"The Boys," Year Five

Parts of "The Boys" fandom seem to have vocally turned against the show in its last season, which is getting weirdly common with genre media these days.  I find this a little mystifying, because "The Boys" has been pretty consistent in quality throughout its whole run, and has even been released on a reasonable schedule - five seasons across seven years.  My pet theory is that it's the same old story.  Some of the fans expected the show to be something that it never was, and handled the disappointment badly.  "The Boys" did decrease in quality the longer it went on, ran short on ideas, started repeating itself, and had to juggle the same issues that all long-running shows do.  Still, I thought it ended just fine - better than "Supernatural," or "Preacher," other genre shows from the same creators.

The fifth season has its ups and downs.  Like "Daredevil: Born Again," events in "The Boys" mirror current events in 2026 to a startling degree.  However, "The Boys" has been purposefully reflecting the rise of MAGA and the alt right since the beginning, with Homelander standing in for Donald Trump.  Still, it's wild how some of the extreme escalations in Homelander's tyrannical behavior look an awful lot like what the Trump administration is actually doing, starting with our heroes incarcerated in a "freedom camp" in the season premiere.  The season's biggest storyline involves The Boys hunting for the means to create a plague that will only affect people with superpowers, and to prevent Homelander from obtaining Compound V, a substance that will potentially give him immortality.  After establishing total control over the US government, Homelander finds he's still miserable, so he turns to religion.  With the help of the superpowered televangelist, Oh Father (Daveed Diggs), he decides to create a new American belief system with Homelander himself as the supreme being.  

Beyond this point, there will be spoilers.

I suspect that one of the reasons certain fans of "The Boys" were so unhappy is that this season, is that it stays pretty small scale throughout.  There's no epic spectacle, no mass casualty events, and a fairly modest amount of property damage.  We do get our big showdown in the last episode, but it's not any more impressive than the showdowns we've seen in previous seasons.  The pacing is also fairly slow and meandering, not really building up to a major climax.  Instead, the season could be called a collection of false-starts, abrupt endings, and lots of indulgent nonsense that the creators wanted to try while they still had the chance.  There's an episode that's essentially a bunch of one-shot character shorts that at one point involves a lot of random celebrity cameos and a few "Supernatural" alums.  It's also very apparent that the creators are setting up storylines for other shows in "The Boys" universe - we're at three spinoffs so far.  This means some characters like Solider Boy really wear out their welcome, and nobody bothers to explain who any of these kids from the "Gen V" show are.  

Still, I was satisfied with the way things shook out, even if the season felt like it was running short of material.  This time there is no more pulling of punches or ducking out on the consequences.  The bill comes due and there are a lot of major character deaths.  Some of them should have probably happened earlier, but none of them feel cheap.  Endings are difficult, and I thought that the showrunners did the right thing choosing to focus on the characters instead of the carnage.  My favorite storylines this year had to do with the Vought toadies like Ashley and Firecracker dealing with their complicity in Homelander's reign of terror.  Ashley becoming Vice President and literally growing a second face on the back of her head (Who has her own personality!  And is telepathic!) is so much fun. 

Sure, there are missteps.  Everything involving Soldier Boy and Sage is pretty underwhelming.  Kimiko being able to talk felt kind of pointless, though clearly it needed to happen.  I wish some of the big character moments, like Hughie finally standing up to Butcher, were given some better buildup.  Honestly, I haven't been very invested enough in the show since the first season, so its slipping quality simply didn't bother me much.  The ending was telegraphed long in advance, and the fact that they stuck it was all I really wanted.          

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"Invincible," Year Four

Spoilers for the first three seasons ahead.

I'm having some trouble with "Invincible."  I've become convinced that the show probably peaked with the first season.  There's plenty of interesting stuff that happens this year, as Mark and Nolan reconnect to wage war against the Viltrumites.  There are more allies to be gathered and new villains to be revealed.  However, an awful lot of time is also spent on Nolan's apology tour, as he starts to make amends with Debbie, Mark, and Oliver.  And while I appreciate that "Invincible" is still committed to portraying all of Mark's personal relationships with something approaching realism, it still bothers me that the show has spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to walk back Nolan's betrayal, arguably the defining moment of the entire show.  And the show is worse for it.

It's not that three seasons isn't long enough to pull off this kind of development, but "Invincible" is much better at being a superhero action show than it is at being a melodrama.  During the big emotional showdowns the vocal performances are very good, but visually the characters are noticeably static and there's hardly any change at all in lighting or composition or shot choice to help sell the intensity.  "Invincible" has been cutting corners with its animation from the beginning in order to keep the production timeline reasonable, but I felt it more this season.  There are several flying scenes where the limited animation is especially egregious.  It's hard not to notice that the character designs of new characters like The Grand Regent Thragg (Lee Pace), rebel leader Thaedus (Peter Cullen) and new recruit Tech Jacket (Zoey Deutch) are very derivative of other characters.  

Many of the writing choices this year struck me as off.  While I liked some of the individual episodes, there's a real head-scratcher in "Hurm," which is spent exploring the Under Realm, the show's version of Hell that is populated by supernatural creatures.  It might be setting up something further down the line, but feels like a strange digression the way it's placed in the season.  The Guardians show up for two early episodes, set up a big cliffhanger, and disappear until presumably next year.  The most interesting subplot is actually about Eve having trouble with her powers, and big chunks of that take place completely offscreen.  I'm glad that Debbie gets more of the spotlight, but her wonderfully cathartic scenes with Nolan wind up being seriously undercut by where the story goes in the last episode.  I haven't read all of the source material, but I have the same terrible feeling that I had with a lot of cartoons growing up when they were about to do something that drove me crazy - moving back to the original status quo, and resetting the board even where it doesn't make sense to.  Maybe it won't happen.  I really, really hope it doesn't. 

I know some viewers are only here for the outrageous level of violence that "Invincible" regularly delivers.  I don't think this gets remotely as gory as the third season, but the action fiends should be satisfied.  There are many more Viltrumite-on-Viltrumite battles, and the premiere episode had a pretty gnarly take on an alien invasion that I enjoyed.  Those who have been waiting for a full scale Viltrumite war might come away a little disappointed, however.   Despite spending so much of the prior seasons setting up the Viltrumites as an implacable threat, when push comes to shove they almost feel like underdogs in the fight.  It was akin to preparing for the Galactic Empire, and finding out the enemy is a single terrorist cell - it's still bad, but much more manageable.  

I still like "Invincible" enough that I'm going to stick it out until the end, but I've had to adjust expectations.  That relentless sense of narrative momentum from the first season is probably not coming back.  We're never going to get a better villain than Nolan on this show because it was the family connection and the deception that really made the twist hurt.  And now Nolan is more akin to a redeemed antihero, and watching him is no longer very fun or frightening.  I still want to see where Mark and Eve's stories go, but Nolan's wearing out his welcome.  I hope to see less of him from here on out, as it's already been established that "Invincible" works perfectly well without him.

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"The Boys," Year Four

Spoilers for the first three seasons ahead.

