WandaVision makes some big moves this week
Our Friday-Free-For-All looks at a "broken" videogame we enjoyed enormously
It’s Friday, February 5, and here’s where we are…
Here’s how you know WandaVision is a genuine hit and not just something people are watching out of obligation.
Last night, the new episode dropped at midnight PST, as they do each week, and something happened that has happened to me once before with Disney+ with The Mandalorian, and again, it happened at midnight, just as they released a new episode. Everyone started getting error screens about how the internet isn’t fast enough like this one…
When you’re able to create a technical challenge for a company like Disney, which has paid to have everything about Disney+ be as cutting-edge as possible, then you know you’re dealing with a crazy and very real consumer demand. It’s like when Ticketmaster would collapse when certain bands went on sale when I was younger. It was always the biggest shows that would kill their system.
I wasn’t sure at first if WandaVision could be the same kind of buzz hit that The Mandalorian was, and the first two episodes didn’t make it an easy sell. I think they’re smart and they made the right choice for the story they’re telling, but I also think that for more casual viewers, people who aren’t absolutely soaked in the continuity of the larger Marvel universe, it’s a difficult one. Wanda isn’t one of the characters who broke through to the larger pop-culture consciousness the same way someone like Iron Man or Spider-Man did. That’s not a reflection on the character but just an observation. I think Marvel has introduced so many characters at this point that it’s hard for people who want to dip in and out to keep up with things.
Oddly, it’s by introducing even more obscure continuity that I think the show became more accessible. When Kat Dennings and Randall Park showed up last week, it gave us a pair of audience surrogates to help talk us through what’s been going on so far, and with this week’s episode, it became clear that this is no mere sidebar, not just some inconsequential corner of the storytelling world. To some degree, the entire idea of “continuity” is up for grabs now and part of the actual text of the piece, and it’s fascinating. The week-to-week release strategy for the show leans back into the thing that gives television its unique cultural currency, that “oh my god what happens next?!” energy that sustains the audience between each new episode.
It’s also clear now that if you want to understand the Marvel universe moving forward, you need to see what’s going on right now on WandaVision. There are huge implications, and if you haven’t seen this week’s episode yet, you should jump to the next section at this point. There’s no way to talk about this without talking about this week’s big moment. There are many, honestly, because they have really started to peel back the curtain on the game they’re playing. Vision is finally fully aware of just how broken the world around him is and he’s sure now that Wanda is the one behind it. He doesn’t have the same information we do, though, which is that he is not really himself. He’s dead. Genuinely dead. And, as Wanda tells one of her twin sons in this episode, you can’t reverse death. That seems like an important distinction here, especially considering the way the episode ends.
There’s a doorbell, but unlike all the earlier interruptions, always timed for comic effect, this comes in the middle of an ugly argument between Wanda and Vision. She doesn’t want to accept that she’s responsible for everything, and considering the conversation she had outside the barrier earlier, it seems like she’s having trouble truly comprehending the scope of what she’s doing or what it’s like for the people trapped in it. She goes to answer the door and we see the back of a familiar head. She’s already mentioned Pietro a few times now, so it shouldn’t be too shocking to see his face.
Except it’s not Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Pietro. It’s Evan Peters. Which means the Fox X-Men universe just collided with the Marvel universe, and anything is now officially up for grabs. Or… does it?
If we hadn’t heard any of the casting news for any of the other films that are going to be spinning storylines out from these same threads, including the Doctor Strange sequel and the upcoming Spider-Man movie, this might be even more shocking, but it was still a genuine surprise to see it happen. This one’s a fascinating version of the multiverse game to play, too, because it allows Marvel to not just solve a problem but turn it into a very rich opportunity. They are done with the X-Men franchise the way we know it, but that doesn’t mean they’re done with everything about it. Deadpool, specifically, is an ongoing concern, and because of his interactions with the larger X-Men world, you can’t just fold him into the Marvel universe without acknowledging that somehow. Before all of this is done, I think it’s safe to assume that Deadpool will make use of everyone else’s multiverse shenanigans to have some fun of his own.
