Grown-up political drama on Netflix – or is it?

So this is what happens when I try to watch something that isn't nerdy and/or belonging to a global franchise. Not that I didn't have a good time with the miniseries The Diplomat on Netflix: it had a zingy script, some tense will-they-stop-world-war-three-in-time drama, and good performances, especially from Rufus Sewell as the titular diplomat's husband. I'm just not convinced, given the season's ending, that it's so clever and mature as it thinks it is.

The set-up of the series is that Kate Wyler, a successful American diplomat on her way to do some serious damage limitation in Kabul, is instead hoisted off to become the new US ambassador in Great Britain after a British ship has been torpedoed at sea and an international crisis looms. What Kate doesn't know is that she's being vetted for the position as Vice President, and her political assignment serves as a kind of test. Her husband Hal, who has also had a stellar diplomatic career but is now on the back burner because the Secretary of State doesn't like him, accompanies her. However, it's understood that he's supposed to leave after Kate has settled in as they're divorcing. That is, it's understood by Kate. Hal is a loose cannon and his motives are unclear at the best of times, but one thing is certain: he has no intention of divorcing Kate.

While finding her feet, Kate has to figure out how she can keep an irate British Prime Minister from blowing something up. Forty-odd British sailors have lost their lives in the attack and it looks like Iran is responsible. So of course, this being the kind of show it is, it's not Iran.

Now, to be fair, it's been a staple of political thrillers for a long time that the most likely suspect is not responsible. While it's harder to deliver surprises on the culprit front in this genre than in, say, a classic whodunnit, without looking silly, it doesn't stop writers from trying. The Sinister Third Party is a trope often used, for instance in Agatha Christie adventure stories such as The Secret Adversary and They Came to Baghdad and in James Bond films (I haven't read Ian Fleming's novels, so I can't be sure that his Soviet spies are always so blameless as in the films). And I can see why political thriller writers strive to introduce some kind of twist, even when it doesn't make a lot of sense. It just feels a little flat to simply point the finger at a country that's already considered a major military threat in the real world.

But what do you do if there is no organisation à la Spectre to blame? With The Diplomat I was along for the ride until the final episode. I had no problem with the usual suspects being discarded, especially as the series doesn't pretend that they're innocent little lambkins (with reactions to accusations ranging from "We didn't do it! I'll call off this assassination attempt we've been planning for ages just to prove it" to "Yeah, that sounds like us, but funnily enough I didn't give the order"). But then the reveal comes, and it's so forehead-slappingly stupid I found myself feeling less forgiving towards the show's other missteps.

It's not a solution you haven't thought of: it's one you briefly consider before thinking "no, this show is too clever to do something daft like that". Like I said, the script is good. I was lured into watching it by a trailer full of West Wing-style zingers (well, that and Sewell). But if you scrutinise The Diplomat more closely, you'll find some odd creative choices which make you wonder if the writers are as read up on, for instance, British politics as all that.

Why does the British PM Nicol Trowbridge (the "Nicol" being a dead give-away that the character is modelled on Boris Johnson – at least he doesn't have the hair) gate-crash a diplomatic meeting behind the wheels of a red sports car? Is it likely that his Foreign Secretary Dennison (to whom Kate is attracted) would refer to Brexit as a "self-inflicted wound"? Dennison is supposed to have been a front-runner for the leadership post, yet when does he sound like a Tory at all? Why does Kate's second-in-command Stuart sniffily refer to Trowbridge's erstwhile spin doctor as someone who can make "racists" look cuddly? Who exactly is she supposed to have been working for?

Celia Imrie does her best as the cardigan-clad spin doctor, but nothing about her character feels the least bit credible, and she is responsible for the biggest head-scratching moment apart from the finale reveal, when she claims that Trowbridge is tense because not only Scotland, but also Northern Ireland and Wales are on the verge of breaking out of the United Kingdom. What kind of weird parallel universe is this?

That a political drama has a certain political slant isn't to be wondered at. The West Wing certainly had. But its writers did try, for the most part, to understand the opposition's arguments, not least so they could script characters not belonging to the Bartlet crew in a credible way. There's none of that nuance in The Diplomat, and it does feel like its odder moments are at least partly caused by the writers' blank incomprehension of political opinions other than their own. 

Still, I enjoyed the series, and I'm hoping for a second season. Kate is a bit annoying (I'm not big on hairbrushing, but even I thought she looked aggressively scruffy), but her complicated relationship with Hal is interesting, and there's some amusing back-and-forth between Stuart and his sassy CIA girlfriend. Plus, they can easily retcon some of the silliness from the season finale. Hey, maybe we Swedes did it? We made it look like the Russians framed the Iranians so that we'd be welcomed into Nato with open arms? Believe it or not, that explanation would be less ridiculous than what the series has come up with so far.

