Ex Urbe

(This is a tongue-in-cheek in-character “review” of the “plot” of Marvell’s film Thor 2: The Dark World.  You are hereby warned that it is filled with spoilers, and that it is absolutely not a straight, serious review. For earlier installments in the series, see my reviews of Thor, Avengers, Iron Man III, and my Recap.)

It was a bit much, I admit.  There is something to be said for the elegance of a simple plan, something with just three steps, something like, say…

1. Get back into Asgard by allowing myself to be captured.
2. Escape during the next convenient (chance or pre-arranged) chaos.
3. Steal all the awesome stuff!  (Cosmic Cube, Infinity Gauntlet, etc.)

But that little period of imprisonment between steps 1 and 2 required patience, and patience breeds… Well, you must have had the experience of that anxious period when you’re waiting for the fruits of something you were working on, and you just can’t help adding to it?  Yes I’m dressed for the dance, but surely I could shine my shoes and sew fresh trim onto this jacket.  Yes this dinner menu is sufficient, but surely there’s time to also make an apple pie, and cookies, and some quiche. You think, “I’ll add just another couple brush strokes to this landscape,” and next thing you know you’ve painted an entire town, with a train pulling into the station, and a tickertape parade.

They say a truly great artist knows when not to add to what is already perfect, but months in a box, months in a box surrounded by idiots, idiots who only give you a book a week because that’s how long it would take him to finish it, idiots who don’t even recognize a predator’s gaze when you snarl through the force field at them, idiots who… ahem, well, even the most supreme intellect succumbs to boredom’s urge to… overcomplicate. Just a little bit.

Because you know what’s more fun than chilling in a dungeon?  Chilling on a throne.

First off, don’t you just love the Svartálfar?  (That’s Dark Elves, for those not so good at pronouncing Icelandic.) Setting aside how hilariously confused Snorri Sturlson and the other saga writers are about them (Are they elves? Are they dwarves?  Were they invented purely to irritate anthropologists?), they’re so adorably simple!  “We hate light!”  Well, yes, all sensible people do, and the Aesir are jerks for having littered their tacky light-balls from Musfelheim all over the freaking cosmos, but instead of adopting a reasonable plan like, say, destroying the Sun, or tricking the Aesir into selling you the Sun and the Moon, or feeding them to wolves, the sort of plan a sensible*ahem*Jotun*ahem* individual might come up with, they come up with Operation: Destroy Everything. Including, you know, meat, and mead, and gold, and books, and conquerable peoples, and my most excellent boots (gotta looove my boots).  But the Svartálfar have this absoluteness and simplicity to their motives that makes recruiting them for a plan so effortless it’s almost zen.

“Would you like to help me d–”
“Yes!  Destroy!”
“OK, well, the plan is–”
“We will sacrifice ourselves to do it!  RAAAH!”
“Right, then.  Anyone want to stop on the way for pancakes and–”
“Destroy!  Accursed!  RAAAH!”

Needless to say Svartálfheim is not where one goes for a rich Socratic dialog.  I confess, the only times I usually trek out there are just to show off that I know where Svartálfheim actually is.  All nine worlds are accounted for, so is it part of Alfheim?  Nifflheim?  Vanaheim? In the dwarven tunnels under Midgard?  (Keep on stacking up those bribes, Snorri, and maybe someday I’ll tell you…)  But Svartálfheim is totally where you send your illusory projection when you suddenly realize you can’t stand sitting in this damned box another day playing endless rounds of “Guilt Trip: the Confrontation” the with the Yawnfather.  Get.  Me.  Out.  Now.

By the way, it’s getting harder to maintain the weakening third person pretense of these reviews, so shall we drop it?  I still maintain they’re “unbiased” because it’s only from the one being in the cosmos who knows what actually happened that you’ll get an accurate version.  But it is so much easier to explain when I can say “I” and “me” and “my” and not couch things in roundabout phrasing.

I once taught myself how to stack a deck of cards.  For about twenty minutes it made playing cards brilliant, but after that it made it intolerably dull.  Until I realized I could stack the deck agianst myself, and then have to play extra-brilliantly to make up for it, and try to keep my opponent from noticing that I was double-cheating against myself. That was perfect. That was, and stayed, deliciously perfect. So this became precisely that. Awakening the Svartálfar was the deck I stacked against myself, a little handicap to make me have something else to occupy part of my attention so that returning to Asgard in secret, defeating Odin and replacing him on the throne won’t be laughably effortless. It’s like keeping one hand behind your back, only with a bit more alien invasion of Midgard. I told the Svartálfar they had to release the Great Red Macguffin on Midgard.  They didn’t ask me why Midgard.  I wonder whether “Midgard is the most fun!” would’ve meant anything to them…

