Loki was a baffling chaotic hot mess of a series that is a clarion call of things to come.

He Who Remains in the middle of his villainous monologue

Spoiler Alert: We are talking about Loki today. Proceed at your own peril.

Loki season 1 (there will be a season 2 according to the stinger embedded after the credits sequence of the season finale) ended by introducing us to a character called "He Who Remains." Played by Jonathan Majors from HBO's now canceled Lovecraft Country, he was a monologuing villain. However, his monologue wasn't boring, as he spoke to both Loki and Sylvie in the house at the end of time.

Who "He Who Remains" actually is...has yet to be revealed. But most sources who have read comic books say that this is Nathaniel Richards. They also say that Kang the Conqueror is one of many versions of Richards, which echoes a sentiment shared by He Who Remains when he referred to one of his variants as a "conqueror." This particular version of Kang was just a nerd who became a tyrant kind of accidentally. Not because he actually wanted to rule, but because he thought he knew what was best and had the means to achieve it.

As a villain, I found this character of He Who Remains to be affably evil with his pseudo arguments of, "What would you do in my place? All of your lives were necessary collateral damage...a sacrifice to keep the timeline pure. If you think you can do better, then you should and just take over." I also liked the line, "We're all villains here." It seemed appropriate given the circumstance that Sylvie and Loki had somehow managed to achieve the high ground of morality despite their storied history of death and destruction. The difference then seemed to be in the growth of the Loki character played by Hiddleston, who learnt to consider what if he is wrong and how that can affect others. This was unique, as Sylvie (to the very bitter end) was consumed by revenge for the wrongs that had been done to her.

In watching these six episodes of the first season, I've got to say that none of this went in the direction that I thought it would. Loki was singularly the most baffling of the Disney + series that include WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It was also the most revealing into the MCU's future, by giving us a glimpse of all the time travel quackery that is going to consume the multiverse. I wonder how the writers are even going to keep track of all the timelines that are going to explode, and all the various iterations of the characters we know and how they will face the threat of Kang the Conqueror. I worry that it will become confusing in the same way that Dark on Netflix got really confusing and not at all enjoyable. I also wonder if Kang will fall short of the impressiveness of Thanos. I don't really know much about him, so I'm excited to learn. I definitely think that Marvel is trying to go in a different direction, and try out a completely polar opposite of Thanos by recognizing that you can't capture lightning in a bottle more than once.

And I had a parting thought I wanted to share sparked by the Loki mini-series. Maybe the common thread of the future movies is going to be the TVA (Time Variance Authority), and how everyone is going to try for a better version of the TVA. In other words, stopping Kangs from warring across multiverses seems necessary, but not if the cost is free will and the destruction of so many other lives. I also wonder if the timelines diverging means that there are now multiple instances of the TVA. Loki landed in a very different version--one with Kang's statues and no one remembering him. So what exactly does that mean if the TVA itself has been rewritten other than to send the basic message that nothing that has happened thus far in the Marvel Cinematic Universe accounts for anything. It seems like a weird place to go with these stories, but maybe a great reset is what they needed to break away from the comic book peak that they reached with the Infinity Gauntlet story.

Do any of you have any thoughts or considerations regarding the Loki mini-series? 

Disney Studios does a great job in rotating major characters out of their Marvel properties. Black Widow is the latest example of this.

A bunch of people around the world watched Black Widow this past weekend. I was one of them. By the time it was over, I had thought yet again on why Marvel (when run by Disney) seems to keep hitting things out of the park. Every film has a freshness to it that you don't get with new Batman and Superman movies where they have recast the old character with whatever the new hotness is in Hollywood. It occurred to me that one of the things that Disney really has going for it is its willingness to just let things go and move on.

For example, Captain America, Iron Man, and Black Widow had run their course. So they let those characters go. There may be new ones that pop up in the future. Anthony Mackey is going to be a "Captain America." But he will never be "The Captain America," and I'm not bothered by that at all. That old "cap" is done as far as I'm concerned (and I really do love me some Chris Evans). The reel's been run out on that particular iteration of the character and what they wanted to do with their life. I gotta say though, that I'm a little in awe of Disney's bold moves to just toss aside old characters that have made them a ton of money. Lesser studios might have tried to woo the actor back with a salary increase or some other such nonsense, but not Disney.

