I’d also be fine with any of those three approaches, and I agree they’d be more interesting than “he was secretly a villain the whole time.” 

I dunno, seems pretty natural there’d be some (mostly low-key) rivalry between Cap’s old best friend/sidekick and new best friend/sidekick. And there’s no particular reason they would be friends - after all, how much time have they actually spent getting to know each other? They were probably together a few…

The other problem with making Walker a racist idiot is that a whole ton of people would have been involved in choosing the next Cap. I find it hard to imagine that at least one of them wouldn’t have gone ‘you know, maybe we shouldn’t choose someone hateful to be the next Captain America.’

I suppose it’s possible it was intentional - that the plan was to have a regressed version of Thor in Endgame that doesn’t get his life back together until the next movie. But (1) leaving a character static through an entire movie is bad storytelling, and (2) they played it like him leaving was the right call, so I…

The “maintaining his faith in humanity rather than the other way around” idea is a good point. Reminds me of Doctor Who, and the recurring question of whether we live up to the Doctor’s expectations, and how he manages to keep finding a reason to fight for us when we don’t. (Or not - there was that moment in Torchwood…

I think what we’re maybe saying is that IW should have been more like Endgame (setting up pieces via interesting character studies), and Endgame should have been more like IW (one last go-round with familiar characters and familiar action beats)? 

Agreed - the dude is capable of being charming (see Man from UNCLE), but Snyder apparently intentionally created a Superman that is the opposite of charming. It takes an incredibly gifted actor to make ‘inhuman god’ interesting, particularly without any help from the script. I can’t really fault Cavill for not being…

I think I had the exact same issue with Infinity War that you did (undoing the previous movies), it just didn’t bother me until Endgame, when I realized we weren’t going to ‘fix’ any of it.

It’s not like white people are unfamiliar with the “only I get to call my brother an idiot” concept* - anyone who says they can’t understand why its ok within a minority group but not for outsiders is either (1) lying or (2) so racist that they truly don’t see how something that applies to their own in-group could…

Cool Runnings!  The quintessential High School Sports Team Bus Trip movie. 

I’ve never understood why not having emotions means not using contractions / generally talking like a poorly programmed robot. Not feeling things doesn’t undo 30 years of learned linguistic behavior! This sort of dialogue seems to happen every time a genre show has a character get a brain boost (I call it the ‘Data…

I think what Wanda did to Agatha was supposed to be a bit horrifying. Acting-wise it was definitely played as cold hard revenge, as intentionally vicious rather than angry lashing out. The show threw in enough moments to make us uncomfortable with Wanda, so that we can’t help but wonder if the Scarlet Witch is going…

I had assumed that White Vision (WV) went off to kill himself. His instructions were to destroy the real vision, and Vision convinced WV that WV was the real vision (and had a very sad look on his face when he did it). Given that Vision wanted his body destroyed so no one could use it as a weapon, it seemed consistent…

I can’t help but wonder if its a twin-powers thing: that Jordan’s kryptonian half only ‘activates’ if he’s around his brother

He seemed to be saying that the US was the only country that *fought a war* to abolish slavery - though as you point out, other countries managed to abolish slavery *without* fighting a war over it, so I’m not sure why he thinks that speaks well of us.

I’d have to think on the classist attitudes interpretation, but I agree that a lack of compassion was a key reason his treatment of Faith gave me bad vibes. Faith actually could have been interesting, but she was just used for shock value.

I’d argue there’s nothing inherently wrong with writing a character that’s a villainous oversexed teen if it’s handled in an interesting way, but everything about Faith seemed so... voyeuristic? It wasn’t “here’s how a really damaged person might react to being a slayer,” it was “ooh, goody, lets play in the ‘damaged…

I also used to quite enjoy it (also largely for Spencer), but I think I dropped it somewhere around season 7 when I realized that (1) the team never seemed to actually use their special skills to solve mysteries anymore, they just kind of stumbled over obvious answers,* and (2) the guest stars / day players were…

I agree Doctor Who is great at this - the (modern) gold standard is still LOTR, I think.

Agreed. Treating it like subtle foreshadowing for the Agatha theme is a weird way to look at it - it’s just the recurring WandaVision theme, which is then co-opted by Agatha (much like the plot/show itself).