Make Avengers Great Again, or the Curse of the Second Season/Movie/Book

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At one of my jobs, we have weird conversations. We have time to exchange a line or two, part and return with replies. It allows for thoughtful replies in theory although I don't know if it turns out that way. Since we are mostly men, the topics range from Scooby Doo heirs to Lil Wayne, business ethics, corporate policies, the second amendment, Star Wars, Star Trek, video games, etc. One topic lasted two hours--perhaps that verb should be swapped for "was overly exhausted in."

Anyway, a guy smiled, raised his fist, and said, "Maga." I was puzzled, unsure if I had misheard or was unfamiliar with this bit of popular culture. He said, "You know what that means, right?"

I walked away, remembered MAGA, and suspected there was some trick yet to be pulled, so I suggested my own acronym explanation: "Make Avengers Great Again." He agreed. Avengers had ceased to be great. We both suspected Age of Ultron was the last great Avengers movie, but didn't explain why. 

I have my own theory and it expands into all movies, TV series seasons, and possibly books, and whatever requires a narrative structure. I formulated it while watching Justified, a show that had a great first season, a pretty good second, and a third that fell into absurdity. Now Justified began with a wild-west premise transported into a contemporary rural culture: A U.S. Marshall in Miami, Raylan Givens, gets a guy to draw first, so that he can kill the man. His antics get him reassigned to Kentucky, which I guess still retains vestiges of this Wild West culture. So we have the 19th century west in contemporary Kentucky with local criminal cartels.

What unravels starts in coolness but gets stranger and stranger until it surpasses believability, such as Raylan falling for someone (exciting new fling) until it can't work anymore and he has to fall for someone else the next season until we know neither who he's attracted to or why. [Aside: it would have been interesting to watch a series that tested the boundaries of a US Marshall without overstepping them at will, as this show may.] Why does this happen?

It may be the desire to have good plot and character except the character logic has to give way to exciting plots. In the twentieth century, we were happy with flat and static characters and a never-ending variety of plots. It didn't matter what order you watched the shows in. You could pick up the show at any point and catch reruns later.

Then someone realized [in the 90s?] that if you marry plot and evolving character you can have more enthralling plots. Viewers are enthralled in the first season when the plot and characters make most sense. They enjoy the second although weird stuff makes you question what's happening, but hey, it's a wild ride, so viewers keep going, but then the third season hits and you realize how stupid the series is (or has become).

I tried watching in the middle of the X-Files series and was incredibly bored. When I started at the beginning of the series, I was hooked although I want to believe that it would eventually arrive somewhere that it never arrived. It was just a never-ending mystery that never resolves, which is sort of interesting until you figure that out and realize that watching more will reveal nothing, so you quit.

That's the problem with a good show. No one wants the cash cow to end--neither the viewers nor the creators who are making good money putting on the show. But it must end, or the cow will become emaciated and run out of milk. "Leave them wanting more" is a better operative phrase than "Beat the dead horse [cow]."

Enough premable. Let's look at the Avengers. They begin as individual movies, inventing character histories and cultural identities.

Captain America works on the myths of the individual power, the power of sacrifice, the weak becoming strong enough to take on the powerful, and good triumphing over evil. The movie should be trite, but it succeeds. I enjoyed rewatching it--probably because it touches on so many issues that are relevant to us all: that we have power over to improve our lives and those around us. The movie is sort of over when Red Skeleton Head runs away because Captain A is on his trail even though he has a ton more resources and upgraded tech than Cap. Just imagine all of those expensive industrial complexes he abandons too easily. In a way, though, apart from fleeing too easily, one can understand Red Skeleton Head doing what he does based on his character, which believes in the myth of the superior man, over even the technology he's developing, but it still seems strange that he doesn't think he has the upper hand since he himself is a superior man plus technology plus greater man power.

Cap has a touch of the tragic in that he doesn't get to dance with the woman he's attracted to although if you think about it, it shouldn't have much power since they never dated and have no idea whether their relationship might work. Still, that too is probably mythic. Captain America has sacrificed himself for the good of the world and his love has waited for him: Penelope and Ulysses.

Unfortunately, where do you take Cap's character from there? He's at a dead-end. You can bring him back, make jokes about how good he is, how old and antiquated he is (although he's frozen in time and young looking), but you can't do anything with this character. We love him, though, and want to see him again.

Thor is seemingly more mythic on the surface, but he's actually an interesting case--potentially more of a character study. Loki has led him down the path of his destruction, but it's still a destruction of his own choosing. He choose to be an impulsive warrior, to resolve conflict through violence, but the movie never goes into this fully and the series doesn't take this flaw on. What's interesting is that the hammer is both meant to build and destroy, but all it does is destroy. There is room for Thor to grow as a character, but it is never realized.

Loki is another character who comes into play from the same movie. In Thor, he's awfully clever. Rewatching is impressive in his Iago-like deceptiveness. But he loves his father in Thor, a figure Loki is trying to impress. This thread gets totally lost. He becomes just an average bad guy. A weak god. You can't kill him, but then he isn't strong unless he's wielding someone else's weapon. This is the problem of the sequels. They don't develop from what has gone before. Where do you go with a guy who has tried impress but been rejected by his adopted god-dad? This could go somewhere but doesn't.