I nearly dropped "The Boys" after a third season that felt repetitive and stalled out.  It was only because I knew that the show was ending with the fifth season that I decided to catch up on the fourth one, and then I debated whether to just write up the last two seasons together.  However, I think the fourth season has enough for me to talk about in its own post.

There's still a lot about the fourth season of "The Boys" that is repetitive and feels like it's stalling for time.  We don't appear any closer to the show's final goal of either killing Homelander or watching everybody die trying.  However, there are some different goals and side-quests this year that play out in interesting ways, as well as a few new characters and old characters in new roles.  Right off the bat, the best new addition to the show is Susan Heyward as the superintelligent Sister Sage, who is absolutely fascinating to watch because she is working toward her own unstated goals the whole time, which don't match the goals of anyone else in the show.  She also has a habit of temporarily lobotomizing herself to enjoy sex and junk food binges, which gets funnier every time it happens.  

I also like Valorie Curry as Firecracker, a right wing influencer and conspiracy theory peddler, who spearheads the media misinformation campaign against Starlight.  I didn't think it was possible, but "The Boys" becomes even more blatant about tying Homelander's supporters to the alt-right this season, with Firecracker as a cutting caricature of the new breed of MAGA-era white nationalist zealot.  The show apparently got a little too close to current events for comfort, prompting the finale to change its official title from "Assassonation Run" to "Season Four Finale," due to some of the depicted events.  I found the Firecracker storyline the most difficult to watch due to how grating her schtick is, but I'm also very appreciative of it, because the satire is so spot-on.

Easily the most improved performer is Cameron Crovetti as Ryan, who is given much more to do as he gains more autonomy and starts asking more difficult questions of his two father figures.  "The Boys" is better about balancing its dark humor with more sincere storylines this year, and Ryan experiencing some growing pains was one of the better ones.  I also want to highlight Claudia Doumit as politician Victoria Neuman, who is one of this year's major villains.  Like Sister Sage, she's a villain with some shades of gray, and it was genuinely hard to predict where her loyalties were ultimately going to land.  I also want to acknowledge that Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Rosemarie DeWitt, Will Ferrell, and Tilda Swinton appear in this season in roles I will not spoil. 

As for the main characters, the showrunners did a decent job of giving everyone new things to do, while not making it too obvious that nobody was making much progress.  A-Train and Ashley got some of the funnier interactions as they toyed with dumping Vought.  Deep and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) are pretty much pure comic relief at this point.  Homelander gets points for never getting any less disturbing every time he shows up.  On the other team, Hughie and Annie had a good season, weathering a lot of ups and downs.  I wasn't sure why Frenchie and Kimiko were seemingly on a break at the beginning of the season, or how Frenchie ended up in a deeply problematic relationship with a guy named Colin (Elliot Knight), but at least that one wrapped up well.  Butcher had a very big, meaningful arc this year, but it wasn't executed too well, regrettably.

I continue to prefer the show's worldbuilding to any of its actual plot.  Season Four gives us a holiday ice show, an Avenue Q parody (complete with a song number about informing on your parents), superpowered farm animals, and the most depraved versions of Batman and Spiderman I have ever seen.  The shocks are still pretty inventive and disgusting, which I respect, even if this part of the show hasn't worked for me for the past few seasons.  And I'm looking forward to the finale, and seeing if "The Boys" can top itself one more time.  This feels like the right time for "The Boys" to be ending, and I'm glad it's going on its own terms.

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"Eyes of Wakanda" and "Marvel Zombies"

Two Marvel universe animated miniseries were released last year, which both skewed nerdier and more mature than Disney+'s usual animated offerings.  Both run four episodes of roughly 30 minutes each, adding up to the length of two feature films.  

"Eyes of Wakanda" explores concepts from "Black Panther," tracking the efforts of multiple Wakandans over the centuries retrieving artifacts and going on special missions around the globe.  In the first episode, a former Dora Milaje travels to the Minoan Empire to retrieve a Wakandan agent who has gone rogue.  The second is set during the Trojan War, the third in China in the 1400s, and the fourth gives us glimpses of Wakanda of the future.  All the characters are new, and don't have obvious ties to the characters in "Black Panther," which means there's some time needed to adjust to the new reality of each episode.

The series is designed to be a showcase for black talent, with the episodes written by Geoffrey Thorne and Marc Bernardin, directed by Todd Harris and John Fang, and cast with an array of black actors including Steven Touissant and Anika Noni Rose.  What stands out are the visuals, featuring a dynamic, impactful animation style that makes the action scenes look great.  The production quality is strong the whole way through, but this is very much an anthology where the individual stories are designed to be self-contained and barely connected to each other, so "Eyes of Wakanda" ends up feeling very diverting but non-essential.  I'd love to see some of the episodes expanded, especially the third where we get a crossover with a different part of the MCU, but getting "Eyes of Wakanda" made was surely difficult enough. 

However, as unlikely as "Eyes of Wakanda" is, I'm downright baffled that "Marvel Zombies" exists.  This is a spinoff of the "What If…?" episode that takes place in a dystopian version of Earth where much of the population and the superhero community have been zombified.  It uses the same visual style and brings back many of the same characters.  "Marvel Zombies" has a mature rating because there is violence galore and characters are constantly being killed left and right.  We start out in the first episode with Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) being gal-pal survivalists together in the remains of New York, who discover a mystery device inside a zombie, which might save the world.  This kicks off a long, winding journey through different realms of the zombified MCU, picking up friends and allies and much more trouble along the way.

  

I appreciate that the status quo is constantly changing in "Marvel Zombies," so it's impossible to guess what's going to happen next.  The stakes are also properly epic, as the miniseries builds to a big conclusion involving multiple big bads.  However, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but the most die-hard adult MCU fans.  It takes a good amount of knowledge of the existing film continuity to keep all the various characters straight, and appreciate how they differ from their original versions.  The  inexpressive animation style is also not helpful in this regard.  It took me a while to realize that John Walker (Wyatt Russell) had shown up in one of the episodes, and I spent a few minutes of the finale trying to work out who another character was (It was London Master (Daniel Swain) from the second "Doctor Strange" movie).   

If you're confident in your nerd bona fides, however, and you like darkest timeline scenarios, "Marvel Zombies" can be a lot of fun.  A surprising number of MCU actors were convinced to lend their voices to the project, and I like what the series does with some of them.  A few of my favorites get great death scenes, and this is definitely the best use of Agent Woo (Randall Park) yet.  There's a focus on "Shang-Chi" and "Black Widow" characters, which hints at when "Marvel Zombies" was written, but also some fun cameos from other shows.  Also, we get an interesting version of Blade (Todd Williams) who provides hints at what his long-stalled feature was going to look like.  

Marvel doesn't get this dark very often, so if "Marvel Zombies" sounds like it would appeal to you, enjoy it while you can.        

