How Do You Even Do a Mass Effect TV Show Anyway?

Part One: It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.

The proposition sounds simple enough. Adapt the Mass Effect video games into a TV show.

You're already starting out with an advantage over cinema. Time. You've got a lot more time to explain backstory, go over plot points, introduce side characters and flesh out the world. The history of the video game industry is littered with the graves of adaptions that have tried to squeeze everything into a 90 minute blockbuster, but after a few high profile successes, it is now commonly accepted knowledge that, for a successful video game adaption, TV is the way.

Mass Effect even seems to fit the mould of a TV show, its story unfolding over several, somewhat linier, episodic arcs. If you squint you can almost see how the first game could slot perfectly into an 8 to 10 episode season. A couple of episodes covering the tutorial and setup. A couple of episodes for Feros, Noveria and the subsequent planets, all with a grand finale based around the battle for the Citadel.

When you think about it like that it practically writes itself!

However, once you drill down into the details, dilemmas start to appear. Contradictions begin to escalate. The inability to please everyone rears its ugly head. You thought you had a The Last of Us on your hands and it is fast turning into a Halo.

What the heck is it I am talking about, you ask? Alright, I'll break it down. The many problems you're going to run into adapting Mass Effect to the small screen, the first of which originates from the very beginning, as soon as you hit New Game.

Part Two: Your Face, is Not My Face.

Here's a question. Who is the protagonist of the first Mass Effect game?

We all know that the answer is Commander Shepard, but who is Commander Shepard? A ruthless pragmatist? A noble altruist? Do they respect or buck the chain of command? What is their breaking point?

When it comes to adapting video games, one of the most common stumbling blocks comes from the handling of the protagonist. Video game protagonists commonly tend to have looser personalities and backstories than those from other mediums. This is often to give the player some wiggle room to see themselves in the character. To feel as though it is themselves out in the game world, living the adventure.

Video game protagonists can run the gamut in this regard, some have a loose personality like Link or Master Chief, where others have a more concrete and set personality like Max Payne or Kratos, while others still are completely customisable, even down to their backstories and personal morals, like in Baldur's Gate or The Elder Scrolls. This can often make it difficult for adaptions, because one person's experience with a game might be quite different to another's. This is likely why the Fallout TV show opted to tell its own story rather than adapt that of the games.

Mass Effect occupies a weird space, however, where it simultaneously has both a set protagonist and a customisable one. Commander Shepard is a set character like Markus Fenix, and a complete blank slate like The Baalspawn. They're a Schrodinger's protagonist, if you will.

This is due to the fact that, while players are free to completely customise their own Commander Shepard, down to appearance and gender, a set, solid version of Commander Shepard has been used by Bioware from the start to advertise the game.

Based around the appearance of Dutch model Mark Vanderloo, the default appearance for Commander Shepard appeared slap bang in the middle of the Mass Effect box art. It would continue to be used all through the remainder of the trilogy. He was the first character you saw when you started a new game, presenting you with a pre-made John Shepard for those not curious enough to explore the character customisation options. A default appearance for the female option was given no such consideration until the third release in the trilogy.

From what we know from long studied gamer habits, John Shepard is likely the only version of the character a vast majority of players recognise. When they think about Mass Effect, that is who they think of as the protagonist, no different than Lara Croft or Duke Nukem.

For millions of other players, however, there are a million other permutations. To some Commander Shepard is undeniably a raven-haired Asian woman. To others they are a square jawed Latin-American man. For those who chose to take it, Mass Effect presented the option to let players make Commander Shepard entirely their own. When they think of Mass Effect, it's their own Shepard that they walked with every step of the way.

So, right from the get go we have a premise that can't please everybody. Shepard could be played by any actor, but for a great many fans they're going to be expecting a guy that looks like a Dutch model with a buzz-cut. For those who chose to customise Shepard, any casting at all is likely going to feel out of sync with their own experience.

While I think a lot of people will go in with an open mind, there's also going to be a lot of fans that'll find it difficult to get over that hurdle.

Part Three: Second Star to the Right, and Straight on Till Morning.

The first Mass Effect is, no doubt, very suited to fit the streaming TV formula. The story is broken down into a series of episodic arcs that unfolds over a small group of planets. You can see how you'd piece it all together into a solid set of episodes with each having their own little self-contained adventure that can hook casual viewers that might have missed the first few episodes.

When we get to Mass Effect 2, though, things get a little trickier. Despite being arguably more episodic than the first game, 2 has a looser grasp on its main plot that would run the risk of looking meandering to casual audiences. Most of the main plot only unfolds over a handful of levels, with much of the game's runtime being made up of side-quests concerning the game's companions. This is great for an in-the-moment experience, but it does render the second entry in the trilogy as little more than a delivery system for unrelated, self contained adventures.

Now if it were the 90s or early 2000s this wouldn't be a problem. Back when broadcast TV shows in the US used to get 15 to 20 episodes, you'd have more than enough time to delve into all those side plots. Audiences were used to filler. They'd be more than happy for the main story to take a break for an episode to delve into Jack's backstory.

However, in the modern streaming era, shows tend to have only 8 to 10 episodes, and audiences expect each to be more like the chapter of a book than a story of the week. Audiences are going to be much less tolerant of a series putting the search for The Collectors on hold to focus on an episode where Jacob has to track down his dad.

On top of all that, the story ends with a much hyped and looming 'suicide mission.' In the game, it is possible for players to get everyone through alive as long as they have done their due diligence, though a couple of easy slip ups can lead to some tragic fatalities. For a TV show, though, having everyone get out alive would feel like a cop-out, and it would risk cheapening the stakes for the rest of the series.

On the other hand, killing some of the cast would be certain to bristle players who love those characters. Killing off Jack or Samara at the end of season 2 would no doubt anger some audiences who would want to see more of them, even if their roles in Mass Effect 3 are mostly insubstantial.

To top it all off, I'd like to direct you to the late Shamus Young's point that the shift from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 was a jarring break that damaged the narrative flow. At the end of Mass Effect 1 we are all set to investigate the Reapers on behalf of the Council, only for Mass Effect 2 to immediately kill off Shepard, resurrect them, and have them work on behalf of a clandestine organisation investigating a mystery that, to begin with, seems completely unrelated to the Reapers.

For video game players, this type of weird narrative jump is common amongst series where changing dev teams and evolving gameplay mechanics can cause projects to end in very different places from where they began, but to audiences of a TV show this would all feel a little more jarring. Imagine if season 2 of the Sopranos featured an assassination attempt on Tony in the first five minutes and the rest of the season was about him going into hiding in Vancouver. It's not that you couldn't tell a good story about that, but after what was set up in season 1, audiences would feel like the show was going nowhere.

All of the issues above are not without their solutions, but alterations and re-writes also come with the risk alienating the game's original fanbase. It makes perfect sense to write out Cerberus to keep the flow of the story more natural, but fans of the game are going to bristle at such an iconic part of the franchise being absent.

Part Four: Have it Your Way

Mass Effect has a big LGBTQ+ following. This is undeniable. Spend five minutes on any social media platform of choice looking up Mass Effect and you will be presented with reams of fan-art and fan fiction concerning the characters in same-sex relationships. Gay players really resonated with Mass Effect and found a place for themselves within it. You can't have a conversation about Mass Effect without mentioning the strides it made.

However, unlike Mass Effect's sister series, Dragon Age, which started off with a very specific queer intent, Mass Effect's status as an iconic part of gay gaming happened almost entirely by accident. Mass Effect 1 launched in 2007, in an era where the gaming industry was almost entirely geared towards an audience of teenage boys. Booth babes were still a staple of video game conventions. Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 had just came out the previous year.

