Also, I finally watched season 2 after almost a year. I was at first waiting for all episodes to be out, but then I kinda forgot. Overall I liked it a lot! The last episodes of season 1 I didn't like very much because I wanted the show to keep being an anthology instead of making an unified story, but at least this time the finale felt a lot more personal.
Some thoughts (unmarked spoilers ahead):
Episode 1 - The idea and setting were pretty cool, a Nova Nebula playing noir cop in a cyberpunkesque Xandar that shielded itself from the outside universe to avoid a war, only to stumble on a murder investigation turned conspiracy to reopen the shield. Unfortunately, the execution was really uneven, because we are given very little suspects for this supposed noir mystery, so it was more or less obvious what was going on. A shame, as I said, the premise is cool, it should have been allowed to cook longer. Howard was funny tho. 6/10
Episode 2 - Very fun and entertaining episode. Unlike season 1 which at times felt like it took from a very small pool of characters, here we get a new Avengers team in the 80s made up of supporting/side characters of the canon Avengers (aside from Thor), and it makes for a fun team composition, as was making Ego the Loki getting it started and Peggy and Howard Stark the Nick Furys. Peter Quill and Hope interacting as kids is something I would never think of, and they were pretty cute. Gorbachev sending the Winter Soldier instead of the Red Guardian is a bit weird (if it were me, RG would have been sent as the official help, but WS is secretly sent as well to take care of things behind the scenes if the team fails), but it worked for his emotional arc so I do not mind much. And that one is just for me, but I'm glad at the indirect reference to King Azzuri being real in the MCU (aside from an unused mention in the
Wakanda Forever script). 9/10
Episode 3 - A funny Christmas episode, which apparently introduced the Freak, a thing from the comics that Happy Hogan transforms into that I was not aware of before looking it up. It's a delightful, low-stakes Die Hard parody, in a timeline barely different than the Sacred Timeline, so it served its role well. The atmosphere of the episode was very funny to me because it was extremely similar to the tone of MCU fics circa the first Avengers (and some up to
Age of Ultron): where people interpreted the Avengers as much closer than they are in reality, like a found family, instead of the pretty much coworkers the movies usually go for (aside from Clint & Natasha and Tony & Bruce)*, so a lot of fics wrote them all living in the Avengers Tower and acting pretty much like the X-Men. This episode feels like that, not only with the Avengers doing small side trips for Christmas and organizing a party, but also the presence of Darcy Lewis, a Ao3 fanfic favorite, as Happy's intern. This made the episode even funnier. 8/10
Episode 4 - The episode that was supposed to have been in season 1 to introduce AU Gamora, but was moved to later because of COVID I believe. What I like about WI this season is how the point-of-divergence is usually very simple but make a lot of sense to spiral into a completely premise. Tony not entering the portal in time just makes a lot of sense when he was also a hair's breadth from missing it in canon. Anyway, another fun one, this time a Planet Iron Man story. The Grandmaster by himself makes the episode fun, but Tony too having to act as the straight man to a planet of weirdos for once makes the dialogue witty and snappy. The idea of a race instead of gladiatoral combat makes sense since the Romans themselves didn't just have gladiators in the Colosseum, but chariot races as well, so I could definitely see the Grandmaster having varied forms of entertainment instead of just fights to the death so he doesn't get bored (makes me wonder if like the Romans he also simulates naval battles, or maybe an upgraded version that simulates space battles...). Gamora is a bit of a letdown for a character this episode is supposed to build up tho. 7/10
Episode 5 - A follow-up to her cliffhanger last season,