Black Widow (of course) is the latest of the bunch that gets their swan song in a motion picture. When the character was first introduced, female members of "The Avengers" and female superheroes in general were kind of rare. However, we can't say that anymore (and it's only been ten or so years--that isn't that long, folks!). And as much as Natasha spent posing and doing the things that she does really well for the entirety of her run in the MCU, the film was also a highlight of Natasha's greatest hits, showing us one more time just why she was an Avenger in the first place (even though she had no actual super powers). The film also was an excellent springboard to introduce us to someone who is going to be "a Black Widow," even if she isn't the Black Widow. And that's actually exciting, because I love this new character (her name is Yelena Belova and is the younger sister of Natasha but not by blood). Progression and change is so much better than just rebooting characters and asking everyone to pretend that they don't know the origin story one more time.

In watching all of these comic book movies and television adaptations, I feel like studios (and Hollywood) too often keep reaching for the same bag of tricks to try and capture lightning in a bottle. The characters of Superman, the Batman, Spiderman, and the Joker have been done to death. As much as I love Tom Holland in the role of Spiderman, it's going to be fun to see what Disney does with the character next as Holland's contract is up. I read online that Holland is hoping that they will renew his contract, but I actually hope they don't. With the MCU providing a guiding hand to the property of Spiderman, I would assume that we are going to see an expansion of the character into the many alternate realms and earths, giving us all kinds of "Spider people." This hasn't ever been done before in live-action, and it's going to inject some badly needed freshness into a very stale franchise.

Change is a good thing. Capitalism doesn't agree with this statement of course. With regard to entertainment, what capitalism tends to do is to seize upon a successful thing...and then clone it with something that is only marginally different. The up and coming Windows 11 operating system reminds me of this, because Gizmodo's screen shots show that its interface will be almost identical to Mac OS. So, they are copying Apple to try and catch lightning in a bottle. Only Apple already caught the lightning in a bottle, so I don't think it will end up being any more successful than Windows 10 was (I'm actually a fan of Windows 10). And that's why what Disney does by tossing out these old characters in favor of trying out new ones is remarkable by any capitalist measuring stick.

Anyway, Black Widow was a great film that didn't feel stale, and it opened the doors to many other fun opportunities to explore within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Anyone else see it this weekend? I'll look for your responses in the comments.

Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights brought me joy.

This weekend I watched In the Heights, the movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's stage musical of the same name. I loved it so much that I watched it on Friday night and then again on Saturday night. The musical itself is the story of several families who live in Washington Heights, which is a neighborhood in New York City that (in 2021) is largely associated with people from the Dominican Republic.

All of them to one extent or another are followers of el sueñito, which is Spanish for "the dream." In the 1950's, when the abuela of the movie was following her sueñito, all they wanted was to have and provide for children who would not have to struggle and experience the losses that they did. In a musical number called Calor, which is Spanish for "heat," this same abuela to the neighborhood sings about the terrible heat wave that claims her life, and how hard it was to leave Cuba, a place where they had clear skies and stars but no food. Her dream wasn't ever to go and be a cleaning lady. But in order to get what she wanted, this is what life dealt her. So she lived in a way that allowed her to have dignity in small places so that she could tell the world that she was not invisible.

The timeframe for In the Heights is vague. It is set around a blackout that lasts for days in July. Miranda wrote it in the nineties, and he drew inspiration for it from events in the 70's. The original show premiered on Broadway in 2008. But the theatrical musical adaptation that was on HBO Max through June and July (and in theaters) was set right now. This is more than clear with the issues surrounding one of the undocumented dreamers in the show who desperately wants a green card and citizenship in the United States during a time when racism and white nationalism is on the rise nationwide.

Although I can identify with everyone's sueñito in the movie, the theme that struck me most was the idea of being able to forge a life with people in one place and to call that place home. Too often, people are pulled in different directions in life. They move away to different zip codes or country codes, and it can feel like (for those who stay) that the place they called home is dying. The thing I found remarkable was that this story was a way in which young people transitioned to adulthood, yet still came back home to live their lives and continue their story among friends and family. That certainly might have been one thing I would have welcomed in my own life, but I was never able to stick any kind of landing in the place where I was born and have long since left that place and all those who I knew that I might have called, "friend."

If you haven't seen the show, I recommend that you take some time out of your schedule and earnestly watch it. In the Heights resonated with me, because I've experienced discomfort and isolation in schools and workplaces for the way I looked, my lack of religious beliefs, and for my sexuality. I existed in a space and aspired to goals that in many ways, the widespread population of Idaho and Utah would say was not intended for me to achieve. And that's just the truth of it. In the Heights was in many ways about the "otheringness" that Puerto Ricans feel. But anyone who is part of a minority can definitely relate, and feel the power it takes to have pride in oneself and not be apologetic for it. This show brought me joy, and I'm glad it was so readily available to watch.

