Quarantine Control #183: My Big Fat Togruta Universe

DC Staff | October 5, 2023 | Animation, Features, Movies, Reviews, Television | No Comments

Merely discussing the recent spike in COVID-19 cases is enough to make someone feel like they’re insane. News of it has seldom been covered by mainstream media outlets, especially those in broadcast media. It’s also too difficult to find information on just how bad the spike is, as many states and organizations (some of which were themselves state-run) stopped tracking the pandemic’s severity long ago. To be on the safe side, anyone who can get the new booster should do so, which is unlikely to turn you into a zombie or kill you instantly. Let’s be real here.

Geoffrey Barnes

Ahsoka (2023)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 8

I had serious misgivings about Ahsoka before the series started, but maintained faith in its potential quality. The last three live-action Star Wars series that weren’t Andor were iffy in terms of execution, specifically The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan, and The Mandalorian’s third season. Ahsoka itself was continuing a story started in animated form with Star Wars Rebels, at an unfortunate time where the animation has a better track record than live-action material — perhaps to no surprise considering which company owns the brand now. But I had faith that series director and writer Dave Filoni, the very man chiefly responsible for some of the best animated content, would pull it off. The Mandalorian writer Jon Favreau claimed this would be Filoni’s magnum opus, after all. Filoni largely succeeded.

Ahsoka finally addresses the teaser image from the end of Rebels’ fourth season, the one featuring both Ahsoka herself (the voice of Ashley Eckstein then, and Rosario Dawson now) and Sabine Wren (the voice of Tiya Sircar then, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo now). Both are an occasional experienced Jedi and apprentice, respectively. They pledge to find Ezra Bridger (the voice of Taylor Gray then, and Eman Esfandi now), somewhere lost in the galaxy after the events of Rebels. They also plan on stopping the new threat posed by Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen in both), something alluded to in previous Mandalorian seasons, who plans on rebuilding the Empire in a post-Return of the Jedi world.

It’s clear that watching Rebels is essential for knowing these characters. Otherwise, it’s tough for anyone to immediately connect with Sabine, Ezra, and Hera Syndulla (the voice of Vanessa Marshall at one point, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead now). Filoni and the production team made compromises to create a story that largely, though not entirely, stands on its own. This is reflected through the fallen Jedi Baylan Skoll (the sadly late Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), both of whom are partially working for Thrawn and returning character Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), but are also looking out for their own interests. Seeing Rebels first is fortunately not required for enjoying the show, though it helps.

Ahsoka is fortunately one of the better live-action Star Wars seasons. The character development is solid, through showing just how much Ahsoka has learned in the time since her teenage debut in Clone Wars, but also by showing how imperfect she remains, with Rosario Dawson playing her well during this stage. Sabine is even rougher around the edges, showing how she’s still her hot-tempered self from Rebels. Bordizzo does a great job bringing her to life in live-action. A big focus is on the two of them reconnecting as Jedi teacher and apprentice, and showing how difficult it is when fighting serious opposition. They get the brunt of the character development, but the show also features a bit of the New Republic’s politics, and how they involve Hera, her son Jacen Syndulla, and even Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly).

As the show progresses, however, it becomes clear that this show is building up to a larger future conflict, perhaps one to be solved through the Avengers-style film they announced. The number of conflicts resolved by the end are enough to justify the series’ existence, and the well-directed action helps that along. But there are plenty of plot threads left unresolved by the end.

There are reasons why I wish this was animated instead of in live-action. Specific actions and characters would have been much easier to render and execute in animated form, including the many species of aliens in the Star Wars galaxy. This also would have made for opportunities to feature planets with backdrops that don’t resemble different shades of New Zealand.

A lengthier episode run like those The Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Bad Batch received would have left more room for character development, including more time for Hera and especially Jacen to receive some growth. It would have made more time for episodic adventures around the galaxy for further character development among the main cast. This also could have been a way to further feature the politics in the universe at this period of Star Wars instead of merely touching on it, similar to The Clone Wars and (yes, again) The Bad Batch. This, lastly, would have made time for a Zep appearance, who looked expensive to render in his guest appearance in The Mandalorian’s third season.

