Half-way through The Gilded Age season two: many Chekhovian guns not fired

When it comes to TV, I'm in a funny situation from a blog perspective. It's not that there aren't a lot of shows on that I'm interested in; it's just that we're in the middle of them, and I'd prefer to finish them before giving an opinion. The jury's still out on both The Crown season six and the Doctor Who specials (of which only one has aired so far) for different reasons. I'm still not sure what I think of The Crown, and am hoping the six remaining episodes will help me make up my mind. As for Doctor Who, if I review "The Star Beast" now, I risk overemphasising my complaints and forgetting about the good stuff, which includes the wonder of being able to watch the show on telly, at the same time as the UK. I'm hoping the remaining two specials will blow me away and make me more thankful.

So a mid-season report of The Gilded Age it is. Not that I'm certain of what my final verdict will be here either. I can only say so far, so good; however, it's still not a patch on Downton.

This is starting to be a problem, as it's the second season, and we should be past the awkwardness of the show setting out its stall. I think the second season of Downton was my favourite one, in spite of it being set during World War I (I'm not too fond of the World Wars as period-drama settings). So why is The Gilded Age, in spite of being entertaining and the best costume drama we've had in a while, not able to hit the same heights?

From a plot perspective, the show is suffering somewhat from late-Downtonitis. Remember how, in the later series of Downton, some storylines were spun out way too long because they constituted certain characters' "arc" for that particular series? The Green murder investigation comes to mind, as does Thomas (uncharacteristically, in my view) trying to medicate himself straight. (That last one didn't take the whole series, but it felt like it.) There's quite a lot of that sort of plotting in The Gilded Age. Mrs Russell is getting involved in the New York "opera wars". Mr Russell is facing strikes and disgruntled workers. Marian is being mildly courted by an eligible widower. And this, it seems, is what they will be doing all season.

These storylines are left simmering, with a desultory mention here and there, without ever really coming to the boil. I can better face the romances moving slowly than, say, the opera plot, which isn't very thrilling to begin with. But I'd prefer a faster pace all round, where the same character could be involved in more than one major occurrence per season. Just look at how comparatively action-packed Downton series two, episode two was. Both Edith and Thomas loved and lost during the episode, and that was far from all that was going on. Afterwards, Fellowes found new things for them to do. No need to dwell on love interests that aren't going to lead anywhere.

A reason for the drawn-out plot threads is, I suspect, that the show has too many characters to juggle. We have the Brook/Van Rhijn household, the Russell household, and Peggy and her parents. It's a lot, especially as both the Russells and Agnes Van Rhijn keep an impressive number of servants. The result is that many of the characters are still pretty sketchy, and I have a problem even remembering their names. You can see that it would be quite a challenge to furnish them with more than one seasonal story arc per head.

Another problem is that two of the characters that get the most screen time – Bertha Russell and Agnes Van Rhijn – are so hard to feel anything for. I still don't understand what's behind Bertha's social ambitions, and I would much rather get some real insight into Agnes's psyche than hear any more of her Dowager Countess-isms. Last season she was at least a good employer to Peggy, but this season she's just stuffy and awful, apparently without reason. We need some introspective scenes with these ladies fast, or we'll never know why their sister and husband respectively bother with them.

Having said that, other characters and plot lines are more of a success. George Russell is still a cynical delight. Ada Brook is lovely, and I found her autumnal love affair so engaging I basically spent one episode holding my breath fearing that Agnes would spoil it. I'm intrigued to see what happens with disgraced businessman-turned-valet Watson, and how Peggy will disentangle herself from her budding romance with a married man. I can watch Oscar fortune-hunting unsuspecting (or maybe not) heiresses all day. And while the servants of both households haven't had a lot of juicy drama coming their way so far, I do like them and hope that better things will be waiting just around the corner.