Ready Player Two is the sequel that didn't need to be written.

I finished reading Ready Player Two this week by author, Ernest Cline. As a novel, it wasn't as good as the first installment which got made into a movie. However, even knowing this...knowing that it is generally impossible to catch lightning in a bottle twice in a row...I wasn't prepared for how "dystopian" the world of Ready Player One actually is. And maybe I should have been. In the first book, the character of Daito got murdered when he was thrown out a window by Sorrento. The event is shocking in the book (not seen in the movie), but it was easy to ignore some of those things (like the stacks getting blown up by IOI/Sorrento), because the Oasis was so much fun visualizing it all.

Ready Player Two picks up where the novel pretty much left off. It turns the page and quickly closes a chapter on the Wade and Samantha romance because Wade is pretty much a huge douchebag. He's like the stereotypical incel character that you hear about on the news, who is really into video games and gets so enraged when women rebuff him that he commits crimes. I was really surprised by this, but I probably shouldn't have been. Wade was always this character, I just refused to see it. Even though Wade shares "ownership" of the company they formed that took over the Oasis, he consistently talks over Samantha and doesn't listen to a thing that she says. She ends up breaking up with him after only a week, because he's changed so much.

Because Wade is Halliday's heir, he wears the "Robes of Anorak." This pretty much makes him a god in the Oasis. So, what does he do with that power? He monitors all the chats for anyone who disparages him in a public way, and then kills their character with a level 99 Finger of Death spell by teleporting to their location while invisible and then snipes them off. He also stalks his ex, Samantha (Artemis), by watching when she logs onto the Oasis, and then he sifts through her private conversations. It's actually super creepy, and I have no idea why Ernest Cline went this direction with Wade in this book.

At the soul of this book is a new discovery that means huge implications for the human race, and it is through this discovery that Wade regains an opportunity to patch things up with Artemis. However, it all seems just a bit too contrived that she'd forgive him for all the creepy things he does and immediately fall back into his arms (which is pretty much what ends up happening). The discovery is another Easter Egg left by Halliday in a corporate vault: a pair of glasses that when worn turn the entire Oasis into a holodeck simulation from Star Trek. In other words, you can feel the wind on your face, you can taste food, you can feel pain and pleasure, etc. All it requires is that anyone who wears it must fork over their brain patterns to this thing for up to twelve hours a day. Any more than this, and you would risk lobotomizing yourself, as the human brain cannot put up with that kind of connection for longer than that. And therein is the plot of the book: by setting a limit on this new headset, the plot has to take us there in a "what if" scenario that evolves into a huge world engulfing crisis.

When Wade announces the new headset to his friends who control the corporation, Aech and Shoto both think it is amazing. Artemis thinks the world isn't ready for the technology, and in many ways she's right. Once again, Wade votes her down and then they go on to patent and sell the glasses to the public. They make so much money on them that they are able to pay off the national debt of the United States. While Artemis/Samantha uses her share of the profits to try to improve the world they live in (the real world), Wade just thinks the planet is f*cked anyway and he, Aech, and Shoto spend their money creating a spaceship that they can fly to Proxima Centauri, a nearby star system that may have planets that can support life. The trip will take 43 years and they will just have their bodies plugged into the Oasis the entire time, so they won't care. Basically, pack up, skip town, and kiss the planet Earth goodbye. You can really see why Samantha wants nothing to do with Wade.

And then, the villain of the story shows up: Anorak. This was the avatar of the now dead Halliday character, but you come to find out that Anorak is a ghost in the machine. He's an artificial intelligence that can think for himself and has Halliday's memory as well as many of Halliday's worst vices that are very "incel-like." He asks Wade to solve a puzzle left behind by Halliday, and he has to do it within twelve hours. If not, then everyone...billions of people worldwide...will not be able to log out of the Oasis, and they will all experience brain death because they are all using those headsets that Wade sold. And this number includes Wade. The only major character who refused to wear one of those new headsets was Samantha, who still logged into the Oasis using the old haptic gear from the first book. She manages to log out, so Anorak tries to kill her by having the plane fall out of the sky (similar to the events of 9/11). 

And then the rest of the book is just puzzle solving to beat Anorak's timer (and to come up with a way to beat Anorak without having to destroy the Oasis with the big red button). The book has a happy ending, but in many ways it seems very contrived. I'm not sure why Wade and Samantha reconcile and become a couple again, but maybe it has something to do with personality disorders and codependency. 

