on that wacky premise I mentioned. The Undoing sticks to more realistic scenarios, but that means that whatever you come up with, some of the viewers (or readers - the series is based on a novel) will already have thought of it. There are only a handful of people that could have killed the luckless Elena Alves - I make it four or five at a pinch - if you discount roping in a stranger or a bit player like Grace's best friend as the killer. Like Ariadne Oliver in Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table, we in the audience can cheerfully suspect all of them, one after the other, thinking up the most likely scenario for the murder in each case, so when the truth is revealed we are unlikely to be blown away.

When disappointed viewers say that "any other ending" of The Undoing would have been better than the one we got, I'm not so sure. It wasn't satisfying as the solution of a mystery, certainly, but I can think of at least one ending that would have felt equally "meh", and in terms of fall-out for the characters that were not guilty of murder it could have been a lot worse. Not that you care desperately about them (and this is another problem with a lot of "grown-up" TV dramas). The ending, to my mind, felt flat, but it didn't feel insulting.

What bothered me rather more was a plot point where a tragedy in a character's past - and said character's reaction to it - is given undue weight when the reveal draws near. That the character in question shows "neither grief nor guilt" over what happened is seen as a grave point in their disfavour. But the tragedy wasn't the character's fault, and they still got blamed for it - in such circumstances, I would also have been wary of expressing any grief freely. 

But the series has points in its favour too. Hugh Grant acts his socks off as Grace's husband Jonathan, who thinks he can charm his way out of any scrape (I preferred his disarmingly flippant moments to his emoting, but maybe that's partly the point). Donald Sutherland is badass as Grace's father, who as a bonus likes to hang out in front of the appealing paintings in the Frick Collection; Noah Jupe is affecting as the Frasers' precocious son, who has to watch his world fall apart; Mendoza the cop was cute, and I enjoyed the scenes with public defender Robert Adelman and super-expensive private lawyer Haley Fitzgerald respectively ("not feeling the vibe here, team" quips the latter when things are going especially poorly). It's to be expected: David E. Kelley, the script-writer, is an expert on courtroom drama.

All the same, if you're looking for a thriller that will have you murmuring "wow, that was clever", this isn't it. But then, how many thrillers are?                                    

The well-structured fantasy world of Netflix's Shadow and Bone

Now this is more like it. A little more than a year ago, I was hate-watching and groaning over the Netflix series Cursed. This year, Netflix provided a much more solid fantasy offering in the shape of Shadow and Bone (a second season has been confirmed, whereas I believe that Cursed has been cancelled). 

This series seems to have benefited hugely from being based on a string of novels written by Leigh Bardugo, which are neither graphic novels nor Young Adult. Without being as dark and brutal as Game of Thrones, the series felt more grown-up than most of the graphic novel- or YA-based stuff I've seen (though it's still fantasy - in terms of grown-up-ness, it'll never be Middlemarch). The characters were more complex and interesting, and the dialogue was funny and sharp, which leads one to believe that the source material must be well written too.

Book adaptations have their own problems, and Shadow and Bone doesn't avoid them altogether. The first season did feel a bit over-stuffed. There's a whole side plot about a girl called Nina which has no bearing on the rest of the story until the second season is set up in the end. I'm sure that in Bardugo's novels, the reader is given plenty of reasons to care what happens to her, but in the series so far, her scenes are more of a distraction. The two main plots - about a girl who is discovered to have magic powers and a gang of doubtful characters who are tasked to abduct her from a heavily guarded castle and bring her to their city for a life-changing amount of cash - don't gel as well as one would have liked. Barely are the protagonists from both story lines united, than they are separated again, and the stories run parallel most of the time instead of becoming fully integrated with each other. Nevertheless, what the series has is promise: you feel that there is a solid foundation in terms of the characters and the world they inhabit which can be further built on in future seasons.

Now, the show's not a new Once Upon A Time. I don't think I'll ever become obsessed by it or care desperately about what happens to anyone in the series. But I didn't care overmuch for the characters in Game of Thrones either, and I still had a good time with it (mostly). If you like fantasy which is fairly light-hearted without being downright daft or ridiculously formulaic (as in Cursed), it's well worth a watch.