Before that, though, we’re going to see Wanda struggle to make sense of this alternative version of her brother and where he came from. They went out of their way this week to explain that she can’t just create something from nothing. She’s not making everything up. Instead, she’s altering and rewriting matter and people around her, bending them to her idea of things. It seems horrifying for the people involved, and we get a glimpse of that when Vision and Norm (played beautifully by Asif Ali) have a brief conversation free of Wanda’s influence. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) also describes it as terrifying, a near-total loss of agency. Monica managed to pierce that, and she was expelled from Westview as a result.
There are characters who remain cyphers, though. Is Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) being controlled the same way everyone else is? Or is she somehow playing a role in all of this, egging Wanda on for some reason, facilitating this withdrawal from reality? And this new version of Pietro? Where did he come from? Was her desire to have her brother back so strong that she tore a hole into an alternate reality where Pietro was still alive? In doing so, has she opened that door in a way that allows other doors to be opened? Or is someone else using Wanda’s power to play this game, and did they pull a Pietro from another universe, not even aware that he doesn’t look like the same person?
Once Marvel starts doing this, there’s no limit to what games they can play. Everyone got crazy about Chris Evans signing for some kind of return to the MCU, but there would be nothing funnier than if he showed up for a cameo somewhere as Johnny Storm, not as Captain America. Somewhere, right now, David Hasselhoff is polishing an eye patch and staring at his phone, willing it to ring with an offer from Kevin Feige to suit up once again as Nick Fury, and while the Hoff might be waiting for that call for a while, it does seem like the rules just changed.
The tiny references to the larger world are going to drive fans crazy, and I’m not sure which was my favorite this week. Was it the way Monica tersely hissed “We’re not talking about her” when Captain Marvel was mentioned? Or was it the Lagos commercial and what it says about the guilt that Wanda feels over everything she’s done?
Either way, I’m glad to see this is genuinely turning into watercooler television and not just something we’re watching out of some sense of obligation to a corporate marketing plan. Marvel continues to do this larger-world thing better than anyone else in the business, and it’s exciting to see how strange this particular game is so far. And speaking of games…
HOW BROKEN IS BROKEN?
It is very rare that I dream in the language of movies.
Movies are a very passive experience, even the most engaging of them. You are watching something that has been carefully and completely constructed. From the first company logo at the beginning to that final legal language at the very end of the closing credits, everything in that film has been put there to have an effect on you as a viewer, and the goal is to hopefully give as many audiences as possible the same experience. A great film communicates something that we then share like a common secret. When you talk to someone about that film, you have this shared memory, this thing that you both know, an experience you share even if you didn’t see the film at the same time or in the same way.
That’s not really true with games. Games are wholly participatory, and when you engage with them, it’s a different emotional and visceral experience than with movies. I watch a lot of TV shows at the same time, and I’m usually juggling four or five books, and I’m usually also reading something out loud with my girlfriend in little bits and bites, and I don’t have any problem holding my spot in all of those narratives. I can pick them up and know where I am and drop right back in and the world is there and waiting and it doesn’t seem difficult to me at all. I can typically play one game at a time, though, because I have to play a game enough that the actual control scheme becomes second-nature. That’s when I really enjoy a game. That’s when I can lose myself in it. That’s when I start dreaming in it.
It is not uncommon at all for me to dream the videogame that I’m playing during a week, and I think it’s because gaming is fully participatory. You are controlling your character. You are in that world. You are free, depending on the game, to do whatever you want, however you want to do it. I definitely have a bias towards huge open-world gaming. That’s what I like. That scratches the particular itch that video games scratch for me, and when you get one of them right, it can get under my skin like nothing else.
Even when you don’t get it right, though, I still find it pretty amazing.
For example, one of the primary narratives of the last few months in gaming media has been that Cyberpunk 2077 is unplayably broken and a terrible game.
Politely, I disagree.
I finished the game yesterday, and I thought it was terrific. There were some bugs, but at this point, every giant triple-A title that’s released ends up shipping with some bugs and glitches. I played it on a PS4 Pro that’s about three years old as a digital download. I got the game the day it came out, and since then, it’s crashed three or four times total. That is not a preposterous amount, and I didn’t really lose anything when it did crash since the game auto-saved so aggressively. I can’t even call those crashes a hardship, because they were three-minute blips out of what was ultimately an experience that lasted dozens of hours.
