The increasing weight of the Marvel universe

(Spoilers ahead. Stop reading if you’re interested in watching Loki and don’t want to know what happens.)

I used a VPN to sign up for Disney+ last week and recently finished watching Loki, the new Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) TV show. My wife and I started the series together, but she lost interest halfway through the first episode. Her reason was illuminating: she told me she didn’t understand what was going on.

When intelligent and thinking non-fans give the show a chance but ultimately turn away due to confusion, I think Marvel has a major problem on its hands.

It gets worse. Loki appears to be a poster child for “power creep”, introducing special abilities of new characters and complex situations that simply didn’t make sense to me. Or maybe I’m just not enough of a fan to get it, despite having seen every MCU movie - some more than once.

In Loki, there’s a particularly jarring scene - our titular character incredulously notes a handful of Infinity Stones that were randomly deposited in a low-level TVA analyst’s desk drawer. They were inert, implying that even the most powerful and dangerous artifacts in the Marvel universe had no influence in the TVA. Loki's magic - a god's magic - also didn’t work in this place. I first thought that Loki must be in some sort of simulated reality in his mind, because this all didn't make any sense. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

The only explanation left, then, is that there’s a greater power behind all this - a villain who wields more power than even Thanos and the Infinity Stones, since the villain has demonstrated that he can just reduce them to pretty paperweights in his TVA. This appears to be right, as the season finale revealed a long-awaited “He Who Remains”, who proceeded to spend about half the episode explaining his backstory (and why he’s essentially all-powerful in the story’s timeline).

But wait, Loki and Silvie can’t use their god magic in the TVA, but somehow can use it in a much more dangerous place called the Void. They then proceeded to enchant a multiversal monster that was later described as powerful enough to devour a million copies of the all-powerful “He Who Remains”. And somehow, this all-powerful "He Who Remains" can simply be stabbed to death by Sylvie, despite controlling technology and other resources that can manipute time and neuter Infinity Stones. The message is clear - enjoying these new MCU stories now requires the complete suspension of disbelief.

The signs were there when we approached the end of the MCU's Phase Three. Infinity War/Endgame was a miracle in that it worked. Following a string of 20+ consecutive successful MCU films, a heavily invested fan-base could mostly understand what was going on in this epic finale. “Big baddie Thanos collected all the Infinity Stones, snapped his fingers, and disintegrated half of all living things in the universe. The heroes use time travel to go back and fix things.” Ok, easy enough to understand for those who haven’t seen every MCU movie. Bruce Banner even makes a humorous attempt to explain the science behind the time travel.

However, things just stop making sense in Phase Four with the introduction of a “multiverse” and “branching timelines”, which give up all semblance of credible scientific (or even logical) explanations. I suspect that most people won’t be willing to sit through half an hour of exposition just for an explanation of why the next villain is even more powerful than the last, especially since it won’t logically make sense in the end anyway. This happened in Loki, and I suspect that it will happen again in related upcoming movies such as Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

The way I see it, the problem is in the perceived need to escalate the formidability of each successive villain faced by the Avengers. We clearly saw this with the first three MCU phases - Loki, then Ultron, then Thanos. After Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet, which threatened the entire universe, what credible villains remain to be presented? "He Who Remains" (or "Kang the Conqueror" to those who have read the related comic books) with his easy control over Infinity Stones and all of reality-time seems to be the next step up.

The original Marvel Comics indeed scaled this dubious ladder to the utmost heights, imagining fantastical entities such as Galactus, the Celestials, Destiny and Death, and the Living Tribunal. Eventually, the comic book writers, at their wits’ end, introduced an indisputably supreme being: the One-Above-All. His depiction? The likeness of Jack Kirby, the real life co-creator (with Stan Lee) of the Marvel Universe. It’s as if the comic book writers had finally and humorously acknowledged the physical limits of power creep, in tongue-in-cheek fashion attributing ultimate power in their fictional world to the creator of that world. (Yes, this is the literal definition of a god.)

What if the MCU also went in this direction? Would Marvel's films still gross over $1 billion each, loved by audiences and critics alike, if they spun tales that pit Earth's Mightiest Heroes against ever weirder and more powerful intergalactic despots and extradimensional representations of near-omnipotence? I’m not sure.

All I know is that I’ve been disappointed by Loki’s and WandaVision’s endings, which were unnecessarily over-the-top and failed to deliver on the promises of better-crafted earlier episodes (especially with WandaVision). Critics seem to agree, decrying the flashy finales that neglected all the character development that had come before.

I actually enjoyed the first five episodes of Loki, even with their hints of building up to an overly complex (read: nonsensical) conclusion. The scenes featuring any combination of Loki, Sylvie, and Mobius were almost universally great. However, the sixth and final episode shattered any illusions I had that the story could be wrapped up in a satisfactory manner.

Ultimately, if the MCU is to continue to be interesting (to me at least), it should continuously reinvent rather than continually up the stakes. Instead of having the heroes face ever greater foes, let them face interesting foes that inspire development in each character, such that when they finally reach their natural end (perhaps in something like Scarlet Witch 3 or Spider-Man 5), we can look back wistfully on how these imperfect protagonists matured over time and feel some momentary grief at their passing.

In the realm of superhero films, Christopher Nolan’s Batman series did this well. In other media, we have examples like the manga Hikaru no Go, where the most masterful Go player was a thousand-year-old ghost who disappeared halfway through the story, or the martial arts world created by Jin Yong (金庸), who wisely placed the most overpowered martial artist of all, Dugu Qiubai (独孤求败), in the far past.

These creators understood that the best fiction mirrors reality, and that reality is more like a sine wave than a positive exponential curve. People, no matter how powerful, grow old and eventually become dust. Families rise and fall, and so have all enterprises and even empires throughout history. The future may yet prove that mankind also has the same fate.

Every story ends, to be replaced by new stories. Every imagined world, from Tolkien's Middle Earth to C.S. Lewis' Narnia to the mythologies of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Norsemen, is eventually exhausted of new tales and enshrined in the collective cultural consciousness. As the MCU passes its 13th anniversary, perhaps it's time for Marvel to contemplate whether their creative well will also soon run dry, and make plans for laying their golden goose to rest.