I also sort of admire Fellowes's disregard for the "Chekhov's gun" principle, which – sorry, Chekhov – I find to be an overrated piece of storytelling advice. How predictable wouldn't stories be if a gun introduced in act one were always to be fired in act three? Fellowes doesn't scruple to introduce a lot of false trails, as he did in Downton. Oscar's ex-lover simply gave up wooing Gladys Russell out of spite. Peggy's child died, so she won't be hunting for him the whole season. Her visit to the South might, after the foreshadowing of her worried mother's warnings, end up with her witnessing the lynching of one of the bright young people she has optimistically interviewed. Or it might not. Julian Fellowes keeps us on our toes and makes life difficult for people like me who enjoy making predictions.

The latest episode, where Fellowes actually lets a momentous change take place for one of the main characters mid-season, leaves me to hope that the drama will soon pick up the pace. Meanwhile, it is still an enjoyable stroll.

Villain redemption and free will: of course I like Loki season two!

Oh joy, Loki stuck the landing! While I'm not quite as invested in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as in, say, Star Wars – I'm fairly new to it after all – it's always a relief nowadays when an MCU project does well and wins the approval of its far from uncritical fanbase. Not to mention that it's great to be able to enjoy the project in question myself without too many quibbles coming in the way.

On balance, I think I liked season two of Loki even more than season one. I had a good time with season one, but I was still adjusting to the fact that Loki wasn't really able to flex his villainous muscles in his own TV series. Also, the over-complicated set-up of the series bothered me, and I wasn't completely won over either by Loki's love interest and alter ego Sylvie or the TVA setting. In season two, we have the set-up out of the way, and though a lot of the storytelling is still labyrinthine, its complications are more enjoyable.

Now we have Loki's whole character arc, it makes more sense to me and increases my appreciation of season one as well. What we saw in season one was Loki's change from a villain to an anti-hero. What we see in season two is his change from an anti-hero to a hero.

Whoa, you might say. Isn't the whole point of Loki that he's a villain? When the shady TVA Hunter X-05 tells him: "Stop trying to be a hero, man! You're a villain. You're good at it. Do that", I for one thought he had a point. However, when push comes to shove, I'm a sucker for a good villain-redemption story, if only it's done right. Loki, ultimately, pulled it off.

I was irritated in season one by the apparent attempt to cram several films' worth of character development into one episode, as Loki was treated to a whistle-stop tour of how the rest of his life would have played out if he hadn't diverged from the "sacred timeline". But I can live with it now as this was only the start of his long and bumpy road to redemption. He made friends with Mobius, but it didn't end there. He fell in love with Sylvie, but it didn't end there. He realised he cared more about her than about ultimate power, but it didn't end there. Season two started with him working apparently selflessly to save the TVA and potentially all of existence, but we still weren't done with the character development stuff.

While the first episodes of season two reminded me of Doctor Who with its time-jumping quirkiness – the lovable engineer and overall fixer Ouroboros (O.B. for short) is in many ways a typical Doctor Who character – the final episode gave me Once Upon A Time vibes, and from me you can't expect higher praise than that. If you'd explain the plot to an old Viking, you'd get the same head-scratching response as if you'd explain the gist of Once to the Brothers Grimm: "Excuse me, who did you say saved the day again?" 

Loki made his final sacrifice in exactly the right way for a redeemed villain: not proudly or self-righteously as a hero might, but resignedly, after having tried everything else. He had a personal stake, rather than acting for an abstract Good of All Mankind. At the same time, he wanted to save not just Sylvie, but a whole group of friends. In the villain-redemption game, sacrificing yourself for a family member or love interest is all fine and good, but sacrificing yourself for someone you don't have to care for yet still do hits harder.

As a Scandinavian, I appreciated the nod towards mythological Loki too. MCU Loki's fate was a great deal less grim – it's not as if he ended tied up in his son's guts with poison dripping on his head, like his wicked inspiration. Nevertheless, he is stuck, and the day he becomes unstuck the world supposedly faces its Ragnarök. Very neat.

Of course, I had some quibbles too. Making Loki so overpowered adds to the ongoing confusion about MCU "gods": I mean, I like the guy, but a Messiah he ain't. Season two dropped the ball badly when it came to the relationship between Loki and Sylvie. Not only is there no discernible romantic chemistry between them any more: she seems angry with him for some reason, though she was the one who betrayed him at the end of season one, a betrayal he never confronts her about. Still Sylvie serves a function as the uncompromising advocate of free will, and I can't but applaud that her outlook won out in the end. The Multiverse may have turned out to be tricky to integrate into good storytelling, but I'm happy that it's still around.