I have not made the jump to next-generation gaming fully yet, nor have I embraced virtual reality. Both of those decisions are more about money than anything else, but it feels like we haven’t really seen either PlayStation or XBox make the case yet for the next generation. They’re just getting the machines into houses right now. Whatever you play on a next-gen machine, you can technically still play on your last-gen machine as well, and until they release that killer app that shows off just what a big leap forward they’ve made, it still feels like we’re at a point where ambition outweighs actual technical possibility. But just barely.
The world of Night City is huge and busy and the more time I spent there, the more it started to feel like an actual place. But the ways in which it falls short are the ways in which it can’t help but fall short right now, and there’s really no way around it. You can promise a living breathing city full of characters you can interact with any way you want, but you can’t really deliver that. The larger the open world you promise, the more you have to use moments that are on the rails to deliver a narrative within that, and it’s a push-pull that can be damnably hard for any game developer to navigate. What worked most for me was the actual story of the game. It took several hours of play before Keanu Reeves (prominent in all of the game’s marketing) to actually show up as a character. Once he did, the game set up its primary hook, and it’s a fun one. Basically, a chip that’s been installed in your brain contains a digital copy of Keanu’s character, and now the two of you are forced to share a brain while the chip slowly kills you. Your main mission is to find a way to separate the two of you again without killing yourself in the process.
One of the things that the game really drove home for me was that all of the conventional trappings of cyberpunk as it was initially defined have started to date terribly. In 1982, Blade Runner looked like a bold imagining of a possible future, but that was almost 40 years ago now, and the truth is that things change in radical ways that are less obvious than our filmmakers would love for us to believe. We may not have flying cars or robot snakes, but the basic ideas of how humanity and technology intersect are what truly, deep down, drove cyberpunk in the first place. I loved running around in this ridiculous world, but I didn’t really buy that this is where any real future ends up. As actual predictive science-fiction, I didn’t think Cyberpunk 2077 worked at all. But as a tribute to a specific flavor of science-fiction that I spent years reading, I thought it was wonderful.
And, yeah, at a certain point, I found myself dreaming that world. That’s how I know a game has its hooks in me deep. It’s not even about the specific story points once that happens. It’s just about the vibe of that world and the time I spend exploring it. I tend to play video games for a long time since I can’t play them often. I will chip away at the same title for months and months, and when I do that, the game becomes a sort of background fabric to everything else. It feels like this other life I dip into, and the best game experiences I’ve had are the ones I remember like they happened to me, not like I watched them. Again… that’s so different than movies. I don’t ever feel like something in a movie actually happened to me. That’s not how I remember films at all.
But games? I did do those things. When I spend months swinging through a city as Spider-Man or taking back my island in Ghost of Tsushima or uncovering the truth about my own legacy in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I may be doing those things while wearing someone else’s skin, but I still did them. I am the one who has to figure out how to accomplish something. I’m the one who does it over and over until I get it right. I’m the one who decides whether to embrace stealth or chaos, order or entropy, whether I play a game by the rules or intentionally try to fracture its reality. I got enormous value out of Cyberpunk 2077 and played lots of side missions, enough of it to feel like I really did experience the whole game. While it felt like everything worked for me, I saw lots of little weird ways it was buggy. NPCs behaving crazily. Rendering issues. Environmental breakdowns. I understand why some people returned it. I understand why some people were mad at the game. But there are games that are beloved that I never played after the first hour or two because I simply didn’t enjoy anything about them or I found something about their design frustrating to the point of fury. I have never played The Last Of Us. I’ve played the first hour and a half about six times, and every time I tap out around the same place, deeply irritated by all of it. Death Stranding made me want to quit playing video games entirely I hated it so much. I felt like a moron, like I was missing something obvious. The truth is that those games don’t work for me at all while Cyberpunk 2077 was a ton of fun for me. I would never tell someone else that their experiences with those games aren’t valid, but I remain amazed at how narratives get set in stone. Gaming really does stand unique in terms of what it gives me as a consumer, and even in a game that is considered “broken,” there can be so much that is of value that I find it hard to quantify whether or not something is “good.” Gaming feels so much more personal, and I’m not sure we’ve fully caught up in terms of critical language and how we talk about these things.