I understand why this wasn’t animated; too many people take animated content less seriously than live-action, even though that’s extremely backwards in 2023. But some VFX-heavy series would be better off embracing it, and this is one of them.

Ahsoka was not Rebels Season 5. But it was a fine show on its own, a good time for anyone well invested in the Star Wars brand interested in another adventure within the Mandoverse. It was good enough to leave me intrigued for the future of this segment of the Star Wars universe, which will continue with Skeleton Crew and perhaps the fourth season of The Mandalorian. It’s also not as if we’re not getting more animated tales, coming with the third and final season of The Bad Batch and another season of Tales of the Jedi. I wouldn’t mind more, though.

Angela Moseley

Fun fact. I haven’t been to an actual movie theater since December 2019. I had already reached a point in my life where I didn’t go out to see movies much, but I had no idea the pandemic would make that so much worse. The kicker? I had been trying to make an effort to get out to see more movies as part of date nights or with friends to touch grass more often. On the upside, the last movie I did see was the excellent Promare. You’d think for my triumphant return to theaters that I’d pick a glorious movie. Oppenheimer? Barbie? Avatar: The Way of Water? Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse? Nope to all of those. All of which were probably better than what I actually saw.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (2023)
Source: An actual movie theater
Episodes: 1 movie

Let me start out with a short story that is in no way stalling for time when it comes to writing about what I saw. At this point, I’ve been back to work for nearly two weeks now. (Hello full paycheck!) Before I went out for my planned surgery, my mother had wanted me to come with her and my stepfather to see a musical before I went back to work. However, she waited much too late to order tickets for The Lion King while it was in Philadelphia. (Personally, I didn’t mind as I already saw the play with Joseph years ago when he was visiting me.) We settled on a movie instead. It wasn’t until I was picking them up that I found out we’d be seeing My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. If I’d known sooner, I might have protested a little, not having seen the first two movies. But we were already at the theater.

We were the only three who came out to see the movie that evening. It could have been a red flag, or it could be that most people aren’t rushing to see a movie on a Friday at 5PM. Perhaps both scenarios were true. As for the movie itself, seeing only the third movie in a series is a bold, if not foolhardy choice. It’s the type of thing that makes life a bit more interesting, if not confusing. Though it wasn’t difficult to infer events from the first movie at least.

After the death of Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine), the Portokalos family decides to travel to Greece for a family reunion. While there, Gus’ daughter Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos) brings his personal journal. His final wishes were that it be given to his childhood friends. Once the entire family arrives in Greece they’re greeted by the self-proclaimed mayor of their father’s childhood village, Victory (Melina Kotselou). The group learns the while invitations were sent out by the mayor, they’re the only ones who bothered to respond to them. That means the actual reunion probably won’t happen, and Toula might not be able to fulfill her father’s last wish.

Victory tells Toula to have faith. Meanwhile, the Portokalos decide to settle in for a vacation in the old country. There they discover their father left more than just a village behind before leaving for America.

Honestly, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is pretty average as far as romantic comedies go. It’s actually not a genre I watch much of, as I can only take a few of these types of movies per year. Despite not watching the first two films, I found myself actually enjoying this story once the plot got going. I also wondered how on earth a wedding would play into things, since it was supposed to be a family reunion. Thankfully, the movie did deliver on its name.

It turns out that Gus had more family left in Greece, and his grandson wants to marry a Syrian immigrant. The little tension this story has revolves around the family in the village being upset that he’s not marrying a Greek girl. I suppose this is where knowledge of the first movie would come in, as much of the first movie’s plot revolves around Toula marrying Ian (John Corbett) who wasn’t Greek. (I had to look that up to confirm my suspicions.) So having been through a similar ordeal 20 years earlier, the Portokalos family convinces their kin that everything will be fine. After all, the family in the village had been helping out Syrian and Ukrainian refugees.

