My Take on Spoilers

These days, when social media have connected us, given each of us an opportunity to share our opinions or news we've discovered (this blog being an example,) there's a lot of discourse on the nature of "spoilers."

Stories having twists and turns is a device as old as stories themselves. Humans have always wanted to find some new clever spin on an existing structure, and so reversals gave birth to the true twist. But even if you don't have the kind of twist that recontextualizes everything that came before it, the fact is that stories, even those where we know roughly how they will end, can still surprise us. We might know how something is going to go but not want it to be a certainty until we've seen it for ourselves.

I still haven't seen Avengers: Endgame.

In all honesty, I think I'm less spoiler-conscious than a lot of people. I think part of the reason for this is that I get very emotionally invested in the stories I see/read/hear. If, for example, a character who we begin very much liking in a movie is revealed to be an evil villain all along, it can sometimes allow us to create a bit of a defense against that sort of betrayal. Similarly, if a major character is going to die, knowing ahead of time allows us to create a bit of emotional distance from the situation so that when it happens, we can feel less shocked and hurt.

Of course, the point of art (well, that's a huge subject of debate, but here's my take) is to evoke an emotional response. Yes, none of the people we've seen killed on Game of Thrones has actually died (or at least didn't die that way, I know there are at least a couple members of the cast who have died either of old age or cancer) but the exercise of engaging with a piece of art is to invest emotionally as if the characters were real. There's no real guy named Jon Snow (actually, there almost certainly is, but he's probably not anything like the character Kit Harrington plays) and yet we can worry for the Jon Snow who grew up as a bastard in Winterfell in the same way we'd worry for a cousin who's been shipped off to Iraq.

There is safety, of course, in fiction. Indeed, the concept of catharsis as a reason for watching drama (particularly tragedy) is that we get to experience that visceral, emotional pain but then leave the pain behind on the seat in the theater or between the covers of the book we just read.

The point, then, of these last few paragraphs, is to say that art can evoke very strong emotions, and sometimes those emotions get very intense. (I should also point out that they can trigger memories of real-life emotional pain sometimes as well. After my mom died in 2017, a few months later I was feeling sad and decided to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, a famously fun movie, only to forget that the very first scene is of its main character watching his mother die of cancer. To be honest, the absurdity of how on-the-nose that was for what I was dealing with made me laugh.)

Because that emotional response can be intense, sometimes spoilers can make it easier to watch a movie. Frankly, I felt I could enjoy Get Out more knowing the twists, because I was able to intellectualize it a bit more and admire the craftsmanship - which, as I said earlier in this blog, was masterful.

Indeed, Bertolt Brecht came up with a philosophy of drama that intentionally alienated the audience from the emotional aspects of his characters, drawing attention to the artifice of the work.

But a lot of people do not like spoilers. And I will defend that point of view as well.

The way I see it, a work of art need not be ephemeral. Yes, some people view the ephemeral as having value - liking works that you can only experience once, or that change each time you view it. Indeed, I would argue that each time you see a movie, for example, the experience is somewhat different, both because of external factors as well as the fact that you've seen the movie before.

I'd further suggest that if you watch a movie several times, each time the experience is less different than the one before it. Watching Star Wars with my sister (who had somehow not seen the original movies) I was shocked to find that, even over a decade since I last watched them, I could basically say every line before it was spoken, as I had seen them so many times as a kid (I didn't, of course, because that would have been incredibly annoying.)

What this means, then, is that the first time you see any movie, it's a unique experience. Frankly, even with spoilers, you'll still be seeing shots and scenes you've heard about and now actually be able to understand their nature for the first time (and even with a lot of spoilers, you're probably not going to know every beat of every scene.)

That first viewing is not necessarily going to be your best viewing (though obviously, most movies you're probably only going to see once) but it is a unique one. And even if you'll enjoy a movie more after you already know what the big twists and turns it's building to are, the viewing of that movie in which you don't know them is a unique experience.

So I do not begrudge viewers who want to get that first experience of the movie fresh.