Regicides on the run

"I was wondering how a man who wished to do right could act so unjustly and unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did [...] Still, I like Charles – I respect him – I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!"

Thus Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. When it comes to Charles I of England, I have been raised in the Helen Burns school of thought, and have had little cause to doubt it. It does seem as if poor Charles's main crime was losing the Civil War, which was no reason for the victors to lop his head off. He can't very well be expected to be in favour of deposing himself. 

At the same time, I have sometimes wondered if I'm being a hypocrite. I don't object to the lopping off of a monarch's head in principle, after all, if he is actually guilty of a crime. I have zero problems with the execution of Louis XVI of France approximately 150 years later (because he committed treason – me fancying one of the regicides has nothing to do with it). Which raises the question: could any case be made for Charles I having committed treason? What did treason (in political terms) even mean in the 17th century? When did the meaning shift from "treason against your ruler" to "treason against your country and your people"?

So it was with some interest I learned that Robert Harris's (him again? I'm afraid so) historical novel Act of Oblivion would be dealing with the escape of two of Charles's killers, and the attempts made during the Restoration to track them down and despatch them in their turn. Maybe this was a chance to learn more about the rationale behind the decision to execute the king?

It turns out the book has little to say about this particular question for a good two thirds of its respectable length. It's still a gripping read, though, for the most part anyway. There is built-in tension in a man hunt, and the based-on-fact circumstances of this one are exciting enough. The two regicides in question, both willing signees of Charles I's death warrant, are Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, aka Ned and Will. They escape all the way to America, and as they start to build a modest life there you'd think they'd be pretty safe. Turns out they're not.

The significance of the North American colonies still being under English rule slowly dawns on the reader. The Governor of Massachusetts may be a Roundhead through and through: in the end, when faced with a direct order from the King, he must obey it or face consequences for the whole colony. And so the fugitives move from one safe-seeming hideout to another, doggedly pursued by Royalists. It's thrilling stuff, as soon as the chase is on, especially if like me you have no idea of how it's going to end.

But there is one slight problem for a Helen Burnsian like myself. It is somehow natural to root for men who are being hunted, and the two regicides are quite likeable, so yes, I was rather hoping they wouldn't get caught. At the same time, they're not a pair of Jean Valjeans. They did kill the king, and though Ned eventually comes to question the decision (I suspect it's Harris who's doing most of the questioning on his behalf; it would surprise me if the real Edward Whalley had many qualms), the doubt is a long time coming. Will never has any doubts at all. So they will just have to face up to the consequences, won't they? They can't be surprised that Charles II isn't prepared to forgive his pa's killers just like that. What did they think would happen?

At  the same time, the fictional leader of the man hunt against them, Richard Nayler, is hard to have much sympathy for. At first I wasn't sure that Nayler being a bit of a pill was intentional. After all, I have found more than one of Harris's heroes to be pills. As the story progresses, though, it becomes pretty clear that Nayler's the bad guy. Harris does give him a strong, albeit contrived, motive for wanting to – well – nail Whalley and Goffe (Cromwell's infamous banning of worship on Christmas Day comes into it), and he's not beyond reason. He's not too thrilled about digging up and executing already dead regicides, for instance (Cromwell and two others). Nevertheless, enough should be enough. I'm not sure the personal motive was such a good idea on Harris's part, either; it would have been more interesting if Nayler had been carried by Royalist convictions alone.

The novel, as one expects from Harris, is well and vividly written, and he writes skilfully about the "down times" in the hunt as well. But the book is a little on the long side for my liking, and some of the hiding-out descriptions could possibly have been cut to tighten it up. I was torn about Whalley writing his memoirs while hiding: it did give me some of the background for the decision to execute Charles I that I was initially looking for, but at the same time it slowed down the narrative. 