Suddenly, the wedding angle hits as the two youngsters decide to get married. Since the reunion wasn’t happening, this is the next best thing. The wedding is a fusion of Greek and Syrian customs. Better yet, because this is a romcom, Toula’s friends manage to pull some strings and finds Gus’s old friends. They show up in magnificent fashion during the wedding, making the party even grander. I admit, everyone enjoying themselves and celebrating each other’s cultures did make me tear up. It was a fantastic break from all the division and xenophobia happening in this country, and it’s just nice to see people getting along joyfully.

In terms of location, seeing Greece in all its glory was a feast for my eyes. Especially since the first two movies took place in Chicago. I realized that I’ve not seen much representation of modern-day Greece in entertainment. So it was a fascinating look into another culture.

I appreciated learning more about My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and how Nia Vardalos (doubling as star and director) got to tell the story she wanted through this trilogy. That said, I’m doubtful about watching the first two films. I had a lot of fun with My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, and I’m glad I saw it. Even so, I don’t think I can recommend it to anyone else unless they’re just a big fan of the franchise. The critical reception is already indicating that most who have seen the other movies find this one to be more of the same. At least the backdrop of Greece was nice.

Joseph Daniels

So a funny thing happened in anime this week. Within two days, two shows about an ordinary guy starting a VRMMO debuted. Naturally, I had to give them both a try. I’m also expecting them both to appear in one of Geoff Thew’s videos about the new autumn anime. In order of appearance, they are:

Shangri-La Frontier (2023)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: Ongoing
Rabbits?: Vorpal Bunnies. Not the starting enemies, but pretty close. The opening also suggests a rabbit might be joining the cast?

Shangri-La Frontier is the story of a man named Rakuro who wishes to spend his time in a VRMMO game, and Shangri-La Frontier is his game of choice. He’s a hardcore gamer who beats as many trash-tier VR games as he can, which pretty much makes him similar to those people on PSN Profiles who earn all the trophies in one game before going to the next. They try to beat as many games as possible so that they can have more platinum trophies than anyone else, and they pride themselves on having a 100% complete profile. If they start a game, they will earn every single trophy before they’re done. If a company releases an expansion that adds more trophies to one of their games, and one of them happens to be bugged so that no one can ever hope to achieve it without hacking? These are the people who will rage on forums and constantly bombard the company with harassment on Twitter demanding that they fix their trophy because how dare they ruin someone’s 100% profile.

Instead, the company releases a second expansion which also has a bugged trophy that no one can ever hope to achieve without hacking. I think I’ve gotten off track. I’m supposed to be talking about Shangri-La Frontier, not Titan Quest. Rakuro has just finished yet another of the bad VR games and compares it to finishing a prison sentence (speaking of Titan Quest). Come on, dude, tell us how you really feel. It’s okay, you can go all Angry Video Game Nerd all over the game. I can tell you’re holding back. Your show’s theme song has an edgelord feel, we can tell what sort of person you actually are.

Honestly, Rakuro kind of reminds me of me a little whenever I get into discussing some of the negatives of a video game I’ve been playing, and getting into the details of its failings. Ask me about Tellah from Final Fantasy IV, I dare you. I have an entire retrospective article where I wrote several pages about how utterly useless he is.

One of Rakuro’s classmates is named Rei Saiga and she has quite a huge crush on him, so when he chooses to try something different and buys Shangri-La Frontier, Rei follows him in. I’m assuming. We have to wait for the next episode to see if she does.

The game has over thirty million players enjoying it and this summer, the developers are introducing even more new servers to handle the ever increasing load. This puts the game head and shoulders above any MMORPG that we have on the market today. Even at its peak, World of Warcraft was only ever able to entice twelve million players to actively explore the world of Azeroth, and since then it’s dropped steadily, and in recent years, has been falling off of ever increasingly steep cliffs.

Rakuro’s excitement at the character creation screen of SLF also feels like it speaks to players like me. Whenever a game has so many options to choose from and a wide range of ways to customize your character, I can spend a long time creating someone that looks just right. That was me in Mass Effect creating my own personal Commander Shepard. That was me in White Knight Chronicles creating my POV character (which made it so disappointing that her only contribution to the story was to basically sit in the background at campsites). That was me deciding how Sara should look in Final Fantasy XIV. Rakuro eventually comes up with a muscular character (no surprise there, considering how he prefers to create his characters) with a bird mask on his head.