So, the ham-handed Svartálfar naturally wanted to just break in and actually free me.  (And smash all their own ships while doing so: Smash!  RAAAH!)  It took quite a bit of talking to convince them to attack, free everyone except a certain someone, and count on a certain well-advertised transit monopoly to get my “captors” to release me themselves.  This was easily the scariest part of the plan.  No matter how great the efforts to advertise the transit monopoly, the whole thing hinged on the Thunderer thinking of something. For a while, waiting in the cell, it was an almost piercing paranoia: Will he not get it? Should I have hung neon lights in the sky reading “Only Loki Can Leave Asgard Without Bifrost!”?  But in the end he was precisely as stupid as I predicted, no more no less, and off we shot! With the nice perk of getting to undermine the honor and trust everyone had in the Thundrer, and Sif, and all his friends, and, most deliciously, Heimdall.  Heimdall commiting treachery… you know that’ll grate on his stony, laughter-killing heart a good, long time.  Until the day I pierce it through.  Most satisfactory.

Oh, and Frigg had to go.  I even had to direct the idiot Svartálf to her myself. But it was time. I can’t play Odin that convincingly, not well enough to fool her. Pity. I enjoyed Frigg.

Aaaaaand, we’re off!  Quick hop to Svartálfheim. (Note: it didn’t occur to Thunderer to ask me why my tunnel was set to go straight to Svartálfheim without passing go or collecting two hundred fallen enemies.)  And now I get to savor the delicious triple-bluff pantomime of pretending to betray the Thunderer and side with the Svartálfar, only to suddenly reveal that I’m faking and help the Thunderer against the Svartálfar, who know the whole time I’m still with them, and then I get to pretend to get killed!  And then there’s the Thundrer all sad, wid’ his widdle guilt in his widdle cudly heart, awwww.

If course, I could’ve stuck with the Svartálfar a while longer, but they’re the types where if you say, “Can I have a lift home now, please?” they say “RIDE WITH US TO DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!  RAAAH!” and you say, “On second thought I’ll walk.”  Easier to go it solo.  But here’s where the ornamentation born of my impatience gets a little tangled.  I have business in Asgard but there are now Svartálfar running around, and Svartálfar are such short-term thinkers, not a tool one really wants to keep in hand during the long haul, and certainly not a group one wants to let succeed.  They must be dealt with.

Meanwhile, Ian the Intern.

Projecting myself in the persona of Ian the intern is, I confess, another of these ornaments that the plan probably could’ve done without.  But I was so bored, and it was so fun wriggling my way in so close to the Thunderer’s girlfriend-pet-thing whatever he thinks she is.

Sure, I coudl’ve just used good old Dr. Erik “Pants-less” Selvig to do everything I needed, but it was so much more entertaining to let him think he was free of my control, but then taunt him, from the inside, and from the outside as “Ian” and see how long it would take his non-negligable human intellect to snap like a mundane chain trying to hold a certain puppy.   I may have overdone it a bit with Erik.  No.  No, it was perfect.  Stonehenge was hilarious, and Tony did a great job having his Jarvis collect all the Youtube footage for me which I’ve been basking in between bouts of having to pretend being the Un-fun-father.  But the real fun was seeing how unscientific a conclusion I could lead Erik to without him realizing we weren’t in scienceland anymore.  I just had to lead him to the random spot I’d told the Svartálfar was the right place to set off the Great Red Macguffin.  I could’ve, you know, concentrated gravitational waves there, or made an illusory portal appear, or put weird lights moving across the photos taken by Hubble to make it look like a space thing was aimed there, but it was so much more fun scattering the clues around Stonehenge and other randomly selected ancient rocks.  Yes, Erik, draw an X between the henges, that’s totally science.  Ian the intern totally agrees.

Of course, one must get one’s hands on the Big Red Macguffin, but one must not seem to get one’s hands on the Big Red Macguffin, or people may start to talk.  So first one sends in the person least likely to be helping with a sinister plan: Thundergirlfriend!  Spacial instabilities are easy enough to arrange, enough to attract Team Thunderscience, and then it’s easy enough to whip up a portal to the hiding place of the ancient all powerful weapon which no one bothered to actually set a guard on (Is Asgard ready for a regime change or what?).  Of course, as soon as she got to the place where the distortions were she got so distracted by the kids and cute, I thought she’d never wander in the damned portal… had to have “Ian” accidentally lose the keys to keep her there.

That was the beauty of “Ian” you see.  In that form, I could do anything.  No one would suspect.  And it was so plausible to have any technology I might need (“Oh, I don’t know what it does, I didn’t make it, I don’t know anything, I’m just an intern, dum-de-dum”) and no one would even ask!  And I could be on the internet doing anything science-looking or math-looking, or even beyond, and they’d just assume it was either work or some kind of videogame.  Even if someone looked over my shoulder and asked “What are those equasions?” or “How come that looks so much like the S.H.I.E.L.D. Mainframe?” or “Why are you text chatting with someone called SexyStark4evR and why do they keep calling you ‘master’?” I could just say “It’s a World of Warcraft thing,” and they’d never ask again.