Questions raised by The Mandalorian season three

Though I haven't stooped so low as to call those sceptical towards the recent output from franchises I enjoy names, I'm aware that I tend towards the over-positive side of the fandom spectrum. Of course there's a lot to criticise, for instance, in the Disney + Star Wars shows. But still I have an irrational urge to shout "shut up! Just shut up!" when confronted with too many negative fan responses. 

It's not just because of my old affection for the Mighty Mouse, which makes me cringe whenever someone uses the "oooh, Disney's so bad, they only want to make money" argument (I admit, my brand loyalty is waning of late – not because Disney wants to make money, but because they want to preach at the audience while doing it). I'm also somewhat of an anxious consumer. I've witnessed in the past how crucial good viewing figures have been for the continued existence – or not – of my favourite TV shows. That's partly why I've been obsessing over viewer responses to the latest season of The Mandalorian, to the point where it almost overshadowed my own enjoyment of the series. Because if various commentators talk down the season too much, and viewers consequently fail to tune in, Disney might quite simply stop making Star Wars TV shows. And then where would I be?

So, when I say that this season was somewhat unfocused and probably the weakest of The Mandalorian seasons, please let the record reflect that I still liked it very much and want lots more of this particular sort of fare. That said, here are a few points that puzzled me after the season finale aired yesterday:

So, who was the spy, then? An enjoyable part of The Mandalorian from the first has been the episode titles, which can often be interpreted in more than one way. The episode title "The Sin" in season one can refer to Din Djarin taking back Grogu (at that time still known as the Child) from a group of sinister ex-Imperials, after having accepted payment for delivering him. It's a clear violation of Din's wonderfully deal-based creed. But the real sin was handing over Grogu in the first place. The title character of the episode "The Jedi" can be Grogu or Ahsoka (though she left the order years earlier). "The Believer" can be Din Djarin, or the cynic Mayfeld who discovers something to believe in when confronted with a particularly nasty ex-Imperial, or even said ex-Imperial himself: what he believes in may be terrifying, but he does have conviction. And so it goes on.

So when an episode is called "The Spies", you certainly expect to see more than one spy in it. It could just as easily have been called "The Spy" and featured more than one spy, leaving you guessing as to which of them the title specifically singles out in true Mandalorian fashion. But no, here we have an episode title which is unusually insistent on the plural – and only one spy, Elia Kane who we already knew was crooked, is revealed during the run-time of the episode. This may of course be explained in the next season, but then the reveal that one of the assembled Mandalorians was playing false all along will have less of an impact because it has already been quasi-spoiled. In my view, the spy should either have been revealed before the season's end, or they should have gone with the episode title "The Spy" instead.

What's the Armourer's game? This isn't an original observation by any means, but the Armourer – the spiritual leader of the "covert" of Mandalorians Din belongs to – is awfully soft on Bo-Katan Kryze. Din Djarin, who's always toed the line, gets into trouble for having removed his helmet in public (all for the love of his boy) and has to fulfil a task the Armourer herself believes impossible and bring proof of it in order to get accepted again. 

It's another story with Bo-Katan, though she has lived in open defiance of the Armourer's creed. She is integrated into the covert, though that wasn't her original intention; her alleged sighting of a mythical beast is taken by the Armourer at face value without proof; later, she is singled out as the future leader of the Mandalorian people by the Armourer, who asks her to remove her helmet so that she can "walk both ways" and unite the covert and less dogmatic factions of Mandalorians. 

It's not that Bo-Katan hasn't proven herself useful, but still, it's a steep rise to the top for one whom the Armourer was very scathing about in The Book of Boba Fett (in one of the episodes where it forgot it wasn't The Mandalorian). This strange Armourer-behaviour made many speculate that maybe she was the spy, though her motives would in that case have been unclear. As it is, the Armourer remains enigmatic – which I realise is partly the point, but it's starting to get on my nerves.       

Whatever happened to Doctor Pershing? Unpopular opinion: I really liked the Doctor Pershing episode, though admittedly there wasn't much Mando in it. It's hard to pinpoint what I want from political intrigues in Star Wars, but maybe, like my expectations of the franchise or the genre as a whole, it can be summed up with the words: relatable but different. I shudder at clunky parallells with the real world. My heart sinks every time someone calls the Imperials "space Nazis". It's obvious where Lucas got some of the inspiration for his black-hearted Empire from, but still: this is a galaxy far, far away. Let the Empire be evil in its own way!

The limitations of the New Republic as seen in the Pershing episode don't have an obvious real-world counterpart, but it illustrates wider philosophical problems we too can be faced with. What some commentators took away from the episode was that the New Republic was too soft on Pershing and other ex-Imperials, thereby letting itself in for being double-crossed. Me, I saw the complete opposite. 