What helps to ground the series is that the author of the original books has clearly put some thought and work into the world building. In this world, magic is wielded by the grisha, which consist of different groups with different skill sets. There are those with traditional elemental magic skills like fire magic or wind magic, but there are also other kinds of specialities. There are healers, heart-renders - who can do anything from manipulating your feelings to downright killing you, but it's all connected with the heart - fabricators who have a magic skill for inventions etc. 

Though I have a weakness for fairy-tale-like magic where anything goes, this kind of specialised magic-wielding and the rules and limitations it imposes add some structure and are a safeguard against making any one character too powerful. With shows like Once, magic objects with wonderful properties can suddenly appear and be used to solve a problem (or raise one) in an episode or story arc, but then quickly be forgotten, which leads to plenty of plot holes ("but why didn't they use object X from episode Y?"). Also, if you have extremely powerful characters, new ways must constantly be found to temporarily divest them of their power or limit it so they can get into trouble when the story demands it. Here, the limits of the magic are built in: if you are a grisha who can wield shadows, then that's what you can do, but you can't, say, heal a loved one or control the wind. I was also relieved that the magic-making wasn't merely connected to the four elements (which is so often the case), because frankly, that concept has become a little old. Not only the magic, but the politics of the different countries and regions feels thought through. Here should be plenty of material which can be made use of in the future.

It's true that the central romance between the heroine Alina - who is discovered to have the legendary power of "sun summoning" which many believed to be just a myth - and her childhood friend Malyen (Mal for short) left me pretty cold. They are both orphans who have been friends forever, and when Alina's powers are discovered they are separated and long to be reunited. Their behaviour made me impatient - if they are so crazy about each other, how come they didn't manage to work themselves out of the friend zone long ago? Alina's pining makes her reluctant to embrace her new powers. There's a large, dangerous shadow-realm divide called the Fold dividing her country, which she is supposed to be able to consign to oblivion. Maybe she should focus a little more on that and a little less on Mal, who never had the guts to put their relationship on a less platonic footing? The Crows - the would-be abductors - are more colourful and bring more zest to the proceedings.

What of the villain, then, General Kirigan? (Yeah, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that a shadow wielder called "The Black General" turns out to be the villain.) Well, he's pretty good, though for my part I wasn't blown away. He's built up so well that the first proper meeting the viewer has with him feels like a let-down. Kirigan is played by Ben Barnes, who also played Prince Caspian in the Narnia films. He's conventionally handsome, and for a villain-lover like me it's a disappointment when a villain looks too much like a traditional hero. It turns out his pretty-boy looks has its uses, however, and it has to be said Barnes can glower very convincingly when he needs to be menacing. Not in Rumple's league, then (which could hardly be expected), but preferable to most of the awful bad guys in Game of Thrones, and decidedly better than evil monks.      

Vindicating the Bennet sisters

My summer holiday (unusually long by the standards of most countries except Sweden, yet it feels too short for me) is drawing to a close. I have done quite a bit of reading, though - not very ambitious reading, mind you, but reading nonetheless. Two of my not-too-demanding summer reads have been "Austenuations", i.e. novels somehow connected to Jane Austen's fictional universe (prequels, sequels, retellings from another point of view - that kind of thing). In both cases, the novel they lean against is the ever-popular Pride and Prejudice, and one of the authors' goals has clearly been to give a satisfying ending to one of the Bennet sisters still unmarried at the end of P & P: Mary and Kitty Bennet respectively.

Now, this is not a new exercise. I'd guess one of the reasons Pride and Prejudice attracts so many sequel writers is that there are still two Bennet girls to marry off. Austen couldn't resist playing this game herself, apparently: she's supposed to have told her family that Mary married her Uncle Phillips's clerk and Kitty married a clergyman. Sequel writers tend to take different views on whether this should be considered "canon". For myself, I don't think they need to follow Austen's pronouncements to the letter: I've no idea in which context they were said, but I can just see her putting a worried niece's mind at rest ("Auntie Jane, didn't Mary and Kitty marry?""Yes, yes, Mary married her uncle's clerk and Kitty got really sensible with time and married a clergyman."). It is strange to imagine Kitty as a clergyman's wife - why couldn't she marry an officer, but a nicer one than Wickham? - and consequently, I've seen her paired with a couple of pretty unconvential clergymen in various sequels. Sometimes, I'd wish that the sequel writers would ignore Austen's marriage predictions rather than force them into being, but on the other hand I'd rather they follow them than write a sequel where Mary becomes an old maid or Kitty is killed off (this has happened). It's not too big a stretch to assume that Austen meant all the Bennet sisters to get husbands, and this is what most readers (including me) want too.