I had to take down S.H.I.E.L.D., of course.  I would only have a narrow window of the Svartálfar releasing the full-blown Power Stone, and we needed unrestricted access to get the technology I had Tony build for me in place.  I wanted to not only gain a sample and the ability to reproduce the effect, but I also wanted to route my imprint onto the Stone, so I could gain control of it, and make sure I could track, activate and recall it from anywhere in the cosmos.  To do that I needed something beyond just Midgard tech, and while I could teach Tony to build the stuff, I couldn’t teach him to camouflage their non-Midgard origins well enough to hide it from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s inevitable curiosity if they inspected our innocent detector rods that golly-gee coincidentally were also capable of defeating the big bad.  Also, S.H.I.E.L.D. might’ve brought Hulk – things get less fun around Hulk.  So, when perky-Thundergirlfriend-assistant-girl picked up her phone, it was vital that S.H.I.E.L.D. be fully occupied.  (A multi-billion-dollar international super organization not picking up a phone call from the team of human scientists with closest contact with the Asgardians?  And she doesn’t find that fishy?)

I gave Tony carte blanche to divert S.H.I.E.L.D. as he liked, with no command beyond “Entertain me.”  He took that one to heart, and has a mind which knows how to make the best of fleeting opportunities.  There was this Great Conjunction bringing Nine Worlds into alignment: just the sort of circumstance to make S.H.I.E.L.D. perfectly distracted, if it’s brought to the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s enemies.  It was clearly established that Asgardian troops had just restored a fragile peace in vulnerable-little-village-infested Vanaheim.  A little push of HYDRA attention that way and Captain Flagpants couldn’t unpack his star-spangled space suit fast enough.

That left the Thunderer.  As ever, the Thunderer.

Using “Ian” to push Thundergirlfriend to push Thunderer made it easy enough to make him pull his weight in eliminating the last Svartálfar before they could actually (shudder) destroy all the meat and mead and gold and books and conquerable peoples. Self-stacked deck defeated.  And as a bonus, since it’s been a while since my New York invasion, Midgard  got a fresh reminder reminder that the universe is teeming with monsters, Midgard is not prepared, and its Human defenders are useless, but we grand, divine Asgardians can protect them, we alone.  Must get these humans ready to embrace my rule.

As for the Thunderer, I couldn’t have him wandering Asgard with me on the throne, any more than I could have Frigg around.  It’s not that I thought I couldn’t deceive him, it’s that there are those idiot friends of his who’re pushing for him to take charge away from daddy, and a rival power base is… an inconvenient complexity.  And he’s irritating, and it would be so tempting to… tease.  Mustn’t let myself get distracted. But he’s too valuable a blunt instrument to just destroy. Banishment might make him, or others, try to reverse it, so the ideal was to get him to banish himself. The treason of freeing me got him thinking he deserved it, then a few choice reminders of his own incompetency compared with the Mirror of Princes that is yours truly, was the starting wedge.  I didn’t even have to drive it home, though.  Thundergirlfriend did that, plus the pathetic plight of the defenseless humans flattering the Thunderego into thinking he could do something valuable by living among them as some condescending protector. Cute. He really is too cowardly to be a sovereign. Realizing it may be the first slightly smart thing he’s ever done.

So now the prelude is complete, Midgard is freshly cowed, the Thunderer is gone, his friends are discredited, two Power stones are nicely under my control, and I’ve finally got reasonable quarters as I wait for the real first stage of my plan to get going.  Most satisfactory.

Only one thing went genuinely wrong: stupid Svartálfar smashed Odin’s throne!  I’d been waiting to sit in that damned throne again for so long, and you go and smash it!  I was so pissed when I got back to find a pile of rubble.  Oh, well.  At least the new one I designed has a more comfortable seat, and swivels, and has wi-fi, and a little screen in the arm rest so I can text with Tony during these endless valkyrie status reports.

SexyStark4evR: “Master! Cap just made a Facebook account!”
*TheOdinChat: “srsly? Whats he doing with it?”
SexyStark4evR: “Posting pictures of SHIELD 4th of july party”
TheOdinChat: “R they rlly bobbing 4 apples? lol look@Fury’s face!”
SexyStark4evR: “Im gonna send a friend request pretending to be Miss America. No, Miss Canada! Think he’ll agree to a date?”
TheOdinChat: “Im gonna invite him to Farmville. And Cookie Clicker.”
SexyStark4evR: “Master, you’re evil!”

*When the Lord of Asgard sleeps he sleeps The Odinsleep; when the Lord of Asgard chats he chats TheOdinChat. Must keep up the pretense.