IF A SHOW FALLS IN THE FOREST
I am glad to hear that there will be a third season of the HBO/BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials. It must be terrifying to start work on something like that without any guarantee that you’re going to make it to the finish line, especially when you’ve seen someone fail at it in fairly recent memory.
I visited the set of The Golden Compass the first time around, and everyone on that set said all the right things. They were all so determined to get the world right, and at that point, everyone was positively drunk on Lord of the Rings, chasing their own version of it, and New Line was sure they had the answer with Philip Pullman’s trilogy. I read the books at that point and I was unconvinced. I thought they were interesting but with some strange dramatic choices, and I wasn’t sure the daemons would ever truly work onscreen.
Now that they’re two seasons deep on the series, I am pleased to have been wrong about the potential, although I definitely think it helps that they have room to tell the story, taking seventeen hours so far. It also helps that Daphne Keen is well-cast as Lyra, with an equally-well-cast adversary in the form of Ruth Wilson as Mrs. Coulter.
I am surprised that they’re getting their third season, though, because it feels to me like the first two seasons happened in absolute secrecy. I haven’t heard anyone talking about the show, and I haven’t seen any real buzz about it. I think it got better and better over the course of the series, with the back half of season two really getting it all right, but I’m surprised by how little noise it’s made. It’s clearly an expensive show, and it’s a well-known property. I would think that this kind of no-impact cultural footprint would doom a show, especially these days when there are a thousand options competing for your attention at any given moment.
As with WandaVision, which feels to me like a genuine hit at this point, I’m not basing this on the numbers that have typically been used to gauge these things. I’m more interested in the way it feels like something is landing in pop culture. One of the main things I use social media for is to take a sort of culture temperature as things are released. I follow thousands and thousands of people, and there’s no way I can read everything that goes by. I don’t even try. Instead, I treat Twitter like a river that is always moving, and when I want to, I dip in and look around. You can get a quick sense of how much people are organically talking about something and how much is marketing-driven, and they are very different things. I do think the right amount of marketing and the right kind of marketing can drive that conversation, but it can’t keep it going when people just aren’t interested in something.
Likewise, when people love something, that buzz takes on a life of its own. You can see the way people start to absorb the pop culture they love into their lives, and it doesn’t feel to me like His Dark Materials has done any of that. I’m curious if any of you have been watching it and what you think, but more than that, I’m curious if buzz really means anything. After all, a lot of shows that are giants for networks, like all of the NCIS shows or the 911 shows, don’t seem to have any real footprint in social media, but clearly someone’s watching them. It’s easy to mistake buzz for actual success, and it’s easy to think that something has to have an online footprint to be considered a hit, but neither thing is automatically true.
Are there things you love that feel like they don’t exist in the larger conversation? Things you watch that it feels like you’re the only one watching? This is the main point I’m curious about on today’s Friday-Free-For-All, and I’d love your feedback below.
Remember… with the Friday-Free-For-All, anything’s fair game. I want you guys to feel free to chat about anything as long as you treat each other with respect. Today’s question is just a starting point!
AND FINALLY…
Rodney Ascher’s new film A Glitch In The Matrix is available today, and if you’ve seen Room 237 or The Nightmare, you have a pretty good idea what you’re in for. Ascher’s work seems largely concerned with people who believe in extreme or marginalized things, and he gives them room to speak without feeling judged. This new documentary is about the idea that we might be living in a computer simulation, and it covers a fair amount of ground while focusing on this very specific idea.
In an odd bit of synchronicity that would probably make half the people in Ascher’s film completely freaked out, Mike Cahill’s new film Bliss is also coming out today, and it also concerns the idea of simulated lives and artificial worlds, with Owen Wilson starring as a man who comes unmoored from reality and Salma Hayek starring as the woman who may be the only one who can tell him what’s real and what’s not. I wish I liked Cahill’s film anywhere near as much as I liked Ascher’s but I think I’m just not in sync with Cahill as a storyteller. This very much feels like a companion piece to I Origins and Another Earth, and if you liked the oblique storytelling of those films, you may well enjoy this one more than I did.