In the novels I've read - The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow and What Kitty Did Next by Carrie Kablean - the authors want to do more than simply marry the girls off, however. They want to vindicate and flesh out the characters of two sisters who, in different ways, were pretty hard done by in the original novel.

Hadlow's novel is the most ambitious, and maybe her task was also the hardest. I can't be the only one who's felt sorry for Mary Bennet, but sadly, the main characters' low opinion of her seems well-founded in Pride and Prejudice. As the plain and bookish sister, one could assume that she would be the clever one in the family, but she never says or does anything sensible and is in her priggish way almost as silly as her younger sisters. Austen was harsh here. You would expect an author to give a plain, studious girl good sense as a sort of compensation, but Austen would be familiar with enough luckless maidens who were neither good-looking nor clever and consequently really hard to marry off (this at a time when staying single and making your own living wasn't really an option for a middle-class woman, unless you could face the drudgery of becoming a governess). Mary is an example of this type of unfortunate girl. If we only go by what we learn from her in Pride and Prejudice, she's lucky to get a husband at all, even if he's "only" a lawyer's clerk.

Hadlow puts a lot of effort into vindicating Mary. The hefty novel takes place before, during and after the events of Pride and Prejudice. We learn of Mary's troubled childhood, despised as plain by her mother and ignored by her father, whom she is eager to impress. Hadlow skilfully doesn't deny that Mary's behaviour is priggish, but she makes a convincing case for why it's not unreasonable for her to behave in this way and gravitate towards ultra-serious books which denounce fripperies such as appearances. I did feel that too much time was spent on Mary's back story, but seeing Mr Collins's visit from Mary's viewpoint was fascinating. Many a reader have asked themselves why no attempt was made to match Mary to Mr Collins, seeing as they seem compatible. The answer is simple enough: Mr Collins, as Longbourn's heir, thinks he is entitled to the best the Bennet household has to offer him by way of wife material, and if Jane isn't available Elizabeth is the next-best thing. This, again, is realistic: what's remarkable is that Charlotte Lucas, no dazzling beauty, manages to catch him in the end. Mr Collins would probably not have much luck on a dating site in this day and age, but from the point of view of Regency England, he is highly eligible.

What I liked was that Hadlow's Mary isn't any more taken in by Mr Collins than the rest of the Bennet family: she sees his absurdities, but believes she would be able to live with them and makes an entirely unromantic play for him. It fails, and she is not given any credit for her pragmatic thinking by her mother.

Hadlow doesn't spend too much time on the events described in Pride and Prejudice, but only delves into them when they are important for Mary, which is a good call. I was more interested in what happens to her after P & P, and the slow build-up pays off when it comes to character development: I could believe that the self-aware and intelligent young woman at the end of the novel was the same person as the insecure teenager at the beginning of it who sought solace in Fordyce's sermons and thought she had to make an impression by quoting moral platitudes. There's a lot to enjoy for the Austen nerd: we get to see what it really means to be the unmarried sister in a family, and I appreciated how Mary unwittingly puts the Collinses' marriage on a better footing during a visit by forcing Charlotte to up her game. Avoiding your husband as much as possible really isn't much of a recipe for a happy marriage. When Mary's own chance for romance finally comes I found her love interest a little underwhelming, but I think Austen would have approved of him, for all that he's not Mr Phillips's clerk.

What Kitty Did Next isn't as substantial as The Other Bennet Sister - it's more of a classic Regency romp kind of Austen sequel. Like Hadlow, though, Kablean is a stern champion of "her" Bennet sister and keen to portray her as a young woman of character. Now, Kitty in the original novel is more of a blank slate than Mary. She copies her sister Lydia a lot, so what she becomes when she is free of Lydia's influence is really anyone's guess. In this respect, you could say that she's easier to vindicate than Mary. Like her sister, though, she is left in an unenviable position at the end of Pride and Prejudice. Mr Bennet, spooked by Lydia's fate, vows that he will become a much sterner parent and rattles off a number of restrictions which poor Kitty will bear the brunt of. He is mostly joking, but Kitty isn't to know that (I didn't get it myself as a teenager), and had he been serious, she would have had zero chance of meeting a suitor. Serious or not, Mr Bennet's new-found interest in his role as a father is likely to lead to a much duller life for Kitty.