And that is the story of how I walked effortlessly out of prison, saved Asgard and the universe from a danger I created, awoke and then defeated one of the great ancient rivals of Jotunkind, seized two Power Stones, crippled S.H.I.E.L.D., put my newest servant through his paces, further opened humanity’s eyes to the truth about aliens and gods that their leaders have been conspiring to hide, shattered Heimdall’s honor, tricked the Thunderer into banishing himself, seized my rightful throne, and finally faced my first truly worthy opponent: myself. Not bad for a plan I came up with in one night in a fit of boredom. I shall now accept applause.

The new Marvel movie “Thor: the Dark World” opens in just a few days, so for those who have been following my “unbiased” review series (and for those interested in starting) here is a brief refresher on the “real” plot of the Marvel movies.

Alternately, you can read my full-length analyses of the earlier films: Thor, Avengers,  and Iron Man III.

(And before I receive any more comments or e-mails attempting to correct my “mistakes”: this series consists of tongue-in-cheek, in-character reviews of these films, intended for fun and to add extra zest to watching.  Please relax and enjoy my reviews it in that spirit.)

We will begin, as Aristotle would recommend, with some syllogisms:

1. Loki is brilliant
2. Brilliant people produce brilliant plans
3. THEREFORE: Loki produces brilliant plans

Second syllogism:

1. The plans Loki attempted in the Thor and Avengers movies were bad plans
2. Loki produces brilliant plans
3. THEREFORE: those were not Loki’s real plans

Hereby we arrive at the single guiding principle which must inform our interpretation of the films: Loki’s activities so far were, in fact, a brilliant plan which succeeded, cunningly disguised as a terrible plan which failed.

Loki’s activities in the first film were a tour-de-force of misdirection, designed to secure and confuse his enemies about his true motives and lower their guard against him so he could freely put the mature stage of his plan into action.  The gods (doubtless influenced by Loki’s good advice) had put all Asgard’s transportation eggs in one basket, creating only one means of interstellar travel, Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge aka. giant conspicuous vulnerable zappy teleporter gizmo. Having first developed his own original and untraceable method for moving between planets (Pleasant exercise for an oft-bored brain), the next necessary step was to destroy Bifrost, securing a monopoly on faster-than-light travel and stranding the others in Asgard (or making them waste staggering amounts of power to escape, and run around like idiots in the meantime).  The fake plan with which he camouflaged this goal was not even quite a plan, more a feigned temper tantrum.

Having trapped Thor on Earth and incapacitated Odin, he took charge of Asgard (side perk: getting to boss everyone around for  bit = superfun!). He then pretended to discover the (bloody obvious) secret fact that he was actually Jotun-born (Duh! What other race could produce such cold and glittering genius?), and to flip out and try to overcome this shameful (ha!) background and prove his loyalty (ha!) to Odin by exterminating the rest of the Jotun race.  And by pure, natural, utterly serendipitous coincidence, the most efficient way to do that was to repurpose Bifrost into a super-destructo-laser (Didn’t realize it could do that?  That’s what you all get for spending your time drinking and skull-splitting, while only a certain someone read all the schematics).  Thus when Thor returned, he destroyed Bifrost (such a pity), and was so convinced by the flipping-out-traumataized-oh-woe-is-me-I-was-adopted little brother lie that he tried to “save” Loki despite everything, but instead Loki fell “helpless” into the void which, of course, he had no means of navigating (Aaaaah, the sweetness of success).  Securing interstellar transit monopoly without anyone realizing that was what you were after: 12,304 hours of scheming and a few bruises; leaving Thor and Odin with a giant guilt trip: priceless.

The Asgardians are now safely out of the way, and the overture can give way to the opening act.

In this camouflage plan, Loki makes a deal with random aliens in which he promises to deliver the Mighty Macguffin (currently possessed by S.H.I.E.L.D.) which will somehow let these aliens conquer the entire universe, and in return he gets the (puny) Earth (desirable for some reason?) while they get the entire rest of everything (go on, take it, I’ll pe peeerfectly happy just sitting here on this rock playing king of the humans…).  And to accomplish this he takes the following steps: (A) get captured by S.H.I.E.L.D., (B) hang around  in a cell for a while goading the Avengers, (C) escape making no attempt whatsoever to kill any of the Avengers who could’ve been easily killed and taking no advantage of his access to the secure inner workings of S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, (D) help the aliens smash New York City for no particular reason (Loki smash?), (D) hang out in Tony Stark’s incredibly high-tech house for a while also for no particular reason (Loki dawdle?), and it is during this last step that he totally lets his guard down and gets captured by the Avengers despite numerous opportunities to escape (invisibility… teleportation… shapeshifting… alien allies… stairs…).  And everything else, particularly the bit where he revealed the existence of extraterrestrial life incontrovertibly to the entire human race, was totally accidental (Oopsies… was that me?).  Truly this is a cover-plan which only an idiot would believe.  Happily most of the Avengers are idiots, and of the exceptions, Banner has rather a lot on his mind, and Stark… now Stark is a toy worth playing with…