Just like the first five Final Fantasy games, the starting enemy is a goblin, and Rakuro manages to level up on just that one kill, then follows it up with two more levels from one kill of a Vorpal Bunny. Wait… a skyrocketing level right from the start in a popular MMO… this is League of Angels III, isn’t it?

Rakuro continues to level up in the starting area, more out of a desire to give the game’s movement engine a thorough workout rather than a need to grind, and he finds and challenges a powerful snake boss.

A Playthrough of a Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life (2023)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: Ongoing
Rabbits?: Surprisingly, yes. Unfortunately, they’re the weakest enemy you farm for loot.

Certain Dude is the story of a man named Tanaka who wishes to spend his time in a VRMMO game, and One More Free Life Online is his game of choice. The fact that he has chosen this game literally the day after Rakuro chose SLF is coincidental timing, I’m sure. Tanaka doesn’t want to stand out so that he doesn’t get picked for parties, nor does he want to feel any kind of social obligation to his server because he only has about three hours to himself every evening, so he deliberately tries to choose abilities that will make sure he not only doesn’t stand out as the best, he’s kind of below average. He’s pretty much the only person in the game to take crafting classes and he’s also the only archer, due to how pathetically weak they start out. I think there’s at least one anime where the main character deliberately begs the gods to make their reincarnation underpowered, so even this feels like it’s treading familiar ground. Also, if Tanaka wanted to be average and not feel social pressure to be awesome, he could just play Final Fantasy XIV. A lot of the game is geared towards being a solo player and there’s no pressure to join a static party for end game raids. It’s not like someone like him would be eligible for a raid any time soon, because there’s a lot of story to plow through on his way to the current end of the game. Patch 6.5 was just added two days ago, and the new expansion Dawntrail is coming next year. He can also set his online status to Busy or Do Not Disturb so that he doesn’t get any guild invitations.

Anyway, as soon as a group of bullies sees an archer wandering around in the game, they thoroughly roast him and beat him up and oh crap, this is going to be The Rising of the Shield Hero all over again, isn’t it? Okay, I guess I’ll watch this show until Tanaka gets pushed past the despair event horizon and into sheer dead-eyed apathy to everyone around him, and then I’ll drop it.

Despite that Tanaka doesn’t want to excel, he still grinds away at his archer skill until he’s half decent at it and is able to upgrade his skills. Soon, he’s crafting better bows that do more damage, and it’s becoming evident that he’s not as underpowered as he intended. He also grinds wind magic enough that he’s pretty deadly out in the field. He just had to wait a while because the entire player base was out trying to kill enemies before he could get there. The fact that there’s only one starting zone makes me wonder if a game like One More Free Life Online would actually work in real life. Final Fantasy XIV makes use of three different starting cities with a total of six zones to go to where you can kill the weakest enemies, alongside quests that help you level. One More Free Life Online not only doesn’t have a story, it supposedly lets you play however you want to, becoming a craftsman if that’s what you want to play as, but let’s be honest, everyone thinks of themself as the hero of their own story, and they’ll want to play as a fighter of some sort. Without a story to follow, you’ll end up with a game like Guild Wars 2, where exploration is a much greater focus than the story that’s drip fed to players. Also, as many have observed, a game that tries to do everything for all kinds of players ends up being good at nothing.

Tanaka is apparently the only crafter on the server because when he starts cooking the meat he got from enemy drops, everyone wants some, and so he finds himself cooking a ton of steak and leveling his cooking skills. Campfire Cooking in a VRMMO With My Absurd Skill, anyone? Then, he crafts some pretty good healing potions that are grape flavoured, which seem to go over well. A sudden change to how the NPCs act, likely with the intention to boost the player economy and push more of them to choose crafting classes, causes shortages of healing potions and forces players to step up and meet demand. As the only crafter on the server, he finds himself feeling a social obligation to craft for literally every other player in the game. By complete accident, he’s become the most important person on the server.