Pershing is allowed to give a lecture on cloning, but he isn't allowed to practise it or do any research at all. After having lived in a "re-integration" camp, he is housed with other ex-Imperials who are all busily extolling the virtues of the New Republic and condemning the Empire, yet none of them is keen to re-visit that camp. Pershing's job isn't only menial but gives no satisfaction at all, as he's tasked to make an inventory of Imperial technology which will then be scrapped when, according to him, it could be put to good use. His freedom is restricted: he's not allowed to leave a certain zone, and the Republic has planted a mole – double agent Kane – to spy on and employ entrapment strategies on him and other fellow ex-Imperials. 

There are more indications still that the New Republic's "Amnesty programme" isn't all it's cracked up to be, yet you can see their dilemma: ex-Imperials are a threat to their regime, and it can't be easy to know which of the Imps will make model citizens and which will remain bad news. All the same it was clear, at least to me, that they'd set the bar far too low with being "not as bad as the Empire".

But what happened to Doctor Pershing after Kane, seemingly, fried his brains out? And was it so smart to do it when her bosses clearly wanted their clone doctor's brains unfried?         

Will we ever see the end of the helmet rule? Are the Armourer and the other helmet nutters really expecting this genuinely stupid rule to survive, when they live side by side with Bo-Katan's buddies who don't adhere to it? And why hasn't Din Djarin abandoned it a season and a half ago? It's time he and his fellow Mandos saved their helmets for battle and started thinking about the future of their civilisation. Because how do you find a mate and procreate with your helmet on?

Shadow and Bone season two: when protagonists go dark

As far back as August 2021, I watched the first season of the Netflix fantasy series Shadow and Bone and liked it. Now the second season is available, and though this is one of Netflix's more solid fantasy offerings (that I have seen, that is) I have to admit I'm a tad disappointed.

With the setup stage out of the way, I expected the second season to be better than the first. But after a spirited start with an enjoyable MacGuffin hunt, one of the main plotlines slowed down, while the other reached a questionable climax – and then slowed down too. The pace in the second half of the season was at times leaden, which is an unwelcome trend in newly-produced fantasy series. 

Some problems from the first season which I had expected the second to get to grips with – like the story of the Crows from Ketterdam, a colourful band of rogues, and the one about sun-summoner Alina never integrating fully – remained. Even the first time around, I found the hour-long episodes a bit overlong, and now I noticed it even more. The series overall would have benefited from more and shorter episodes, where some scenes could easily have been sped up and/or trimmed down.

In some ways, though, things were changed up, but not always in a manner I liked. In the first season, I preferred the storyline involving the Crows to that of Alina, whose pining after her childhood friend Mal I found tiresome. This time around, I was less taken with the Crows. Not that there wasn't a lot going on with them at first, before they too were hit by mid-season inertia, but I didn't much care for their leader Kaz going full-out Monte Christo on his underworld rival Pekka Rollins.

It raises an interesting question, though: how dark can a protagonist we're expected to root for go? Kaz isn't meant to be a knight in shining armour, but nor is he meant to be a villain. Anti-hero is probably the best fit. But even anti-heroes are supposed to be distinguishable from villains.

I don't think it's just villain-loving souls like me who are fascinated by speculations on what villainous versions of our favourite heroes and heroines would be like. Writers are aware of it, but there's a reason plots advertised as exploring a hero's or heroine's dark side often turn out to be cop-outs, such as the seemingly villainous protagonist being under some spell, or just pretending to be bad, or being an evil doppelganger. Once a main player who's not supposed to be a villain has committed to the dark side, it's not so easy to pull them back again. "Good" characters rarely have the style and charisma of first-rate villains, but they are supposed to have the advantage of doing the right thing, or at least knowing what the right thing is. If they lose that advantage, what do they have left?

In Kaz's case, his behaviour reflects badly on his crew as well as they aren't really trying to hold him back. He starts off by blowing up his own club, now in Rollins's possession. That made me sit up and wonder "hello, isn't it likely people died because you wanted to make a point?", but the Crows never ask this question, though they are a little shaken by the destruction of property (Jesper laments his lost jackets). 

The worst part of Kaz's plan, though, is that he uses the knowledge that Rollins has a small son against him. In a pivotal scene, he defeats Rollins by leading him to believe that Kaz has buried the boy alive and will only give away where he is in time for Rollins to save him if Rollins bends to his will. It's a deeply unpleasant scene, witnessed by Jesper, Kaz's best friend, and Nina, a relatively new recruit to the Crows. I expected one of them to give Kaz a piece of their mind afterwards and make it clear to him that he was out of line. 

Nope, doesn't happen. Jesper is content as long as they don't really harm the boy, and also swallows Kaz's story of Rollins having "killed" his brother. The brother died of a disease carried in by one of Rollins's ships, which only makes him guilty of murdering Kaz's brother in Kaz's brain, but the Crow leader even gets away with a piece of his revenge motivation being wonky.

