We’re about six weeks away from Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and I sat on my ass, failing to blather on about the latest MCU crap and whatever else came out in the meantime. Sure there’s spoilers by now yet I would love to get your opinions or input. Why? Well, once again, Disney did a fantastic job keeping the MCU ball rolling through Disney+ with Loki which is canon and some non-canon, MODOK is dirty humor, with Hulu; it’s easily outside the MCU given Iron Man being still alive, AIM is a menace (the R&D division of HYDRA) and this universe has Wonderman.
First up is Loki which makes everybody’s favorite step-brother villain an anti-hero in his own right. What can you do? Tom Hiddleston is a very charming actor who made Thor’s main nemesis his own thing. Besides giving the god of mischief his very own adventures, the series sets up the foundation for the new ongoing villain for the upcoming theatrical releases. It’s been about a year so it’s not a spoiler anymore…Kang the Conqueror. More on him later.
The show begins during Avengers: Endgame with Loki taking advantage of the Avengers from the future messing with time to retrieve the Infinity Stones before Thanos can get them. However, this is not the Loki we would go on to see afterwards. The Avengers triggered a split in continuity by their actions or what I propose, a divergence through the fifth dimension (known as probability). This Loki doesn’t get loose for long because he’s busted by the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Much like the Marvel editorial team, their job is to keep everything straight and maintain ONE TIMELINE, ONE REALITY. Instead of eradicating this stray Loki, he’s recruited by Agent Mobius to hunt down yet another Loki (Sylvie, a possible stand-in for the villain The Enchantress) who’s avoided capture. Time isn’t necessarily linear to the TVA as they bounce around it, destroying divergences to protect the one, true timeline they monitor from afar.
Given how well WandaVision and Falcon went, I was pretty sold and I’m glad I wasn’t disappointed. The attention to detail was my favorite part. Here’s this amazing time travel/police agency still saddled with Seventies technology! Rotary phones. Data entry with pencils. Reel-to-reel tapes. Punchcards. All with those awful earth-tones businesses had. The show also visits points in History outside of the Earth, some disaster on an alien mining world was pretty scary. Eventually you find out even time has a stopping point because the future is always unfolding and hidden from the TVA. When Kang is revealed, I was squealing with joy and completely forgot he just sat there and blathered for about 10 minutes, bringing all the action to a halt.
The show did way better than planned, unlike the previous two (successful and great), Loki will have a second season as it ended messily…the multiverse was unleashed by Loki, Sylvie and Kang’s actions. The latter character is slated to return to plague Ant-Man and the Wasp next.
Lastly, who is Kong exactly? For those who don’t know and/or aren’t too concerned, he’s a slippery time-traveling and probability foe of the Fantastic Four and Avengers from the future. Some say he’s Dr. Doom, others Dr. Doom’s descendent, another time he was Frankling Richards (son of Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman) and sometimes he’s anybody. The problem is that he is rather infinite thanks to the multi-verse, divergences in time and probability and how causality isn’t in stone with comic books. One thing is always certain with Kang, he (or she) can’t stand other Kangs as only he rules alone, not by committee as per Rich Sanchez.
MODOK is more of a Robot Chicken project with Patton Oswalt voice-acting a villain even weirder than Arnim Zola. I can’t even remember which Marvel hero he plagued first, given his propensity for gadgets and bossing around AIM, I’m gambling on Iron Man. Hulu probably got it due to the swearing and dirty jokes too.
While Loki‘s adventure has great cosmic consequences, MODOK‘s is more personal and limited stakes as it’s mostly a SitCom on steroids. Poor MODOK with his AIM flunkies can’t even defeat a solo Avenger. Now his leadership is being challenged by his head scientist and an annoying, stereotypical Silicon-Valley startup asshole (Austin Van der Sleet). Things at home are going worse. His wife Jodie wants a divorce so she can pursue her Martha Stewartesque bullshit, his daughter is a self-centered teenager (’nuff said) and his son is just a nuisance.
How does time travel fit into it? MODOK uses it to find out when his marriage went wrong and like Loki, he causes a divergence but with his younger, obnoxious, Nineties cliché self. Plus there’s more going on with Austin’s employer than it just being a bunch of evil VCs; hard to believe Peter Thiel could be topped in fiction.
Is it funny? Mostly for the Robot Chicken crowd and fans of stand-up comedy since fellow comic voices and jokesters Eddie Pepitone, Jon Daly, Bill Hader, Alan Tudyk, Brooke Dillman, Chris Parnell and Brian Posehn get parts. I was hoping they’d do more with his daughter Melissa since she shares MODOK’s appearance. Jodie is easy to dislike for me. I can’t stand wannabe gurus who think they’ve invented the wheel and attempt to copyright crap with their name.
Given that Hulu is a thousand times more patient than Netflix and mostly owned by Disney, I’m confident MODOK will return to resolve the conflict of there being two of him and the main MODOK trying to take more direct control of AIM.
I actually enjoyed this show much more than I thought I would. I typically despise looking at Owen Wilson, but I found his smirk somewhat subdued here. The various timeline angle is always fun and it was done well here. That said, I prefer Rick & Morty. I just started watching Season 5 and on the whole it is a return to form after an abysmally poor Season 4.