Is the High Evolutionary a good villain?

My opinions on Marvel's Phase Five so far have been crushingly unoriginal. I did think I'd like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania more than the average viewer because the criticism I heard of it – about tonal shifts, too much "Marvel humour" and not "doing justice" to a villain (Modok) who seemed a pretty goofy concept to begin with – weren't things I believed I'd mind that much. It turns out I was possibly even more disappointed with Quantumania than the average viewer. 

I hated what they did with Cassie, who went from Scott's supportive daughter to annoying Millennial, full of platitudes like "Only because it's not happening to you doesn't mean it's not happening". She also has the gall to be disappointed in her world-saving father because he doesn't provoke policemen during demonstrations for the homeless (because that'll help). The jokes didn't land with me: in fact, I think I actually enjoyed Thor: Love and Thunder more. Kang the Conqueror was a solid head villain, though.

Then Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 came out, and everyone loved it. I saw it once it streamed on Disney + (I can't face waiting an eternity for Marvel's post-credit scenes in the cinema, and consequently I wait for streaming and am always behind when it comes to the movies). And guess what: I loved it too, or at least really liked it. So what kind of "take" can I come up with that isn't too drearily familiar?

Perhaps the perspective of a villain-lover? There has been some talk about the High Evolutionary in Guardians 3 being such an good villain, in fact better than Kang, the MCU's present Big Bad. It's got me thinking about the different things people seem to want from their villains.

Now, don't get me wrong, the High Evolutionary is a highly effective villain. He does exactly what is required of him by the plot, i.e. he makes the viewers hate him. Chukwudi Iwuji puts in a great performance; I heard one reviewer complaining that he shouted too much, but for my part I thought he balanced the quiet and the more histrionic moments perfectly. The High Evolutionary only loses it when he thinks he's achieved his dream of creating a being with original thought, but is terrified that the discovery will slip through his fingers. Guardians 3 manages to integrate intriguing philosophical questions – this time about what makes the "perfect" being, and whether it is worthwhile striving to create one (answer: no) – into high entertainment much better than Thor: Love and Thunder did.

So what's the problem, then? There's none, really, except for villain-lovers like me. I adhere to the maxim of Stephanie Garber's Donatella, that the best villains are the ones you secretly like (or, in my case, not so secretly drool over). The High Evolutionary is not that kind of villain. He's designed to be loathsome. If his experiments on animals and children (yes, the movie is manipulative, but trust me, it works) don't achieve the desired effect, his calculated meanness towards Rocket, whose "enhanced" brain is ostensibly the High Evolutionary's greatest work, and his callous scrapping of whole planets of creatures who don't live up to his vision will. And if that's what you want – a thoroughly boo-and-hissable bad guy – then they don't come much better than the jerk whose hubris even manages to alienate his own followers in the end.

This is probably exactly what many people want from a villain. In years past, I've been delighted to discover that the villain-loving community is much bigger than I imagined. But it only stands to reason that not everyone likes to gush over bad guys. Even I, for a change, can enjoy a story where I whole-heartedly root for the good guys and want their enemy foiled, like in Guardians 3. Some people, I guess, prefer this formula over one where you're tricked into feeling some sort of sympathy with the villain.

Is the High Evolutionary a better villain than Kang? I don't think it's possible to say yet, because the MCU isn't done with Kang. It would be the same as to judge Thanos as a villain before Avengers: Infinity War. But although Jonathan Majors did an impressive job as Kang the Conqueror in Quantumania (and yes, it will prove a challenge if Marvel has to replace him, but that's another story), Kang as a character in that particular movie does perhaps lose out in effectiveness compared to the High Evolutionary. Kang is, after all, taken out by ants, albeit giant, highly intelligent ones. Still, I'm happy that Kang is the Big Bad we're going to see more of: he's potentially more complex than the High Evolutionary which, let's face it, isn't hard.