This is another problem with "the hero/heroine going dark" storyline. If the other good guys go along with it, then they too are compromised. I'm all for nuanced characterisations and stories not being about unblemished good vs irredeemable evil, but there is a line, in my opinion, which characters who aren't villains shouldn't cross – at least not without there being repercussions and regret. (Also, I believe at least some of my villain crushes would have balked at Kaz's tactics.)

Anyway, back to Alina. I had a lot more time for her part of the story this time around, mostly because of chief villain General Kirigan. Ben Barnes's Kirigan really grew on me during this season: he is darned attractive, and Alina plainly thinks so too. Her romance with Mal may still be a drag, and there isn't a lot of heat between her and a potential new love interest either (a dashing runaway prince who's taken up privateering – when Alina had to get engaged to him "for state reasons", I realised belatedly that the novelist Leigh Bardugo was probably a woman, which proved to be the case). But there's real chemistry between Alina and Kirigan. When other couple constellations where on screen, I tended to think "get a move on", but when Kirigan and Alina had one of their tête-à-têtes, the lack of pace didn't bother me one bit.

There are still things to enjoy in the series, then. As last time, I'm impressed with the world building, the costumes and settings are really appealing, Kirigan's a good villain, and Pekka Rollins isn't half bad either, though he sometimes seems to act like a bastard just for the heck of it. I found the juxtaposition of his Scottish accent and Finnish first name a nice touch: yeah, fantasy Finns are tough.

Alina's flirtation with dark forces, hinted at in the final scene, is more intriguing than Kaz's, and I have some hope that the writers will be able to make something out of it without ruining the character if there's a third season. But they'll have to watch out.

"One of the greatest love stories"? Nah.

I'm already tempted to scrap my Nobel Prize Reading Project. Are winners chosen as a sort of endurance test for the reading public? I've purposely gone for prose writers, hoping for something gripping and epic, but the most readable authors so far have been more small-scale – I did enjoy Alice Munro and Kazuo Ishiguro (not really part of the reading project, as I read him before I started it). In contrast, I found Vargas Llosa hard to get through, gave up early on García Márquez, and now I've ploughed through Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago I can't help feeling cheated.

I mean, Doctor Zhivago is supposed to be the accessible choice, isn't it? An intense love story later filmed with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and a star-studded cast overall? Where else would I find the epic experience I was looking for, the kind of novel teeming with colourful characters that 19th-century novelists excelled at? Sadly, my expectations were misplaced – Pasternak may have many estimable qualities, but you couldn't call him a master storyteller.

To be clear: if you go into Doctor Zhivago expecting a tale mostly about the doomed love between the titular doctor and the beautiful Lara you will, like me, be disappointed. It's irritating as many promising ingredients are there, buried beneath lots of other stuff. I expected to find Lara a drag, and I'm not her biggest fan, but in the end I found her far more bearable that Yuri Zhivago himself (more on him later). And she does live an interesting life. Sometimes I wondered if the novel wouldn't have been a better read if it had centered on her instead of on Zhivago, and on random characters loosely connected to him.

What's more, Komorovsky – who has an affair with Lara when she's a young girl and is supposedly responsible for Zhivago's father's suicide – is a promising villain. But he's not in the novel nearly as much as one would expect. After Lara is finally able to cut all strings to him, he disappears completely for a large chunk of the book only to reappear towards the end as a way of getting Lara out of harm's way, but also out of Zhivago's life. Lara's husband Pavel Antipov, hardened by war, revolution and personal experiences, is set up as an interestingly menacing Javert-like character. In the end, though, he actually gets on quite well with Zhivago and only poses a threat indirectly, in that his wife is in danger when he falls foul of the authorities.

Add to the mix Zhivago's wife Tonya, who is lovely and gives her husband no excuse to cheat on her, and you have a love quintet I would have been happy to read at least a mid-sized novel about. But the romantic part of the story is swamped under pages of side plots, or not much plot at all. We spend an inordinate amount of time with secondary (if that) characters of negligible importance to the storyline. One whole section of the book, we follow the wife of a Siberian storekeeper whom Zhivago doesn't even meet. Her son later rats on Antipov in order to save and be reunited with his mother, and that's all the relevance she has to the main story.

For the longest time, I tried to tell myself that my frustration was mostly due to my own vulgar tastes, and that for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. I did wonder towards the end, though, exactly who does like this sort of thing. If you're really into descriptions of nature, this novel might be for you, as there are a lot of those, sometimes evocative, sometimes with similes that feel a little strained. ("Even the sun [...] approaching as if timorously, as a cow from the herd grazing nearby would" – how is the sun like a cow?) 