The bullies come back for him and try to force him to give them all of his healing potions, but he stands up to them and even duels them. They thoroughly underestimate him because they don’t know that he’s been grinding his archery and coming up with a pretty decent build with the skills he’d chosen at the beginning, and he defeats the leader quite easily and oh, I guess this isn’t The Rising of the Shield Hero after all. I guess it depends on whether the bullies choose to quit the game or try to get revenge in the next episode. I can see them trying a second time before they’re run out of town, figuratively speaking, driven by shame to delete their characters and quit the MMO, then they’ll go online and complain on a forum about how they were treated in the game and declare that One More Free Life Online sucks actually and they’ll play something else.

Stay away from Final Fantasy XIV, dudes, it won’t end well for you there, either.

One of my favourite things to do when watching anime like this and like Shangri-La Frontier is analyzing the games themselves to see if they’re viable or if this is just the story writers coming up with something that makes for a good anime plot. You probably could tell a decent story within an actual MMO, but oftentimes, the writers have to take liberties or they’ll be bogged down in details. It’s clear these writers have played some online games with how lovingly they’ve crafted their stories, but not all of them should design games. It’s just like with Sword Art Online. It’s pretty compelling to watch a show about an MMO that deletes your character when you die, but it would not be popular at all in real life outside of players who play roguelikes, Vampire Survivors, and Hardcore mode in Diablo. Most of these players aren’t interested in playing through a long and drawn out game where one mistake a month into your playthrough costs you your character, and the only reason Diablo gets away with it is because there’s plenty of other difficulties to play which don’t delete your character. Sword Art Online does not let you play in any mode other than Hardcore, so if players try it and find a brick wall of difficulty partway through, they’ll quit en masse if they’re unable to immediately find a way around it, doubly so if it takes days to get to that point in the first place. Within its first week, the game would be dead. There may be a few insane people trying to study the game to come up with a strategy for getting through this roadblock, but eventually the time required to get back to the next roadblock they find will be longer and longer unless they can also figure out how to speed run the early levels, and typically people don’t speed run MMOs. How Long To Beat says Final Fantasy XIV takes at least four hundred hours to complete from A Realm Reborn all the way to the end of the current patch, and that’s for casual players. The current record for a speed run of A Realm Reborn’s main story is thirteen hours. These are not short games.

You’ll be forgiven if you thought that my write-up of Shangri-La Frontier cuts off midway, but the episode feels more like part one of a two part pilot, whereas Certain Dude loads the entire pilot episode into its first. Sadly, I have to wait until next week to see if Rakuro beats the snake, although with how high he set his luck stat, I don’t see how he can’t have… not unless the game is using the boss to teach him that this MMO is actually too well balanced to allow him to exploit stats like that. I will also have to wait until I’ve seen more to know if SLF would work as a game or if there’s no reason it should be as popular as it is.

It’ll be interesting to see where these two shows go in the coming weeks and what kinds of stories unfold. Rakuro is a hardcore player and Tanaka is more casual. Shangri-La Frontier also spends a lot more time in the real world than Certain Dude, lending the latter more of an isekai feel and the former acts like more of a high school drama at the start. Despite that they’re both about a player playing a VRMMO, it’ll be like watching two vastly different shows.

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One and Two
Source: Disney+
The Avengers (2012)

This is the big one. Well, one of them, anyway. I’ve not yet reached Endgame. But this was the first actual big one, the team up that everyone was waiting for. Apparently, Disney+ used the theatrical release of Captain America: The First Avenger because it still features the trailer at the end of the movie that advertised this movie would come out in 2012, which is funny when watching it on streaming many years later. Disney+, I don’t have to wait. I can watch it whenever, now!

It was also huge news when Joss Whedon rewrote the script, but he pretty much had to. The big reason was that they had Hawkeye and Black Widow join the cast despite not having movies of their own, and this was because they were introduced in other superhero films. Hawkeye was there in Thor, although he was such a minor role that only people familiar with him from the comics even knew he was there, and Black Widow was introduced in Iron Man 2, which kind of made her feel a bit overshadowed by everything else that movie was trying to do. I think this is the reason I like Iron Man and Iron Man 3 better than Iron Man 2. It’s very hard to gracefully introduce a new superhero in someone else’s film (not impossible as we’ll eventually find out), and it probably would’ve been better for both of these characters to have gotten their own origin story, but I don’t think they had the time to do that. Black Widow has since gotten her solo film and Hawkeye got a series on Disney+ but it took a long time for either of them to get that chance to shine.