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"Wonder Man" Works

The "Wonder Man" miniseries, created by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, is being released under the "Marvel Spotlight" banner, meaning that it has very few ties to the wider MCU.   Frankly, it has more in common with "The Studio" than the last few Marvel pictures.  This is a superhero series where the hero barely does any fighting or uses any superpowers.  There's no love interest, no supervillain, and hardly any flashy special effects to speak of.  Most of "Wonder Man" turns out to be about two guys in Hollywood trying to get jobs.  

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Simon Williams, an actor who is constantly hustling for auditions in Hollywood, and is currently up for the lead in a reboot of an old superhero property, "Wonder Man."  However, Simon has a secret - he may actually have superpowers.  However, since nobody will insure a superpowered actor, Simon has to keep this under wraps or lose his dream of playing his favorite hero.  Unfortunately, a sinister figure (Arian Moayed) has noticed Simon's activities, and coerces a fellow actor to befriend and unmask him - the former Mandarin, Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley).  Over eight episodes, we watch Simon and Trevor bond over old movies and shared career aspirations, while Trevor secretly digs into Simon's past.

Even though this is a very weird take on a superhero story, "Wonder Man" works.  Abdul-Mateen and Kingsley make for a very good onscreen duo, and it's fun to watch their friendship develop.  I'm generally not a fan of media about actors, because I find stories about the acting process pretty insufferable.  Simon, who takes his roles too seriously, and gets himself fired from a job for overthinking and trying to change a bit part, initially had me worried.  However, the far more seasoned Trevor is soon there to set him straight and provide encouragement.  Soon they're trading movie monologues and industry stories, and getting involved in each other's business like old buds.

There's plenty of industry insider chatter, cinephile references, and a few delightful instances of famous actors playing themselves, but "Wonder Man" isn't really that concerned with showing us the ins and outs of show business.  The spotlight stays on Simon and Trevor for the most part.  This is key, because the show is so short and self-contained, there's not much of a chance for it to do anything too ambitious. So, it goes all in on building up its two leads and their attachment to each other, which was exactly the right move.  Once I realized that the show wasn't really about making the "Wonder Man" movie or even about Simon gaining enough self-awareness to be a better actor, I was onboard.  

This also feels like an oddly fitting time for a show about out-of-work actors, since the industry is weathering some tough times, Hollywood itself has been in especially bad shape, and everybody has been feeling the pinch.  Simon is pretty typical as far as fictional actors go - perpetually disappointing his agent Janelle (X Mayo), and incredibly intimidated by the director he needs to impress, Von Kovak (Zlatko Burić).  His personal relationships are also fraught.  However, Abdul-Mateen plays him like an overgrown, somewhat awkward kid without an ounce of cynicism or guile.  He's very easy to root for, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of him in the future.

As for Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery, I've liked the character since "Iron Man 3," and I'm ticked every time he shows up again in this universe.  It's clear why Kingsley keeps saying yes to more appearances.  Trevor's not a comic book character, but more like the third banana comic-relief on a sitcom.   He's the Oliver Putnam of the MCU, a perfectly cuddly old glory hound and name dropper who turns out to be more lovable the more screentime he gets.  "Wonder Man" is a perfect fit for him.

I'm afraid we're not going to be getting many more of these "Marvel Spotlight" shows in the future, which is too bad.  Being smaller scale and less ambitious really worked for "Wonder Man," and I'm sure there are plenty of other Marvel characters who could benefit from this approach too. 

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"Peacemaker," Year Two

I'm not quite sure what to do with the second season of "Peacemaker," which has shifted from being less live-action "Venture Brothers" to more generic superhero antics, and also being used as a connector piece between the big screen "Superman" movies, which is the exact sort of thing that got the MCU in so much trouble.  There is a compelling hook for the season, which is that Peacemaker has to confront more fallout of his past misdeeds while dealing with his romantic feelings for Harcourt, with the added complication of discovering that the quantum portal his father left him happens to lead into other dimensions.  And one of these other dimensions is a world where his father and brother are still alive and well.

I like all the secondary characters in Peacemaker, including Adebayo, Economos, Vigilante, and Harcourt, who have taken to referring to themselves as the 11th Street Kids.  They get a bunch of new antagonists, including ARGUS agents played by Tim Meadows and Sol Rodriguez, plus Frank Grillo as Rick Flag Sr., the new ARGUS leader.  There are a ton of cameos from James Gunn regulars, and a few faces from "Superman" too.  Judomaster (Nhut Le) is back, and as lovably annoying as ever.  And I have absolutely no issue when the show is focusing on any of them.  The trouble is that Peacemaker is the central character, and he's in an absolute funk this year that is no fun to watch.  When he's not mooning over Harcourt, grieving family members, or feeling guilt-ridden over killing Rick Flag's son, he's allowing himself to avoid his problems by being drawn deeper and deeper into the alternate dimension, where everything is obviously too perfect to be true.  

Some of the new concepts are interesting, but in general everything's a lot more toned down than the previous season.  It feels like Gunn has to be more budget conscious, so only the finale really features any expensive CGI setpieces and creature effects.  This isn't a bad thing in the least, but it does mean that this round of "Peacemaker" is less about fantastical comic-book adventures, and more intent on focusing on the real, personal problems of its oddball crew, and it's not very good at that.  I don't fault any of the actors, and John Cena remains wonderfully committed, but the material just isn't working a lot of the time.  The banter and the silly team dynamics are as good as ever, and Vigilante is quickly moving up the ranks of my favorite characters in this show, but every time we cut back to Peacemaker in existential crisis, it really takes the wind out of their sales.

It doesn't help that there is a lot of indulgent fanboy excess going on.  It feels like that since James Gunn got away with certain things in the first season of "Peacemaker," he's doubling down in this one.  For instance, there was that great opening dance sequence everybody loved in season one.  Season two gives us a new one, set to Foxy Shazam's "Oh Lord."  It's a perfectly fine song, but it doesn't deliver that big dose of bombast that Wig Wam's "Do You Want to Taste It" did.  And the music references and playlist curation are a lot more prominent this time around.  Foxy Shazam even shows up in the finale, where the camera lingers on their performance for an uncomfortable length of time.  Maybe Gunn is more interested in being a deejay than a showrunner for this crew.  

Sophomore slumps like this are pretty common, and I have no reason to think that future seasons of "Peacemaker" won't improve from here.  There's plenty about the second season that I did enjoy.  However, I think that it's pretty telling that certain brief cameos were the best parts of the episodes they appeared in, and I finished off the season much more interested in the further adventures of pretty much everyone except Peacemaker.  Frankly, it was rough finishing this batch of episodes, and now both of James Gunn's DC television projects have thrown up some major red flags for where the rest of the new DC franchise is going.  

At least "Peacemaker" is better than "Creature Commandos," but not by as much as it should be.

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Finagling "The Fantastic Four"

"The Fantastic Four: First Steps" is the third big budget attempt to launch a movie franchise with the Fantastic Four superhero team.  These have been tough characters to crack for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the heyday of the Fantastic Four comics was back in the 1960s.  Instead of trying to modernize them the way that the previous films did, "First Steps" chooses to lean into the retro vibe, taking place in an alternate universe that looks an awful lot like 1964.  Our main characters also feel like superheroes of another era - larger than life celebrity do-gooders with a long list of powers and accomplishments.

Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) is a brilliant scientist whose body stretches like rubber.  His wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) controls light, can make things invisible, and creates energy shields.  Sue's brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) can become a flying, flaming Human Torch.  Finally there's Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss Bachrach), The Thing, a strongman who appears to be literally made of stone.    All four got their powers from "cosmic rays" during a space flight a few years ago, and have since then kept busy fighting villains and bringing peace to the world.  However, this is all prologue.  Our story starts when two things happen - Reed and Sue discover that they're expecting their first child, and a Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) comes to Earth, heralding the imminent arrival of Galactus (Ralph Ineson), an implacable cosmic being who goes around literally eating planets.

The production design is the best thing about the film.  We don't just get a 1960s themed Marvel movie, but the kind of comic-book retrofuturist world where the Fantastic Four have a robot assistant named H.E.R.B.I.E. (Matthew Wood), get around in a flying "Fantasticar," and it turns out there's a hidden subterranean civilization led by a cranky Mole Man (Paul Walter Hauser), who Sue Storm brokered a peace deal with before the events of the film.  I was a little taken aback at how broad and cartoonish some of these elements were at first, but I got used to it quickly.  By the end, I was reminded that it's been an awfully long time since we've had a superhero film that's properly family friendly, and we could use more of them.  And with the big focus on family the film keeps emphasizing, it feels appropriate that "The Fantastic Four" is very all-ages.

And ultimately, I think that's why "First Steps" works.  Yes, it's goofy a lot of the time.  Yes, the CGI baby isn't always convincing.  Yes, they tried to stuff too much into one film, so it doesn't feel like some storylines and character arcs quite came together.  Apparently John Malkovitch got left on the cutting room floor somewhere.  However, it commits to telling one story from start to finish, gives us crystal clear stakes and motivations for everyone involved, and delivers plenty of excellent spectacle along the way.  It's an old fashioned, earnest superhero story in the best way, with the fate of the world in the balance, and the heroes being faced with tough moral decisions - but we know that they'll choose right in the end.  I'm not really a fan of Galactus, because he's a very one-note villain, but he sure does deliver on scope, and ultimately he feels like the right kind of threat for this kind of superhero story. 

Compared to the previous iterations of these characters, these versions of the Fantastic Four feel more idealized, and more functional as a team and family unit.  This is great for the superheroics, but also makes them less interesting to follow as characters.  Ben Grimm is lonely, but doesn't deal with any self-hatred.  Johnny expresses some frustrations, but is not the hothead loose cannon in any sense.  We learn plenty about them through their interactions with each other and with other characters, but no one on the team gets the spotlight individually for long enough for any real character development.  Reed and Sue experiencing new parent anxieties and trying to protect their kid are probably the biggest real arcs.  

I don't know if a sequel is in the cards, but we'll be seeing more of these characters very soon in the upcoming "Avengers" movies.  Hopefully they'll get a little more fleshed out there, even with the limited time.  I'm not sure if these are the best screen versions of the Fantastic Four, but they're certainly strong enough to warrant a few more appearances in the MCU.  

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State of the Superhero, 2026

2026 is going to be a big year for superhero franchises, but let's recap 2025 first.  The big winner was the newly rebooted "Superman," which cleaned up at the summer box office, but also signals that James Gunn isn't too keen on embracing family audiences.  The heightened level of violence and the tie-ins to the very adult second season of the "Peacemaker" series mean a more limited audience.  Over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (hereafter the "MCU"), none of their three theatrical releases did as well as Disney hoping, with "*Thunderbolts"/"The New Avengers"  putting in especially concerning numbers for a summer release with good reviews.  Disney is also scaling back their Disney+ shows, having finally released the long-delayed "Ironheart," "Wonder Man," and "Daredevil" series.

So, what's coming up in 2026?  The Sony Spider-verse is extinct at this point, with the very limited exception of the third "Spider-verse" movie tentatively scheduled for 2027.  However, Tom Holland's Spidey will return in "Spider-man: Brand New Day," the big MCU release for the summer.  The hope is that this will be the start of a new trilogy for the character.  However, the real test for the continued viability of the MCU will be "Avengers: Doomsday," which has announced a massive cast and has already had its release date moved back once, to December.  This will be the first "Avengers" film in seven years, and attempt to provide some kind of climax to Phases Four, Five and Six of the MCU.  I expect that both films will make a lot of money, and solve none of the franchise's problems.

Currently, the only MCU live action series scheduled to premiere on Disney+ in 2026 are the second season of "Daredevil: Born Again," and "Vision Quest," which is the sequel series to "WandaVision" featuring Paul Bettany's Vision.  After crossover attempts with some of the features, the MCU is no longer going to try and tie in their streaming series into the feature continuity so heavily.  We'll still get some cameos, like characters from "Davedevil" reportedly showing up in the next "Spider-man" movie, but probably not more situations like "The Marvels" or "Thunderbolts" where major characters who were introduced in one of the streaming series go on to headline a film.  This should reduce the concerns about too much "homework" to keep up with the current releases.  It is not looking good for "She-Hulk" on the big screen.    

Over at DC, James Gunn is taking his time.  He's not sticking to a wider roadmap, but claims he's greenlighting films based on whatever finished scripts are ready to go.  So "Supergirl" with Milly Alcock is coming in June, which has an uphill battle as a female-led superhero movie, but does have the benefit of a good director in Craig Gillespie and good source material behind it.  The other DC release is a much smaller horror film, "Clayface," featuring a Batman villain who can change his appearance at will.  The only live action DC series in the works for 2026 is "Lanterns," which will feature not one, but three Green Lanterns in the DC equivalent of "Training Day."  They have the right cast, with Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre playing Hal Jordan and John Stewart, but I'm curious whether the tone is going to be closer to the feature films or the more adult series like "Peacemaker" and "The Penguin."  

What's concerning are the titles that aren't anywhere on the schedules for 2026 or 2027.  Aside from "Spider-man," the MCU hasn't made a sequel to any of its films released since 2020, and has fumbled several already announced titles, including "Blade" and "Armor Wars."  We still get announcements for projects in development, but not much concrete.  I don't see another three-movie year for the MCU for the foreseeable future.  DC is in better shape, and 2027 should see sequels to both the 2025 "Superman" and "The Batman" if everything works out.  However, it also quashed some projects, including the "Sgt. Rock" movie that was potentially going to be directed by Luca Guadagnino.  

As superhero films continue to recede at the box office, we'll likely see the MCU and DC offerings continue to shrink.  They won't be totally gone anytime soon, but it's clear to me that their dominance of the box office is quickly fading, and we're likely to see a transition away from interconnected universes back to individual character franchises.  Batman, Superman, and Spider-man will all be okay, but everyone else will need to watch their step.

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A "Superman" For Today

I had my concerns about James Gunn being put in charge of  "Superman."  I've found his superhero movies very hit-or-miss, a little too crass and a little too cynical for me.  After a decade of Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill's grimly god-like Superman, I was definitely ready for a change, but was Gunn the man to do it?  Yes, it turns out.  Maybe this isn't the best "Superman," but it's exactly the right "Superman" for 2025.