Also, if you have a keen interest in everyday life in Russia around the time of the revolution, there are vignettes that, though they don't contribute much story-wise, can be memorable in their own right. Sometimes the lives of the random side characters hook into each other in unexpected ways. An idealistic young commissar who thinks he can win hearts and minds with his oratory is shot when making a failed speech to bunch of rebellious soldiers. Much later, Zhivago meets a fierce partisan soldier who admits that it was he who fired the shot and that it's the one killing he regrets. I did go "Ah, nice" over that one.

If you are more lyrically minded than me, then (Pasternak was primarily a poet), and don't insist on a strong narrative, you may appreciate this novel a lot more than I did. But it wasn't for me. Two more things came in the way of me enjoying it. One was the translation, which is the most recent English one and seems to adhere to the school of thought that puts faithfulness to the original before a natural flow. Seeing the original idioms shine through has it own charm, but it soon palls. The characters speak stilted English, as if continuously expressing themselves in a second language, which means that dialogues are almost as hard to get through as the descriptive passages.

My final gripe is the title character himself. First, I thought he was just a bit bland, but later he does show personality – a pity it's not a very appealing one. Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is an insufferable prig. His nearest circle is remarkably tolerant about this; even his father-in-law, after Zhivago more or less tells him not to embarrass him in front of others with conservative talk, answers graciously and without irony: "I like the way you pose the question". Lara, naturally, thinks he's wonderfully intelligent. Zhivago grows swollen-headed so that he even when he's down on his luck silently judges his critical friends: "The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and that you knew me." He keeps his thoughts to himself, though, "so as not to distress them".

I'll say this much: I really want to rewatch the film – which I saw ages ago and hardly remember – and watch the TV series now, because I'm curious how these adaptations reshaped the novel into a coherent romantic drama. "One of the greatest love stories ever told", the Daily Mail is quoted as saying on the blurb. They were talking about the film, right? 

A villain-lover's guide to Marvel Phase Four: She-Hulk and the TV specials

From now on, I'll give up the grand overviews of Marvel's phases, and will instead adopt my Star Wars stance: one post per film/TV show, if and when I feel so inclined. The reason? Well, apart from the sheer scope of MCU content, there are some Marvel properties I have more to say about than others, as will be made clear below. Though I enjoyed the TV Halloween and Christmas specials, I would probably not have blogged about them if they weren't part of an overview. As for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, perhaps it's the kind of show I shouldn't blog about...

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

Series set-up: Jennifer Walters is an ace attorney who also happens to be the cousin of Bruce Banner aka The Hulk. She accidentally acquires Hulk powers during a car accident, and she's not happy about it. Bruce tries to show her the ropes, but she just wants to get back to her normal life and be a good lawyer. Besides, she doesn't have the same issues with a split personality and uncontrollable rage in Hulk form as her cousin does, so going green once in a while should be a breeze. Right?

Additional genres (apart from the super-hero genre) channelled: Light-hearted legal comedy in the Ally McBeal style. 

Overall impression: Oh dear. Look, I have tried defending the odd show or film I find overhated. But this... this is just so bad. I'm not against trying on a legal comedy within the MCU bracket on principle. I rather like the way Phase Four has experimented with different genres. But a legal comedy without interesting cases or good laughs? 

I enjoyed Ally McBeal (showing my age a bit here) because it was funny and inventive, and that made me put up with some odd messaging here and there. During the first episode of She-Hulk, in contrast, I didn't laugh once, and the second episode raised only two chuckles. And so it continued. The satire was clunky, the protagonist (in spite of the innate charisma of Tatiana Maslany) annoying at times, and the writing surprisingly amateurish for an MCU product. Say what you like about Ms Marvel – it wasn't really my cup of tea, but at least it was professionally made.

There was one episode of She-Hulk I liked all the way through, and that was "The Retreat", where Jennifer, ghosted by a guy she was really interested in, visits her client Emil Blonsky (more on him in a bit) on his expensive retreat and is unwittingly roped into one of his therapy sessions. There she shows some vulnerability, and we get to the core of her troubles with her She-Hulk personality: She-Hulk is like the popular girls she used to envy at school, and no-one seems to be interested in "just Jen". I liked how Blonsky's therapy, though completely bogus, nevertheless managed to help Jennifer; that was funny and also a bit touching. 

The next episode, where Jennifer meets Matt Murdock aka Daredevil, in and out of the courtroom, was also enjoyable for the most part, though by the end the clumsy satire made a reappearance. And then the finale was a complete train-wreck. Fourth-wall-breaking, apparently prominent in the comics, is also a part of the TV series, and I don't mind that. But the way it's used in the finale makes sure the series ends in a huge anticlimax and messes up MCU lore (unless the implications are ignored in future shows and films, which I'm pretty confident they will be) for the sake of a lame joke.

And then, there's the messaging. I usually have a higher tolerance for misandry than perhaps I should have. Not being much for the macho ideal, there are few things I'd consider "unmanly", but whining victimhood might just be one of them. Blokes should be able to take for instance the odd mildly sexist jibe from River Song in Doctor Who on their chin like – well, like a man.