It also doesn’t help Hawkeye that he gets turned by Loki very early on in the film. Not only do we not get a chance to see him in a solo origin story, now we don’t even get to see him as a protagonist for very long. He and Black Widow appear to have a history, but that’s all we really know. We don’t even get a true sense of what, if any, Hawkeye’s specialty is. We see that he’s an archer with a fancy bow in Thor, and that he’s pretty good with it in The Avengers, but we actually have to wait several more films before Hawkeye gets his big shot, pun intended. He does get snapped out of Loki’s spell and helps the Avengers at the end of this film, true, but he’s honestly gotten pretty shafted, up to this point. Pun intended.

Black Widow, meanwhile, got to show off her skills in Iron Man 2 and then again at the start of this film. In fact, she’s also gotten quite good at appearing weak and extracting the information she wants from really bad men since we last saw her. She’s tied up and being interrogated when we see her again, but partway through, the men who’ve captured her get a phone call and are told to put her on the line and everyone, including her, are like, “What the hell?” And then during her conversation on the phone, it sounds almost like she’s the one who has the situation under control, not the men who captured her. Sure enough, she subdues everyone despite starting out tied to a chair. One wonders how humiliating that must’ve been for the bad guys.

The plot of this film revolves around Loki’s acquisition of an artifact known as the Tesseract, which you’d be familiar with thanks to its use in Captain America: The First Avenger. Although Loki’s working for someone, he also has been looking for a throne to sit on, and he decides that if he can’t have Asgard, he’ll have Midgard.

Much of the film’s central purpose is to bring the various heroes from prior films together and try to get them all on the same page, working with each other instead of against each other. Bruce Banner has no confidence that this is at all a good idea, especially for someone as volatile as him, for example, and when Thor and Iron Man first meet, they’re at each other’s throats. It takes a lot for them to earn each other’s respect and get them actually working together, but the time is ticking because Loki’s planning an invasion of Earth by his new Chitauri allies. During the course of the film, they manage to snap Hawkeye out of his spell and he joins the team in New York City to fight Loki, but are too late to stop him from setting off a wormhole generator, and the Chitauri invade.

Unfortunately, not everyone survives, and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson, who has been a part of the films since the very first Iron Man movie, is killed by Loki. The Battle of New York is motivated by a sense of sadness and revenge, and of survival. It’s definitely one of the most impressive battles ever put to film, and one of my favourite aspects of it is that several of the Avengers do their best to get the citizens of New York to safety. Property damage is through the roof but at least the people are safe.

In the end, Loki is subdued and taken back to Asgard to stand trial, the Chitauri are defeated, and Earth is saved. This is also the movie that first shows us Thanos, and really drives home that these movies are definitely for the fans of the comics, because people who didn’t grow up with the comics would have no real context for his reveal during the end credits. The question on everyone’s minds at the time was, what’s Thanos’s plan? What is he planning on doing, and how does he expect to achieve it? It would take several more years before we would start to find out what he was working towards.

In the meantime, the next film was…

Iron Man 3 (2013)
Rabbits?: Believe it or not, a really large stuffed toy that very nearly steals the scene it’s in

Phase Two starts with a bang. After the runaway success of The Avengers, and the relative success of the cinematic universe concept, Phase Two began, and was led out of the gate by the most successful of the phase one characters, Iron Man. This proved to be a good move, because the film made 1.2 billion dollars, vastly outperforming everything from Phase One except for the big team up movie. The film also focuses mainly on Tony Stark as Iron Man instead of introducing any more superheroes, and not only does this mean the movie feels like it’s tighter and more personal, they can really focus on deconstructing Tony Stark as a character. He’s had some emotional damage since New York, where he flew into a wormhole carrying a nuclear device that was originally intended to blow up New York City, and he was very nearly lost in space.