Now, when it comes specifically to Endgame (can you tell I'm thinking about it a lot knowing I don't get to see it until Thursday?) it's kind of funny, because there are some spoilers that are just in the nature of knowing what a movie like this demands.

Infinity War's ending, in a vacuum, was incredibly bleak, but the fact that the MCU is such a massive and continuing franchise, and the fact that we already know new Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Spiderman, and I think Doctor Strange movies are coming, not to mention that I could never imagine Disney (or Marvel) to allow such a dark ending to remain in effect, suggests that Endgame has to find a way to reverse what happened. That's before we get to the heavy foreshadowing that this is all part of the plan - the fact that Doctor Strange claimed he saw only one version of events in which they succeeded and then gave the Time Stone to save a single person's life: you knew that this had to be part of that version.

The question is what we lose along the way. Basically, which of these characters with whom we've spent the last eleven years is going to wind up paying the ultimate price to save the universe.

I have my theories, but even though I think this is going to be one of those movies where knowing its trajectory might make it more fun, I do actually want to have that unique, first viewing experience.

So far, I haven't gotten any really firm spoilers. So let's try to keep it up.

The Long Night

On this, the third episode of Game of Thrones' final season, we come to what the show has pretty much been building toward for its entire run. Winterfell is besieged by the Army of the Dead, and the fate of humanity and all the characters we care about rests in the balance.

Naturally, any episode this big is going to be big on spoilers, so I'm going to put the cut pretty early here.

As in now.

No, I Haven't Seen Avengers Endgame Yet

My friends and I have figured out a time we can all go see Endgame, which is the good news. The bad news is that it's not until Thursday, during which I will be spoiler-dodging as best I can. That being said, the biggest obstacle to this will be myself.

In theory, I think there is some value to seeing a movie without knowing what's coming. The first time I saw The Matrix (how can that movie already be 20 years old?) I had only seen the rather impressively detail-scarce trailers, and had no idea that the movie's premise was that the real world was actually just a virtual reality we were trapped in (or is it that our descendants will be trapped in such a world?) So everything was a surprise in that viewing.

That being said, while I do think people ought to have the right to see a movie fresh the first time, I also recognize that all subsequent viewings of such a movie are going to be "spoiled," and that doesn't detract from their value.

I loved Get Out, even though I had the biggest plot twists spoiled for me years in advance, and in fact it allowed me to watch the movie with those in mind and thus allowed me to appreciate the clever craft of it - how those twists were so well-seeded in moments I likely would not have remembered if I didn't already know about the twists.

As an exercise, I am, for now, trying to remain spoiler-free on Endgame, though I did see an errant tweet that was either a full-on spoiler or a trolling misdirection.

Naturally, the big question for the movie is who is going to die. With this huge arc coming to an end, and many of the actors ready to move on to other projects, it's prime killing season. Obviously, Infinity War saw a number of deaths before its profoundly bleak finale (bleak if one did not assume Endgame was going to fix it - something that announced sequels and such would make absolutely necessary.)

So let me make my predictions. For the record, I swear I haven't seen the movie. These are not spoilers - they are only my predictions. So don't get mad at me if I get these right!

First off, the two most likely deaths to me are Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. Both have been at the center of the Avengers story. Even if Thor has had just as many movies, those didn't really get good until the third one, and Thor's kind of off in his own space. Also, after the devastation of the beginning of Infinity War - something I'm not sure is going to get reversed (we'll get to those parts below,) the Asgardians really need to keep him around.

Iron Man, I think, would find the ultimate completion of his arc from selfish to selfless, and maybe more profoundly, by sacrificing himself he would ultimately be stepping aside for others to protect the world in the future. Tony's biggest flaw, I think, has been the notion that he's got to be the one to fix things. That led to Ultron, and it led to his conflict with Steve. While yes, a self-sacrifice does kind of put the spotlight on him, it is also, ultimately, a passing of the torch.