Having said that, I don't approve of consistent man-bashing, and that's what we get here. Men in bars, men at the workplace, men on the dating scene, men in long-term relationships, men on the internet – they all get dumped on, and it's not even done in a witty way. I confess that if the comedy had been brilliant, I'd probably have swallowed the sexism happily and not been so harrumphing. But the question is academic. Unsubtle messaging and less-than-stellar quality tend to go hand in hand for some reason.

OK, enough ranting. What about villains? You mentioned Blonsky. Isn't he from The Incredible Hulk? He is indeed. I have by now watched The Incredible Hulk, and found it soporific – with the exception of Tim Roth as Blonsky aka Abomination. Though his motivations were disappointingly macho (wanting to be the best soldier there was), he had that character-actor-playing-clever-villain look which kept my eyes glued to the screen, and he's still a peach to look at. 

This Blonsky has little in common with the testosterone-fuelled mercenary of the film, though. Now he's more interested in making easy money with therapy mumbo-jumbo. I quite liked this version of Blonsky as well, but it didn't seem like the same character, and if Wong hadn't shown up to spring him out of jail at the end, the show would have painted itself into a corner with him. A cheat, but a necessary one.    

However, it's not Blonsky who's the villain of this show, but a group who calls itself the "Intelligentia", but is in fact a bunch of... male internet trolls.

Look, I could go on about how She-Hulk has nothing interesting to say about "toxic" men on the web, but instead opts for pointing at them and basically saying "ha ha, you dumb". But I have to get to the two specials some time today. Let's just say, internet trolls do not make for compelling villains. And don't get me started on the underlying message that anyone who doesn't approve of She-Hulk the character or the show must, by definition, be a troll.

Werewolf by Night

Set-up: A group of renowned monster hunters meet up, after the death of the most prominent hunter, to compete for a prized gem with magical properties. The one who catches a dangerous monster will be rewarded with the gem. The dead man's estranged daughter is also in the running. The complication? One of the hunters is, you guessed it, a werewolf. He's also the hero.         

Additional genres (apart from the super-hero genre) channelled: Classic horror.

Overall impression: I don't know much about classic horror of the endearingly hokey variety, but I'm guessing if you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you like. It feels like a very loving pastiche, with plenty of practical effects instead of CGI overload, and the labyrinthine set where the monster hunt takes place is a delight. I confess I wouldn't have watched it if I hadn't been bitten by the Marvel bug, but it's a nice length and quite fun.

It must be said, there are some story beats that feel distinctly of the twenty-twenties: the standard "who are the monsters here" plot line, for instance (guess what – the monster hunters are the bad guys), and the fact that Elsa Bloodstone, the estranged daughter, is of course the most competent of the hunters although she wasn't trained by bad old dad. Nevertheless, if you have any lingering fondness for scenarios where characters look at a shadowy creature out of frame and go "Aaaaah!", you could do worse than to put this on next Halloween.

Villains? Over-the-top, which I guess is in keeping with the genre. It's a bit of a pity, because Elsa's stepmother has a legitimate reason to resent the chit who comes to claim her inheritance without showing any grief over her father's death. However, this is isn't a psychological family drama, and so the stepmother is mostly played for laughs. 

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special

Set-up: The Guardians are hanging out at their new base, but their leader, Peter Quill, is still sad about losing the love of his life. Drax and Mantis have heard stories about an Earth holiday called Christmas and, although they haven't much grasp of what it's really about, they decide to give Peter a special present to cheer him up: "the legendary Kevin Bacon", who they think is a real hero and not an actor. Shenanigans ensue.

Additional genres (apart from the super-hero genre) channelled: Sci-fi (of course, it's the Guardians), heartwarming Christmas story.

Overall impression: This is a charming Christmas-tree bauble of a show. The humour is a little twisted at times, but not so much that it takes away from the warm, fuzzy feeling you get at the end. Mantis and Drax are a great duo, and Kevin Bacon impressively game. If you haven't seen the Guardians films, this is probably not the right place to start making their acquaintance, but if you have seen them and liked them, you'll probably enjoy this a great deal.

Villains? No.

A villain-lover's guide to Marvel Phase Four: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

All right, so pushing on with the final movies and shows belonging to Marvel's Phase Four, I have come to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the favourite Phase Four film of many. I was wary, to be honest. While the first Black Panther movie had likeable goodies and great villains, it wasn't really my cup of tea. I expected more of the same and with perhaps even more worthiness. But while this film isn't one of my favourite Marvel things, I was pleasantly surprised by it. Let's get started with the overview:

Movie set-up: The kingdom of Wakanda and the royal family are reeling after the death of the noble T'Challa aka the Black Panther from an unspecified illness. T'Challa's sister Shuri, a scientific prodigy, blames herself for not having been able to find a cure for her brother and buries herself in work. Meanwhile, her mother the Queen has a hard time with the UN, or rather they're having a hard time with her as Wakanda isn't exporting any of their much-coveted wonder mineral vibranium. As vibranium is the country's main asset, one can't help but wonder how T'Challa's "one tribe" vision is coming along, exactly.