Ready Player Two ended up being the book that I honestly think didn't need to be written. The new headset is cool, and so are the implications of what such technology could do for the human race. But for those saving graces, the nostalgia from the eighties became a bit much. I mean there's a part in the book where they have to take on seven different versions of the Artist formerly known as Prince in a musical competition to the death while being aided by Morris Day and Janet Jackson and the Rhythm Nation. I was like...eh...this is dumb. Entertaining...but dumb. If anything, reading Ready Player Two made me realize that the original story was always a depressing vision of the future of the Earth, and that if everyone had the ability to escape into the Oasis, then no one would ever interact in person with each other ever again. It would be the end of the human race...an extinction by apathy for real life. I think that I much preferred not knowing about all of that, and should have just left well enough alone with the first book, and it's somewhat "Happily Ever After" ending.

I know that the movie is being directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, and I think it is set to come out in 2022. I just hope that Spielberg does what he's famous for doing and that he changes practically everything in it. In tone, it should match the first movie. And I hope that he makes Wade into a likeable character and ditches all that creepy, stalker stuff. I also hope that the movie packs a powerful environmental message of hope, instead of going "all in" on Wade wanting to flee the solar system by using his wealth to escape a dying Earth. I also hope that they skip that battle with Prince. It went on for way too many pages.

For the Independence Day IWSG post we are asked to ponder what would make us quit writing.

 It's Wednesday, July 7th and Salt Lake City is in the middle of a historic drought and another heat wave. And it's also time for the monthly Insecure Writer's Support Group blogfest.

The Insecure Writer's Support Group was originally started by Alex J. Cavanaugh, who is an excellent science fiction writer. It's purpose is to share knowledge and inspire/encourage other writers. The rules for the blogfest are simple: you post the first Wednesday of every month. The post can be about writing, or you can take a turn at answering the monthly question which can be found HERE along with the signup.

The awesome co-hosts for the July 7 posting of the IWSG are Pat Garcia, Victoria Marie Lees, and Louise – Fundy Blue!

Now, and with that out of the way, why don't we answer the question.

July 7 question: What would make you quit writing?

This is an easy question to answer: not having any ideas. But (thus far) I've always had things that I want to write and/or talk about. My problem isn't that I don't have enough to write about. Rather, it is that I don't have the time, discipline, or the energy to complete all the projects that I want to do. I'm sure that I'm not the only one.

There are other more obvious answers to this question as well. Lets say I got disabled, could no longer use my hands and speech to text wasn't an option, or let's say that my brain wasn't working like it should. I remember reading about how Terry Pratchett succumbed to Alzheimer's disease prior to his death, and I thought...yeah that's one way to silence a writer forever.

Anyway, those are the answers to the July questions. I hope that all you writers are having a nice summer, and that things are working out well for you. I also hope that your creative well never runs dry.

The Apple TV adaptation of Foundation can't resemble the book at all if it expects watchers.

Apple TV released the first trailer for their adaptation of Foundation. I've included it below. The first season of the series comes out in the fall, and I will probably watch it. Having read the Foundation books, I'm actually surprised that these could be made into something watchable. From a reader standpoint, they were barely entertaining, with no main characters having any emotion or likeableness, and spanning a length of time that is absurd by modern-day fiction standards. If you haven't read them, imagine getting a slice of a character's day...perhaps heated dialogue with another character...and the rudimentary dressings of what Asimov believes will suffice to "set the scene." And then there's a break, and the next scene takes place fifty years later. Those characters are now dead, and their descendants find something that remotely connects back to that argument that took place fifty years prior. That's how Foundation lurches its way forward in its narrative.

The characters in Asimov's famous work are not really the story. It's the idea that this immense galactic empire is collapsing and that one man can foresee and prove that it will happen to the doom and detriment of all the civilizations that form the empire. So the empire IS the character. This doomsayer prophet using math and science doesn't convince many people. But those whom he does convince become his army to essentially work toward making sure that there is only a dark age that lasts a thousand years instead of thirty thousand years by preserving knowledge. This future-seeing man is Harry Seldon, and he checks in every once in a while with preprogrammed holograms of himself that provide instructions to people so that they can go about the tasks of ending the Dark Age of the galaxy within a single millennia.

But I read from a standpoint that characters are what make a story interesting. Without them, the story is just a summary of the rise and fall and resurrection of a galactic empire containing billions upon billions of people that I don't really care about. Asimov essentially asks us to care about civilization in these books, and the question I always have while reading is: why should I care? It's like being asked to care about a thousand people getting wiped out by a plague in Bangladesh. We gasp at how horrible that sounds, but none of us actually shed a tear (or very few at least). We don't know those people. It's just a number. "Oh...did you hear that a thousand people were killed in Myanmar?" It's that kind of thing. We never know more than the headline.