Captain Carter and the Winter Soldier was also good fun, any episode with Captain Carter are great. We see more of her friendship with Natasha, and they have great chemistry, I may even be so bold as to say it is greater than Steve and Natasha (tbf the circumstances meant he couldn't trust her, whereas here Iron Steve is not accompanied with a HYDRA conspiracy). And I would also not be surprised people ship them either, the chemistry is too good. But the heart of the episode is Peggy and Steve reuniting, and they are extremely cute and touching together. I usually find it funny that the MCU doesn't have enough fictional countries for stuff to happen in, so it usually resorts to Sokovia (Justin Hammer in the Christmas episode randomly saying "I should have gone for the Sokovian team" made me snort, like why is Sokovia implied to have expert mercenaries now lol) or Wakanda for even the most random things (and Madripoor as well now I guess), but an abandoned experimental city in Sokovia makes sense here since it was a Soviet experiment and Sokovia is a post-Soviet country. It was also great seeing Melina more villainous here than in
Black Widow and thus making her fight her "daughter" a cool thematic dynamic (kinda sad Yelena wasn't there, but oh well). Peggy and Steven getting separated again was heartbreaking (it is interesting that their relationship here mixes Steve seeing Peggy as the one that got away and Bucky, his last remaining link to the past, also disappearing at the end of WS), but I have no fear that they will find each other again. 9/10
Episode 6 - The second MCU foray into having a Native American protag in a Native American context and setting (or well, first, but I watched
Echo before it), when I heard about the episode's concept last year, I was wondering how it was going to be an AU when it seemed to mostly be its own self-contained thing. So I didn't expect the Lake Space Stone as a result of an early Ragnarök, but that was well-thought. The story is fairly simple, but it's not a bad thing. The Sky World is just cool and pretty to look at, which makes Kahhori's motivation being "this may be paradise, but it isn't one for me if my brother is dead/not with me" much stronger when she could really have just stayed there and given up. Ahtaraks is really funny, and I like the dynamic with Kahhori, even if they only
imply they may view each other romantically. The Spanish conquistadors are fun antagonists, even if their presence this far north is puzzling: I concluded they just didn't want to portray English colonists badly and conquistadors are easy targets, but on the other hand, there are ways to justify it, like
these Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories:
Wikipedia said:
Some have conjectured that Columbus was able to persuade the
Catholic Monarchs of
Castile and
Aragon to support his planned voyage only because they were aware of some recent earlier voyage across the Atlantic. Some suggest that Columbus himself visited Canada or Greenland before 1492, because according to
Bartolomé de las Casas he wrote he had sailed 100 leagues past an island he called
Thule in 1477. Whether Columbus actually did this and what island he visited, if any, is uncertain. Columbus is thought to have visited
Bristol in 1476.
[140] Bristol was also the port from which
John Cabot sailed in 1497, crewed mostly by Bristol sailors. In a letter of late 1497 or early 1498, the English merchant John Day wrote to Columbus about Cabot's discoveries, saying that land found by Cabot was "discovered in the past by the men from Bristol who found 'Brasil' as your lordship knows".
[141] There may be records of expeditions from Bristol to find the "
isle of Brazil" in 1480 and 1481.
[142] Trade between Bristol and Iceland is well documented from the mid-15th century.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés records several such legends in his
Historia general de las Indias of 1526, which includes biographical information on Columbus. He discusses the then-current story of a Spanish caravel that was swept off its course while on its way to England, and wound up in a foreign land populated by naked tribesmen. The crew gathered supplies and made its way back to Europe, but the trip took several months and the captain and most of the men died before reaching land. The caravel's
ship pilot, a man called
Alonso Sánchez, and a few others made it to Portugal, but all were very ill. Columbus was a good friend of the pilot, and took him to be treated in his own house, and the pilot described the land they had seen and marked it on a map before dying. People in Oviedo's time knew this story in several versions, though Oviedo himself regarded it as a myth.
[143]
In 1925, Soren Larsen wrote a book claiming that a joint Danish-Portuguese expedition landed in Newfoundland or Labrador in 1473 and again in 1476. Larsen claimed that
Didrik Pining and
Hans Pothorst served as captains, while
João Vaz Corte-Real and the possibly mythical
John Scolvus served as navigators, accompanied by
Álvaro Martins.
[144] Nothing beyond circumstantial evidence has been found to support Larsen's claims.