The LGBT representation in the first game is very slight. In it's totality it is made up of a brief general discussion on Asari sexuality, and an optional same-sex romance and sexual encounter exclusively available to those that created a female Commander Shepard. I don't think it is a controversial statement to say that this inclusion was driven more by titillation than representation. The depiction of the Asari as bisexual blue skinned alien space babes was almost certainly more motivated by the appeal to teenage boys than an honest exploration of sexuality in a sci-fi setting. For players who chose to play a male Shepard, and we know this was the majority, it was entirely possible to play through the game without encountering any gay representation or queer themes at all.

Many people only heard about the same-sex content thanks to a sensationalist report by Fox News that criticised the game as pornographic. This had the consequence of giving the game a Streisand Effect. Many gay players found out about the game through this controversy, and Bioware found itself with an outpouring of support, bolstered by the good will generated from gay representation in the Dragon Age series.

However, the Mass Effect team were more spooked by the Fox News reaction than they were buoyed by the outpouring of support. Multiple same-sex romances were planned for Mass Effect 2 and later cut because of this, leading to much confusion over why an explicitly bisexual character in Jack would refuse the advances of a female Shepard. On top of all this, Bioware would even put out a statement that any permutation of a male Shepard would always be explicitly straight.

It wasn't until Mass Effect 3 that Bioware took the steps to embrace their LGBTQ+ following, introducing multiple gay characters whose sexuality would be commented upon outside of the player character, and a male Shepard finally having the option to initiate a same-sex relationship himself.

So, what does all this have to do with a TV show? Well, the problem is that Mass Effect doesn't really start from a queer foundation, and it isn't until the 11th hour that a lot of the queer characters show up. A TV show is obviously going to want to keep the loyalty of the gay community that it has picked up over the years, but it is going to have to make sweeping changes if it wants to bring that representation forward.

If the show-runners choose to depict Shepard with a male actor there is the very real risk that the story could skip over what little representation there was in the opening arc. Going with a female Shepard instead could alleviate this, as her romance with Liara is going to be the most likely relationship in the show, given its popularity and centrality to the narrative.

Other than that though, you'd again have to make sweeping changes. Kaidan could come out of the closet sooner, and characters like Kelly, Steve and Sam could be introduced earlier, but this in turn comes with its own risks, like that of antagonising the vocal minority of regressive fanboys who like to claim that Mass Effect never had strong LGTBQ+ representation to begin with, and any inclusion in the TV show mocked as pandering to a different audience. Sadly, a lot of these criticisms can colour the opinion of casual audiences, as the concerted negative campaigns against Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age The Veilguard have proven.

Part Five: My Favourite Store on the Citadel.

On top of all the previously listed issues, Mass Effect is going to have one more major hurdle. Budget.

Network and streaming shows have done some impressive things in recent years. The sets and props on Game of Thrones have risen to cinematic standards. The prosthetics and makeup used on Fallout are thoroughly convincing depictions of that which we see in the games.

Mass Effect, though, is going to require a pretty hefty budget. This isn't a show you can just film on existing locations with a couple of really convincing aliens. The entire conceit of the story involves mankind as a small and almost insignificant part of a confederation of alien races. At any given time the cast will need to be made up of multiple actors in prosthetics and makeup.

Granted, there's a lot of tricks you can pull to get around it. Your groups of Turians and Krogan can all be standing around with helmets on most of the time. Large groups can be rendered with CGI. Minor races like the Elcor and the Batarians could have their roles reduced or written out entirely. A concept like Mass Effect is not immune to cost cutting.

Despite all this, the show is still going to require a lot of expensive props, sets and makeup. Characters like Garrus and Wrex require a lot of screen time. Conversations with groups made up entirely of alien characters, like the Council, make up a big chunk of the narrative. Mordin, Legion, Saren, these characters make up a lot of the emotional appeal of the story, and are going to be need to be done right.

If a decent budget can't be secured from the start, then the show may very well be dead on arrival. We only have to look at Halo, which had to start its season 1 with a human versus human conflict and have its alien faction's point of view character be a human adoptee. While the show had a plethora of problems, its lack of iconic franchise aliens was certainly something that steered fans away. Mass Effect itself comes with a similar risk.

Part Six: Something Ends, Something Begins.

Lets say you manage to pull it off though. You get the budget required. You streamline the script. You dedicate enough time to the relevant themes and ideas needed to please the existing fanbase. You thread the needle with the transition to the plot of Mass Effect 2. The audiences resonate with your Shepard.

One final question remains. What do you do about that ending?

Mass Effect 3 finishes on a famously loathed conclusion. While it has its defenders, the general consensus of the finale tends to range from 'a good idea poorly executed,' to 'an absolute betrayal of the game's world-building, backstory and themes.'

Whatever your own personal thoughts, I think we can all probably agree that, given the benefit of hindsight, the ending of Shepard's story is in need of some serious tweaking. Unfortunately, like Shepard themself, what players wanted from an ending was disparate and personal, and this is before you account for the fact that the game already has five possible endings to begin with.

Do you spend more time on setting up The Catalyst? Do you change the Reaper's motivations? Do you re-tool the ending entirely to be based on one of Bioware's unused ideas? Do you go for a more conventional outcome, having Shepard save the galaxy and live to see it?

Whichever one you go for, it is going to have its critics, and if you don't change the ending and present it as it was, it is also going to be pretty unpopular. TV shows have started getting a reputation for unsatisfying endings, and Mass Effect is starting off on the back foot for being notorious for its own.

Like the rest of my previous points, this is going to be a difficult hurdle to handle. Stray too far and you risk alienating the core audience again. Stay too close and you risk pissing off everybody. It's another lose-lose. A difficult needle that will have to be threaded.

Part Seven: This is Not My Beautiful House.

After the success of Fallout, a common suggestion for a Mass Effect TV show would be to do a self-contained story instead. A new cast of characters going on an adventure set in the world of Mass Effect, unrelated to the events of the game.

I understand this impulse, but it unfortunately misses that the Mass Effect trilogy involves Shepard living through one of the most historically important events in galactic history. So much of what unfolds over the course of the games is tied up in foundational parts of the universe. This is deliberate, as it is easy for the writers to bring the players up to speed on the backstory if the core parts of their own adventure is influenced by them.

If you set the game after the events of Mass Effect, the audience will need to have all the core elements introduced to them. The events of the games will need to be addressed, which runs the risk of audiences wondering why they're not watching a TV show about the more interesting, epic story.

If you set the series before the events of the game you've got a bit more leeway, but are going to be restricted in what kinds of stories you can tell. Wherever you take the characters, the status quo of the galaxy needs to remain as it is. Additionally, because a lot of revelations with regards to the galactic cosmology aren't discovered in-universe until the events of the games, you're going to be introducing a lot of iconic elements where the audience will never be clued in to their significance. Stuff like the Mass Relays and the Prothean Ruins will be set up but given no payoff.

There's going to be a big temptation to go the self-contained story route. It resolves a lot of the problems listed previously, but it also comes with problems of its own, the biggest of which is coming away not really feeling like Mass Effect.

Conclusion

That Mass Effect TV show is probably never going to happen.

Okay. I'll be a little fairer than that. It is more likely to happen than the Warhammer 40'000 TV show is. Even so, what form it'll arrive in is unclear, and it is more likely than not we're probably going to end up with another Halo situation on our hands.

A report from Eurogamer went up a couple weeks ago claiming that Amazon had asked for a re-write that would make the proposed show "more appealing to non-gamers." While this statement led to much catastrophising from fans, I personally found it a bit of a nothing statement. The term 'gamer,' can apply to so many disparate interests in this day and age that I have no idea what 'appealing to non-gamers,' suggests. It could mean that they're dialling back the action and putting more into world-buidling, it could mean the exact opposite. You can see the argument working either way.

What concerned me more was the statement that the show was to "take inspiration from the games without following them directly." Some folks took this to mean that the show was going the Fallout route and telling a side story, but it is clear from the casting call that the TV show is to some extent going to be about Commander Shepard and the Reapers.