Since then, he’s been throwing himself into his work, creating new suit after new suit and developing the technology like a madman. Probably in response to the drone technology used against him in Iron Man 2, Tony creates an army of Iron Man drones of his own, controlled by his faithful AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S. (I can’t believe this is the first time I’m mentioning him, but he’s been around since the beginning as well). It becomes pretty clear throughout this film that Tony Stark copes by throwing himself into his work. He did so in Iron Man 2 as well, but he also hit the bottle very hard in an effort to cope with his impending death, and he seems to have at least learned his lesson from that debacle. It probably helps that he’s not dying any more, too.

However, everyone wants to talk to him about the Battle of New York, and he has been having panic attacks as a result of what happened there. Not only that, but a new villain named the Mandarin is attacking the United States seemingly at random, blowing up targets and taunting those in charge. One such explosion badly injures one of Tony’s closest friends and he takes it incredibly personally, causing him to issue a very public challenge to the Mandarin. The Mandarin takes it incredibly personally and sends several attack helicopters to blow up Tony’s home in California, but Tony manages to escape in one of his suits.

Tony accidentally makes his way to Tennessee, where one of the earliest bombings occurred, but which was never linked to the Mandarin due to the terrorist not taking responsibility for it. Thanks to his investigations, he discovers that the bombings were actually a result of something he’d encountered years before, the work of a scientist named Maya Hansen, who had come up with a regenerative treatment known as Extremis.

Tony tracks the Mandarin to Florida where he confronts the terrorist, only to find out that he’s actually a British actor named Trevor Slattery. What’s brilliant is that the marketing leading up to the movie revealed that the Mandarin is being played by a British man instead of a Chinese man and the Internet flipped out because how dare they cast an actor of the wrong race as one of Iron Man’s greatest comic book villains. It turns out that they were slyly revealing to us the actual plot of Iron Man 3 and none of us figured that out. It turns out that there is no Mandarin, he’s just a character taking credit for all of the unfortunate failures of Extremis.

Of course, the Internet lost its collective minds a second time, especially fans of the comics who thought the Mandarin was being done dirty, so they made a One Shot and added it as a bonus feature on the Thor: The Dark World Blu-ray, in which Trevor Slattery finds out the “real Mandarin” doesn’t like how he portrayed him. Of course, the only reason this exists is because a lot of people whined and complained about not getting an authentic Mandarin.

The actual perpetrator is a scientist Tony Stark met at the end of 1999 and then blew off by the name of Aldrich Killian. Killian eventually takes Maya Hansen’s work on Extremis and tries to apply it to humans, but he could never stabilize it. He knew Tony would be able to, so he kidnaps Pepper Potts and injects her with it in the hopes that Tony would be forced to do his work for him and stabilize the treatment to save her life.

Meanwhile, his big plan is to kill the President of the United States, after having bought the Vice President with promises that Extremis can help his disabled daughter. Tony Stark is unable to stop the President from being kidnapped off of Air Force One, but an incredibly well shot action sequence sees him save every passenger that got blown out of the airplane during the attack. This is one of the many ways in which Iron Man 3 is a step up from the first two. It’s clear that a lot of money was spent making the special effects better than they had every right to be. Even ten years later, this movie is fantastic to watch.

Tony Stark’s final battle with Killian and his men occurs on an oil tanker, and although Pepper survived the Extremis procedure, she falls to her apparent death during the battle with Killian, and Tony is unable to save her. However, she survives thanks to the Extremis treatment and she shows up to finish off Killian. At the very end, not only does Tony give up the Iron Man suits, he’s able to stabilize Pepper’s Extremis procedure and also finally gets the shrapnel from the first movie out of his body. The movie ends with him reaffirming the famous words at the end of the first film.

“I am Iron Man.”

I remember when I first watched this, wondering what this would mean for the character in the future. Was he giving up his suits forever and would he still show up in the films as the superhero Iron Man? It would, of course, be a couple years before we would see him again, but for now, it seemed he was out of the superhero game.

Incidentally, I love that he was providing narration throughout the film, it made it feel that much more intimate. It also turns out that he’s telling all of this to Bruce Banner, who is revealed in the post credits sequence to have fallen asleep listening to Tony.