The true goals, of course, were to manipulate the Avengers, push Earth toward an interstellar war, and to wind up exactly where Loki wanted to wind up, back in Asgard close to Odin’s treasure trove of Cosmic Macguffins which make S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Mighty Macguffin look like a cracker jack prize, and Mjolnir look like the dinky rubber mallet which, in the grander scheme of things, it always has been, and always will be (Kids will cling to their toys…). And in the comfort of an Asgardian cell from which a well-prepared genius can effortlessly escape/project/whisper to agents/etc., we await the delectable invasion, at which point Loki will be freed by the Asgardians who are not quite stupid enough to forget the scintillating brain which really is their only possible salvation.  And in the chaos of that invasion, and with the Cosmic Macguffins in easy reach, the true  the plan will begin, at last, to turn…

I want to bring our attention back for a moment, to the detail that Loki very directly and very intentionally revealed the existence of aliens to the human race.  This is a truth the “good guys” at S.H.I.E.L.D. had been concealing for how long now?!  Hello, human race!  You’re not alone!  First contact!  What you’ve all been searching for, for so long!  Oh, and if the cosmic playground is a little rougher than you might’ve hoped, that’s only good for you.  Adds zest.  In fact, opening Earth’s interstellar relations with that tiny first foray in Manhattan may have been the kindest first contact he could offer Earth, since it’ll make the planet and its people prepare themselves for dealing with the idiotic stellar empires that are out there without dooming them to conquest-at-first-idiotic-diplomatic-snafu.  I mean, Galactus is out there, and Celestials, and the star-eating Phoenix entity.  A few space monsters in Manhattan is the cosmic equivalent of a light punch on the shoulder along with your “Hello.”  Frankly it’s Loki’s turn to stand before the human race and say “You’re welcome.”  But enough of that tangent… we have bigger fish to fry than Earth…

A full-scale alien invasion of the Earth, not some petty giant bugs squishing Manhattan, is a tricky thing to achieve, particularly with the most likely perpetrators, the Kree and Skrulls, locked in their eternal entertaining but rather monotonous war (Been there, manipulated that…).  Earth must be made to seem to be at just the right level of power, powerful enough to be a worthy target and to require a full invasion (delicious…) and not just a disappointing expeditionary force (bored now…).  But it can’t seem so powerful as to make the aliens bring genuinely overwhelming forces, since those might be too hot to handle while also juggling one’s usual thousand other balls, and might result in the accidental breaking of a few favorite toys.  Hence the necessity of carefully manipulating the Avengers so as to put just the right face forward, inviting just the right sized alien force.  And hence securing time alone in S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ and, later, in Tony Stark’s house, to tap their security systems and technology and gain complete mastery of Earth’s defenses, so one is prepared to shape the Earth reaction, and consequent conflict, to precisely the scale one wishes (…but the third bowl of glorious carnage was juuust riiight…).

Perhaps the most fun, if not the most critical, details which, thanks to Loki’s elegant subtlety, many viewers seem to have missed: Loki had a mind-control wand.  It let him turn people into his minions.  He hit Tony Stark with it.  For no explicable reason it “seemed” that Tony Stark was completely immune (Yes, tell yourselves it’s ’cause of the mechanical heart thing… that’s totally plausible…).  Stark was, of course, in his own high-tech house with his Iron Man armor nearby, meaning he and Loki were under surveillance the entire time.  If you were Loki and mind-controlled-loyal-to-Loki Tony Stark (note, Stark and Loki, both smart dudes), would you have Stark kneel abjectly at Loki’s feet?  Or would you have him pretend he hadn’t been affected, so that no one in the Avengers would suspect that one of their own had been co-opted?

For further evidence that Tony Stark was and is still under Loki’s complete control, we have only to look to “Iron Man III”, a film which may seem like Loki isn’t in it at all.  Yet, when examined closely, it is clear that the entire film is  portrait of Stark’s internal transformation as his admittidly quite respectable mind (not a rival to Loki’s but respectable in a “clever puppy” kind of way) became gradually reconciled to his new servitude, and came around to accept and eventually embrace his new master.  An exceptional mind takes breaking in.  Thus, the film chronicles Stark’s conversion, from his initial trauma-like symptoms (the mind fighting to free itself… how cute..) to his concluding declaration that his former self was a “cocoon, and now I’m a changed man” (details in the Iron Man III review).  And in the midst of this, we saw the master himself visit Stark (lucky puppy…) in the guise of the implausibly wise and ingenious little boy “Harley”, confirming, for those of us who were anxious during the long wait fearing that poor Loki might be bored waiting in his necessary but annoying Asgardian prison, that our genius has means enough to project himself in mortal guise at will. At the end Loki showed his satisfaction with his new servant and played the kind master, teaching him how to finally repair his heart (It was clearly established that Stark couldn’t and then suddenly bing! he does? Good service is rewarded…)