The casting call asked for "a young Colin Farrell-type male (30-39) with open ethnicity;" Obviously Shepard, "a female co-lead alien character requiring prosthetics (34-39);" Obviously Liara, "a female human providing a parallel narrative from Earth;" Likely a re-worked version of Ashley, "a Doug Jones-type male villain (40-60);" Saren, "and a male wrestler-type soldier (30-49)." Kaiden, maybe, or possibly a version of James?

Either way, it sounds like the show is going to have some significant departures from the story of the games, which is a massive risk and could doom the show to failure unless it manages to be really good in its own right, or otherwise feel authentic to the game's story, even if it isn't accurate to it.

All things considered, the show is facing an uphill battle. Those who fail to learn the lessons of the Halo TV show are doomed to repeat them. Were I a betting man, I'd be putting money on it being cancelled before getting a third season, but who knows, maybe they'll thread that needle and win everyone over.

Maybe, like Commander Shepard's hopeless battle against the Reapers, they'll manage to defy the odds.

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Jack Harvey 2026. Images Used Under Fair Use. Mass Effect is (c) Bioware/EA

Alright, here's how I would reboot Doctor Who. Version Two. On a budget.

 

"Well, here we go again." - Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Planet of the Spiders, 1974.

Part One: You've Got to Walk It Like You Talk It (Or You'll Lose That Beat)

Nearly a year ago I embarked on a rather off-the-cuff and ill-conceived ramble about the direction I'd take Doctor Who with a soft reboot if I ever got a chance. It was less of a serious pitch and more of a meditation on how even self-imposed limitations can fall apart to self-indulgence no matter how careful you are. In that way, I suppose, I garnered some sympathy for the season of the show which inspired me to write it in the first place.

Since the conclusion of Doctor Who's last season more information has come to light on the behind-the-scenes dealings, though far from anything conclusive. Likewise, we've been given a more concrete idea of the show's precarity with the handling of spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea, which was dropped from international broadcast by Disney and has yet to find a new distributor.

What has become crystal clear in the intervening months is that the show doesn't have much of a voice in its defence outside of the BBC. The corporation claims it still wants to stick by the show, but can't afford to keep making it without a streaming partner to front some of the costs. Something that the BBC has struggled to make materialise.

Even if the upcoming Christmas special somehow manages to clean up the show's confusing and dangling plot threads to everyone's satisfaction, it is crystal clear that the show's future is going to be on a lower budget no matter how you cut it. Even with a streaming partner, it is unlikely the BBC would be able to wrest out of them the kind of expenses they'd need for a planet-hopping monster-of-the-week show that could also compete with the likes of Star Trek or Fallout.

With all that in mind, it is very clear my original pitch is now a little outdated. More and more people are coming to the conclusion that the show will need a re-launch in the style of Jon Pertwee's 70s era, using, for the most part, a single, Earth-based location and a recurring cast of characters. Recently my thoughts got whirling again on how I'd do such a relaunch, this time with greater limitations and an even more immediate thought into drawing in new audiences.

Part Two: Some Things Will Never Change.

To be clear, most of my proposals from the last time around will remain the same. Indira Varma is The Doctor. She's still an aloof, reserved and somewhat cold incarnation with elements of Mr Spock and Vampire David Bowie. We're still skewering the tone towards older audiences, though with one foot in the fantastical to keep the kids interested.

As an aside, I've given more thought to the pushback on the subject of Doctor Who aiming for older audiences. The most common argument I've heard against is is that the show will suffer if it leaves pre-teens out as a target audience. What I think this argument misses is that a lot of younger viewers actually tend to gravitate towards media that they perceive as more mature. I know when I first got into Doctor Who it was something that felt more 'serious' and 'grown up' than I was used to. Likewise, plenty of my school friends grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and The X-Files long before they were teenagers in part because those shows felt more grown up. I don't think making the show darker and more adult is necessarily going to drive away the younger viewers, but actually treating 12 year-olds as the primary audience runs the risk of driving that very audience away.

So I still want this to be a show where we do things a little more mature. As a principle, this goes hand in glove with the blueprint that the re-launch would draw upon, i.e Jon Pertwee's first few seasons. Exiled to Earth, unable to leave, with only a job at UNIT to keep them occupied and working on a solution, taking place some time in the near-future. It worked in the 70s, and it can work now, and enough things have changed that it doesn't have to feel like it is treading old ground either.

What I hope to achieve with this pitch is the to lay the groundwork for a version of Doctor Who that can not only feel like a clean break from what has become an over-convoluted and, at times, embarrassing status-quo, but also an enticing and interesting concept in its own right. A show that can bleed cool and sit on culture's razor's edge, while still being quintessentially Who.

Before we really get into it, let me make my goals clear here. This has to be a show that can be done on a shoe-string budget, but not at all feel like it. It has to feel current. It has to feel like it honours the past but also work as a brand new start with no foreknowledge of the show's canon. It has to appeal to an international audience while still retaining its British identity. There is to be no call backs, no cameos, no returning monsters or characters save the Daleks, the Cybermen and The Master.

I don't profess to know what kind of budget the BBC has access to, and what it would be able to squeeze out of a streaming deal, so all of this is purely an amateur pitch on my part, but I'm basing my estimates on the BBC's recent output.

With all that out of the way, let another needless ramble commence.

Part Three: How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?

Episode one opens on a UNIT facility, and the text communicates we are "In the near-future." We're at a clean, but very grounded and serious army base. There is no sign of any rooftop laser guns here. We hear a voice begin to speak. It is European sounding. Maybe Swiss. The voice is reciting a speech to new recruits. It is confident, rousing, but blunt. Reminiscent of Z's speech from the first Men in Black film. The recruits are being greeted as the best of the best, that they are entering an elite and prestigious organisation, but that whatever they have been told, it will not prepare them for what they are about to face. Their goals will be secretive and confidential. The enemy will not be what they expect.

As the speech continues we see the Doctor, played by Indira Varma, enter the facility's foyer. Behind the desk is a large UNIT logo, the 70s one, making it clear what era the series is harkening back to. At the front desk, The Doctor explains that they are the organisation's new scientific advisor. The clerk at the desk is unaware that they were recruiting one, only to find that The Doctor is indeed on file.

They express confusion over The Doctor's name, which The Doctor explains sarcastically as being 'old irish.' First name The, second name Doctor. With the confusion cleared up, The Doctor makes her way to her assigned station and lab. Equipment is transported by UNIT orderlies, whom The Doctor chastises for being slow and careless with her gear. Much importance is laid upon the arrival of a blue police box, but its significance is not elaborated upon. For now it is just one of many curious objects alongside near-100 year-old computers and foggy looking chemistry sets.

In the midst of their setup, The Doctor is greeted and grilled by Brigadier Maximillian "The Beancounter" Strauss, played by Daniel Brühl. Strauss might hold a military title, but his position is primarily financial. Geneva feels as though UNIT has become quite the money sink over the years, so Strauss has been sent in to cut down on the waste, and the UK branch is his current assignment (and a meta-commentary on the budget of the show.) Strauss immediately bristles against The Doctor, questioning the need for a scientific advisor, and scrutinising their past employment with UNIT, which naturally doesn't match up.

The Doctor manages to placate Stauss for now, but it is made clear he wants to keep the scientific division on a tight leash for the sake of the budget. He's not an antagonist, but he will butt heads with The Doctor at some point.

Shortly after this, we are introduced to The Doctor's new assistant. Ben Dixon, played by David Jonsson. Ben is experienced graduate in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, and a civilian contractor specifically recruited by The Doctor. Ben is competent, knowledgeable, and brave, but completely oblivious to the existence of aliens and dark science. He draws upon companions like Liz Shaw, and characters like Dana Scully. He is The Doctor's equal in many ways but a sceptic much of the time.