Also, while I applaud Harris's attempts to get into the religious mind sets of his protagonists – otherwise, it's a common fault in modern historical novels that the characters lose their faith far too easily, so the author doesn't have to deal with a piety they don't understand – I didn't always find it convincing. Better that, though, than Nayler's increasing atheism, which doesn't make much sense seeing as he is so outraged by the very idea of beheading a King. (Why is that so terrible if the King isn't God's anointed? Nayler doesn't seem to have had any personal relationship to Charles.) All in all, Harris has a better hand with the historical figures than the fictional one, though it's clear he prefers Ned to Will.

This isn't my favourite historical novel by Harris, but it's still good; I've found myself missing the New England atmosphere after having finished the book. It's no mean feat to make me sympathise with two Puritan regicides, while at the same time remaining convinced that I would have hated living in Oliver Cromwell's England.

Ahsoka: Enjoyable viewing for Star Wars nerds (not sure about the rest)

So, yeah, I liked Ahsoka. But be warned, I'm not exactly the most critical of Star Wars fans. Hey, I even liked Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I've come to realise that when it comes to Star Wars shows, I'm a complete pushover. You can put anything in front of me TV-wise and I'll gulp it down, as long as it's linked to the good old galaxy far, far away. The same pretty much goes for the movies, with Solo being a possible exception (and I do think that Rogue One has been over-hyped in the wake of Andor). It's a bit troubling to be so undiscerning – Star Wars is, after all, only my second favourite sci-fi franchise after Doctor Who – but at least I have fun. 

I do, however, completely understand if true Star Wars fans – the fine diners to my burger gobbler – tend to be less easy to win over. Overall, I have the impression that they had a good time with Ahsoka, but were disappointed that the series didn't deliver more on the promising scenarios it set up (a feeling I as a die-hard Once Upon A Time fan can relate to). As in Once, it's a question of letting go of all the cool concepts that were never properly explored and instead trying to appreciate the things we actually got.

However, what the average Star Wars movie viewer makes of this show, I have absolutely no idea.

This bothered me. The franchise isn't in such a great shape that it can risk alienating "casual" fans – if by "casual" you mean fans who have watched all three trilogies of the Skywalker saga, plus Rogue One and Solo too. Because you can do all that, and still not have the faintest idea who Ahsoka is.

The Ahsoka mini-series prominently features characters from the two animated shows Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels but, unlike characters like Bo-Katan in The Mandalorian, they're not properly re-introduced, in a way as to give you a good grasp of them even if you haven't watched the animated stuff. I got the strong feeling that we're already supposed to know the story of Sabine Wren, Ezra Bridger, Hera Syndulla, Grand Admiral Thrawn and – last but not least – Ahsoka herself when going into Ahsoka. And I did, so there was no problem for me. But Clone Wars and Rebels shouldn't be required viewing for a live-action series such as this one. It should be able to function independently, and ideally make its characters so interesting that viewers will be curious to learn more about them in the animated shows.

Even if you knew everything Clone Wars and Rebels could teach you about the characters, though, character development wasn't this show's strong suit, and in this it reflects a common gripe with me when it comes to Star Wars content: the reluctance to explore relationships. The franchise's large male fanbase may be a factor here. Guys are rightly or wrongly supposed not to be interested in too much relationship-focused drama, especially if the relationships in question are of a romantic nature (and admittedly, the most disdainful dismissals of "shipping" do tend to come from male commentators). 

Whatever the reason, we get a couple of surrogate parent-child relationships and some pat-each-other-on-the-back camaraderie in Star Wars, but otherwise attachments are avoided in a way that would make any member of the Jedi Council proud. It's a wonder that anyone besides Anakin and Padmé and Han and Leia procreates at all. 

In Ahsoka, the exact nature of Sabine's feelings for Ezra – for whose sake she makes a momentous and un-Jedi-like decision (I'm all for it) – is never fully explained. But even putting romance aside, we don't get a clear idea of what the characters actually think of each other. What's the deal with Ahsoka and Sabine? Or with Morgan Elsbeth and Grand Admiral Thrawn? Or with Baylan Skoll, a fallen Jedi looking for a new creed to follow beyond the Jedi and the Sith, and his power-hungry apprentice Shin Hati? I want to know!