We begin not with Issue #1, but somewhere around Issue #200.  Clark Kent/Superman (David Corenswet) is already in a relationship with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and is the sworn enemy of industrialist Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who is devoting considerable resources to destroying him.  In the opening scene we watch Superman in a heated battle with an armored warrior who Luthor controls, and later his superpowered henchmen, giant monsters, and other foes on his payroll.  This is a universe where "metahumans" are plentiful and very active, so Superman also regularly encounters the corporately sponsored Justice Gang, made up of Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Michael Holt/Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi).  Superman doesn't know much about his origins, but he has his Fortress of Solitude, with a couple of robot helpers, and also a loveably destructive superdog named Krypto.

Superman has never faced the kinds of challenges that he faces in this movie.  The new Lex Luthor is not only greedy, but obsessive in his hatred of Superman, and using all kinds of crazy technology to attack him on multiple fronts.  This includes an intense online hate campaign using a deluge of misinformation.  The public isn't sure what to think of him.  Metahumans are common, but Superman is an alien from another world, and there are deep suspicions about his motives.  However, the important things stay the same.  The one thing that hasn't been modernized at all is Superman himself.  He's still the same aw-shucks small town reporter from Kansas, raised by loving human foster parents (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell), who staunchly believes in helping humanity and doing the right thing.  He's naive about geopolitics, not sure about his place in the world, and has a lot to learn about public relations, but he wants to be a good person wholeheartedly.  David Corenswet gives him the right physicality and heroic gravitas, but also a fair amount of relatable frustration and existential doubt.  This Superman can believably beat up an army of robots and still feel like an underdog.  

And the casting is great all around.  Brosnahan is a fantastic Lois, who is smarter, savvier, and more pragmatic than Superman, but there's never a doubt they're perfect for each other.  Nicholas Hoult is channeling petty tech-bro on a power trip, and it's so satisfying to see him get what's coming to him.  Comic relief characters Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and Eve Tesmacher (Sara Sampaio) get their own ridiculous subplot, and prove to be a lot of fun.  The Justice Gang is made up of the typical James Gunn-style abrasive oddballs, who would be a better fit in the "Peacemaker" corner of this universe, but they're mostly just around to provide a contrast to Superman, and not in the movie too much.  I really love that Ma and Pa Kent are played by non-celebrity actors, and come across as just ordinary, average people.  

The cast is what keeps the overstuffed plot and the in-media-res narrative from being too overwhelming.  Gunn and company decided to throw us in the deep end more or less, introducing us to all kinds of super-powered characters, pocket universes, secret conspiracies, crazy creatures, and other common comic book devices.  There's a cameo cavalcade, naturally.  You couldn't have made a "Superman" like this ten years ago, but after so many years of superhero movie saturation, audiences can be expected to keep up, more or less.  And even if they do get lost, "Superman" offers plenty of action and spectacle that needs no explanation and should satisfy even the nitpickiest fan.  Plus, there's a cute dog, and who doesn't love a cute dog?

My biggest complaint, ironically, is the same one that I had with "Man of Steel," which is that "Superman" isn't kid friendly enough.  I like that this version involves more interactions with kids, and uses a few kid performances to great effect, but there are some intense sequences and a few instances of questionable content that make this hard to recommend to anyone under the age of twelve or so.  (No parent wants to explain what a harem is to a second grader.)  And that's such a shame.  

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"Invincible" Year Three

Minor spoilers ahead.

Well, "Invincible" is back with a vengeance.  Having spent its previous season mostly on Mark Grayson's angsty personal life and setting up a new status quo, "Invincible" is putting Mark through the wringer again as a superhero.  In the early part of the season, we find Mark still recovering from his confrontation with Angstrom, and trying to strike out on his own away from Cecil's influence.  Episodes are devoted to his relationships with a new girlfriend and his family members.  Younger brother Oliver (Christian Convery) is now old enough to be a budding superhero himself, though one who needs a lot of guidance from Mark and his mother.  

However, most of the season is spent on Mark discovering that he's woefully unprepared for the threats he has to face as the most powerful superhero on Earth.  There's a sense of foreboding that carries through the whole season.  As the danger keeps escalating, Mark is confronted with more difficult moral questions.  In one episode, he ends up on a dystopian future Earth where the only way to save everyone is to do something unthinkable.  In another, he's faced with a sympathetic new enemy that hates Invincible to the point of self-destruction.  We have some excellent guest stars, including Aaron Paul as the superpowered Powerplex, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a Viltrumite named Conquest.    

The pacing this year is much better, with no midseason hiatus and far more momentum driving the bigger storylines.  Supporting characters like Debbie are still very much in the picture - she's got a new love interest named Paul (Cliff Curtis) this season - but they're far less prominent than they've been in the past.  Mark is at the center of almost every single episode, and it's to the show's benefit.  The time we do spend with secondary characters like Eve and Rex (Jason Mantzoukas) feels less like filler and more like necessary character building.  It's nice to see these characters grow and change in "Invincible," some for the better and some for the worse.  There are still the occasional check-ins with Nolan and Allen the Alien (Seth Rogan) in outer space that don't seem to be going anywhere, but we have plenty more going.

I feel like many "Invincible" fans are really interested in the show for its carnage-filled action scenes, and this season does not disappoint.  The action is more brutal than ever, with most of the animation budget saved for the last two episodes of the season, where it's almost wall-to-wall superhero beat-downs and wide scale destruction.  There are several points where the creators are really pushing at the limits of what's acceptable to show, so those who are sensitive to gore may want to steer clear.  Also, we get a love scene at last, not quite a sex scene, but probably as close as we're going to get in an American-made superhero production.  It's clumsy stuff, but I appreciate the attempt.  

I prefer the episodes that aren't so reliant on shock value.  The introduction of PowerPlex was the highlight of the year for me, representing the kind of ethically troubling conflict that most superhero media is keen to ignore.  "Invincible" is doing a far better job at exploring the more morally gray parts of the superhero mythos than shows like "The Boys," and taking advantage of the animated medium to dramatize situations that would be prohibitively expensive in live action - or just too gruesome.  It's also incredibly indulgent, of course, but the darker material is never played for laughs, and there's a certain grim, but refreshing candidness to the way that "Invincible" shows the amount of physical damage that would realistically result from a superhero brawl.  

After four years and twenty-five episodes, I am sorely tempted to go read the comic books, because I'm sure it'll be a long wait for future seasons.  However, it's comforting to know that the adaptation is in good hands, with "Invincible" creator Robert Kirkman still heavily involved, and Amazon Prime committed to finishing the series.   

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I Heart "Ironheart"

"Ironheart" was hastily dumped on Disney+ a few weeks ago, premiering its six episodes over just two weeks.  And it in no way deserved this treatment.  Created by Chinaka Hodge, the series is about Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the young genius who built her own Iron Man-style armor.  She was introduced in "Wakanda Forever" a few years ago as an American university student.  However, in the opening scene of "Ironheart," Riri is expelled from MIT after one lab mishap too many, and goes home to Chicago to stay with her mother Ronnie (Anji White).  