As The Doctor introduces a, somewhat credulous, Ben to the kinds of work he is going to be involved with, an alarm blares, and their first operation begins in earnest. Somewhere in rural Somerset there has been a string of deaths, apparently at the hands of a mysterious 'Knight' that has the power to control plant life. While the troops travel by helicopter, The Doctor explains that she'd rather travel in style, and introduces Ben to her chosen mode of transport. A cream coloured 1967 AC Cobra.

Arriving at the rural town of Potted Veil, The Doctor and Ben are met by the UNIT strike team's commanding officer. Our final main recurring character. Captain Corazon Cortez, played by Janina Gavankar. Cortez is a no-nonsense, right-to-the-action type, with a lot of characterisation crossover with Brigadier Bambera from Battlefield (and likewise, our UNIT uniforms should harken back to that take as well. Urban/Rural camo. UN Peacekeeper blue berets.) She begins the series as a shoot-first, ask-questions-later type, but over time learns to grow after leading too many soldiers to their deaths. She, like Strauss, doesn't really respect The Doctor's position to begin with.

(A note on the casting. At this point you may be thinking that my dream cast is already eating up a lot of the budget. I can't profess to know what kind of pay-checks Brühl, Jonsson and Gavankar draw at this moment in time. Brühl has obviously been on the Disney payroll in the past, though he does do plenty of TV and European productions. Jonsson is a rising star, so it is unknown if he'd be up for a joint lead. Gavankar meanwhile is mostly known for TV, video games and bit-parts. I'm not saying we'd be able to afford these three on a reduced BBC budget, but they should at least give you an idea of the types of performance I'd want for these roles.)

Over the course of the first half of our opening episode, we should have clearly communicated the new status-quo to our viewers. This, naturally, should raise some questions and mysteries for both new and returning audiences.

For newcomers, they should be immediately curious about what The Doctor's deal is, and what is up with that mysterious blue box. Obviously I know most new audiences are probably going to have some foreknowledge going in, but we'll tease it out all the same.

For returning audiences, several things will be made clear. Firstly, is that the public has no knowledge of alien races. Either time has been re-written, or our memories have been tampered with. This both wipes the continuity slate clean, makes near-future earth feel more grounded, and also sets us up with an ongoing mystery as to why mankind has no knowledge of past events like going mad in The Giggle, or nearly being wiped out in Flux.

Likewise, The Doctor is not a legendary figure. Even UNIT barely have any real knowledge of her, and (almost) none of the season's villains know who or what a Time Lord is. Like with the reason behind her tethering to Earth, this is a mystery that will be teased out in time.

For now, we have a monster to track down. Along the way Cortez's haste gets a bunch of soldiers killed confronting the mysterious 'Knight,' while Ben use their knowledge of electrochemistry to establish how the creature is controlling the vegetation. By manipulating the water within the plant life itself. Eventually they trap the 'Knight' by luring it to a field that is suffering from drought, due to near-future Earth's worsening climate crisis.

The Doctor attempts to communicate with the creature, but cannot speak their language (another mystery for returning audiences.) They do manage to establish that the creature is a lost solider in power armour, lashing out in confusion after being abandoned from some far-away war. The Doctor attempts some kind of peaceful negotiation, but in the end, the language barrier is just too large, and the creature attempts to slay The Doctor the old fashioned way, only for Cortez to arrive and kill the creature at the last minute, much to The Doctor's chagrin.

We wrap the story up with Ben's world view now expanded, Cortez's conscience weighing on her, and The Doctor pondering their next move, glancing at the blue police box. Only Strauss is truly content at a cheaply concluded operation.

Part Four: Give My Regards to Broad Street.

As the series continues, The Doctor and Ben explore relatively small-scale alien incursions and mad science gone wrong around the country. A little bit of X-Files here, a little bit of Fringe there. Along the way Cortez and Strauss soften, and we delve deeper into the ongoing mysteries. Eventually Ben gains enough of The Doctor's confidence that she reveals her origins and that of the mysterious blue box, welcoming him into a baroque control room reminiscent of the TV Movie. The Doctor is an alien. A Time Lord... sort of. A time traveller, but her time machine is grounded, for reasons she can't explain. Its chameleon circuit is broken and its translator microbes inoperative. More worryingly, she suspects that time and memory, including her own, has been re-written, and that all time travellers have been grounded, not just her. Ben, for his part, starts to suffer from an existential crisis thanks to these revelations.

Along the way we also get passing references to the political climate of the near-future. Climate change is worse than ever, though finally being taken seriously. Major corporations have been severely curtailed after multiple financial crashes and scandals. China is ascendant, and Europe is beginning to form more of a mono-culture. Additionally, and I know the BBC would probably never let me do it, but I'd also like the near-future to have a united Ireland, abolished British Monarchy, and fractured United States... and in the Doctor Who pitch too (Disclaimer: That was a joke.)

After all of this drip-feeding of information, we come to the grand finale. A two part adaption of the DWM comic The Flood. Most of you probably know that this Cyberman story has a legendary reputation, and it is well deserved. The Cybermen have constantly suffered from stories that fail to capitalise on their true strengths, sometimes being pathetic remnants of a greater civilisation, sometimes being an unstoppable assimilationist force. The Flood is one of those stories that threads the needle and manages to unite the disparate characterisations.

Of course, we'd have to bleed every penny from the budget to get those Cybermen and Cyber-sets to work, but I think it could be done. Keeping earlier episodes grounded with small scale threats, more interesting through writing and concept that bombast and spectacle, could leave you with just enough of a war chest to make the finale a cinematic event. As I've said, I don't know what kind of resources the BBC has a their disposal, but speculatively, I think it could work.

The Flood is already a story where The Doctor works alongside a government organisation to fight against a secretive invasion by far-future Cybermen. With just a few tweaks you can basically adapt it verbatim. Ben gets the opportunity to shake out of his existential crisis by figuring out the weakness in the Cyberman ship, and Cortez gets to air all her guilts and doubts at the hands of the Cybermen's psychoactive chemical.

It is also an opportunity for us to explore more of the ongoing mysteries and arcs. The Doctor expresses a feeling of deja-vu, as though she has lived this moment before, implying that the events of the comic have already happened in some pre-altered timeline. UNIT would spend a lot of time trying (and eventually succeeding) to keep the reality of the invasion secret from the public, blaming the Cybermen on an experimental drone operation gone wrong. Adding to our mystery of the time-locked Tardis is as to how our far-future Cybermen are able to travel into the past. Can the Doctor salvage some of their technology in order to end her banishment?

Alas, despite the Cybermen's defeat, The Doctor finds no solution to fixing the Tardis, and Ben gets no further answers into the truth behind their altered timeline. Still, Cortez has grown more of a conscience, and Strauss has learned to put human lives ahead of numbers on a spreadsheet, and so we end the season on a high, with greater mysteries yet to be explored.

I think that's a pretty good baseline foundation for a distinct and fresh relaunch. A new and different tone from the show's immediate past, but taking a great deal of inspiration from other parts of the show's history. A bold new status-quo, a diverse and interesting cast with a different set of dynamics than what the show has recently used, and a setting that allows some interesting hard sci-fi and topical stories to be told. You get a good writing team with some fresh and experimental ideas, and I think you'd have something that could draw in a solid new international fanbase.

Part Five: I Wish that I Knew What I Know Now

As for what comes next, I won't go into too many details. I'd envision the second season to remain on near-future earth, with a single story allowing a temporarily fixed Tardis to take The Doctor and Ben further afield, a-la Colony In Space, this time to re-introduce the Daleks in a sci-fi horror story where they stalk a ruined space base. Along the way, The Master re-emerges, played by an icy Timothy Olyphant (In this instance, I can concede there's no way our budget could afford him, but a man can dream,) to torment The Doctor and UNIT.

As for the answer behind the ongoing mysteries? We'll drip feed the details, but in time explain that the Time Lords returned (no elaboration given as to how,) and decided that the timeline of galactic history had become too chaotic in their absence. They instituted a history-wide cosmic 'pruning' to bring things back in line, grounding all time travellers for the duration. We'll keep them at arms length, used sparingly as more like the angelic god entities they were depicted as in The War Games over the squabbling bureaucrats they usually are.