“Oh, Loki, pretty please save us from the alien invasion you yourself set up!”   The trailers have already revealed that much of the plot of the forthcoming film, but it will be interesting to see whether the film reveals that Loki set up the invasion, or whether Loki and the writers will conceal it from Thor and Odin throughout.  It may be that Loki’s connection with the invaders will remain subtext only, but he (and the writers) may succumb at last to the desire to let him gloat.  Thus the board is set, and we can expect the coming film to finally show the first stages of Loki’s true plan unfolding.  For maximum enjoyment, as you watch next week, try to keep these basic “truths” in mind:

1. Loki set up this alien invasion, got captured on purpose, and has been waiting for and planning something big.
2. Loki carefully arranged the current limitations on transit to and from Asgard, and has secret transit methods of his own.
3. Loki has complete access to and control of all the data and technology possessed by S.H.I.E.L.D. and by Tony Stark & co.  Any use of technology or troops of any kind anywhere in the film may (and likely is) part of his secret plan.
4. Loki is a shapeshifter, and can teleport. Any character at any time may actually be Loki in disguise, and the disguise may not be overtly revealed by the script (these writers have proved their willingness to trust us to see through such things ourselves).
5. While he seemed to be imprisoned in Asgard, Loki has had the ability to project himself in disguised form anywhere he likes, and has been setting up all sorts of delightful things in the background, working on Earth, and, presumably, other planets.
6. Any and all opportunities to tease adorable Thor and expose his embarrassingly soft underbelly will be exploited.
7. Tony Stark is not only under Loki’s control but now actively loyal to him.  During any and all scenes we must be wondering what exciting thing Tony Stark is secretly doing in the background at the same time to further his master’s plans.  If we are lucky, the DVD extended edition will contain a special disc showing the parallel adventures of Tony Stark behind the scenes (“Iron Man IV: Servant of Greatness)”, but even without that we can guess.
8. Loki loves nothing more than to pull the wool over the eyes of enemies.  We can fully expect that, once again, his brilliant plan, which will succeed, will be disguised as a terrible plan which fails.  Don’t be deceived.

And with these critical “truths” in mind, I hope you will all enjoy Marvel’s “Thor: the Dark World.”  Oh, and if the Thunderer or Odin asks, I’ve been quietly in my cell the whole time…

Click here to read the next installment of the series: the Thor 2 Gloat-a-Thon.

Contains spoilers.  For background, see my Unbiased Review of the Marvel “Thor” Movie.

(Also, disclaimer: this review is, like its prequel, tongue-in-cheek and written as if the reviewer is Loki.  Some people who do not know me very well apparently failed to realize that and were confused.)

Fired with anticipation after the subtle and intricately imagined commentary on Norse Mythology offered by Marvel’s “Thor” film, I used my one free afternoon on a short conference trip to Oxford to see the sequel “Avengers Assemble” (UK title, which DIDN’T have the 2nd easteregg scene, thank you licensing people.  Grrr… I want my 10 pounds back.).

I did a little research in advance, and was glad I did, since the title had misled me to expect treatments of Ragnarok and Baldur’s murder and the betrayal-vengeance cycle surrounding the death of Yigdrasil, but it turns out “assemble” rather than “avenge” was the operative word of this transplantation of a bunch of heroes from other previously-unrelated sagas into the Thor-Loki narrative.  I therefore quickly acquainted myself with the relevant corpus of publications, and, despite some confusion, looked forward to the film.

The dialog was snappy and the effects excellent, as was the refreshingly novel absence of a tedious romance.  I was pleasantly surprised by the extraordinary writing and attention Hawkeye received, while in fact all the members of the Avengers were charmingly done, but what are a few beautiful flowers blooming in higgledy-piggledy clumps when the garden and its architecture – and above all its architect – have gone?  That was Loki’s plan?!  Once again, Loki’s true plan, which succeeded, was pure genius, and cunningly designed as a terrible plan which failed.  Yet sophistication of his scheme has declined in complexity so radically since his elegant and subtly-worked plan to destroy Bifrost and fake his own death in the “Thor” film that the viewer is left wondering what happened?  Was he distracted when he came up with this plan?  Further research into the “Marvel Universe” led me to several alternatives.  Is he simultaneously waging another battle in the Astral Plane, or the Mojoverse, which requires the majority of his attention?  Perhaps we are to believe that this was a cry for attention?  This would be consistent with the focus on his youth and desire for respect, treated in both films (though smelling more like a ruse than truth in both).  Perhaps we are to believe he was so frustrated that no one noticed the brilliant success of his earlier scheme that this time he has dialed down the subtlety in hopes that at least some of the supposed-genius members of the adversary squad might piece together the logic chain: “Loki is an unmatched genius.  This plan is dumb.  Therefore this is not Loki’s plan.”

