Hawkeye: Hide And Seek
Now the two have met, and a few different mysteries are swirling around them. Kate is thrilled to have met her idol, and Clint just wants to get back home.
I’ve been commenting that, by and large, the writers on the first season of Marvel’s What If…? seem to be in a competition about who can write the darkest story. While last episode, featuring the hijinks of an only child version of Thor, was a lot lighter and funnier, it ended on a bleak note that gave a hint about the next episode, “What if Ultron Won?”
In 2012, Marvel Studios made history. Not only did the Avengers set all kinds of box office records at the time, but for the first time, characters that had headlined their own movies came together as a team for a major event. In the MCU, there were six founding Avengers, and five of them have had their own movie, or movies. Hawkeye, often overlooked and with arguably the smallest part in both his first appearance (Thor) and The Avengers, now gets the Disney+ treatment in his own six episode series.
Taking its name from the comic where Thor (and later Loki himself) first appeared in Marvel Comics back in the 60’s, Loki goes into the Void to learn a lot more about what’s really going on in “Journey Into Mystery.”
Past the halfway point now, Loki continues to deliver surprises and twists. What would you expect from something where the main character is the god of mischief, or lies, depending on which version you’re going by? I like to think I’m pretty good at working out where stories might go, and I saw none of what happened this episode coming.
When your main character is a god of mischief and you’ve already introduced time travel and unlimited teleportation, you never know what’s coming next. Add in other chaos factors like a different version of your main character and some kind of allegedly all powerful group behind the scenes, and the sky’s the limit. Or even that isn’t really a limit.
Disney+ has been producing some great additions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. WandaVision was surreally amazing, and The Falcon and The Winter Solider was a great buddy cop/adventure story with some events that should change the future of the MCU. Now Loki gets his turn in a six part series explaining what happened to the God of Mischief after he escaped during the Avengers’ hijinks in time as seen in Endgame.
“The World Is Watching” was the perfect title for last episode, as John Walker crossed the line, killing one of the Flag-Smashers in a spectacularly brutal way, and using Cap’s shield to do it. Now, the ramifications roil through the world of the major characters as everyone tries to figure out what to do next.
They keep that high bar going, and we learn about the new Captain America they introduced us to, with “Star Spangled Man.” Even the title is a callback to Captain America history, which happens a lot in this episode.
We get to see a bit of characters actually having lives, which has been largely lacking in the MCU (do I need to say why either Tony Stark or Wanda’s “homelife” doesn’t count?). Sam Wilson and James “Bucky” Barnes are trying to find their places in the “New World Order.”