Season 3, with hopefully a larger audience justifying a larger budget, would see The Doctor and Ben finally get free of Earth and give us a (mostly) full season of proper space and time travel. We'd get a second companion in the Red Sonja-inspired amphibious warrior woman I mentioned in my last pitch. Maybe she could have a funny romance with Cortez, who knows?

Long term? Eventually Varma's tenure ends and she regenerates into Benedict Wong, playing The Doctor as a more eccentric, scatter-brained professor in the style of Cushing from the 60's movies. With a fixed Tardis, The Doctor's tenure as UNIT's scientific advisor comes to an end, but I think there'd still be more fertile ground to cover with near-future Earth, so so he'd take up residence as a lecturer at Edinburgh University, as a bit of a call back to Capaldi's final season.

I think an important factor here would be setting up a new and distinct companion dynamic from one Doctor to the next. I think New Who specifically struggled over time because it kept going back to the safe and tested formula of 'quirky young British man in a will-they-won't-they relationship with an attractive young woman.' So when the newer series started to stray away from this some fans felt like it wasn't the show they fell in love with.

I think setting a clear precedent that the show can, and will, shift drastically in style and tone is crucial to its long term viability. New formulas should be adopted frequently and often.

I haven't put much thought into what I'd do with a Benedict Wong era of the show, but ideally I'd want to leave the show in a healthier place, ready to be handed off to the next show runner. No loose plot threads. A clean break once again.

As I was thinking over this pitch there were many things that I was tempted to add into it. I wanted to resolve the Timeless Child arc without retconning it, bring in Faction Paradox from the books, explore Graham's ex-companion support group from Chibnall's finale and have a multi-Doctor story with Christopher Eccleston. Yet, like I mentioned last time, It is all too easy to bog yourself down with 'Glup Shittos' and grand ideas. You lose track of what the show should be in the first place. A solid science fiction series.

Conclusion

Deep down, I know that to survive Doctor Who needs to stay lean and stay fresh. Leave convoluted lore explorations to anniversary specials and spin-off media. If RTD2 proved anything it is that there's no life-hack to getting the show a bigger audience. You can't 'fake it till you make it' with funky title cards, social media podcasts, celebrity cameos and spin-offs. Acting like you have the biggest show in the world isn't necessarily going to give you the biggest show in the world. All you end up with is a Potemkin village.

I have no idea if my above pitch would work, or if I have vastly overestimated the kind of budget the BBC has on its hands, but I hope I can give food for thought on what we as fans of the show should expect and what would probably be for the best. I think a lot of fans who joined the show in 2005 ought to understand that one day they'll face a relaunch that abandons most of their era of the show the same way the 2005 relaunch abandoned most of the classic era.

And that, I think, is the crux of the point. More than anything the show needs a completely new reinvention, whether that be in tone, setting, format or budget. The show can't survive trying to reconstruct the golden age of the 2010s Who any more than the classic series was able to reinvent the golden age of the 1970s Who.

Like the man said. Change is what makes us real. At the end of the day it's what it's all about.

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Jack Harvey 2026. Images Used Under Fair Use. Doctor Who is (c) the BBC.

My MCU Nightmare

 

When I went to the cinema to watch The Avengers in 2012 it felt like a dream come true. Now that dream has turned into a nightmare. I'm here to take a walk down memory lane, examine my own past with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and ask how it is we got here.

Part One - Secret Origin (Yes I am aware this is a DC reference.)

My origin is a weird and complex one. I could probably start this column with a long and meandering story about how I fell in and out of love with comics over the course of my childhood, from picking up Dark Horse's Thrawn Trilogy series during trips to America, to how I kind of ignored the first Spider-Man and X-Men films when superheroes didn't interest me, to getting into Judge Dredd through second hand copies of American reprints.

We'd be here all day, however, and ultimately most of this is not pertinent to the subject at hand. Suffice it to say I have always been into comics. My parents started buying me and my brother The Dandy and The Beano as soon as we could read, but the real keystone here is when my Dad took me to the local second hand book shop to buy a big batch of Marvel Comics. Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange. I fell in love with this weird world from the get-go.

Even though reading superhero comics with any decent regularity was difficult in 1990's Britain, it wasn't hard to keep up to date thanks to the surprisingly faithful animated adaptions that graced the TV screen frequently during those years. Spider-Man, X-Men, the Marvel Action Hour and, of course, Batman The Animated Series, had all brought me up to speed by the time I was old enough to start buying issues with my own disposable income.

It also left me with pretty strong opinions on the explosion of superhero films that were soon to follow. From the Mid-90s through the 2000s, big tent-pole adaptions would show up every couple of years. Batman got in early of course, but it was the Raimi Spider-Man films and the X-Men trilogy that really paved the way for the golden age of the cinematic superhero.

Despite all this, it was a commonly held frustration amongst long time superhero readers how willing these movies were to throw the baby out with the bathwater. All the weird, crazy stuff I fell in love with was frequently sanded off, simplified or discarded entirely. Neither Doctor Octopus nor the X-Men would wear brightly coloured costumes, but instead black leather. Characters like Bane and The Juggernaut were simplified into being generic henchmen.

Magic and aliens were avoided almost entirely.

While me and my fellows understood why they altered things to appeal to a broader audience, there was also a sense that the producers were failing to understand what made the superhero genre so magnetic. Indeed, the failures and disappointments of many of the late 2000s sequels like Spider-Man 3, X-Men 3 and Rise of the Silver Surfer were almost certainly in part due to the producers being unwilling to engage with their source material's more fantastical elements.

I was at university at the time these films hit, and as a superhero fan surrounded by movie buffs it felt somewhat embarrassing that my favourite medium was starting to be seen as a bit of a laughing stock. Characters I knew and loved were being dismissed by my peers as juvenilia.

This is the reason why I never went to go and see Iron Man at the cinema in 2008. My favourite character from Marvel comics when I was a kid. I just kind of figured it would be bad.

We all know what happened next.

Part Two - A Golden Age From Page to Screen

The road to The Avengers all went by in a bit of a blur. Iron Man was a hit. It was THE hit. Not only was it a smash with both fans and general audiences, but there was also a palpable feeling that we finally had a film that wasn't embarrassed to be a superhero film. While Batman Begins, and later The Dark Knight, rationalised and grounded the Caped Crusader, Iron Man brashly painted its hero's science-fiction robot suit in racing-stripe red. The film was more than willing to fully adapt, with some updates, the protagonist's bizarre origin of building his superhero persona in the back of a cave with box of scraps.

Iron Man did, however, still have one foot within the idea of 'realism.' Elements like the Mandarin and his magical Nine Rings were reinterpreted into a terrorist group that had almost nothing in common with the villain. Despite Obadiah Stane mostly staying true to his character, the name Iron Monger is never used once in the film. Much excitement came from the post-credits scene of an eye-patched Samuel L Jackson teasing the Avengers, but there was still a great degree of trepidation on how this was all going to pan out.

The Incredible Hulk likewise left me with unclear expectations. As with Iron Man, it wasn't afraid of its more fantastical elements, but certain creative decisions, like choosing to have the Abomination look more like a generic monster than the big lizard in the comic, gave me pause. Not long after, Iron Man 2 started paving the road to The Avengers, but wiped out most of Whiplash's character backstory, and couldn't even commit to giving Black Widow a Russian accent.

Up next on the docket was Thor and Captain America. In comparison to Iron Man, these were two characters with much wackier concepts, with source material as far removed from 'realism' as you could get. There was a general assumption, especially with Thor, that the adaptions would take point from the then-ongoing "Ultimate Marvel," line of comics, a series that had launched in the wake of the Raimi Spider-Man movies and had gone on to great success.