Captain America would be staying true to himself if he sacrificed himself to save the universe - even pre-serum, he was throwing himself on a (fake, but he didn't know that) grenade. Steve is the ultimate Lawful Good, self-sacrificing hero, but in a way that almost makes me wonder if we're going to lose him without him actually dying.

There's clearly going to be some kind of time-manipulation if they're going to undo the snap - just bringing people back would create some really messed up existential stuff for literally half the universe. Steve Rogers has, of course, become an integral part of the modern era, but there was a whole life for him in the 1940s that was lost to him pretty unfairly. If we wanted to give Captain America a happy ending, could we think of a better one than sending him back to the 40s to be with Peggy again?

Now, I've talked about how the Snap is obviously going to have to be undone. We've still got Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3, Black Panther 2, maybe another Doctor Strange movie? (I liked it, though I'll admit largely because of how cool its visuals were - I think they wasted Mads Mikkelsen.)

The real question is which pre-snap deaths from Infinity War are getting undone. First, let's talk the Asgardians. I think Heimdall and Loki are probably down for the count. Loki has come back so many times that this one really needs to stick or we'll just never believe he's dead. I'd like to know what happened to Valkyrie, Korg, and the other Asgardians (Sif escaped Hela's cast-culling in Ragnarok, but we don't know how she did with Thanos.)

Then we've got Gamora. Now, I think she's got to come back. The fact that a vision of her appears when Thanos gets the Soul Stone makes me think that she's not truly dead, but somehow trapped within the gem or something. I think Guardians would really suffer losing any of the core group, and while Nebula and Mantis get them enough women to potentially pass the Bechdel test, I really think Gamora's got to come back (if for nothing other than to have some kind of final reckoning with Thanos.)

So that leaves Vision. On one hand, Vision hasn't been around in too many movies, but on the other, Paul Bettany has. I could imagine that, as someone who has been in the franchise just as long as Robert Downey Junior, he might be ready to leave. But in-narrative, I don't think Vision really needs to stick around. Can they save him? Maybe. Will they? I don't really know. It's a chance for an unsnapped Wanda to feel sad, and doesn't angst drive all sorts of drama?

Anyway, it seems pretty clear to me that the fact that Doctor Strange saw only one possibility in which they beat Thanos, and then went on to hand over the Time Stone to him, means that the "only way" absolutely required that they first lose. As I've said before, Strange is no stranger to dying over and over if it means winning in the end. After Dormammu, that one death probably feels like nothing.

Two Episodes In, Game of Thrones Pays off Emotional Arcs Before The Cast Gets Culled in Episode Three

The first two episodes of this season of Game of Thrones have been remarkably light on action. Tonight's episode in particular, "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," spends all its time processing the relationships and growth of the characters who are holed up in Winterfell, preparing to make their stand against the Army of the Dead.

Where even to begin?

Well, I don't think I'm going to hit every arc. But rather central to the episode is a scene in a hall that begins with the Lannister brothers reflecting on how their lives have changed. Jaime has gone from a vain and cruel incestuous brat to something of a man of honor, and Tyrion has gone from the family fuck-up to one of the respected great minds of the world. They've both gone through terrible pains to get to that point, but they can take some satisfaction that now, as death closes in on them, they can at least rightfully claim that they are better men than they once were.

Gradually, more and more people arrive in this room - Brienne and Podrick, Davos, and Tormund all wind up there.

The air is grim. Only Brienne views this as a standard battle, describing the troops under her command and the area she has been given to defend as being good terrain with a tactical advantage. She is fighting as a competent soldier, despite the fact that the foe is utterly different than anything most of the people there have ever faced.

Brienne is one of my favorite characters in the series. She is the exception to that proves the rule: namely, George R. R. Martin has made a major theme of the series the deconstruction of the "noble knight" archetype, showing that knights tend to be brutish murderers - the Hound never wanted to be one because if his brother, who is a monster (now literally,) could be one, then there was clearly no truth to the chivalric ideals they were meant to embody.