In Kablean's novel, Kitty discovers talents both for writing and music, which I thought came a bit out of nowhere. But she is still suitably interested in the glamours of high society. The novel feels a little static at times: the blurb mentions a "fateful night" at Pemberley, but it doesn't take place until quite late, and before that there aren't that many events or conflicts. It has to be said, though, that I hadn't predicted the way in which Kitty gets into trouble: it's a little different to what one might think. Kablean is clearly familiar with Austen's marriage predicitions for Mary and Kitty, and mischievously introduces several young men who either are or might become ordained, which keeps one guessing, though Kitty's own preferences seem pretty marked. Or will her final choice not be a clergyman at all?

Of the two novels, I prefer Hadlow's, but I enjoyed Kablean's as well as an easy summer read. It's interesting to see that they have some things in common: for one thing, happily, they aren't written as Austen pastiches, and the prose flows well yet unanachronistically. In both novels, the sisters' parents are no help when it comes to the girls finding happiness (except in the end for Kitty when Mr Bennet steps up) and their father's contempt for their "silliness" wounds them both. Jane is kind but ineffectual when there's a real crisis brewing. Miss Bingley is a cow. The Gardiners offer a refuge and are very important in Hadlow's book especially. The Darcy household is somewhat criticised for being a self-contained unit: it's difficult to find a place in their happy bubble. Hadlow's Mary never quite fits in at Pemberley, whereas Kablean's Kitty thrives there at first, only to learn the hard way that her sister, her brother-in-law and her new friend Georgiana Darcy don't quite trust the "new" Kitty yet.

Another thing the novels have in common, then, is that the focus is not (as it so often is in P & P sequels) Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage, so they're not an excuse to dwell on love scenes between these fan favourites. Fine by me (I'm a little tired of this romance, I must confess), but might be useful to know: trust me, if you want Lizzy-Darcy smooching, there are plenty of alternatives. 

How to lose like a villain (and keep your dignity)

So, I finally got to the part in Star Wars Rebels with Grand Admiral Thrawn in it. Thrawn was actually one big reason (though not the only one) why I decided to really get into the two animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. When there was a mention of him in The Mandalorian, the fans were so delighted I realised that here was a Class A Imperial villain waiting to be discovered. I knew he was in Rebels, but I suspected I would get more out of this series if I saw Clone Wars first - a fair assumption. 

I owe Thrawn some gratitude, as I've had a good time with both series - eventually. I didn't think much of the first one-and-a-half season of Clone Wars (which I watched ages ago), and the first season of Rebels was a slog too. But they picked up, and though Clone Wars had some storylines that weren't too thrilling - I'll not be revisiting the "corruption on Mandalore" plot in a hurry - and the more kid-friendly Rebels can be annoyingly "hey wow, look how cool it is to be a rebel" at times (especially trying when you're not-so-secretly on the Empire's side), there's some really good stuff here for a Star Wars nerd to sink their teeth into. For instance, plenty of delightful villains. When I first heard that they brought Darth Maul back, I thought it sounded silly, seeing as he was - you know - cut in half in The Phantom Menace, but boy was it the right call.

But what about Thrawn, then? Did he live up to the hype? Well... he still might. It's only fair to say that Thrawn doesn't only appear in Star Wars Rebels but in a number of novels too, and may have acquired most of his fan base that way. In Rebels, he shows potential: he's clearly cleverer and more complex than your average Imperial officer. But I'm a good way into season three, which is when he first appears, and he hasn't had a substantial win over the rebels yet. His strategic genius is more talked-about than in evidence. Even with a high-ranking spy in his inner circle, how could he let those important new ship designs go?

