With a slew of Marvel Studios productions coming to Disney+ over the next six months, The Escapist has launched a weekly show discussing these series. I’ll be joining the wonderful Jack Packard and the fantastic KC Nwosu to break down WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki as they come out.
This week, we take a look at the fourth episode of WandaVision, particularly the pointed metatext, the question of “checkbox” storytelling and the question of how best to pace a story being told like this.
I published a new column at The Escapist this evening. Since I binged The Expanse and since the season finale is out this week, I figured it was worth taking a look at the show as one of the defining television series of the past ten years.
Every generation gets a science-fiction show that reflects its particular anxieties. The Expanse is a show that engages aggressively with the concerns of the moment. It is a show about fragmentation, about nationalism, about inequality, about exploitation and about power. In the same way that Star Trek spoke to the uncertainty and tumult of the sixties, and Battlestar Galactica spoke to the nightmare of the War on Terror, The Expanse resonates with a world still coming to terms with the aftermath of the Great Recession.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
The Sound of Snow my favourite episode of the third season of Millennium, serving as a nice epilogue to the second season finale The Fourth Horseman and The Time is Now. It is an episode that is largely about grief and moving on, about coming to terms with loss and about working through it. In some ways, it feels like a necessary story for the third season of Millennium as a whole, and it is only a shame that it takes half a season for the show to reach the point where it can tell this story.
As ever, you can listen directly to the episode here, subscribe to the podcast here, or click the link below.
With a slew of Marvel Studios productions coming to Disney+ over the next six months, The Escapist has launched a weekly show discussing these series. I’ll be joining the wonderful Jack Packard and the fantastic KC Nwosu to break down WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki as they come out.
This week, we take a look at the third episode of WandaVision, including looking at spoilers, metatext, predictions, long games, inside jokes and the art of pacing of a serialised narrative like this.
I published a new column at The Escapist last week, but didn’t get a chance to share it. With WandaVision now streaming on Disney+, it seemed like a good idea to take a look at it.
The most striking thing about WandaVision is how immersed it is in the language of television. Previous attempts to bring the MCU to television treated it as secondary to movies; Netflix shows like Daredevil or Iron Fist were treated as thirteen-hour movies, while Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter lived off scraps from the films that drove the shared universe. In contrast, WandaVision is not just a thriving celebration of television as a medium, it’s also an exploration of it. This is very firmly and very definitely the MCU coming to television.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
With a slew of Marvel Studios productions coming to Disney+ over the next six months, The Escapist has launched a weekly show discussing these series. I’ll be joining the wonderful Jack Packard and the fantastic KC Nwosu to break down WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki as they come out.
The plan if for the weekly episodes to launch on Saturday, but our first episode is launching today looking at the first two episodes of WandaVision. We talk about expectations, about continuity, and about what it means for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to come to television.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With WandaVision currently streaming on Disney+, it seemed like an interesting opportunity to look at the show’s use of the language of sitcoms.
In particular, sitcoms have long been a staple genre of American television. However, they don’t just reflect cultural norms, they also project an aspirational ideal. For generations of Americans, the domestic sitcom presented a vision of domestic life that shaped and informed popular consciousness. In WandaVision, those nostalgic fantasies become a trap and a waking nightmare, as characters build themselves a life of seeming domestic bliss dictated by decades of television. Wanda has built herself a cage, treating television as a mirror.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist yesterday. With WandaVision launching this weekend, it seemed like a good time to take a look back at Marvel’s first foray into streaming, their Netflix series.
The Punisher was the last entry into the shared Netflix Marvel Universe, starring Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle. However, what’s interesting about The Punisher on Netflix is the extent to which the series is reluctant to let Frank Castle… be Frank Castle, to wallow in what makes the Punisher such a challenging and unsettled character. In contrast, the series reframes Frank as a much mroe generic streaming hero, stripping out anything that makes the character particularly compelling or engaging.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With WandaVision launching this weekend, it seemed like a good time to take a look back at Marvel’s first foray into streaming.
The series produced by Netflix are largely forgotten and overlooked in histories of the shared universe, which makes sense given that they operated at a remove from contemporaneous features like Avengers: Age of Ultron or Captain America: Civil War. However, when it originally premiered, the first season of Daredevil was jaw-dropping. It was bold and ambitious in a way that stood apart from the rest of the live action content associated with the studio. Marvel Studios could learn a lot from it as they return to the medium.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With rumours that Jodie Whittaker may be departing Doctor Who, it seems an appropriate time to look back her time on the show. In particular, the weird political furore around it.
Under producer Chris Chibnall, Doctor Who has been criticised for being “too woke” and “too politically correct.” This is interesting, because – if anything – the show is more conservative than it has been at any point since the mid-eighties. Under Chibnall, Doctor Who believes that “the systems aren’t the problem” and is openly deferential to authority. It frequently rejects the idea of radical systemic change, instead suggesting that the status quo is something to be preserved rather than disturbed.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
the m0vie blog 