Spoilers Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness grade and discussion thread

It's come up in at least one Stephen King work as well, people from other realities going where they don't belong causes instabilities and disruptions

 

It came up in a little known show called Star Trek too, all those Enterprise's spamming the sector.

It was just in empty space so visually far less spectacular.

 

I love this film (probably more than most) but that was another great Honest Trailer...and that Everything, Everywhere, All at Once moment was a spot-on deep cut (even if everyone else has already said everywhen).

 

It's from the comics: I believe they first came up in Hickman's Avengers run.

 

There it is! I've been waiting for that one.

Superman's point about looking for a universe where Billy and Tommy are orphans was the first thing that came to mind pretty early on in the film but I figured that point would never come up. Which I'm fine with because the point is Wanda isn't thinking rationally because her mind was corrupted by the Darkhold. That's why calling in Clint or White Vision would've been cul-de-sacs, too.

Loved the jam session in the post credits.

 

Finally getting to see this, a few observations 45 mins or so in.

The whole thing about dreams being views into your other lives. Does that mean before Loki, nobody in the MCU dreamed?

I'd also like to apologize to all the more interesting versions of me out there for boring the hell out of them during their dreams.

 

Timey wimey wibbly wobbly stuff. From the perspective of the MCU the multiverse has always existed because when Loki recreated the multiverse it didn't start just *after* the stabbing but from the beginning of time. The multiverse always existed from the perspective of everyone but the 2 Loki's.

 

Bringing in Fantastic Four and Charles Xavier, it seems like a missed opportunity to bring in Agents of SHIELD characters.

Although, you could argue that SHIELD must have happened in a variant universe because they had to create two additional universes to survive it.

 

On the one hand, directly referencing Inhumans, of all things, seemed almost like slight-by-omission of AOS, but on the other hand, it sounds like a lot of people who didn't watch SHIELD didn't fully understand the way the Darkhold warps the minds of those that read it and thought it didn't track for Wanda's methods to shift so much between the end of her show and the beginning of the movie, so maybe it was, kind of, tied into MoM.

 

The multiverse was cited in the first Doctor Strange, and Endgame necessitates the existence of multiple universes. Loki just ignored all that.

 

My handwave is that the TVA didn’t have an accurate understanding of their own mission, just a good-sounding cover story. Their job was to avert variants of Kang, so in actuality, they may not have been maintaining one timeline, as they thought, but we’re actually grading any timeline as acceptable so long as it either led to the version of Kang who ended up as He Who Remains, or no Kang at all. Whatever happened beyond Kang’s eventual fate (or existence) was totally irrelevant to their true mission, so their gee-gaws and doo-dads might not have even shown them timelines where Earth was destroyed or Thanos wasn’t defeated.

 

The Assembled episode is now available on Disney+. Going to watching this evening.

 

That was a lot of fun to watch and not just because of Bruce Campbell just hamming it up every moment he could as the narrator (and later on as an interviewee).

Unsurprisingly, the episode focused heavily on the production side of things and I greatly appreciate how much work went into the practical sets and sequences. But the most mindbogglingly of them all was the seemingly simplest: Because of COVID, their planned filming of the apple orchard scene was delayed out of the regular blooming season, which resulted in the production team individually tying on little blossoms on multiple trees just so it would look right and not rely on CGI! Please give that team an extra bonus because that's amazing and I couldn't tell those blossoms weren't real.

The actors beyond the core cast didn't get much in the way of the interviews, which is a shame because I'm really bummed out we didn't get to hear from at least Hayley Atwell and Patrick Stewart returning to their iconic characters but in a different manner. Curiously, they completely skipped over John Krasinski's and Anson Mount's appearances entirely.

While we didn't hear that much from Cumberbatch, Olsen, Wong, Ejifor, and McAdams, I was happy to hear a lot from Xochitl Gomez and about how much fun she was clearly having making this film, both on and off set. We need full video of her jam sessions with Wong.

One curious nugget we learned about early draft of the film: Originally Wanda was suppose to become a villain by the end, instead of the beginning, but scriptwriter Michael Waldron decided to change that because he wanted them to get to play with the villain instead of someone else later on.

 

Yeah, I was surprised by her being the villain, but then I thought 'in retrospect I guess that was set up by Wandavision'. So the early draft was seemingly more like what I came in expecting.

 

After Wandavision, I figured she would be the villain--but I was surprised and think it was a poor choice to have her already be so willing to slaughter anyone who stood in her way. It would have been more powerful to have seen a little more of her journey--as she gives in further to the Darkhold's power. But, I guess that all happened offscreen between the end of Wandavision and the beginning of this film.

 

I saw her becoming a villain after her interaction with Thanos in Endgame.

 

"I don't even know who you are."

 

Wanda could only dreamwalk and see into other Universes where she had a living counterpart, so she wouldn't have been able to look at Universes where they were orphans cause her version there would be dead.