The key part of the term here was ‘multi’ and the film did give us various dimensions,
but only really one of any significance.
I think people were expecting both Loki and Doctor Strange 2 to be like the TV show Sliders – great show by the way – first two seasons are the best exploration of a multiverse of any sci-fi thing ever.
Fight me on this.
But at best, Doctor Strange 2 gave us a short sequence where Doctor strange and his new sidekick America Chavez crash through many dimensions, but this sequence is less than a minute long.
This is not how to do the multiverse.
We want characters to explore these other dimensions, and meet other characters who are significant, not just get a brief glimpse of them.
Honestly, on the DCEU side of things, the Flash did the exact same thing but given us a two minute CGI filled mess where we mostly saw the multiverse in weird spheres filled with Adam West and cancelled Supercage fighting robot spiders.
Still, if the title of Multiverse of Madness was still not the MCU going fully fledged into the Multiverse, we did get one dimension where they delivered on the potential of what Marvel and Disney could do with the multiverse concept.
On Earth 838, we meet the Illuminati, which gave us the return of Patrick Stewart as Professor Charles Xavier, which means it was the second time that the MCU had delved into the vast Fox X-Men series…although this time from the original X-Men cast with Stewart rather than bringing in James McAvoy to line things up with Evan Peters Quicksilver being from the prequel timeline of the X-Men films.
Stewart does have a couple of scenes, but then he is killed by Wanda, who was the villain of the movie, which I’ll note would make no sense to many Marvel fans who dind’t see the Disney Plus show Wandavision…where even then she was presented as a complex character, but still the protagonist and not a villain.
And the thing with this is that this was the third time we’ve seen Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier get killed on screen,
which after a while does lose its impact and starts to make the character seem more like Keeny from South Park…although the true MCU Kenny would in fact be another character,
but we’ll get to that later.
Along with Patrick Stewart we got Anson Mount as Black Bolt as a variant form his role in the Inhumans flop TV show that no one remembers.
Fair enough that this could be a deep cut,
but then they kill him like an idiot too.
And they bring back Lashana Lynch as a variant Captain Marvel without explanation of how or why she is Captain Marvel instead of Photon.
She gets killed quickly too.
Then there is Hayley Atwell as Captain Carter who we had been introduced to in another dimension in What If, which again, I’ll get to that soon.
Captain Carter is a variant Peggy Carter where she is her universe’s Captain America,
but is English and Not American but is called Captain Carter because Captain Britain is something else.
This brought back fan favourite Hayley Atwell, and we had already seen this idea of the character in the animated What If, but before anyone can get too excited, she got killed off too.
And then there was the first introduction of the Fantastic Four into the MCU,
which let’s not forget, was a big factor in Disney buying Fox so they could get all their characters back and most importantly for them, the Fantastic Four.
But instead of bringing back one of the three previous actors to play Reed Richards AKA Mr Fantastic,
they went the route of fantasy casting and brought in fan choice to play Reed in John Krasinski for what would turn out to be a seemingly one off thing as they then cast Pedro Pascall as the main MCU Reed Richards for the first official MCU Fantastic Four movie.
And they killed him off too.
All these multiverse characters were killed off within ten minutes of arrival on screen and failed to deliver on the promise of what the multiverse can bring to the table in the MCU franchise.
Whilst Spider-Man No Way Home sent all it’s Multiverse charcaters back home by the end and there was no sense that it was a new beginning with any of them to look forward to in future movies,
Doctor strange didn’t even give us fun times to enjoy these multiverse characters in the movie they were introduced in.
Only Patrick Stewart felt like something exciting that they couldn’t previously have done,
and only John Krasinski gave us something new for the MCU.
But even if the others were just repackaged characters that no one was asking for,
they all had their impact on the MCU be a damp squib after being killed in moments.
The impact of the arrival of Charles Xavier and Reed Richards is now lessened when they do get their proper introduction in later films as they won’t be introductions but rather re-introductions.
And we know they are both pathetic characters who can be killed in seconds.
Sure,
the new versions won’t be,
but psychologically for many in the audience,
Marvel have established these characters as losers.