Anyway, things are about to get worse as the US finds vibranium elsewhere, in the wide ocean – only to be set upon by mysterious merfolk. Wakanda gets the blame somehow. Also, the head of the merpeople, called Namor, pays the Queen and Shuri a visit. He also blames Wakanda, in this case for opening the surface world's eyes to the wonders of vibranium. Fearing the detection of his underwater kingdom Talokan (Atlantis in all but name), he demands that they help find the person who built the US's vibranium detector, or else...

Shuri has been willing to let the Black Panther legend die with her brother, but as the conflict escalates she finds she has to think again. Only, will she be worthy of walking in T'Challa's footsteps?

Overall impression: This film looked set to be critic-proof. As long as it handled the absence of Chadwick Boseman, who tragically died of cancer in 2020 and thus couldn't reprise the role of T'Challa, in a respectful manner (which it did), surely no-one would be heartless enough to find it anything else than spectacular, especially considering the high worthiness factor of the Black Panther franchise.

At the same time, the film's creators were left with a "Hamlet without the Prince" dilemma. Yes, another character could take over as Black Panther – after all, it's already part of the set-up that the title of Black Panther is handed down throughout the generations – but the trouble was finding the perfect fit. The other heroic characters already had established parts to play and characteristics that rhymed more or less well with the role of franchise-fronting lead ass-kicker.

I wasn't thrilled to hear it was going to be Shuri who donned the black suit, ironically because she was one of the characters I enjoyed most in the first film. I liked her quirkiness, humour and brains – characteristics not traditionally on display in defender-of-the-nation action heroes (not that T'Challa wasn't intelligent, but he was wise rather than clever-clever like Shuri).

In the end, the film didn't turn out to be as depressing or moralising as I feared. The film makers found a way to pay moving tribute to their deceased lead actor without losing sight of the difference between Boseman and T'Challa. It's T'Challa the fictional character's death that is crucial to the story being told. More than his combative skills, it's his compassion and sense of diplomacy that his country misses. Queen Ramonda (in a power-house performance by Angela Bassett) is impressive, but a diplomat she ain't. As for Shuri, she is blind-sided by grief, and once in the Black Panther suit less inclined to be forgiving than her predecessor.

The film did feel too long; it's evident that the film makers scaled down the importance of the US as the third party of the ongoing conflict, but they could have cut even more here. For example, they could have found another bone of contention between Wakanda and Talokan than gifted science student Riri aka Ironheart, who will soon get her own TV show anyway. But all in all, I liked that the film touched on universal themes like dealing with loss and change and didn't get bogged down in a classic "bad whiteys want precious minerals" plot (there's a reason I haven't seen either of the Avatar films).

OK, but what about the villain, then? Well... the problem is that the part of the film which resembles the Avatar setup the most is the one which provides him with his motivation. Also, as he's several hundreds of years old and his people ended up as underwater creatures because of the Spanish conquistadors (long story), he's got quite a bit of po-co rhetoric going on.

All right, that sounds tiresome, but wasn't Killmonger a bit like that? What made Killmonger bearable, in spite of poisoning polite museum attendants and wanting a full-out race war, was that he was still very much a product of the modern age. Also, he had compelling personal reasons for resenting the Wakandan royal family. 

Namor, on the other hand, comes perilously close to the trope of a leader of a "nature people" (as we Swedes call it – not patronising at all then) who equates modern civilisation with disaster. I almost expected him to say something along the lines of "we lived in harmony with the Great Spirit of the Ocean, and then the men from the surface came with their sticks that shot fire". It's not as bad as that, but as I said, close.  

He's also extremely trigger happy (or throwing-spears happy). The US try to mine vibranium out in the ocean, without even knowing of Talokan's existence, and suddenly Namor's ready to declare war, and on all the surface world, no less? I get that Talokans are great fighters, but if pushed, we evil surface dwellers could still drop a bomb on them, right?

Having said that, he's charismatic enough, and it helps that he's supposed to be the villain – as with Killmonger, the film makes it clear that Namor's on the wrong track. But to my mind, the villain is not the main reason to see this film. Shuri's story of overcoming grief is more compelling – and Okoye (a female general whose kick-ass skills I have no trouble believing in) is fun.

A villain-lover's guide to Marvel Phase Four – Thor: Love and Thunder

After taking three posts for the larger part of Marvel Phase Four – two for the TV shows, starting with WandaVision and ending with Ms Marvel, and one for the movies before Thor: Love and Thunder – I really thought I could end my overview with one final post. But no. The phase's two final movies are worth discussing at some length (for different reasons), and I also want to have plenty of space to shred She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. So here I go again, splitting the final roundup into several posts. Did I mention that Phase Four is really packed?