Look...you know I'm not a scientist. I'm not an archeologist. I don't really have an interest in studying the rise and fall of a fictional civilization. But therein is probably the audience for this kind of thing: scientists and archeologists. It's clear that Asimov wrote this book for those people, who read science fiction and were blown away that someone would write what is essentially a summary of the Roman Empire with an added "we're back" hook that takes place over so many centuries that the characters involved in the story are just footnotes. It's the "what if" scenario. "What if there was this huge civilization, and someone saw it was falling, and then they took steps to preserve knowledge so that the horrible barbaric period only lasted a thousand years instead of thirty thousand? Wow! Wouldn't that be interesting!" And it undeniably is to some people. For me, the hang-up is just that huge timeline. It's too big for me as I never get to know a character other than in the five pages they exist.

I can see the likes of astrophysicists like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson waxing poetic about Foundation. Though these people are super smart, they also wax poetic when talking about Earth history and cosmological time. "In this collection of a billion years...trees evolved...and there were no microorganisms that could digest the wood pulp when they fell because they hadn't evolved yet. So, it all got buried under volcanic ash and earth and became petrified...giving us vast petrified forests today." I mean...scientifically...it is interesting. But I don't really care about those trees, and it's hard for me to care about any animal that may have lived at that time. I just don't. That's what Foundation is...more or less.

Asimov as a writer has been compared to being the worst of the great writers. More than one person has pointed out that he has thin characters whose only spin is that they face and overcome intellectual challenges that Asimov poses through his writing. You can see that Asimov was amused over his plot twists and his big ideas every time you read Foundation or any of its sister books. I will say this about him: he writes very clearly, and all of the things he says are easy to understand. But his prose isn't pretty.

This all leads me back to the trailer for Foundation. Does it make me want to watch the series? Yeah...I will watch it. But they are going to have to depart from the books a lot, because successful television requires a "soul." And you only get that through emotional connection to characters. So they are going to have to slow down the narrative of the one-thousand years to give us characters whom we can slip into in order to see the events of the collapse of the empire, which are essentially just glossed over in the book. I mean...it's pretty much just a steady decline that is narratively talked about on just a few pages. This happened, followed by that, and now we will focus in on a world on the fringe that now finds itself by itself and in need of government, because government has collapsed. Hmm...what happens next for these poor people? Oh! A hologram from Harry Seldon left fifty years ago will provide clues! Some people watch said video...and then you never hear from them again because another fifty years has passed. But they did things with that knowledge that will be built on by others.

In other words...it's kind of boring.

It's weird that something like this could get published and lauded as so amazing. Foundation as it stands feels like a really well-developed outline. You know how you outline a book's plot? Well think of Foundation as that only being like 240 pages in length. That's what it feels like when you read it...an outline. But in it's age, there was nothing else like it. It was like Asimov was the greatest world-builder ever, but he never got past the world-building stage to build a story that took place in real time. So all  you get is world-building. And there's pages and pages of it, telling you about all the things that happened and when. Imagine all the Star Wars stuff and its immense history being boiled down to 240 pages of outline, telling you when Order 66 happened, when the emperor was defeated, what Jango Fett did, etc. I mean...it'd be great world-building, but you wouldn't care about any of those characters. That's how Foundation reads, more or less. It's a summary of things that happened.

How on Earth is any of that going to translate into a watchable television series? Our first clues are in the trailer embedded below:

James Gunn has actually got me a little excited to see the next installment of The Suicide Squad.

The new Suicide Squad trailer aired on F9 this weekend. It was my first trip back to theaters, and it was a small bit of normalcy despite extreme weather events being a constant reminder that our planet has been totally screwed over by selfish people. Despite the first outing of Suicide Squad being almost unwatchable (because it was so bad), I think that I'll be heading to theaters opening weekend for this one if for anything...just to get more of King Shark.

Ron Funches, who is the voice actor for King Shark on the animated show Harley Quinn, absolutely kills in the performances (pun intended). In the scene below, he greets everyone with a "Howdy!" and he seems to like shark jokes. If you don't know anything about Harley Quinn click on the embedded video below and watch the first time Harley meets Shark. It's rather fun. Also, I like Idris Elba way more than Will Smith, so I'm glad that Smith isn't in this one.

And here's the trailer for the new Suicide Squad movie from James Gunn. You probably have heard of Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy. I predict that the same magic may work for this group of misfits. Here's to hoping.