And yet, Brienne, despite not being a knight due to the fact that in a patriarchal society, they'd never even consider making her one, has embodied exactly the chivalric ideals that knights are supposed to represent. She has been true to her word, fiercely dedicated, and utterly competent. Even a figure like Barristan Selmy, a rare exemplar of such values, still found himself in the awkward position of having served an evil king.

Brienne has been trained never to expect recognition for her virtues, and so it is an immensely emotional moment when Jaime, whose redemption as a human being is largely thanks to Brienne's honor, follows Tormund's advice on fucking tradition and knights Brienne - this after he has offered to serve as her subordinate in battle.

It may have taken the end of the fucking world, but finally, a person who embodies exactly what a knight should be is recognized for those virtues.

Does that give us hope?

Hope is a tricky thing here. It's satisfying to see so many dangling plot threads resolved - from anything as simple as Jorah and Lyanna Mormont meeting again to Arya and Gendry consummating their relationship (though I'll leave it to you to interpret to what extent that was a real emotional connection and to what extent Arya just knew Gendry would be willing so she could cross that off her bucket list.)

The thing is, for anyone who knows narrative structure (particularly if you've ever watched a Joss Whedon show,) having a character resolve a long-running storyline is a really good sign that that character is going to die.

And the fact that the massive battle at Winterfell is going to start next episode, with more than half of the season to go, means that this battle ain't going to be pretty, and might even wind up being decisively lost.

One thing that sticks out like a red warning flag is that they've made it very clear that all the innocent people are being sent to the Winterfell Crypts. This is meant to seem like the caves beneath Helm's Deep, for us to watch the battle and know its stakes are high but still assume that if the heroes emerge victorious, all the innocents will be safe.

But this is Game of Thrones, guys. And you've got an Army of the Dead that can raise the dead, and you're putting a bunch of people down with a bunch of long-dead people? Really?

We have a structure to the battle now, with Bran serving as bait for the Night's King to come to the Godswood and hopefully be destroyed by either Dragonfire or Valyrian Steel.

But I do really wonder if that's going to happen at all.

We don't know how clever the Night's King is, and what kind of play he might make. Is he really just relying on all the magical advantages he has, or is he also a brilliantly clever campaigner, willing to win dirty like Tywin Lannister was?

Hell, maybe the army won't even attack Winterfell, letting a chain-reaction of undeath spill forth from the crypts. In fact, how fucking crazy would it be if the Army of the Dead just passed Winterfell entirely and then the people there had to rush and warn Cersei?

In a way, there are some characters who stand a better chance at survival just because there's unresolved issues:

First, (actually last in the episode,) Jon tells Daenerys what Bran and Sam have told him, that he's actually Aegon Targaryen, son of Rhaegar and Lyanna. Dany doesn't have time to really process this (I don't think either of them have stopped to consider that this makes them aunt and nephew,) when the horns blare three times, and we all know what three horns means.

Earlier, Dany and Sansa have a talk, as Dany tries to smooth things over, relating to Sansa on the way that both of them have been through some real shit and have struggled in a world that doesn't like women to hold power (indeed, Jon's claim on the throne offends her in part because it's some dude sweeping and and grabbing what she has fought for for years.) She and Sansa seem to arrive at a place where they like each other as people, but the political divide - that the Northerners are fucking done with answering to a monarch in King's Landing, and Dany's fear that without total control over the Seven Kingdoms, her position as Queen would be unstable and weak - means that there's still some delicate negotiation that needs to happen if they survive the battle.

It seems very unlikely we won't be losing a lot of character next episode. The real question I have is what the final few are going to look like. I see a couple possible scenarios:

1: The plan works, and at great cost, the Night's King is slain, and the Army of the Dead crumbles. But this leaves the good guys to face Cersei and the Golden Company as the true "final boss" of the series.

2: The battle at Winterfell is a disaster and the castle is lost, along with most of the people. The survivors must rush south and desperately try to convince Cersei to take this Army of the Dead seriously. (I think this one, or something similar, is the most likely.)