What the series does have, though, is plenty of atmosphere, some heartwarming nostalgia, a fun droid voiced by David Tennant and potential to develop further if there's a series two. Ray Stevenson, who played arguably the most interesting character (Baylan), tragically passed away after the series was completed, but hopefully there's still room to explore his quest (recasting, maybe? It will be tough as Stevenson was seriously good). Then there's Shin, dubbed "Shin Hottie" by the fans, who's a far more fun bad-girl Force wielder than the aggrieved Reva in Obi-Wan Kenobi. I wouldn't mind seeing more battles between her and Ahsoka and Sabine, and maybe even a temporary, easily fractured team-up.

I'm still not convinced by Grand Admiral Thrawn as the next Big Bad in Star Wars, though. I'm sure he was great in the books the serious fans keep referring to, but here as in Rebels, he leans far to heavily into the "Ah, just as I anticipated" kind of villainy. But I appreciate Lars Mikkelsen as an actor, and there's still time to make the blue guy work for me.

OK, I admit it, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is pretty great

A few years back, I was gloating because I believed that Illumination, the studio that came up with the annoying Minions, had got their hands on Disney's angriest competitor DreamWorks. It seems the reality is more complicated: the two animation studios now have the same parent company, but they remain separate. So, spoke too soon, and too uninformedly. What's more, any input DreamWorks may have got from Illumination doesn't seem to have harmed them in the least, quite the contrary.

I really didn't expect to like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish for a number of reasons. One, it's the sequel to a spinoff which was quite decent but didn't beg to be followed up. Two, it is, albeit tangentially, part of the Shrek franchise, which is the main reason I have a lingering scepticism towards DreamWorks in the first place, in spite of really enjoying many of their films. The Shrek films' ambition to "deconstruct fairy tales" is so clearly aimed at the Disney versions of said tales that it becomes embarrassing, and there's a mean streak running through them that I know many people appreciate but I kinda hate. 

Three, the theme of The Last Wish, as praised by a number of critics online, didn't seem to be ideally suited for a family film. It appeared to centre to an alarming degree on confronting and accepting your mortality. That may be an interesting topic for grown-up critics, but what about the kids, a not unimportant target audience? If anyone should be allowed to not to have the inevitability of death rubbed in their faces, surely it should be children.

But, I have to admit defeat. I was won over. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is vivaciously animated, cleverly plotted, and has engaging characters. Yes, the "value your life" message is in there, but it's not what everything's about. Puss isn't the only one who may come to realise that he already has what he needs, "no magic required". The last wish of a fallen star, which he and many others seek, becomes a useful MacGuffin in order to highlight this theme. The way the map to the star changes, and the terrain and its challenges with it, depending on who uses it, was a great detail, inventive and unironically fairy-taleish.

The villains are also particularly strong. There's the dead-serious one (literally), a scary wolf in a hood, armed with two sickles, whom Puss meets in a tavern while drowning his sorrows in cream when he's found out he's on the last of his nine lives. Puss thinks he's a bounty hunter at first. He's not.

Then there's the potentially redeemable antagonist Goldilocks and her bears, a band of small-time crooks (as signalled by their far-from-posh English accents). I really liked the take on the Goldilocks story here: in this version, the bears adopt the orphan girl, fondly imagining that she's part of their family now. Goldi is not so sure.

Lastly, there's a more traditional Shrek-type villain, Big Jack Horner, who is Little Jack Horner grown up to a far from good boy. He's traditional in that he is a comic villain, but also (as the best ones of the Shrek villain bunch) a lethal and ruthless one. The big difference to the Shrek films is that the protagonists respect him and take him seriously. "Oh no, not Jack Horner" Puss exclaims in dismay when he learns who has the map. "That's why you don't mess with Jack Horner", Puss's sometime partner and love interest Kitty comments later, grimly. This approach makes the comic elements of Horner funnier than if he'd been the endless butt of Shrek jokes. At the same time, the cats are right to fear him.