Hulk has no backstory (in this series) except in The Avengers where he is working in the third world presumably as a medical doctor although they talk about him as if he were a physicist. Apparently one advanced scientific pursuit is the same as another. The only time Hulk is particularly interesting is when he says something clever ("puny god") or when he's paired with Thor, which should have been more interesting since Thor's flaw is that he tends toward destruction as much as Hulk's "smash." The old TV series has arguably more character in a mythic sense in that he can never settle down since once he reveals himself and must move on. But everyone knows who the Hulk is here and don't care, so that aspect is not at stake. Interestingly, Banner does reveal he hit a low where he tried to kill himself but Hulk spat out the bullet, yet this seems a dead end.

The Black Widow gets her greatest scene in The Avengers movie--perhaps the greatest scene of the movie. Although there are arguably more exciting scenes, hers is most revealing and shows her craftiness: When she looks low, she may be at her strongest. She has a replay of this in her scene with Loki, but if you look at the logic, it's not there. There's no reason to suspect from the dialogue that Loki is somehow using Hulk to destroy his enemies. In fact a nefarious plot involving his capture to get at the Avengers seems a little too convoluted. Anyway, the Black Widow has been through a lot of pain and uses it to get at people, but this  is never developed

Barton, like the Hulk, never gets developed. He has a family whom he loves, but what about them?

You'd think that the director of SHIELD who is mysterious and whose "secrets has secrets" and he has bosses who are at odds with him, so he should be fascinating as we learn more about him, but nothing revealed about him is particularly interesting. Side note: Surely, on a flying battleship, surely he'd have sensors to pick up hostile forces flying at him.

Captain Marvel is flawless, all powerful and self-important, so she's is the least interesting of all the Avengers. Her first half of her movie is interesting while the last is a spectacular explosive dud--possibly because her creators were afraid to give her flaws and a tough enough opponent. Her movie is like chewing on those hard banana taffies the begin in delight  and becomes tiresome after chewing and chewing until your gums begin to bleed.

Now Guardians of the Galaxy are an interesting case study. They had two good movies but both were origin stories of their own kind, plus they are all so quirky, they have a fascinating dynamic. However, when they show up in an Avengers movie, it's more like "Hey, there's that raccoon I like. He's so quipful, hateful, and funny!" But really, that's what all of the Avenger movies devolve to, especially as they add more and more characters who have to have cameos put in an appearance.

Black Panther is a case in point. We are introduced in an Avenger movie where the mantle is passed father to son. This should have had baggage attached to this, especially in his/their own movie, but instead they abandon this character thread to dangle and chase after a red herring bad guy who is too easily dispatched to reveal the true bad guy who, therefore, doesn't get the character development he deserves. They should have focused on the dangling character thread and contrasted the bad guy and good guy with their daddy issues.

Black Panther may have been a box office success, but it demonstrates the fundamental problem in all of these movie sequels. Character is abandoned for a chase after plot baubles until we realize the creators don't care about the characters--at least in that they make sense across the series.

When I was a kid, I couldn't get into the superhero comic books as much as I'd have liked to--probably due to the same reason I couldn't get into X-Files. They felt like walking into the middle of a soap operas--melodramatic and chockful of juggling character inconsistencies. Note that every now and then, creators cut the cord and just start from scratch. These are generally good until they accrue too many character defects and dead-ends and dangling threads.

Why was Age of Ultron good? Ultron. He was the most interesting character, breathing life into the series. The other characters ran through the same hoops.

What can a show do to remain relevant over several seasons or movies? Pay attention to character established, obviously. Another possibility is to set the end at movie three and call it quits. Think of Star Wars. We all wanted the succeeding trilogies to succeed, but they've all been duds. Someone needs to step back re-see the series and re-invent. The fact they've blown up the death star so many times should be a major clue that something has gone wrong. There's no reason that a new trilogy couldn't be done well, but so far the characters haven't and invention just haven't shown up to play.

Tony Stark or Iron Man is an exception. He's got an interesting character in his second movie. You may question whether the action arc is as good (the problem is that the villain is mostly an underdog (Mickey Rourke), which is what we usually root for and while he's tough, we don't get to see develop into something grander but for a blip). While Stark is labeled as a narcissist, he clearly cares about others, saving lives. So he isn't who he thinks he is. He is more. He is complex. The saving of the boy dressed like him is particularly telling. While the kid is him, the kid isn't him, and he gives the kid credit for doing something he didn't do.

Game of Thrones demonstrates the viability of a series over many seasons although we must admit that GoT did devolve into episodes of standing in strange rooms and debating with mandatory scenes of one boob shot and one scene of shocking violence per episode. But mostly, the show remained fresh and relevant. How?

It had a large cast of characters it rotated through. When a character ceased to do interesting things, they had a tendency to get killed off. That meant sorting through the other characters and developing them into something different or introducing a new guy who would do something fascinating to force others into new development.