Riri has sky-high ambitions, but coming from a working class background, she'll need to find her own way forward.  In order to make some easy cash, she ends up falling in with Parker Robbins, a charming villain known as the Hood (Anthony Ramos), and his gang of talented criminals.  She also makes the acquaintance of an oddball black market arms dealer, Joe (Alden Ehrenreich), and attracts the attention of other sinister forces.  It emerges that Riri is still grieving the deaths of her beloved stepfather Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins) and her best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross), who were killed in a drive-by shooting.  Eric André, Shea Couleé, and Sacha Baron Cohen show up in roles that I will not spoil, except to say that this may be the best use of Sacha Baron Cohen in years.       

"Ironheart" is chaotic and juggling too many ideas, but it's also a refreshingly different entry for the MCU.  Riri Williams is a genius like Tony Stark, but she's also prone to making terrible choices like Tony Stark, and suffers for those choices.  Every time she does something brilliant, she tends to do something equally dunderheaded, like trusting the wrong person or taking the easy way out.  Riri could be a hero, but by the end of "Ironheart" she seems just as likely to become a villain, and it's her own fault.  I really enjoy Dominique Thorne in the role, who keeps Riri a compelling and sympathetic presence throughout.  The creators crucially give her a family life and a history that feel very genuine, and there's an attention to the way she talks and dresses and interacts with others that grounds her in an emphatically African-American milieu before all the genre elements start coming into play.     

The supporting cast boasts a deep bench of acting talent.  Lyric Ross as Natalie stands out for her bright personality and skill at banter.  I also like Anji White as supportive Ronnie and Alden Ehrenreich as the schlubby paranoiac Joe.  However, I'm not sold on Anthony Ramos as The Hood.  He's  very generic and the various pieces of his origin don't quite fit together.  I suspect that there were multiple versions of The Hood that ended up all being combined in the end, with poor results.  Or it might just be my indifference to Ramos, who I've seen in enough major projects to know that he doesn't work for me in roles like this.  Fortunately, he's not the only villain in the show; the others are significantly more effective.

There were clearly a lot of ambitions behind "Ironheart," going by the caliber of the talent involved and the expensive looking production.  With such a large cast and so many connections to different parts of the MCU, it feels like a miracle that the show actually coheres as well as it does.  It takes a few episodes for the show's different priorities to all get sorted out, but once they do "Ironheart" is actually one of the better MCU shows.  I think it helps that while Riri Williams is definitely living in the MCU, she's not on the familiar hero path, at least not yet.  Her story is playing more like "Agatha" or "Loki" than "Miss Marvel" right now, and that's exciting.

Unfortunately, it looks like the support for "Ironheart" at Marvel has disappeared, probably due to the current political climate.  It's an awful shame, because Riri Williams has a lot of potential, and her show gets a lot of things right that previous MCU series like "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" didn't.  I hope that this isn't the last we see of Riri and this group of characters, but I'm grateful that they got a chance at the spotlight in any case.

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Rank 'Em: The Phase Five Marvel Movies

The release of "Thunderbolts*" means the end of Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  It has not been a good one for Marvel, and I'm going to take this opportunity to talk about some of the franchise's more systemic issues as we go.  I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to rank the Disney+ shows of this phase, since it'll require catching up on a few programs I don't have much interest in.   

Watch out for all the spoilers ahead.

1. Thunderbolts* - I just posted a full review a few days ago, so I won't say too much here.  However, what I appreciate the most about "Thunderbolts" is that it's venturing into some new territory for Marvel.  We've seen plenty of takes on antiheroes, big team-ups, and evil Superman figures before, but approaching all of this from a mental health angle is something novel, and very effective.  The Void and his Hiroshima shadows and shame boxes are horrifying on a level I've never seen in the MCU before - and how he's defeated is absolutely perfect.  

2. Deadpool & Wolverine - This is the closest to a pure comedy as any MCU film has ever gotten, and it's definitely the first R-rating.  The results couldn't have been better.  Sure, the plot is just an excuse to be juvenile, super nerdy, and nostalgic for FOX media of yore, but the movie is really good at being all of those things, and wildly entertaining to boot.  Some commentators seem aghast that Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy now have a blank check at Marvel, but frankly I'm thrilled that the MCU is getting a shot of new energy from these guys right when it needs it the most.  

3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - Farewell James Gunn.  I'm glad that you got to leave on your own terms after the firing and rehiring drama that happened in 2018.  The movie was delayed, but ended up being worth the wait.  I was cool on the first two "Guardians" films, but connected to the third, where Rocket Racoon takes center stage.  There's such a boundless creativity on display, and a real sense of weirdo vision to the film that is easy to appreciate, even if Gunn's tastes don't really align with mine.  If this is goodbye to this corner of the MCU, then it went out on a high note.        

4. The Marvels - This is not a bad movie.  There are a lot of things that I like in it, particularly Iman Vellani's Ms. Marvel and a new use for alien cats.  Unfortunately, Monica Rambeau still doesn't have much of a personality.  Honestly, Carol Danvers doesn't either, and the less said about the villain Dar-Benn the better.  Still, I like this considerably more than "Captain Marvel," and the low box office performance reflects the changing attitudes of the audience toward the MCU more than anything else.  If this had been released a few years earliers, it would have done at least as well as…

5. Captain America: Brave New World - I didn't bother writing a full review for this.  While it's perfectly watchable, it's also perfectly disposable.  I like Anthony Mackie as Cap, I like Danny Ramirez as the new Falcon, and watching Harrison Ford return to the White House was diverting.  Not much else of interest is going on though.  There was clearly some trouble behind the scenes, as evidenced by the multiple delays, title changes, muddled script, and whatever happened with Tim Blake Nelson's character.  At least this was better than "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," though not by much.  

6. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania - Boy is this movie depressing.  The first "Ant-Man" is one of the better solo superhero movies in the entire MCU, and it's just been steadily downhill from there.  "Quantumania" has my vote for the absolute worst film of the entire franchise.  It's awful as an "Ant-Man" film, taking place in a fantasy world that totally negates the fun of the Ant-Man powers.  Most of the plot involves setting up a villain for later movies who had to be scrapped.  MODOK happened.  Bill Murray happened.  The more I think about this movie, the worse it gets.

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"Thunderbolts*" Hits the Mark

Okay, I was wrong about the stupid asterisk thing. I still think the antics with the title are silly and bothersome.

Anyway, "Thunderbolts*" is the best MCU movie since "Avengers: Endgame," though there hasn't been much competition.  It collects up an assortment of oddball villains and side characters from several other MCU projects, and shows how they become their own unlikely superhero team.  And while it's full of shameless callbacks, especially to the first "Avengers" movie, there are a lot of things that it does surprisingly well. 