Jack Horner also serves a useful purpose as a dark-humour-magnet. There are Shrek-type jokes of the too-harsh-for-a-Disney-flick kind in this film, but as they're mostly connected to Horner and his actions they're far easier to take than if Puss & Co. had behaved with casual cruelty (as Shrek and Fiona sometimes did). Whether they're heroes or anti-heroes, I prefer protagonists I'm supposed to root for to steer clear of meanness and pettiness. Villains, now, that's a completely different matter.

The one good thing about Disney's Peter Pan & Wendy (to be fair, it's Hook)

You've got to hand it to Peter Pan & Wendy, the live-action Disney remake very few people talk about. It answers the interesting question whether a Peter Pan adaptation with a good Hook can still be bad. The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

There are just too many things that don't work. Neverland doesn't look particularly magical. Peter himself is somewhat muted, and doesn't come across as a charismatic leader. Wendy's never swept away by him; you can certainly allow yourself to have a bit of conflict between Peter and Wendy, but she has to be into him before she starts to question him. I try to disregard the display of modern pieties in light entertainment to some extent, because otherwise I'd have practically no light entertainment to enjoy. But Peter Pan & Wendy parades its 2020s moralism so blatantly that it hurts the story and is impossible to ignore.

For instance, we really don't need a girl quota of "lost boys". J.M. Barrie actually offered an explanation as to why there weren't any lost girls: the lost boys were babies who fell out of their prams, and little girls weren't foolish enough to do that. Which, yes, is a bit patronising, but not more so than a scene where Wendy points out "But you're not all boys", only to be answered with an aggressive "So?" Call them lost children if necessary, but for my money being a lost boy, trailing after Peter Pan and following his orders, isn't that much of a privilege – we needn't covet it. There are still plenty of female characters in Neverland: Wendy, Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, the mermaids (plus, I must reluctantly point out, the crocodile was actually female in the original story). I don't mind a couple of women pirates, though, and a multicultural bunch of lost boys is fine; it's easy to imagine that Peter's recruitment field was wider than the British Isles (and I'm not sure I buy the pram story, seeing how he lured away the Darling siblings).

Speaking of Tinkerbell and Tiger Lily, they are also victims of the filmmakers' good intentions (or moral vanity, take your pick). Tinkerbell can be black, no problem – it was Disney themselves who popularised the blond pigtail look, they're free to change it – but she still has to be recognisably Tinkerbellish: temperamental, jealous of Wendy and sometimes a downright menace. But the film doesn't have the bottle to make an ethnicity-changed Tink a flawed character, so she ends up bland, friendly with Wendy and not noticeably in love with Peter. As for Tiger Lily, I could buy her having big-sisterly feelings for Peter, but otherwise, she's not allowed to have a personality either: she's just wise and, of course, good at fighting.

But, yeah, Jude Law's Hook was good.            

Not that the pirate side of things was flawlessly handled either. The pirates of Neverland aren't meant to resemble any real pirates that ever lived: they're supposed to be the kind of pirates children imagine when they're playing. Having a gritty-looking, greasy-haired Hook instead of the usual glamorous swashbuckler is misunderstanding the source material. For all that, Law plays Hook with an inner melancholy disguised by bravado I think Barrie would have approved of. And I like the sea shanties.

I have some sympathy for the film's attempts to focus on the part of the story I happen to find most fascinating as well: the relationship between Peter Pan and Hook. Here as in so many other versions of the tale, they started out as friends before the friendship went sour. They are also more dependent on each other than they like to admit. When the film revolves around this relationship, I actually found it interesting with even a couple of touching moments.

The problem is that the film is called Peter Pan & Wendy, not Peter Pan & Hook or simply Hook (Spielberg beat Disney to that one). It's supposed to be an adaptation of the classic story, not a left-field take on it. The main plot, though, is told in a perfunctory manner. I can relate to finding Hook's character more intriguing than Peter Pan's, but if that's the way you feel, then maybe you shouldn't do a film based on Barrie's book and play, but rather a prequel or retelling. In the original Peter Pan and Wendy, whatever one may think of Peter Pan, he's very much the hero of his own life.

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.