Let us review step-by-step Loki’s “plan” which we, the viewers, are supposed to think was found plausible by such intelligent beings as Bruce Banner and Tony Stark:

SURFACE PLAN:

1. Come to Earth and steal the Cosmic Cube* from S.H.I.E.L.D.**
2. Summon an army of alien goons.
3. Conquer the Earth.  Wa ha ha.  Wa ha ha ha ha.

* I recognize that they’re calling the object-of-power the “Tesseract” these days, but it has almost as many titles as the Allfather, so, since this is a saga, should we not show our learning by cycling through all of them?

** All together, Marvel readers: “Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division.”  (If you didn’t know it already, memorize it now – it is an important part of your nerd heritage.)

Now, we are asked to have respect for the heroes who sincerely believe that this is the best plan which a primordial avatar of cunning and intrigue could come up with?  Really?  To be fair, it did have some intermediary steps, so as presented to the heroes it was a bit more complicated.  Let’s spell it out more thoroughly, shall we?

SURFACE PLAN. GOAL: CONQUER EARTH (USING ALIEN GOONS) & BECOME KING (WA HA HA).

1. Make a badly-thought-through treaty with some unknown aliens where they get the universe but I get Earth.
2. Come to Earth and steal the M’Kran Crystal* from S.H.I.E.L.D.**
3. Set human minions (including co-opted S.H.I.E.L.D. agents) working on using the Ruby of Cyttorak* to make a portal.
4. Get captured by S.H.I.E.L.D.
5. Spend time chilling in boring white cell while making the Avengers cat fight.
6. Smash S.H.I.E.L.D.’s stuff, drop Thor down a hole, drop Hulk down a hole, make no attempt to kill the Avengers members that can actually BE killed, leave.  Tony Stark notices that it’s kind-of odd I haven’t killed the Avengers yet.
7. Go to Stark’s house, which is filled with unmatched quantities of awesome technology and data, and ignore said resources completely while waiting around as the Infinity Gems* summon an army of alien goons.
8. Smash New York City a bit.  NOTE: this is somehow supposed to result in me being king.
9. Spend more time chilling in Tony Stark’s house.  Dum de dum.  Dum de dum de dum.  Hey, heroes, is anybody going to notice that… Oh, finally, footsteps.  “So, mortals, at last you…”  What the?  The Hulk!  I can’t deliver my awesome speech to you!  Well, I could try… um… What vocabulary do you know?  “Unworthy beast!  I am a god, and!..” SMASH!  “Ow…”
10. More time waiting in Tony Stark’s House.  Less fun now due to Hulk.  While the heroes were distracted by goons, some random humans seem to have switched off the Moonstone* and its portal.  Huh… a nuke went by… how cute.  Dum de dum.  Oh, NOW the verbal heroes turn up, now that I’ve got a cracked rib and can’t make speeches.  Well, obviously, rather than using my abilities to turn invisible and teleport to, say, escape, I will surrender.

There was some distraction in the middle of this, I grant, since Loki’s intentional capture was totally unnecessary and thus very successful at keeping the good guys guessing, but are we to believe that not a single one of the Avengers or S.H.I.E.L.D.’s staff saw through such an obvious blind?

We had one hint of hope for the good team when Tony Stark became suspicious and suggested that Loki was intentionally letting the Avengers live so he could fight and defeat them before the public eye later on.  But Stark concluded that this was just because Loki wanted to look cool fighting in public – a theory he should’ve doubted when Loki did not in fact attempt to fight them in public at any time during the final battle.  It was rather charming having Stark’s narcissism interfere with his reasoning, assuming Loki would be the same kind of childish attention hog that he is, but the audience then expects a follow-through from Fury or Banner building from Stark’s good start toward the truth.  Is the film perhaps intending to prepare for an Avengers-Fantastic Four cross-over by leading us to conclude that only Reed Richards, the Smartest Man On Earth, can actually see through Loki’s blinds?  If so, the writers could at least make a blind good enough that we can retain respect for those who fell for it.  As it is, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes pretty-much fell for Pull My Finger.  Adorable, but not endearing.