3: The Dead really do march past Winterfell in an attempt to conquer the south before coming back north, and somehow pin down the folks at Winterfell so that they will have a real struggle to do anything about it.

There are a few questions I have that remain:

First, is Melisandre really out of the picture here? She says she foresaw that she and Varys would die in Westeros. Could she pull the big damn heroes moment and save the day at some point, maybe sacrificing herself to do so?

Second: How accurate is Bran's assertion that the Night's King is going after him specifically? This seems like a very convenient way of funneling the battle into a single arena, which to be fair is a pretty common practice in action movies (think of that chapel in Avengers: Age of Ultron, or the Death Star trench in you goddamn know what movie.) It's actually something I always kind of respected about the big battles in Lord of the Rings - both Helm's Deep and Pelenor Fields were sieges that were not focused around a single location, but were about keeping a fortified location standing until the cavalry/army of the dead (good version this time) could get there. Granted, with an army that can grow over the course of a battle, it does make some sense for it to be less about endurance than taking decisive actions.

Third: Just how willing is the show (which has supposedly been working toward an ending Martin always had in mind) to subvert expectations? Would it go so far as to really let the Dead win? Could we see everyone wiped out? Or is it going to be less about letting the monsters win than making the establishment of peace following the war far more fraught and complicated than Aragorn's 400 years as a "just king?" In particular, I wonder how accurate my assertion that characters with unresolved stories are more likely to survive is - yes, Jon just broached a very complicated subject with Dany, and it seems like we ought to have them survive so that they can feel complicated about it, but maybe the battle will just kill one or both of them and make it a non-issue? (Please don't - I know that both of them suffer from Protagonists-are-the-Boring-Characters syndrome, but I don't want to see either of their stories just kind of fall apart as some shaggy dog.)

Anyway, we should be seeing some serious action next episode. Expect a lot of violence, a lot of death, and probably a lot of beloved characters biting the dust.

Has Marvel Fixed Its Villain Problem?

The MCU is a phenomenon. I think it's always a little hard to be aware of how big a movie is when it first comes out, but for over a decade, we've had this massive franchise that is now twice as many films as Star Wars and has made about twice as much money (which means Star Wars is just as big per-movie) and it's clear that we're witnessing something huge and historic in cinema history.

Despite being movies about super-powered titans fighting each other with magic and/or super-science, the real strength of the MCU is its characters. With so many movies under their belts, the primary cast of the Avengers has had time to grow - both personally and in their relationships with one another.

But one of the early criticisms of the MCU was that, by contrast, its villains sucked. With the notable exception of Tom Hiddleston's Loki (who, true to the comics, was the villain of the first Avengers team-up story) we generally had a parade of really uninteresting bad-guys, even when they were played by really good actors, like Lee Pace's Ronan the Accuser or Christopher Eccleston's Malekith.

As such, the crappiness of Marvel villains has been a go-to critique of the movies.

But is it really true anymore?

In more recent years, the MCU's villains have often been interesting, fun, or compelling.

Probably the most notable is Michael B. Jordan's Erik Stevens/N'dajaka/Killmonger. Despite being a brute and a tyrant, his motivations are understandable, and rooted in a yearning for the utopian homeland that he was denied. Black Panther was explosively popular - in part due to the amazing production design and the feeling of "yes, finally" that we got by having a fiercely and proudly black superhero movie, but also, I think, largely due to the realization of its sympathetic villain and Jordan's compelling performance.

But Killmonger isn't really an exception, even if he's the best example.

Civil War had Zemo - another broken and sympathetic but ultimately villainous character. Thor Ragnarok had Hela, who was a delightfully over-the-top vamp. Ant Man and the Wasp arguably didn't have a true villain, when we discovered Ghost's motivations. And then we've got Thanos.

There was an absolute ton riding on Thanos being a compelling character. Teased since the first Avengers movie, we needed to believe Thanos was truly the biggest threat they'd ever faced. The easiest way of doing that is to simply have him beat your toughest guys - having him win a slug-fest with the Hulk accomplishes that pretty well.