As a follow up to The Avengers, this movie very much lives up to the legacy of the big team up movie. Phase Two is full of that sort of thing. Many of the heroes from Phase One get their next solo shot to show us how they deal with what happened to them in New York. Tony Stark has not been having a good time, sadly, but what of Thor?

Thor: The Dark World (2013)

After the events of The Avengers, the Nine Realms were thrown into chaos, but thanks to intervention from Thor, Lady Sif and the Warriors Three, they manage to bring peace back to the realms, just in time for a once in a lifetime event known as The Convergence. The Nine Realms all come into alignment once every several thousand years, and as a result, gravity starts to break down and portals begin to appear in the realms, linking them all together. As a result, Jane Foster from the first film accidentally finds herself infused with a powerful weapon used by the Dark Elves in ages past, and this wakes them up, with their goal being to use the Aether to plunge the Nine Realms into darkness and kill the Asgardians in revenge for their defeat many millennia ago.

As a follow up to Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World doesn’t feel like it has as much going on, but it doesn’t have to. It is a less complex story, but not everything has to have wheels within wheels. The movie mostly exists to impart two bits of knowledge on the viewer: one, that six artifacts known as the Infinity Stones exist and one of them is in the possession of the Asgardians and one of them is now in the possession of a man known as The Collector, and two, that The Collector exists. He’ll return in a future movie, just like how Thor’s hammer was first shown at the very end of Iron Man 2.

Thor’s battle with the leader of the Dark Elves, Malekith, is just as visually impressive as the action sequences in Iron Man 3, so it’s definitely clear that Phase 2 has benefitted from all of the hard work that Marvel Studios put into developing the technology used to bring these movies to life. The budgets were getting a bit bigger, but honestly, not by much. Iron Man 3 was more expensive than Guardians of the Galaxy, believe it or not.

My favourite soundtrack, so far, out of all of the Marvel films is in Thor, so it’s a bit disappointing that the music from The Dark World is not really very memorable. I think that’s basically the curse of this second film. It’s good, but ultimately it’s not all that memorable. It didn’t have as much humour as the first film, and instead of Loki, the bad guy was someone new named Malekith. They were also trying to set some things up for the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, rather than telling a stand alone story like Iron Man 3 did. That’s not to say that setting things up and planning ahead doesn’t work. Phase One clearly indicates that it does, even if it wasn’t always graceful in how it introduced everything. We’re still waiting for the payoff to stuff that The Incredible Hulk went to great pains to set up.

What this movie does effectively is it follows Loki as he comes to terms with the consequences of his actions.

Okay, let’s be honest, this is Loki we’re talking about. It’ll take a lot to make him feel sorry, and the movie actually does this by killing off Odin’s wife Frigga, pretty much the only person who ever visited Loki in prison on any kind of regular basis. This devastates Loki, who agrees to help Thor defeat the Dark Elves, but he gets stabbed and killed in battle, dying in Thor’s arms. Man, Thor loses Loki at least once a film, it makes me wonder if this is going to be the dynamic between the two for the remainder of the films.

Oh, come off it. You and I both know full well Loki doesn’t die there. They’re currently in the middle of a huge advertising campaign for season two of his Disney+ show. That, and he shows up right at the very end, impersonating Odin, leaving Odin’s fate unknown and making me wonder how they’re going to “kill off” Loki when I finally get around to watching Thor: Ragnarok. Besides, he survived being thrown about like a rag doll by the Hulk. A mere stabbing would probably only tickle him.

Next week, I’ll discuss what Captain America ended up doing after the Battle of New York, as well as possibly covering the next of the superhero origin stories to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I have five more movies to go before I finally begin to watch movies I’ve yet to see, so I’m really looking forward to this.

This Week’s Short Film
Shine (2016; uploaded 2018)

Remember to take care of yourself regarding the illnesses still swirling around in the world. The media may have too many other matters to cover, like the United States’ House of Representatives being a large clown show, but hopefully — maybe! — they’ll make time to discuss what’s very much a still-ensuing pandemic before the spike gets really bad. Until next week, folks.

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