I recently watched Wakanda Forever, but it will have to wait as I find I have surprisingly much to say about Thor: Love and Thunder.

Movie setup: Thor is hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, but after losing his whole family in previous films, he's lonely and unsure of his future role. Then, on a visit to New Asgard, he crosses paths with the sinister Gorr the God Butcher, who kidnaps Asgardian children in an attempt to catch Thor's attention. At the same time, Thor's ex-girlfriend Jane Foster shows up wielding Thor's ex-hammer Mjolnir as "The Mighty Thor", but she's not doing as well as it appears. It's up to Thor to save the kids and his fellow "gods" (yes, there's a reason I use those quotation marks). But can he save Jane?

Overall impression: I can't help feeling sorry for Taika Waititi. His previous Thor movie Thor: Ragnarok, which handled a serious theme with plenty of jokes, was generally popular. Whereas this Thor movie, which handles a serious theme – actually more than one – with plenty of jokes, is generally considered a disappointment. He could be forgiven for asking himself: what do Marvel fans want?

And I'm afraid I'm just like the others here. I really liked Thor: Ragnarok, but though I had a good enough time with Thor: Love and Thunder when watching it, the more I think about how it handled its plots, the more I see it as a misfire. Even when watching it, I found it uneven, though it gave me a couple of good chuckles.

Many commentators have claimed that "Marvel humour" ruined the film. For myself, I love Marvel humour – it's one of the things that got me through all of the Marvel back catalogue in the past years – but the problem with the humour in Thor: Love and Thunder is that fewer jokes land than in Thor: Ragnarok. It's often annoying when it's trying to be funny. Sidekicks like Valkyrie and Korg, who were a definite asset in Thor: Ragnarok, got on my nerves here. For my part, I don't mind Marvel movies being full of jokes, but they have to be good jokes.

One thing I appreciated, though, was that we got a moving conclusion to the Thor-Jane love story. It didn't sit well with me that Jane simply "dumped" Thor according to Thor: Ragnarok, after their romance had been built up during the two first Thor films. Here we get the background and a sweet reconciliation. I liked Natalie Portman's Jane and the fact that she didn't try to put Thor in the shade when she was in superhero mode. When prepped on the "The Mighty Thor" plotline from the comics, I thought it sounded weird and morbid (also, "Thor" is a boy's name, not a title, as every Scandinavian knows), and I'm still no fan of it, but if it had to be included it could have been worse handled.

Which is more than one can say for the Gorr the God Butcher storyline.

Ah, yes, the villain. He sounds scary. Was he scary? Maybe too scary? He was impressively acted by Christian Bale, and I was on his side the whole time.

Wait, what? How come, when he's... you know... Gorr the... Let me explain. The biggest problem with Thor: Love and Thunder for me is the mythological mess it leaves the MCU in. Odin spelled out in Thor: The Dark World that Asgardians were not gods, simply a powerful people who nevertheless live and die as humans ("give or take a few thousand years", Loki grumbled). This was a perfectly decent way of explaining the appearance of various mythological personages in the MCU, though it raised the question why the Egyptian deities in Moon Knight "abandoned" humankind after humans "stopped believing" in them: if they weren't real gods to begin with but rather powerful interdimensional or space whatsits, why go into a huff when they're no longer considered to be gods?

Thor: Love and Thunder confuses things further. Here, Thor clearly identifies as a god, and he goes to "Omnipotence City", (loosely) ruled over by Zeus, where he meets up with a bunch of other characters from different mythologies who also claim to be gods. But if they are, they are absolute rubbish. Gorr's beef with god-dom is that his god not only failed to help when Gorr lost his people and his family etc., he also turns out to be a bastard. Swayed by a dark magic sword that appears at a strategic moment, Gorr draws the drastic conclusion that all gods are bastards and must die.

The Gorr storyline from the comics as explained to me by YouTube sounded fascinating, and a way to dip a toe into weighty philosophical issues before hastily withdrawing it again with a reassuring explanation: that of course Gorr's god let him down as he wasn't a real god but an alien impostor of some kind. But if Zeus & Co. are supposed to be the real thing, and a bunch of bums, that is not a happy state of affairs for the MCU. And I thought the celestial robots from Eternals were bad...

Now, I don't think Waititi thought through the implications for the MCU when scripting "Omnipotence City"; I believe he only wanted to make some irreverent jokes and fun around with larger-than-life characters like Zeus. ("Since when did we become the joke?" Zeus laments in a post-credit scene. Since you appeared in a Taika Waititi film, buddy.) The best thing to do is probably what Doctor Who fans are used to doing when a bothersome bit of lore turns up in the Whoniverse: simply ignore it.