Yeleva Belova (Florence Pugh), Natasha Romanov's younger adopted sister, is our lead character.  She's initially working as a mercenary for the very sketchy Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus), who is finally revealed in this movie to be the director of the CIA.  Valentina is being investigated for her involvement in a new supersoldier project called Sentry.  While she and her assistant Mel (Geraldine Vishwanathan) are busy getting rid of all the evidence, Yelena is sent to a remote facility to stop an infiltrator from stealing secrets.  However, it turns out Valentina has sent Yelena, John Walker aka US Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) to the same place with the same orders, intending for them to kill each other, thus wrapping up loose ends.  There's also a strange amnesiac guy named Bob (Lewis Pullman) at the facility, who has no idea how he got there.  

You can probably work out most of the plot from there.  As the bickering antiheroes learn to work together to escape Valentina's hordes of murderous minions, they start to become a team.  Yelena's adoptive father Alexei aka the Crimson Guardian (David Harbour) gets involved.  So does a recently elected New York congressman, Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), who is doing his own investigation into Valentina's crimes.  This is one of the most interconnected MCU installments, but you really don't need much knowledge of anything except the first "Avengers" movie to follow the story.  The dialogue is rife with  ironic, self-aware banter, punctuated by a lot of spiffy action scenes.  All of the "Thunderbolts*" team members are fairly underpowered, low-level fighters, so their fights are pretty grounded, with a lot of hand-to-hand combat.  We get a nice car chase sequence, plenty of picturesque shootouts, and the final showdown happens in New York City.  

And if you think that this all sounds very rote and familiar so far, you're right.  What makes "Thunderbolts*" special is that the whole film turns out to be one big mental health allegory, and it's a good one.  From the very first frame, Yelena is depicted struggling with her emotional well-being, and as she's building her team she's also building a support network.  The big bad of the movie is referred to as "The Void," and has the most unnerving character design and power set I've seen in a superhero film in a long time.  It resembles nothing so much as depression incarnate, which several of the characters are dealing with to various degrees.  The movie is surprisingly dark at times, and the discussions of mental health, trauma, and loneliness are handled with refreshing seriousness.  It turns out to be very easy to root for the Thunderbolts because they're classic underdogs - criminals and losers and D-listers - who find themselves massively outgunned at every turn.  However, the much bigger obstacles are their own flaws, failures, and self-doubt. 

So our leads get to have full, interesting arcs in this movie, and come to personal and emotional resolutions that are immensely satisfying.  That's practically unheard of in an MCU film.  It's so gratifying that the filmmakers understand that Yelena winning a fight isn't nearly as compelling as Yelena making up with Alexei, or Yelena giving Bob a hug when he really needs one.  For all the one-liners and cynical quips, there's an earnestness and emotional honesty to these characters that I didn't expect.  Florence Pugh anchors the movie and reveals herself to be one of the best actors in the current MCU roster.  Julia Louis Dreyfus and David Harbour remain incredibly fun to watch every time they show up onscreen, and I can't help liking Sebastian Stan a little more as Bucky every time I see him.  Lewis Pullman is doing just fine, and I hope the rest of the team get more chances to build on their appearances here.  Alas, it seems you can't have a superhero team-up movie without a few characters feeling shortchanged.

There are definitely some rough spots, and I suspect I would have liked the movie a bit better with the originally cast Steven Yeun and Ayo Edibiri.  Still, I'm looking forward to the next appearance of the Thunderbolts* in the upcoming "Avengers" movie. 

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"Daredevil: Born Again," Year One

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

The new "Daredevil" series on Disney+ is decent.  Despite all the chaos happening behind the scenes with showrunners being replaced and part of the season retooled, the resulting nine episodes that debuted on the service earlier this year are a perfectly acceptable continuation of the Netflix show created by Drew Goddard.  However, it's not the same by any means.  The first episode immediately breaks the old formula and sets up a changed version of Charlie Cox's Matt Murdock operating without his old support network.

The biggest problem with "Born Again" is that it decided to ditch Foggy and Karen, in favor of a new group of characters that are difficult to care about.  Murdock has a new girlfriend, therapist Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva), who is boring and easy to ignore.  He starts a new law firm with a new partner, Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), who is even more of a non-entity.  These are perfunctory attempts to show that Murdock still has some semblance of a personal life, except that nobody buys for a minute that these are people that anybody should be very invested in.  His arc this season is all about getting over the traumatic events of the premiere that have made him swear off ever becoming Daredevil again.  We know, of course, that he'll break this promise, because he still lives and practices law in crime-ridden New York City, which has a new mayor - and surprise!  It's Wilson Fisk.

Fisk has the more successful storyline this year, struggling to navigate the world of politics and avoid his own worst impulses.  His marriage to his beloved Vanessa has hit a rough patch.  There are some new flunkies around him, including a slimy up-and-comer named Daniel Blake (Michael Gandolfini).  Inevitably, however, he winds up employing all his old tactics to consolidate his power.  This includes putting together an anti-vigilante task force of loyal thugs, who target some of our favorite local heroes.  "Daredevil: Born Again" keeps its head above water because Murdock and Fisk are still both very compelling characters, and the show is pretty good about giving them both compelling things to do.  You can see some of the indecision about the show's new direction in the chaotic story structure.  Some episodes are stand-alone and feel like part of a network procedural.  Others are more tightly serialized, including episodes about a serial killer, Muse (Hunter Doohan), and Murdock representing another vigilante, Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes).  

Anyone worried that airing on Disney+ would mean a watered down version of "Daredevil" should have their fears assuaged by the amount of violence in the first episode.  This is a very adult series, despite a few loose connections to the more family-friendly parts of the MCU.  I don't think it's saying too much to confirm that Jon Bernthal is still around as The Punisher.  The fights are still bloody, and some of the villains are particularly brutal.  There's a graphic killing in the finale that wouldn't be out of place in a horror movie.  Having Disney's resources ensures that the production values are excellent, though the show doesn't do anything too stylistically ambitious.  Probably the only major difference from the Netflix "Daredevil" is the introduction of documentary style "man on the street" sequences, and these never really play into the actual plot of any episodes.     

It's been long enough since the original series that I don't mind too much that Disney has made major character adjustments.  A more cynical Murdock and media savvy Mayor Fisk feel like reasonable evolutions of these characters.  The new show is very uneven, understandably, but I like that the creators ultimately decided to stick with darker, more mature storylines and a bleaker, meaner version of New York.  I also like the greater degree of experimentation that means there's room for the one-off episodes like the one with Murdock caught up in a bank heist.  I don't think that "Born Again" is as good as the best of the Netflix series, but it's good enough that I'll keep watching and hoping that the show can straighten itself out a little more for next season.  

And I find myself very glad that there will be a next season.

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"What If…?" Year Three and "Creature Commandos"

I did "Rank 'Em" posts for the first two seasons of "What If…?" but I don't have much to say about the individual episodes of the third season.  And since this is also the concluding season, I thought I'd put down some final thoughts on the series as a whole.  