But what truly made Thanos work was that you got the sense that he is a man of pure, total conviction. He absolutely thinks that he is the hero of the universe, and that the dark deeds he has done have all been for a crucially necessary greater good.

Even though he's completely wrong and insane, and that his argument would fall apart the moment you pointed out that, for example, population growth is exponential, so in a couple generations the population of the universe would probably get back to where it is now, he makes it clear that he is not trying to be the bad guy. He doesn't hate our heroes. It'll be interesting to see what becomes of him in Endgame.

So, what are we to make of this?

My sense is that the folks at Marvel work very, very hard to make this franchise work. And I think making villains more compelling must be a goal they set out to accomplish, and the work seems to be paying off.

Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

We got our first teaser for episode 9 of Star Wars.

(WARNING: Unmarked spoilers for Last Jedi in this post. Read at your own risk.)

In it, we see Rey on a desert planet watching as a Kylo Ren's TIE fighter(-like ship) heads toward her, igniting her lightsaber and jumping right as the ship closes in.

We see a few different shots, with Luke's narration (presumably we're going to get some Force Ghost Luke) and see a number of things, including the massive fragments of what looks to be the Death Star (1 or II I don't know - but I imagine either Yavin or Endor have had some serious environmental damage from the wreckage.)

The teaser ends on what sounds like Palpatine's laugh.

And then we get the title (and it's blue - so I guess they've got a color scheme for these movies, with Yellow, Red, Blue.)

So what does Rise of Skywalker mean?

Well, first off we need to delve into the extremely divisive reaction to Last Jedi.

As I wrote on this blog, I was a big fan of Rian Johnson's take on Star Wars. It subverted a lot of expectations, blowing up supposed mystery boxes (by far my favorite example being the revelation that Rey is not the scion of some famous family, but just an ordinary person capable of extraordinary things.)

I felt it grappled with the realities of living as a myth, particularly in Luke's arc. I think it had something to say in a way that the Force Awakens, while enjoyable and buoyed by a cast of interesting new characters, didn't really.

But there are certainly some who felt disappointed by the Last Jedi, and I don't know whether Disney is happy or upset with the reaction it received.

Anyway, given that the last Skywalker died at the end of the Last Jedi (though Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is obviously just as genetically a Skywalker as anyone who would have gotten that name through patrilineal naming conventions,) it's surprising to see the title of this be The Rise of Skywalker. It feels like one of the major points of the Last Jedi was to hand off the legacy of the Jedi to people who weren't Skywalkers - that the Star Wars saga itself was moving on to other people, opening up to a broader universe.

(EDIT: I feel like a dunce here ignoring that Leia is, obviously, just as much a Skywalker as Luke. Leia's survival of Last Jedi creates some awkward behind-the-scenes issues, given that Carrie Fisher - badass - died in 2016. Leia has demonstrated some force powers - presumably she could have been as much of a powerful Jedi as Luke had she gotten the training, but the only time we see her use her powers is to escape from the void of space in Last Jedi. Leia as a character might not be canonically dead, but I obviously can't imagine that The Rise of Skywalker is going to focus on her all that much, unless they go with that creepy uncanny valley CGI like they did with Tarkin and a younger Leia in Rogue One.)

So does this signal that JJ Abrams wants to undo much of what happened in the Last Jedi? Are they going to reveal Rey is actually a Skywalker/Solo/Kenobi/Palpatine? How much coordination was there on this trilogy? A lot of people who disliked the Last Jedi seem to feel as if Rian Johnson was just allowed to go off an do his own thing regardless of the plans for the trilogy, but that seems crazy, especially given Disney's experience with coordinating movies like the MCU (though maybe Kevin Feige is just an unparalleled genius at that?)

Anyway, there's really only so much we have to go on. I'm sure we'll have a media blitz in which Disney tells us all the things they want us to know before seeing the film. I guess I'm just nervous that they want to walk back a lot of the interesting ideas they introduced in Last Jedi.