It made me reflect on the well-known problem of recurring villains in long-running franchises - like, for instance, multi-season TV series. Fans want them and grow attached to them, but how can you as a villain keep losing to the good guys, as the genre demands, and still be seen as a threat to be taken seriously? Plenty of strategies are deployed which are more or less successful. Here are a handful, not all of them to be recommended:

Winning battles but losing the war: One of the very best options. If you want your long-running villain to be respected, give him (or her, but I'll use he/him here because of my personal preferences) some wins! You can still have the heroes triumph at the end when it really matters and the fate of the Earth/galaxy/universe/other is at stake. But showing that they are evenly matched by the villains - maybe even outmatched - adds tension to the final showdowns.

The close shave: This is the standard solution - the heroes defeat the villain, but it's not easy. There are some tense moments when it could all have gone in another direction. Works well once or twice, which is why this narrative device is what you usually see in feature-length films, but in a long-running series, you can't use it too often, or the villain will look incompetent no matter what. A player who keeps hitting the goal post is not a good goal scorer.

The cynical miscalculation: Sooner or later, the villain has to start making mistakes. It helps if these mistakes aren't simply dumb errors, but based on the limits of a villainous outlook. Of course it would be foolish to think a hero would be tempted from the straight and narrow by, say, greed, but there are other failings a hero might be prone to because of their self-righteousness, such as vindictiveness (masquerading as "serving justice") and a certain longing for power (for the greater good, of course). If a villain bases his strategy on an over-reliance on his opponents' weaknesses, then that doesn't come across as too idiotic. It only shows that there is a part of being a hero which a villain simply doesn't "get".

The bigger threat: As used in such different franchises as Doctor Who and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (achingly wholesome, but not too wholesome for some pleasingly twisted villain ships). In summary, the protagonist/s have to put their struggle against the main antagonist aside because even greater trouble is brewing - sometimes they get help from their enemy, sometimes not. The reason why it has become a bit of a cliché that the Doctor and the Master must join forces to defeat some universe-shaking threat is that it works so well. The Master can get something right for a change and prove his genius without it having world-burning consequences, and then once the alliance is done he (or she if it's Missy) can go back to being a total selfish bastard. Neat. A variation of this strategy is "the wild card", where the recurring villain has his own agenda, but is not set up as the heroes' main antagonist. The wild card's function can be summed up by quoting Rumple/Mr Gold and Emma from Once Upon a Time: "Are you suggesting I'm working for Regina or against her?" "I don't know... Maybe diagonally".

The problem is that viewers tend to crave a strong main antagonist. You can't put the main threat elsewhere indefinitely, and you can't get away with always upstaging the main villain with a "wild card". Except in Once.

"Ah, just as I anticipated": This is the opposite of winning the battles but losing the war: the villain takes smaller losses with equanimity, because he has a Master Plan, and even losses teach him something about his opponent, or will help him to win in the long run. Thrawn in Rebels is a good example of this narrative device so far. But much as I love Master Plans, they very rarely work out, and unless you can create some really impactful scenes where the heroes think they're properly screwed because of the villain's master planning, the viewer will catch on to the fact that the supposedly intelligent baddie ended up losing the battles and the war.

Blaming your underlings: Also known as "sitting on a throne and complaining". Unless you're Palpatine, don't do this. Making your minions seem incompetent won't make you seem cleverer. One, the success of a mission is the boss's responsibility. Once or twice, you can keep your master-villain reputation by blaming others: it might even come across as relateable (we've all been there, when we've done everything right, and then it all falls apart because of someone else's mistake). But ultimately you're responsible for your henchmen: if they're not up to scratch, fire them or kill them or something. Better still, do some of the work yourself. Because, two, even if your underlings miss a trick or two, if all you've done is sit on a throne (or similar), then they've probably done more for the villainous cause than you. Fantasy Palpatine - sorry, Galbatorix - in the film Eragon is a good example of how throne-complaining comes across. (If you wonder why I've watched this film when all fans of the book hate it - well, just look at the cast list.) Fantasy Darth Vader (Durza) may not have been able to kill off Fantasy Luke (Eragon), but he did for Fantasy Obi-Wan (Brom) and very nearly Fantasy Leia (Arya) too, plus he knows where the rebel base is. In fact, he's done all of the heavy lifting, while all Galbatorix does is whine about incompetence in the tones of John Malkovich seemingly on valium. Just topple the lazy sod and take over, Durza - I'm rooting for you.