So, this season of "What If…?" feels like an afterthought.  Most of its eight episodes are spent on oddball pairings of characters from the MCU's Phase Four, like Shang Chi and Kate Bishop, and Agatha Harkness and Kingo the Eternal.  We get another original character, Byrdie the Duck (Natasha Lyonne), who is the daughter of Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) and Howard the Duck (Seth Green).  The episode explaining how Darcy and Howard got together is far and away the best episode of the season, because it's something so weird and nutty that it could only happen in this series.  The slapstick humor premise, where all the biggest baddies in the universe end up chasing Byrdie's egg, actually works.  

Like the previous season, there's an ongoing plot involving the Watcher that ultimately turns into another big multiverse-spanning fight involving Captain Carter, Kahhori, and other recurring characters.  It's completely unnecessary, but in the interest of giving the series a definite ending, I guess it's fine.  I have more of a bone to pick with the lackluster individual plots this year, like "What If… the Emergence Destroyed the Earth?" which spotlights Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) in a post-apocalyptic universe, or "What If… the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?" where a motley collection of second stringers fight kaiju.  The ideas aren't bad, but the execution is lackluster, and it's very apparent that the show  is trying to boost the profiles of some characters it wants us to care about.  Meanwhile, hardly any of the original Avengers lineup even show up for a cameo.  There are a few surprises and the humor is generally better, but this season of "What If…" appears to have been severely limited in its choice of material, and it's something of a relief to see it go.  The series as a whole has been an interesting experiment, but always felt very constrained by studio politics.

Meanwhile, over in another comic book universe, the animated "Creature Commandos" on Max is the first official project to come from James Gunn's new creative leadership on the DC superhero franchise.  It's essentially "The Suicide Squad" with monsters.  Under the command of Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), Task Force M is made up of dangerous individuals who aren't technically human but capable of heroism.  These include G.I. Robot (Sean Gunn), the radioactive Doctor Phosphorus (Alan Tudyk), Frankenstein's monster (David Harbour) and the Bride (Indira Varma), the amphibious Nina Mazursky (Zoe Chao), and the Weasel (Sean Gunn).  James Gunn wrote every episode and is very gung-ho about this being a launching point for all kinds of media to come.  Unfortunately, "Creature Commandos" completely failed to win me over.

I think if I had seen this series a few years ago, before the "Harley Quinn" series and before "Invincible," I would have found it more interesting.  Unfortunately, after the most recent batch of edgy animated series based on comic books, "Creature Commandos" can't help but feel derivative.  None of the characters particularly stand out.  The production values are decent, but nothing special - the animation, action scenes, and level of violence are all fairly middling.  Despite the big names in the cast, I didn't particularly like any of the characters.  They're all extreme personalities who eventually learn to get along and bond with each other, while fighting much less interesting villains.  Each episode fills in the backstory of one of the Taskforce M members, which are all predictably tragic and violent.  

I've liked most of James Gunn's comic book movies up to this point, but the tone is something I've had to get used to.  There are always a lot of juvenile assholes and hostile reprobates trading one liners, and everyone seems to have a lot of pent-up aggression.  While everyone eventually becomes like family to each other, the learning curves can be pretty steep, and the universe is far too grim and mean for the show to be a good time.  This approach is perfect for "Creature Commandos," a show aimed at angry adolescents, where everyone has an awful backstory and plenty of excuses to behave badly.  However, I'm not an angry adolescent, but a bored elder Millennial who has seen this kind of thing too often.  Good luck to Gunn, but I can recognize when a piece of media is definitely not for me.       

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"Common Side Effects" and a "Harley Quinn" Check-In

"Common Side Effects" was co-created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, and shares a lot of crew with the short-lived Max series "Scavengers' Reign."  "Common Side Effects," however, takes place in the present day and has a very different style and verve.  Our hero is an eco-warrior fungi expert named Marshall Cuso (Dave King), who discovers a Blue Angel mushroom in Peru that can cure all ills, and even revive the dying.  He's constantly on the run from the DEA, specifically Agent Harrington (Martha Kelly) and Agent Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) for his possession of controlled substances, but makes his way back to the U.S. to try and cultivate the mushroom there.  He happens across his old high school crush, Frances (Emily Pendergast) and shares his discovery with her, unaware that she works for a pharmaceutical executive named Rick Kruger (Mike Judge). 

I've seen the show promoted as an adult thriller that is critical of the pharmaceutical industry, but it's actually much lighter and stranger than it seems at first glance.  "Common Side Effects" features an interesting mix of conspiracy theory what-if, ensemble comedy, and trippy tall tale.  There are certainly exciting developments as everyone fights for control of the Blue Angel, and more than a few resort to violence.  However, this is a show where death is awfully impermanent, and the big emotional throughline comes down to Marshall and Frances figuring out how to be friends again as they deal with all the chaos that they inadvertently cause with the mushroom.  Yes, there are environmental and anti-Capitalist messages in the story, but our hero is also a rotund hippie who spends a lot of time getting into and out of ridiculous situations, so the primary goal here is definitely to amuse and entertain.  Also, there are the wonderfully trippy hallucination sequences that happen whenever anybody eats a Blue Angel, which could only happen in animation.  

A note about the visuals, while we're on the subject.  The look of "Common SIde Effects" is very distinct, because all the characters have oversized heads, and oddly proportioned faces, so they all look a little bug-eyed and weird at first.  The characters include an interesting variety of types - law enforcement, business opportunists, scientists, Marshall's community of mycology oddballs, and related allies.  Nearly everyone is sympathetic and relatable to some degree,  but most have pretty skewed priorities, and react to the existence of the mushroom in foolhardy ways.  Even Marshall, who wants to use the mushroom to cure the world, repeatedly puts his trust in people he shouldn't be trusting.  However, he's also not the only good guy we meet, and I really enjoyed watching a couple of characters figure things out and end up on the right side of the fight in the end.  Also, gotta love that Peruvian flute theme.

And now, a quick check-in with Max's "Harley Quinn" series, which recently finished its fifth season.  Because we have a new "Superman" movie coming out, corporate synergy likely decreed that there should be a season of the show set in Metropolis.  Harley and Ivy use the excuse that they've thoroughly screwed up Gotham City to the point where they don't have much else to do, and move to the unnervingly perfect Metropolis, where even Superman (Clark Kent) is feeling obsolete because of how well the city is running.  New adversaries this season include Lena Luthor (Aisha Taylor) and Brainiac (Stephen Fry), with more attention on characters like Lois Lane (Natalie Morales) and King Shark's son Shaun (Kimberly Brooks).

Any show getting five seasons is an achievement these days, but "Harley Quinn" isn't in very good shape this year.  A lot of the original roster of regulars has moved on, and there just aren't compelling stakes to their adventures anymore, even though the show's stakes have always been pretty low.  We meet Ivy's ex and get into Harley's family troubles a bit, and both of the major villains this year are pretty good.  However, it's clear that our leading ladies are never going to break up and don't face any threats that are beyond their ability to handle, so there's not much excitement to be had.  It's not a bad watch as a hangout show, but way too many of the characters are now the kids or relatives of other characters, and the creators have apparently exhausted the supply of obscure comic book characters they can dredge out of the DC archives.  It may be time to let Harley and friends have one last hurrah, and bow out.  

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