Travels With My Zebra

Finally got a chance to see the Wonder Man TV series.

(It’s already renewed for season 2, which is delightful to see. Come on, MCU, let more of your characters have ongoing arcs again.)

Spoiler-light reactions:

It’s good! Funny, charming, with a great weird-but-somehow-it-works (even in spite of [spoiler]) friendship between the two leads.

There were a couple episodes where I was bracing myself for some heavy embarrassment squick, and then the scene went in a whole different direction and didn’t hit it at all. Refreshing.

I kept expecting Trevor Slattery to be the full-blown “Planet of the Apes was amazing, they taught monkeys to act!” doofus we saw in Shang-Chi’s movie, and he’s not. Still a bit of an airhead, lots of fun comic relief, but he’s surprisingly competent when he makes an effort. The character is consistent enough otherwise that it works if you headcanon he was high for most of the movie — the show even goes into his backstory about problems with getting high on-set, which fits right in.

There’s a side character who has a connection to the Darkforce! Nobody in the show uses the word — none of them are in a position to know it’s called that — viewers can just recognize it from other Marvel properties. (Other MCU appearances, even.)

I always like this kind of sidebar, making the MCU feel textured and lived-in. It’s not solely populated with Main Characters, who get cool dramatic origin stories and end up joining the Avengers. It’s filled out with bit characters, who also sometimes touch the improperly-sealed hazardous waste in a Roxxon dumpster, they just mostly keep doing their day jobs with bonus superpowers.

We get some nice leveraging of “Disney can freely put references to Other Things They Own in Marvel shows now.” A+ use of Josh Gad, no notes.

Since we’re already guaranteed another season, and since the status of [spoiler] is left a mystery at the end, I’m sorta hoping Simon will end up rescuing them in S2. Not setting my hopes too high — we don’t see him actively planning this rescue, or even thinking he could do it — but it would be thematically very satisfying if he eventually figured it out.

—

…So the rest of this post is complain-y.

In the sense of “the show missed opportunities to do these cool things,” not “the show did bad things and I’m mad about it.”

One of the main plot threads is, Simon Williams is trying out for the lead role in a remake of the (in-universe) 1980 Wonder Man movie. Other characters pay some lip service to the idea of “updating a vintage superhero story for the modern age will be a great opportunity to reflect on the change in culture, now that superheroes are just a part of our everyday lives.”

And then…we never see that in action. How does the writing change? How do everyday people in the MCU react to a fictional superhero in the post-Blip world? We have no idea!

It would’ve been so easy to give us a clip of, say, J. Jonah Jameson ranting against “Hollywood liberal pro-superhero propaganda.” But nope. Nothing.

The movie itself doesn’t have much to do with Avengers-type superheroes anyway. It’s straight out of the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon genre: a man from Earth gets stranded on another planet, has swashbuckling space adventures, rubber-suit aliens get shot with ray guns, etcetera. If anything, that’s a setup for a cultural commentary on human-alien relations, now that “alien refugees are the ones stranded on Earth” is also a part of MCU humanity’s everyday life.

But the show isn’t interested in exploring that either.

All we really know about the movie is enough to establish “Simon and Trevor are auditioning for the roles of two characters whose relationship mirrors their real-world relationship.” Look, as a narrative parallel crafted by the MCU writers, that’s fine. But in-universe it’s a coincidence, and I still want to know what decisions those writers are making, how their job is shaped by the world they’re in.

Also! Simon is auditioning to play a human character stranded among aliens. This is the perfect setup for him to worry “what if the reason I have superhuman powers is, I’ve been an alien stranded among humans this whole time?” Trevor…okay, Trevor is still doofy enough not to think of it, but agents at the DODC should’ve had the same suspicion. When grade-school Simon first showed super-strength, his parents should’ve worried “did the hospital accidentally switch our biological son with a secret baby Asgardian?”

Again: no! This whole obvious question is never floated by anyone.

Note that 616 Wonder Man doesn’t have much in common with either of these guys — Wonder Man the 1980s space adventurer, or Simon Williams the present-day Haitian immigrant with a struggling acting career.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing (after all, 616 Steven Grant doesn’t have much in common with either Steven Grant the Indiana Jones knockoff, or Steven Grant the present-day London gift-shoppist)…

…But I really wish the 1980s movie character was just a direct riff on comicverse Simon Williams. That way, it would be so easy to make contrasts with “the career in-universe writers imagined a super-powered guy would have in the 1980s” vs “the career in-universe writers imagine for a super-powered guy in the post-Blip MCU” vs “the career a real super-powered guy is having in the post-Blip MCU.”