Historical novels not set in Tudor or Victorian times

Although I've read quite a respectable number of books lately (if not nearly as many as I've bought), blogging about them is another matter. I confess that unless there is some book-related theme I'm burning to comment on, writing about geeky stuff is considerably easier. However, I realise that a book-themed blog post is well overdue.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for book-blogging says something about the novels I've been reading. They've been good, sure, but they haven't made an overwhelming impression on me. I haven't discovered a new favourite author, but I've had a good time. Take The Clockwork Girl by Anna Mazzola, a historical novel set in Paris in the 1750s. Once in a while, I like to read historical novels set in times and places I am less familiar with. For one thing, it's exciting not to know beforehand how things pan out, and you learn something new, even if you have to take anything you pick up from a historical novel with a pinch of salt. The 1750s is a period of French history I don't know much about, so I was interested in the setting from the start.

The plot concerns Madeleine, the scarred daughter of a brothel keeper, who is tasked with spying on a clockmaker called Reinhart and his household. He is considered for a position at court, but there are rumours about unnatural experiments, and the question is if he's quite safe to be let near the royal presence. Madeleine is reluctant to become a police spy, but the reward she is promised could help her and her beloved nephew escape life at the brothel. She becomes the maid of Reinhart's daughter Veronique, and the novel is told alternately from the points of view of Madeleine and Veronique, sometimes with a section told from the point of view of Jeanne (Madame de Pompadour, no less) thrown in.

It's an intriguing story, where the setup reminded me a little of Fingersmith without the lesbian romance – Veronique isn't quite as innocent as she seems. Although the novel focuses a great deal on female solidarity, the mystery that kept me hooked concerned Reinhart. I was happy to be kept guessing about him. Does he have sinister intentions or is he just a committed scientist? Does he care about his daughter or not? It's a well-spun yarn, and clearly well-researched. There's a lot of local colour – a little too much for my taste – and the descriptions are filtered through the characters' consciousness, which always adds interest.

The characters seemed less authentic than the settings to me, though. I frequently felt the presence of 21th-century tut-tutting. Wasn't it awful that there was such a divide between rich and poor? And that women's lives were so limited? And then there was slavery too! (Reinhart's footman Joseph is a former slave, the "former" very much depending on the goodwill of his master.) The female protagonists felt less like 18th-century women than modern women stuck in 18th-century lives and hating it. Even Madame de Pompadour, who's at the top of the tree, is full of gloom.

It's hard to justify why the protagonists' lamentations irritated me so much. Of course the poor resented the rich in the 18th century, and gifted women must often have wondered why they were prohibited from earning their own bread. Many people found slavery appalling, because it was appalling. Only, I think 18th-century people approached these questions from a different angle, and if they expressed similar sentiments to modern ones they did so in a different way. I would have enjoyed the novel more if it had either dialled down the commentary or made more of an effort to make it feel genuinely 18th-century.

Kate Atkinson wisely stays away from social commentary in Shrines of Gaiety, a novel set in London in 1926 which focuses on hard-bitten nightclub owner Nellie Coker and her large family. I wasn't a great fan of Atkinson's One Good Turn, which is the only other novel I've read by her, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the glamorous if potentially dangerous nightclub settings and the expert juggling of several plot threads and characters. There's no downright moralising, mercifully, more wry commenting which reminded me of Fay Weldon's "Love and Inheritance" trilogy.

The ending, though it could have been more tragic, still feels a little downbeat, and it is somehow typical that the author leaves an open ending for one potential romance (which leads me to assume that everything went swimmingly, as I suspect that Atkinson wouldn't have held back from telling us if it all went to pot). But all in all, I liked Shrines of Gaiety. If the Coker family saga had been further expanded upon, it would have made for a good costume drama series of, say, ten episodes. I mean that as praise, though I'm not sure it's the kind of praise Kate Atkinson would appreciate.

Not even the shapeshifting is fun in this Zygon – sorry, Skrull – invasion

At the beginning of the latest Marvel Disney + series Secret Invasion, I thought I'd have a hot take on it – while others called it "promising", I thought it was dull. At the end of the series, however, I'm far from the only one to be critical. 

The set-up of the series first. Nick Fury, the grizzled head of superhero-related intelligence, is called back to Earth from a mission in space. Back in the Nineties, he and Carol Danvers (aka Captain Marvel) promised to find a new planet for a fugitive alien species called Skrulls, whose most prominent feature is their ability to shapeshift. Thirty-odd years later, nothing has happened on the planet-finding front, and the Skrulls are getting restless. Some of them are beginning to wonder whether Earth wouldn't make a decent new home – once you get rid of all the pesky humans.