The Ultimate line, in short, took the same approach as adapting Superhero comics to screen, but then applied it to a new range of comics. Backstories were simplified, costumes were redesigned and the entire world was modernised and made more grounded. For Thor, this meant that the God of Thunder who had come to walk the Earth in the original source material, was now an enigmatic Norwegian vigilante who had some connection to a mysterious power hammer.

The Marvel films up to this point had drawn much inspiration from the Ultimate line, even going so far to adapt the Ultimate version of Nick Fury verbatim rather that the original James Bond pastiche from the comics. Were I a betting man I would have almost certainly counted on the new Thor film veering closer to Ultimate Thor rather than the wacky blonde He-Man type that the character originated as.

Imagine my surprise then, when Thor came out as a big, in your face, sword and sorcery fantasy film.

We like to rag on the first Thor film quite a lot nowadays, but it can't be understated how surprising it was to see a film adaption happily depict its protagonist in a near comics-accurate costume and have him go around having adventures with magic and aliens.

Now, before I give Thor too much credit, it is worth noting that it still felt the need to tiptoe around things to placate general audiences. The film famously claimed that Thor came from a place where "magic and technology are the same thing," as if the idea of gods from Norse mythology being real was a step too far, but despite all this, Thor was a big win for comics purists who argued that the film adaptions didn't have to dial back the camp and whimsy to work on the big screen.

If Thor managed to nail its punch then Captain America: The First Avenger managed to execute a perfect follow through. Like Thor, there was a great deal of fear that a character as ridiculous as Cap could never be done on the big screen without significant changes, and while The First Avenger does thread some careful needles in an effort to make its premise sound plausible, it is a film that is dedicated first and foremost to taking a superhero adventure from the pages of the comic and putting it up there on screen.

The shield. The Red Skull. Bucky. Being frozen in ice for decades. All the stuff a fan of Cap would want to see in a Captain America film was there, with no real sense of embarrassment. If fans had any fears that these films were going to pull their punches, The First Avenger laid those fears to rest.

Even so, by the time 2012 rolled around we were yet to be convinced that The Avengers could be executed to any real degree of satisfaction. I remember talking to a friend at the time, an even bigger fan of Marvel Comics than myself, saying "It's going to be shit isn't it?" Doing a fun Captain America film was one thing, pulling off a never-seen before crossover movie was quite another.

Yet, they did it. The success of The Avengers is so oft discussed that it has now passed into pop-culture legend. The camera pan around Captain America and friends has become meme mythology. You don't need me to go over what made it work and why it was so good. For fans like myself, what was once thought impossible was now reality. The experience of reading those wacky comics all those years ago was now immortalised within mainstream culture. We'd done it. Everything else was gravy.

Part Three - From a Certain Point of View

For the rest of the decade Marvel Studios would undertake one of the most successful winning streaks of all time. It frequently became a running joke when articles would appear claiming that the public was suffering from "Superhero fatigue," that the next Marvel film would break box office records.

This period in history has frequently been re-written into an era where Marvel Studios could do no wrong. Every entry was a slam dunk. Whatever they were doing, they were doing it right. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth, and a major part of MCU history that people forget about is how rocky the road actually was. Far from effortlessly steering the series to major success, the real story of Kevin Feige was Marvel being repeatedly dealt a bad hand.

When old KF took the reins he had a roster of B-List characters and a general sense that the public wanted 'grounded' 'serious' storytelling, in the wake of stuff like Batman Begins and Casino Royale. The success of Iron Man was basically a fluke, given that the film had no real script and was mostly being written and re-written by John Favreau over the course of its production, but a strong, charismatic cast, led by fresh-out-of-rehab Robert Downey Jr, and some of the best visual effects seen at the time, turned lead into gold, and Feige had the good sense to use Iron Man's success to build momentum for the projects he already had on the docket.

It was these kinds of heat-of-the-moment decisions that became Feige's crucible in which to forge what the MCU would become. He would frequently butt heads with Ike Perlmutter on the Marvel board over the direction of the adaptions, had little control over the TV output, and had to mediate over disagreements like the recasting of James Rhodes and Scarlett Johansson's appeals for a raise in pay.

Maybe most pertinent to this discussion, however, is how Feige chose to deal with Ant-Man. Ant-Man had started production way back in the days of Raimi's Spider-Man films. Originally to be directed by Edgar Wright, the film was supposed to be self contained, taking place over two time periods, with both Hank Pym and Scott Lang as joint-protagonists. Once the MCU had hit it's stride, Wright was ordered to re-write elements of the script to fit into the wider universe, something that he bristled against and eventually quit over.

By all accounts Ant-Man should have been a disaster, but under new director Peyton Reed it went on to be one of Marvel's greatest hits. Feige had taken that bad hand and turned it into a winner. Just one crisis of many, not just averted, but reworked to his benefit.

The reality is that in the wake of The Avengers it wasn't all plain sailing. The intervening years saw plenty of duds like Thor: The Dark World and Age of Ultron, and on top of that had a chaotic and uneasy relationship with its TV spin-offs, which were kept at arms length and are mostly forgotten nowadays.

Yet Marvel Studios was able weather most of these problems thanks to having a smash hit, like Ant-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy, for every dud, and fans were willing to stick by the MCU due to the general feeling that the writers and producers were still dedicated towards fidelity to the source material. When changes were made, there wasn't a sense that it was due to embarrassment or to dumb the material down.

All in all, the bumps in the road were forgotten, and as the MCU only grew in prominence, the future continued to look bright.

Part Four - All This and Heaven Too.

The road to Endgame was one of mixed emotions for me. On the one hand, the good ship MCU was sailing straight and true, the duds were becoming rarer and the hits were only getting better. There was no sense that the Infinity Saga was going to fail at the final hurdle. Too much good will had been earned to even contemplate that.

And yet, it is through those years that the cracks in the road would finally start to form. The more popular the MCU became, the less privileged I felt as a fan of the comics. I got genuinely irked when the opening logo animation was changed from flipping through pages of the comics to a montage of characters from the films. It felt like the MCU was discarding its connection to the comics and forging an identity beyond it. Rightly or wrongly it felt as though these characters weren't for people like me any-more, weren't for fans of the comics, they were for fans of the films. It was a cruel irony, but maybe a deserved one.

The 2010s would also see Marvel Studios come under scrutiny for dragging its heels on representation, an issue that remains a millstone around its neck to this day. It was becoming increasingly clear that the MCU being nearly ten years in and only having one female-led film and one non-white led film was pretty inexcusable, as well as the fact that the writers and producers became particularly cagey when pressed on depicting gay relationships.

Even for a British white guy like myself I could see this was a problem, and especially noticeable give the strides that the comics of both Marvel and DC were making in terms of representation at the time. Both Black Panther and Captain Marvel were pushed back to make room for the newly re-integrated Spider-Man and an Ant-Man sequel, calling into question Marvel Studios commitment to diversifying their stories.

The years of 2017 - 2020 are an interesting period for the MCU because on the one hand it was arguably when it saw its biggest successes, Ragnarok, Black Panther and Guardians 2 (which I actually didn't like, but I can't deny was well regarded,) but is also an era filled with missteps. The TV side of the franchise would become completely unmoored, with Agents of Shield unofficially exiled into its own continuity. Controversy would continue to dog Feige when he is forced to sack, and then reinstate, James Gunn over decades-old tweets. The LGBTQ issue would see its biggest punchline yet with the hyping up of the franchise's first on-screen gay character, only to reveal it as an unnamed gay man mourning the death of his husband.

As I sat there watching this unfold, I examined the MCU with a more critical eye, but I remained optimistic. As long as Marvel Studios could stick the landing with Infinity War and Endgame, they'd gain enough good will to fix these hiccups, I reasoned. Once the ongoing story arc was concluded they'd have a clean slate to rebuild the universe anew, make room for a more diverse roster of characters, and delve even deeper into their back catalogue.

Part Five - Which Way Western Man?