[145]
The historical record shows that
Basque fishermen were present in
Newfoundland and Labrador from at least 1517 onward (therefore predating all recorded European settlements in the region except those of the Norse). The Basques' fishing expeditions led to significant trade and cultural exchanges with Native Americans. A fringe theory suggests that Basque sailors first arrived in North America prior to Columbus' voyages to the New World (some sources suggest the late 14th century as a tentative date) but kept the destination a secret in order to avoid competition over the fishing resources of the North American coasts. There is no historical or archaeological evidence to support this claim.
There are plenty of ways to justify or handwave it away. I can see the natives, thanks to the extensive trade network of Precolumbian America and word-of-mouth, hearing of the war the Haudenosaunee waged over the magical lake and when they relay the information to the Spanish, Bimini doesn't likely mean the Mayan lands confused for the Bahamas, but clearly a real place further north. In any case, the Spanish makes for great villains, and the commander was pretty good as an antagonist, he did not hesitate at all to find a way to deal with a superhuman girl by switching tactics, and even when he gets trampled he tries one last time to take her down. And villainess Isabella of Castile was hilariously hammy (where was King Ferdinand?). And it's just nice to see Native Americans able to beat off colonialism in a similar way Wakanda did. Kinda disappointed it wasn't used as the origin point for the 1602 episode, but for a brand new character and origin story, it was well done. 7/10
Episode 7 - This one is extremely memorable for having the absolutely cracked ship of Hela and Wenwu, and it somehow works really well. Wenwu's type really is "woman who can beat my ass and could kill me". Making Hela a protagonist was also hella (ha!) interesting, because while she is formidable in
Ragnarök, she is mostly just a smug bloodthirsty tyrant there, and what she
represented (Asgardian imperialism) was far more interesting than the character itself to me, if that makes sense. But stripped of her powers and humbled down to literal earth, it is fun to see other aspects of her personality, from her dry humor to her aimless sense of purpose being solely defined by war. She also just plain funny. And I'm always up for seeing hypocritical Odin getting his just dessert. Also, glad to get explicit confirmation that Frigga really is her stepmom (Thor calls her half-sister in IW, true, but I never understood where he learned that information). 8/10
Episode 8 - The adaptation of
Marvel 1602. Less of an alternate timeline and more a strange temporal singularity (a prelude to what will happen in
Secret Wars?), another episode made good from the start by featuring Captain Carter, and her being able to see and hear Uatu made it stand out. And once again her and Steve being sickeningly cute in every universe is my drug. Everyone affecting weird Shakespearian behavior was fun, like Loki explaining Iago is the true protagonist of
Othello, or Hulk in the final battle hilariously punctuating his screams with "thee" and "thy". Although there were some missing characters unfortunately, but you can chalk that up to people being taken by the rifts. Speaking of, shoutout to 1602 Wanda, who was a real MVP holding back a rift all on her own during a chaotic battle and managing to help the heroes too at the last moment while she was at it. And unlike the first episode, I liked that this one felt like a proper mystery, I legit didn't know who would be the Forerunner because I assumed Peggy was already filling the role Steve Rogers had in the original comic, so my guess was either Thor or Dr. Strange. The reveal of the POD is once again a POD that makes a lot of sense. And man, the bitter note of the separation really hit. 8/10
Episode 9 - A much better finale than the first season's I think since it wasn't so over-the-top, but while the setup of the reveal was done well, I am annoyed that Strange Supreme regressed in his character to be the final villain, especially when we saw the warm friendship between him and Peggy. Nothing much to say, since the episode was mainly two chases and then a big brawl (kinda funny to see our two heroines get lots of hig level equipments to fight the final boss like they are RPG protagonists). Seeing Kahhori outside of her original context gave more layers to her and it's cool to see how much she grew into her power. Was an appropriate and touching ending for Strange after all he went through. And nice to see Loki's multiverse tree at the end, answering some but not all questions about how the show exists and Uatu's existence, which I assume they will get into in season 3. 7/10
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