You could see how things could get interesting from such a premise. Now after the show has aired, however, there are far-from-glowing reviews all over containing observations with which I concur, such as:

- There's no in-universe reason for not calling in the Avengers. Nick Fury's insistence on handling the situation himself (with the help from a few friendly Skrulls), just because he wants to clean up what he considers to be his mess, looks dangerously pig-headed. The Earth's future is on the line here.

- The motivation of the villain, Skrull leader Gravik, makes no sense. I'd argue it's quite a leap from feeling angry with Fury to wanting to destroy the whole human race. Gravik isn't four years old. Why is he basically going "you promised, and now I'm gonna kill you all"? Plus his railing over the kills he did as Fury's secret agent rings hollow considering all the non-ordered murders he's done since, including some spectacularly stupid ones of his own kind.

- No-one's plan makes any sense. Not Gravik's, not Fury's, not Fury's best Skrull bud Talos's. Everyone's acting aimlessly and idiotically. This is a serious flaw in a thriller, which needs to be slick and smart.

- Why is it so hard to find a planet for the Skrulls? The MCU seems to be full of perfectly habitable planets. And what has Captain Marvel, who considered herself too fancy to help out in human affairs for decades, been doing with her time?

- Why is it so hard to integrate the Skrulls? Fury is appalled to learn that there were as many as a million of them originally. But even allowing for some population growth, that's not an awful lot compared to billions of humans. You could easily tuck all of Skrull-dom away in one admittedly large city somewhere, or spread them out. Even without a shape-shifting disguise they're not that scary-looking, and MCU humans have seen a lot of strange things by now.

- The series makes Fury look bad. He's supposed to be the classic Broken Hero who finds his mojo again – during the first episode, people are continually telling him he's past it – but he never quite does. He's also made to look caddish because he prefers his Skrull wife, Varra, to wear a (very attractive) human disguise, rather than be her green, ridgy, elf-eared and pointy-toothed self. My own main problem with this is that Varra's shapeshifting was her own idea; she purposefully sought out a woman she knew Fury would like the look of, who was conveniently dying, and asked her permission to take over her life. It's a bit much after that to ask to be loved "for yourself" years later.

- The last episode leaves one character ridiculously overpowered, and seeing as this character has previously been complicit is a mass-murder before seeing the error of their ways (kinda), it doesn't feel earned.

- And, yes, the series is actually pretty boring.

What can I add to all these (in my opinion) well-founded criticisms? A more personal disappointment for me was that the series failed to do something interesting with the whole shapeshifting concept. As someone who has been stagestruck since childhood, I've always been fascinated by the "acting" part of shapeshifting. To what extent do Skrulls who take over a human's appearance and tap into their memories also take over that human's personality? 

In one episode, we saw a Skrull give in to Fury when Fury threatened the son of the human the Skrull was impersonating. How come? It wasn't the Skrull's boy. That would have been worth diving into, but the series never does. Plus, I've always loved scenes where shapeshifters give themselves away by acting "out of character" and doing or saying something the person they're posing as would never do. But Secret Invasion doesn't deal with psychological "tells" at all; Skrulls are revealed in a much more hands-on manner.

Instead of shapeshifting-as-acting-drama, we get yet another clunky immigration metaphor. This was all the more irritating for me because it hit the same beats as the Doctor Who two-parter "The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion", which also featured shape-shifting aliens who had lost their planet. There, as here, there were plenty of peaceful aliens who only wanted to live a normal life. There, as here, a growing dissatisfaction with having to disguise themselves led to some aliens being "radicalised". There, as here, the human originals whom the aliens were impersonating were kept in pods and their memories mined in order to make the impersonations more believable. 

The Zygon two-parter is not a favourite of mine, but I must admit it explored the logistics of trying to integrate a shape-shifting species more thoroughly than Secret Invasion, and it did do more with the "human or alien" premise. But both "The Zygon Invasion/Inversion" and Secret Invasion lack something a shapeshifter story should have if I'm to enjoy it: a bit of fun.