It came as no surprise that Infinity War and Endgame were smash hits. Despite my reservations, I knew that too much was riding on their success for them to bork things at the eleventh hour. Nowadays the final battle of Endgame has become somewhat of a cudgel to beat down on Hollywood's overuse of CGI, but I can't deny that seeing Cap raise the hammer and declare "Avengers.... Assemble!" to rally a cast of hundreds is one of the greatest cinematic events of my lifetime. Grown men were crying in the cinema.

I remember vividly at the time, before I went to see Endgame, overhearing a conversation at work between two co-workers. They were enthusiastic MCU fans, and exactly the kind of people who wouldn't have been seen dead going to see a superhero move ten years earlier. They were talking about how Endgame was a definitive end for the characters, and were genuinely confused as to why more films were supposedly being made. "I guess they'll just have to end it here," one said.

I sat back eavesdropping and smiled. As a fan of the comics, I knew that true superhero stories never end. The story will always go on. There'll be new heroes and new villains, and Marvel had more than enough characters to keep going, even outside of those in a legal quagmire. Black Knight, Machine-Man, even major characters like She-Hulk had yet to be introduced . There was more than enough for the films left to cover, and I'd be seated for every one of them, ready for another adventure.

However, it wasn't a major crisis event from the comics that would change the trajectory of the MCU, but instead multiple real-world ones. The sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney, the rise of streaming networks, and, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. Any one of these events would have shook the foundations of Marvel Studios, all three together would become an apocalyptic, but not insurmountable, problem for the franchise.

Feige had been dealt bad hands before. He'd become adept at handling them. That's the real story of the MCU. Yet Feige's luck couldn't last forever. Or maybe it wasn't luck. Maybe he was overambitious. Maybe he was careless. Maybe he was being left behind by a changing world. Whatever the reason, as the decade turned, Feige's magic touch evaporated, but those bad hands would just keep on coming.

I confess I always thought that the 2020 gap would turn out to be a benefit to the MCU. All things considered I had grown quite burned out after Endgame and struggled to maintain any enthusiasm with Far From Home. I figured that a break of a year would leave me eager to jump back in when the cinemas reopened. However, even by mid-2021 I, like a lot of people, was still cagy about going to the movies during a pandemic, and once the underwhelming reviews for Black Widow I was in two minds about going to see it.

What finally made me decide to give Black Widow a miss was when I found out how they had decided to adapt Taskmaster. A beloved character from the comics, and indicative of the kind of camp and whimsy that many adaptions struggle to deal with, Taskmaster's depiction in Black Widow could only really be described as 'in name only.'

While the MCU had made sweeping changes to characters in the past, this was the first time it really felt as though they were flushing the source material down the toilet. It is the kind of cynical decision that I considered to be beneath the MCU up to that point, and more than anything didn't bode well for the future.

Black Widow was followed by Shang-Chi, a much stronger film by all accounts, and probably a better opener for the new era, but also one not strong enough to shake off the blow of Black Widow. Shang-Chi was overly long and lost itself in an overuse of CGI. What could have been a small scale hit like Ant-Man became an overly fantastical slog by the end. Still, audiences such as myself cut it some slack, and were excited to see where the franchise would go with the character.

As of time of writing Shang-Chi hasn't been seen since.

I think it is safe to say that one of the reasons Marvel Studios screwed the pooch on the post-Endgame era was the inability to stick by their new cast of characters. Way back in 2012, the relatively small cast of protagonists were ducking and weaving into each other's narratives, but after Endgame our new protagonists would go unseen for years on end, with no clear sense of what their place in the grander narrative was.

Eternals was up next, which I also decided to skip. The reviews were underwhelming and I sort of resented the film a little for drawing attention away from Dune, which at the time was not a sure thing and many expected to flop for being too grand and too weird. More than anything though I just found the Eternals an odd choice for a feature film when many other, better, and more beloved characters were still awaiting their live action debuts.

Things started to look up again with No Way Home, a certified slam dunk that somehow managed to crib ideas from the highly acclaimed Into the Spider-Verse animated film but otherwise do its own thing. One consequence here, however, is that Marvel Studios was starting to become addicted to cameo overuse. Now that Toby McGuire and Andrew Garfield had come back to play their own iterations of Spider-Man, the genie was out of the bottle and cameos of older actors, no matter how tenuous, became justified under any circumstances.

It is Multiverse of Madness, however, that made it clear how far Feige had sailed the ship off course. While a fairly decent film, and one I genuinely enjoyed, it is in many ways the inflection point of all the problems that would later plague the franchise.

First of all, it is where the series decided to go all in on incorporating the idea of "The Multiverse," into the storyline. This was immediately interpreted as a bad move.

Pretty much any comic fan I talked to at the time agreed that the MCU was simply not ready to start delving into the multiverse concept. For a film like No Way Home, a one off, a special event, sure, but as a main part of the ongoing story it was just bringing in needless levels of complexity. DC comics first introduced its multiverse during The Flash of Two Worlds in 1961, twenty years after the character's debut. It was absurd that they were going to start introducing parallel timelines while we were still waiting for iconic characters like She-Hulk and the Fantastic Four to show up.

Yet far more insidious and demoralising was the idea for the film to follow up on plot elements introduced in WandaVision, Disney Plus' first MCU streaming show. I do not think it can be understated how the brand synergy with streaming really damaged the MCUs reputation amongst general audiences.

Let me make this as clear as I can. In spite of all the buzz around them most people did not watch the streaming shows. Most people didn't have Disney Plus. Sure, enough people watched them to justify their production. Enough people watched them to keep wiki articles on 'what you missed' up to date, but by and large the vast majority of the audience that were sitting down two or three times a year to watch an MCU blockbuster were not going to be watching several 8 - 10 hour-long series on a streaming service.

I had not seen WandaVision, and the expectation that I ought to have only bred resentment. I don't think that this is an unreasonable reaction to have. In order to partake in the MCU previously, one only had to pay for a cinema ticket and spend a few hours of their time, now, Disney was splitting up the fandom into groups of haves and have-nots, where monthly fees and hours of your time needed to be handed over before you could be considered a 'real' fan.

Hell, I'd have happily bought the shows on DVD, but Disney knew that if they walled them off as a streaming exclusive they could exploit their audience's fear of missing out. The naked cynicism could not be ignored.

Now, I've heard a defence of the streaming shows with the argument that this is no different to the comics. Marvel comics constantly have continuous plot-lines and crossovers that most readers cannot be expected to fully keep up with. This argument misses the fact that live action TV shows and movies made for mainstream audiences are supposed to be more accessible than niche products like decades-long-running comic strips, but also, that is an element of the comics that sucks and everyone hates anyway! Why would you want to replicate that?!

All in all, for me, being outside the Disney Plus club is what really dampened my enthusiasm for the future of the MCU. It was hard to get invested in an upcoming film when there was the very real possibility it would involve a character or a plot point from a TV show I hadn't seen and didn't want to have to watch. This was made worse when characters I was genuinely excited about, like Ms Marvel and Moon Knight, were getting paywalled behind a subscription fee.

The next few years were pretty rough for the MCU. Love and Thunder was a bafflingly odd entry that somehow managed to be TOO camp and whimsical. Wakanda Forever was pretty good but couldn't help feel like a compromised vision in the wake of Chadwick Boseman's untimely passing. Quantumania was for the most part genuinely awful, both in the ways it misunderstood what audiences liked about those films, but also, again, abandoning its fidelity to the source material with its butchering of the MODOK character.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 was surprisingly a great film, bringing a slight reprieve to the slump, but Ms Marvel's cinematic debut in The Marvels felt like a squandering of her character, being a mess of competing ideas from both the streaming shows and the films. The misses were outnumbering the hits. With 2023 coming to a close, it was becoming more and more undeniable that all was not well on the good ship Marvel, and those articles about superhero fatigue, once the butt of many a joke, were now looking prophetic.