Ascher’s film covers the way the simulation theory has appeared in other forms before now, the way the modern version of it evolved, and the moral implications of the idea. That last one is maybe the most interesting part of the film for me, and it goes to the larger questions that people ask about morality in general. In short, if this reality is a construct, then why be moral at all? I don’t see this as much different than the question about why you would be moral if you don’t believe in God. If your morality all depends on external factors and not on the idea that other people’s intrinsic worth is equal to your own, then that’s not really morality. That’s fear, and it’s not a foundation for you to make genuinely good choices. Ascher tells the story of a young man who felt disconnected from reality and who killed his own parents, and he traces the way the young man’s lawyers initially tried using The Matrix as part of his legal defense. In the end, he took full responsibility for what he did, though, and even though other people have tried the same defense since then, it hasn’t proven to be a viable way to dodge responsibility. At this point, the simulation remains a very marginalized theory, and there’s no one better at capturing a subculture on the fringe than Ascher, so if you’re remotely interested in the subject, this one’s well worth your time this weekend.
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Here’s this week’s media diary, and as always, things I particularly enjoyed are in bold.
THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Pick of the Week / The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
also - The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson; Already Dead by Charlie Huston; The Case of the Lazy Lover by Erle Stanley Gardner
THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Pick of the Week / Hellboy Omnibus Vol. 4 - Hellboy In Hell
also - Batman Annual #5; Amazing Spider-Man #55 - #57; Avengers #40; Future State: Superman of Metropolis #1; Future State: The Next Batman #1; Star Wars Legends: The Empire, Vol. 1 - Epic Collection; Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago, Vol. 2; Star Wars #11; Star Wars: The High Republic #2; Star Wars Adventures: The High Republic #1; Redfork; Lonesome Days, Savage Nights; The Fearsome Doctor Fang
THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: Pick of the Week / MBMBaM - “A Force Sandwich with Lightsaber Sauce”
also - High & Mighty with Jon Gabrus - “Motivation with Eugene Cordero and Ryan Stanger”; Doughboys - “Subway 3 with Sean Clements & Hayes Davenport”; The Boogie Monster - “Stocks n Stuff”; Screen Drafts - “Aquatic Horror with Rebekah McKendry & David Ian McKendry”; The Kingcast - “The Shining Mini-Series with Nick Lutsko”, “Firestarter with Kate Siegel”; “Battleground with Fred Raskin”; The Dollop - “Zoo Man Cy DeVry,” “The Gentleman’s Riots for Slavery”
THIS WEEK’S TV: Pick of the Week - WandaVision S1 E4, E5
also - Superstore S6 E7, E8 ; The Stand S1 E7, E8; Resident Alien S1 E1, E2; Taxi S1 E17, E18; Monty Python’s Flying Circus S1 E4; Mr. Mayor S1 E5, E6; Dickinson S1 E4; His Dark Materials S2 E4 - E7; Search Party S2 E3 - E5; The Lady and the Dale S1 E1, E2; Babylon 5 S1 E1; The Expanse S1 E3; Flack S1 E1, E2; Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist S2 E5; The Good Guys S1 E1; SCTV Network 90 S2 E3; Gangs of London S1 E2; Your Honor S1 E1; Married At First Sight S12 E4
THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Cyberpunk 2077; Scott Pilgrim vs The World
THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Pick of the Week / The Untouchables
also - The Rock; The Little Things; American Buffalo; The Enforcer; Victor/Victoria; Swiss Family Robinson; The Island at the Top of the World; Treasure of Matecumbe; Allied; The Brothers Bloom; Ants in the Pantry; The Master; Run Hide Fight; Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
I watched the first season of Dark Materials and mostly liked it, but wasn't even aware the second season existed. And I have HBOMax! So indeed it was a well kept secret.
I feel that the Pixar Sparkshorts on Disney+ have not been talked up enough, with only "Out" getting much comment, mostly from people frustrated by the approach it took to its subject matter. So far I haven't seen one that I've disliked, and a lot of them are straight-up great. I haven't bothered with Disney/Pixar features of late (save for Toy Story 4) because they're pretty much all the same now, as you noted a little while back, but the Sparkshorts are something I can still look forward to.