The Current State Of The MCU

And so oh my brothers and only friends, Phase Five of The MCU is coming to a close and my oh my what a shite show this is. Disconnected storytelling, possible scandals and many other issues plauge the once mighty MCU to the point where every new project is met with a collective yawn from the masses. In this article I'm gonna talk about where things are now and what I would have changed about this phase to make a much more cohesive story. Let's begin.

Let's start with the "Loki" finale and already I have some issues with this. For starters, Loki apparently has taken control of the branches and rather than having it be a loom, basically turned it into a tree (ala, Yggrasill) thus allowing the branches to multiply continously without overloading anything because apparently Loki is now the power source for it...(which makes sense Loki is thousands of years old). However, the big question would be IF Loki is in fact now running the timeline does this mean that Kang and his variants are in trouble? Well, it did show that The TVA were tracking variants of "He Who Remains" in other timelines and Victor Timely never recieved the TVA guidebook and thus was never able to create The Loom, so one would assume that the looming threat of Kang and his variants are all gone, yes? 

This actually looks pretty dope.

Maybe, however, since "Avengers: Kang Dynasty" is still on the slate Loki's victory over the timelines appears to be hollow and has no effect on the story at large thus making it pointless. Had "Loki" ended with Sylvie killing He Who Remains and thus unleashing Kang and his variants that would have been an excellent build up and it already leads nicely into the post credit scene of "Antman & The Wasp: Quantumnmania" where we see The Kang Variants are gathered in a place we can only assume is outside of time. But it looks like with Loki on top all the TVA can really do is try to prune as many Kang variants as they can and some of them (the lot of them) may have already managed to allude the TVA. That begin said all of this is pretty much a wash and the "Loki" finale felt horrible in consequential, so in the words of Samuel L. Jackson, "Well allow me to retort."

As far as changes go I'd keep "Loki" the way it was, HOWEVER, there would be no 2nd Season, the 2nd Season was completely unecessary as far as where The MCU wants to go. So "Loki" ends with Sylvia killing He Who Remains, Loki returning to The TVA and rallying the troops to prepare because Kang and his variants are on the way and boy howdy we's gone have ourselfs a multiversal war! That's a fantastic ending and goes a long way to explaining where the MCU is going. From there I'd have ended "Wandavision" differently. "Wandavision" ended with Wanda seeing a vision of a Wanda variants with her children living peacefully and Wanda looking longingly at the image only for more similar visions to appear until Wanda understands that theres a multiverse out there and a possible universe in which she still has her children. 

All of this of course is building up to "The Multiverse Of Madness", which being the only MCU title that has the world "multiverse" in it's title, it needs to tie all these things together and give the audience a sense of continuity. So in "The Multiverse Of Madness" instead of Wanda searching for a universe, she's already found one and her presence there is causing issues in the timeline. In that universe their Wanda is dead but our Wanda is there now raising Speedy and Pagan, The TVA catches wind of this and try as they might the really can't stop Wanda. Loki realizes that Wanda is a sorrceress and tells the TVA to enlist Stephen Strange to help as he is The Sorrceror Supreme. The TVA explains to Dr. Strange that Wanda's presence is throwing everything off and causing issues. Events that were supposed to take place in our universe because Wanda was supposed to be present aren't happening and events in the other universe that weren't supposed to happen are because Wanda's there and this is causing a chain-reaction. 

This answers the question as to why Wanda didn't just find a universe where her children were oprhans and then take over, my answer is it wouldn't have mattered because simply being in a universe you're not supposed to be in causes problems. This gives Wanda more of a reason to dig her heels in and refuse to leave. Stephen can still be overpowered by Wanda and then we can have a nice moment where he teams up with people from other universes like The Illuminati who are aware of Wanda's presence and want to help Stephen, that can still happen. Those are some changes I'd have made to make the TV shows (the ones dealing with the multiverse, anyway) a lot more consequential. Because if we truly are building to The Multiverse than it makes no sense to whore Kang out in "Antman and The Wasp: Quantumnmania". 

Because this was a decent idea...but the execution...

If anything we should be seeing the consequences of Sylvie's actions and understanding "Spider-Man: No Way Home" is a symptomn of that, and every MCU project leading up to that should either be hinting at the multiverse or building to it. Prehaps maybe we see the Nathaniel Richards variant of Kang somewhere, perhaps we meet Rama-Tut, The Scarlett Centurion and Immortus recruiting Kangs from other universes. There are millions of ways Marvel can deal with Kang's approach even if Johnathan Majors is going to get the boot from the MCU (and while the jury is still out on that one), recasting him is no big deal because again all Variants don't have to lookalike, something they're established in "Loki", "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and something they could've easily establish in "The Multiverse Of Madness" if Dr.Strange were to meet his variant OR if Tom Cruise showed up as a Tony Stark variant and member of The Illuminati. All possible roads Marvel could have taken.

This would have been more impactful if they were background villains of each new film

Because as it stands right now Marvel is doing a pisspoor job of building Kang up (at least in the movies, in the TV shows they did a proper job of making him look strong). So where we're at now is Multiversal war is about to pop off and no one outside of the people who've watched "Loki" are aware of what's going down and what's at stake and that sucks because if the TV shows crossed over into the film people would be more inclided to check them out. And those TV shows are there to tell side stories that need time to grow that a full length movie wouldn't allow. If Marvel made more of an effort to get their TV shows and films lined up so that they're telling one story with one major story in the background that'd go a long way to restoring some faith in the Marvel brand, DC certainly didn't accomplish this and now NOTHING is connected and I have no faith James Gunn's DCEU (but that's an article for another time). Anyway lemme know what you guys think about my changes to "Loki", "WandaVision" and "Multiverse Of Madness" and I'll see you guys soon.