It didn't help that all of these films felt as though they were singing from the same hymn sheet. They all tended to involve some combination of the following elements: An opening prologue making fun of the post-Endgame status-quo. A villain with a sympathetic backstory. A mid film section where the characters are spirited away to a parallel universe or magical realm where celebrity cameos would sit and spout plot-exposition. A grand finale involving gratuitous CGI where the protagonist tries to talk the villain down, who nevertheless is hoist on their own petard when their doomsday device goes wrong. An ending with the protagonist walking off into the sunset with some kind of child or younger apprentice.

The days of something as weird and offbeat as Ant-Man, or Iron Man 3 were long gone.

After dumping Jonathan Majors as Kang in the wake of his domestic abuse allegations, whispers were abound that Feige was making ready to right the ship. The master had dealt with bad hands before, he could learn how to play this one.

It was, however, too little, too late.

Part Six - All the Doughnuts in the World.

2024 would be the first year when one, and only one, MCU film would play at the cinemas. There was a sense, once again, that absence would make the heart grow fonder. That Feige and co would be able to use that time to turn things around and win us all back. Maybe he will, but for me, 2024 delivered a one-two punch that killed my interest in the MCU stone dead.

Five years prior, in 2019, Disney purchased 20th Century Fox. For someone like myself this led to mixed feelings. On the one hand, the prospect of Disney reclaiming iconic characters like The X-Men and Fantastic Four, long exiled due to contractual reasons, led to a great deal of excitement. On the other hand, yet another company being swallowed up into the Disney blob did not bode well for human economics and creativity.

Still, there was a hope that if we got a good X-Men film out of this, one that was more loyal to the source material, then it would have somewhat of a silver lining.

In 2024, the X-Men, kind of, would make their MCU debut, sort of, bizarrely, in Deadpool and Wolverine.

I really enjoyed the first Deadpool back in 2016, which I think is a perfect example of how being faithful to a character's source material can be more of an asset than a complication, but that enjoyment was short lived, as I did not enjoy Deadpool 2 at all, found it over indulgent, tonally incoherent and more of a vehicle for Ryan Reynolds than something faithful to the character.

Despite all this, Deadpool and Wolverine really went out of its way to reassure fans that it had their best interests at heart. Hugh Jackman was back, in the yellow suit! This movie would be directly integrated into the MCU, fleshing out the multiverse stuff! The movie was going to be packed with cameos from characters you haven't seen in years!

I walked in to Deadpool and Wolverine primed to hate it, and maybe that's a me problem, but it was damned from the start anyway, as even before I sat down in my cinema seat I was hit with the news that Robert Downey Jr had been cast to play Doctor Doom in the next Avengers film.

There's been plenty of discussion around why this casting decision is considered by many a bad idea, and I'm not going to waste time here getting into it, but for me, it symbolised one thing. Marvel Studios had given up on its faithfulness to the comics.

The promise once that the MCU was going to hew close to the source material, to not be embarrassed of its origins or make sweeping changes to dumb things down for audiences now seemed long dead. Even if RDJ is playing some kind of version of Doom that is close to the comics, the casting decision alone is distracting and displays a desperate lack of confidence in their own product.

With a metaphorical head wound after the Doctor Doom news, Deadpool and Wolverine was the worst thing to follow it up with. A smug, back-slapping cavalcade of endless cameos, in-jokes and references. It is arguable the most 'Have your cake and eat it too,' film that exists, attempting to roll its eyes at its own existence. At the climax, I felt as though I was experiencing a monkey's paw curse, the finger curling with the arrival of the Deadpool Corps.

I felt like the naive youth forced to smoke ten packets of his uncle's cigars to teach him a lesson. "So you wanted Marvel to become mainstream did you? You wanted costumes faithful to the comics did you? You wanted crossovers and cameos and in-jokes did you? Well here is is! You can't complain now! This is what you always wanted! Are you not entertained?"

Deadpool and Wolverine feels like ironic punishment from the gods for wanting the shared-universe concept to succeed in the first place. It is the natural end point. It is like being forced to eat all the doughnuts in the world. At the end of the film, I was just about done with the MCU. If Feige was going to right the ship, I no longer had the patience to wait for it to turn.

Part Seven - The Superhero Story Never Ends

I didn't bother going to see Brave New World. I skipped Thunderbolts. I did, however, go to see Fantastic Four: First Steps, which I thought, was, well, fantastic. But the success of First Steps was bittersweet. A genuinely entertaining and self-contained film that felt loyal to its origins but also like a breath of fresh air in comparison to its camo-packed contemporaries. First Steps was, in some ways, marred by the knowledge that it was connected to the MCU at all, with it's stupid references to Multiverse shit that they should have learned to drop already.

In the wake of Superman, another absolutely fantastic movie that properly understood its source material, I found myself wishing that First Steps had likewise been a fresh start. I could see myself getting excited for the Marvel world again if this was going to be the new status-quo. I'd be first in line for an Iron Man or X-Men film set in this 60s-ish tech utopia. Alas, with Doomsday around the corner, and given what we now know about the returning faces, from Chris Evans to Ian McKellen, it is pretty clear that the MCU is not going to be striking out in a bold new direction and instead will be strip mining its own past.

It has been pointed out repeatedly by many fans online how absurd it is that it has been over a half-decade since the Fox acquisition and there still hasn't been a brand new X-Men adaption yet, and that, in fact, the MCU may never have its own true X-Men proper, re-using the Fox iterations instead.

Truly, Feige has sailed the ship off course. Doomsday will probably make megabucks, but I sure as shit won't be seated, and neither will most of the folks I know who once never missed an MCU entry. My colleagues at work? I barely hear a conversation about the Marvel films these days. For many of them the story really did finish with Endgame.

The MCU will no doubt lurch on for another good few years yet, but in what form is anyone's guess. Whether it tries to consolidate around a fresher cast of characters, or reboot itself with recast versions of its original roster, it now has no choice but to be saddled by the baggage of the Multiverse years, and that's the kind of baggage I have no interest in trying to keep up with.

It is easy to look back and suggest that with a few changes it didn't have to be this way. If they had hit the ground running after Covid with a better focus on the new characters. If they'd gotten Black Widow out of the gate pre-Endgame instead of trapping it in development hell. If they'd gotten Black Panther off the ground early enough to make its sequel Boseman's swansong. Yet even with a stronger start and a better sense of identity, this doesn't change the fact that the MCU is a mainstream product compromised in part due to corporate bullshit.

The MCU was always going to be saddled with Disney's push into streaming. It was always going to leverage FOMO against its fans to try and coax them into subscription fees. The Fox acquisition was always going to be used to mine nostalgia instead of giving us fresh takes on these characters. We can say that Covid threw them a curveball, sure, but it is the never-ending demands of the franchise beast that truly damned it.

Maybe it was always going to go this way. The MCU is dying a slow death, or at least having an embarrassing slump, and I morn it knowing how good the highs were. I can take solace in that, I guess. Early on I mentioned that neither me or my friends really expected The Avengers to work, and were amazed that it did, and I genuinely mean that. I think we were extremely lucky to have gotten even one superhero crossover on film, never mind that it was followed by even higher highs. If everything had fallen apart after the Avengers we'd still have gotten more than we could have dreamed of.

In that way, I feel a little petulant and entitled to complain about where the MCU is right now, so I'll leave you with this. I don't know where the MCU goes from here. Maybe it'll bounce back. Maybe it'll end for good. Maybe it'll find itself supplanted by an ascendant DC film series (and I have my doubts about that buddy.) What I can say is that superhero stories never end. There'll always be another battle, another adventure. We may be witnessing the doldrums of this shared universe experiment, but we won't have seen the last of the world it is depicting, and when the day comes that the MCU baggage has been let go, I'll be eager to sit back down in that cinema seat, ready to start the adventure again anew.

The MCU is proof that dreams don't last for ever, but by that same logic, nether do nightmares.

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Jack Harvey 2026. Images used under Fair Use.