genuinely cannot stop cackling about how Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as an entity is a perfect adaptation of those terrible Marvel Comics event storylines that promise fun and intrigue and that “nothing will ever be the same again” but in actuality just end up interrupting every other comic in the lineup for an infuriatingly mediocre cyclone of bullshit conflict and character assassination galore for everyone involved, quick to disappoint and just as quick to be forgotten about in the coming month.
I got about halfway through rewatching CATWS again and I keep seeing all the lines they’ve buried as foreshadowing for Zola’s reveal and I just can’t see it all as unintentional (even if they’ve tried now for 8 years to wind it all back).
One of Steve’s major internal conflicts in CATWS is “trust”. Right at the start, he makes a few humorous jabs at Sam, but as soon as he feels Sam starts to pry, Steve backs away.
Sam: Must have freaked you out, coming home after the whole defrosting thing. Steve: It takes some getting used to. It’s good to see you, Sam.
It’s not just the line that shuts the conversation down, Steve’s entire body language closes off and he turns away from Sam. Sam, being the amazing guy he is, manages to draw Steve back by sharing his own personal experience of war. Steve then opens up because he recognises that Sam approached him as a fellow traumatised human being, and not for “Captain America”, and not for any ulterior motive.
Natasha then whisks Steve away, and we enter the world of subterfuge that is SHIELD. Immediately during the Lemurian Star sequence we establish that Steve dislikes ulterior motives, double-crossing and people withholding information from him.
He and Fury then argue over Project Insight. There are other important themes there about freedom of choice (“this isn’t freedom, this is fear”), innocence until proven guilty (“I thought punishment usually came after the crime”), and American imperialism (“holding a gun to everyone on Earth and calling it protection”) which I won’t go into here. They finish their conversation this way:
Fury: SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we like it to be. And it’s getting damn near past time for you to get with that program, Cap. Steve: Don’t hold your breath.
What happens next is an important story moment, both emotionally for Steve and thematically for the overarching narrative. Steve makes three visits - I’ve said before how these represent his past (the mural of Bucky, the things he’s lost), his present (Peggy, wizened and weary, secluded from society), and his future (Sam, youthful and energetic, moving past his trauma). But there’s also something else key to these moments, and it is trust.
These are the three people Steve thinks he can trust in his life at that moment in time. He knows he can’t trust Nat and Fury (they even told him this). He goes first to find Bucky, because that’s his childhood friend and brother-in-arms, but of course Bucky can’t give him any answers. He then goes to find Peggy, and it is this very brief conversation with Peggy that has all the foreshadowing for the big reveal.
Peggy: You saved the world, we rather mucked it up. Steve:You didn’t. (*CEvans gave emphasis on the “you”). Knowing you helped found SHIELD is half the reason I stay. Peggy: The world has changed and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best we can do is to start over.
I’m just going to address the last line first. That line is often given as a mark of Peggy’s words giving Steve’s character direction. But on my most recent rewatch, I noticed this line.
Pierce: Despite all the diplomacy and the handshaking and the rhetoric, to build a really better world sometimes means having to tear the old one down.
Those lines, repeated only two assassination attempts 20 minutes apart, draw a disturbing parallel between Pierce/SHIELD-ra’s intention with Project Insight, and Peggy’s advice to Steve about what should happen next. Was it accidental? Or in the hands of a good writer, foreshadowing?
Going back to the first part of the exchange. Steve’s emphasis on him staying in SHIELD because Peggy had found it…
Is it any accident that upon walking into the abandoned SHIELD facility, he first lays eyes on Peggy’s picture - and is tensely silent when Nat asks him who the girl is - then less than 10 paces from her picture is the entrance to the hidden lift?
This was supposed to be a moment of betrayal. Steve is not stupid. Neither, supposedly, is Peggy.
Immediately upon seeing Bucky, Steve mused that “whatever (Zola) did helped him survive the fall”. He already put two and two together.
The significance of what Zola said about Hydra growing inside SHIELD, and Bucky fighting for SHIELDra would not have been lost on Steve. Even without Bucky explaining the conditions of his imprisonment, it was easy enough to infer that Zola had recaptured Bucky and used him for Hydra’s ends.
Now, going back to the theme of trust. Consistently, throughout this movie, Steve reacts badly when he finds out people have lied or withheld information from him. He’s sarcastic when he finds out the Lemurian Star “isn’t off course, it’s trespassing”. He is furious upon finding out Nat has been given a separate assignment that he didn’t know about. He confronts Fury about it, and doesn’t stop snarking at Fury about his “compartmentalisation” even in the end. And for Sharon Carter, who lied to him about being a nurse? His only acknowledgement of her greeting him is a terse “neighbour”.
Do we really think he hasn’t…at least questioned why a woman he has regularly visited over the last 2 years, who he trusted enough to go to for life advice (he literally gave a monologue to her about feeling lost, which is the most emotionally vulnerable we’ve ever seen Steve be aside from the post-funeral “end of the line” scene) has compartmentalisedthis vital piece of information about Zola? If not also about Hydra and Bucky?
At the end of the movie, Steve learns to trust again: it is in Sam, who had treated him like a fellow veteran, and who was open and truthful in all of their conversations; it is in Bucky, who had been steadfast and loyal in his friendship, and who saves his life upon hearing their childhood promise; and it is in Nat, who gradually sheds all her pretences through the movie and show him what she believes in.
But the organisation that he had once stayed in because Peggy had built it? Steve insisted on tearing it down even when Fury suggested to salvage it. CATWS was a story that built Peggy up to be a villain…then the MCU changed its mind and reneged on a Captain America 3.
james gunn tweeted that he changed drax’s origin story to simplify it for people and to make the story more interesting with aliens instead of a bunch of humans who happen to wind up in space. tbh, I have no problem with any of that! I get it’s a different story telling format and let’s be honest, comics are wild (and I, too, am very tired of space stories with a bunch of humans)
what actually bugs me, what makes me dislike mcu drax, is that he’s nothing like the actual drax. comic drax, particularly in the 2008 comics which is where he got more of a limelight and story, is sarcastic, calculating, and smart. he can hide in the shadows, he knows how to suss out skrulls, and he intensely cares for his daughter, his daughter’s girlfriend, and the human girl he basically adopts. he wants to do right by them, and make amends for his past mistakes. he teaches richard rider about war tactics, he goes toe-to-toe with thanos and kills him himself, and then frees galactus and saves his daughter, leading to an end to the annihilation wave that swept over galaxies
mcu drax is a one note ‘why is gamora’ joke; severely underpowered and played for (bad) comic relief
Using the “well, he stopped selling them” argument every time Stark is criticized for selling weapons as an attempt to separate him for the trade and deaths those weapons caused for years is sign of just how privileged he was and I think it’s disingenuous to claim otherwise.
I think it is actually part of the pattern in the MCU as a whole. For a lot of designated “heroes” redemption basically means “stop doing the bad thing”.
Like, Thor simply stopped (even if not really) murdering inhabitants of other realms in imperialistic “interventions” and being openly racist towards them (again, not really) and is never even called out on it. He even gets to say “In my youth I courted war” barely a year after his last attempt at pointless murder of Jotuns. Valkyrie stopped selling slaves and it’s never mentioned again. Hell, Mobius stops supporting genocide of entire universes for made up crimes only after it becomes personal for him and is still painted as a good and righteous guy, worthy of being a judge of the morality of others.
And the ones who are villanized and get ‘redemption arcs’ are the characters who had their autonomy taken from them and couldn’t do anything to stop it…
Character who commits genocide and/or other horrible crimes then (sometimes) realizes their mistakes:
Character who is tortured and/or otherwise forced into doing something bad (even when it’s not as bad as what the first character did):