Why such a weak plan, writers?  You have confirmed for the viewer that the Avengers are idiots (not news), but anyone can tell Loki hasn’t put his true arts into play here.  Even when toying with idiots, can’t we expect him to at least exert himself for his own entertainment?  We are discussing a being who, in the absence of worthy enemies, turns himself into one and battles on both sides (ref: Utgardsloki) and now he plots straight-forward world conquest with only one blind (the fake capture)?  Even when he was just messing with Thor and Odin in the last film he at least had that elaborate double-betrayal power-play attack against his own dear Jotenheim.  Have we descended from the heights of tricking Thor into destroying Bifrost to spending half the film kicking our heels?  The Father of Monsters bores easily, and the writers cannot expect the viewer to contentedly see him literally twiddling his thumbs.  Are we intended to mourn with Loki for the comparative absence of intelligence in this universe?  Are we to share his pain at feeling so alone – a firebrand among dull twigs?

Now, let us review Loki’s real plan, which was, like the first one, elegantly veiled, and entirely successful:

TRUE PLAN. GOAL: BRING INTERSTELLAR ATTENTION TO EARTH & TRIGGER KREE INVASION.

1. Make treaty with Kree Emperor.  Let him think that I don’t know I’m really dealing with the Kree, and that Earth is weak.
2. Come to Earth and steal the AllSpark* from S.H.I.E.L.D.
3. Set human minions (including co-opted S.H.I.E.L.D. agents) working on using the Key to Time* to make a portal.  Get important security info from co-opted S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
4. Get captured by S.H.I.E.L.D.
5. Create elaborate diversion in order to buy Tony Stark enough time to hack  S.H.I.E.L.D.
6. Escape.  Tease Thor a lot.  Drop him down a hole.  Te he.  Make no attempt to actually kill the Avengers.  They have other uses.
7. Go to Tony Stark’s house and harvest hacked S.H.I.E.L.D. data plus all his other juicy science.
8. Use alien invasion to bring incontrovertible proof of the existence of alien life before the human media.
9. Avengers assemble, united by a common enemy (me!) and defeat the aliens, thus gaining the respect and attention of the Kree Emperor.  Earth has now stepped irrevocably onto the interstellar stage, and invasion is inevitable.
10. Since the Kree Emperor has vowed revenge on me if I lose, allow myself to be “captured” and taken to a safe, comfortable cell in Asgard, within easy reach of the Platohedron*.  My well-established and large force of Earthly minions is never mopped up, and continues carrying out my will while I take a holiday.

And in case anyone was close to falling into the trap of thinking that the fake plan was the real plan, we are reassured in our subtler reading by such clues as the fact that Loki did not attempt to defend the Eye of Harmony* from the humans who disabled it (whom he must have spotted, since we know has sufficiently good eyesight to pluck one of Hawkeye’s arrows from the sky), and that the impenetrable shield protecting said Stargate* was defeated by a failsafe which the scientist programmed into it while under Loki’s mind control, i.e. at Loki’s desire.

The blind finishes nicely.  We are left uncertain about how Loki intends to play the Kree invaders once they come.  Will he steal the Dark Crystal* from Asgard at his leisure, and use it to buy favor with the invading Kree, gaining access both to the delights of a worthy war and to the ear of the Emperor which he can comfortably exploit?  Or will he play the opposite card and help the Asgardians save Earth?  As Earth’s only allied alien world, the Asgardians will certainly make natural leaders in the coming conflict, and as Thor and the other Aesir take the battlefield before the public eye, reinstating awe of the gods in human hearts, Loki would naturally be recruited as the master strategist, and save Earth and Asgard, winning the love and loyalty of all.  Or he could join and betray both sides, if that’s more fun.

The possibilities tantalize, as does the unfinished saga of the data Stark hacked from S.H.I.E.L.D., which, of course, the writers would not have introduced if it was going to just lead nowhere.  After all, as the writers quest to simulate the infinite and intricate puzzle-play of the Dark Trickster’s psyche, we must presume that every detail introduced is but one thread in some slowly-unfolding master plan.  In an inferior script, we might accidentally think the writers had no further plans for such details as the criminal syndicate the Black Widow was interrogating at the beginning, the worldbuilding implications of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s airship and invisibility technology, Stark’s comments about his suspicion at the levels of the Gamma Radiation which mutated Banner into the Hulk, and the great effort Loki went through early in the final battle to stab Thor with the tiny dagger which, since it had a blade too short to inflict meaningful wounds, was obviously either poisoned, cursed or implanted a sophisticated tracking device or other micro-tech object harvested from Stark Enterprises or S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ.  When, we are left wondering, will Loki’s mid-control over Hawkeye re-assert itself?  (Since we cannot possibly be expected to believe that a mere concussion could undo mystic space-alien mind engineering.)  And when will Loki activate the mind-control which Tony Stark thinks inexplicably failed?  Does he secretly activate it every night, so Stark is unknowingly spending half his hours preparing new toys at his divine master’s command?  Or will he save Stark for a special moment when his enemies are a sniff from victory?  We who await the sequel can spend a happy year weaving and unweaving schemes in our minds and cackling at the consequences.  Yet all this subtle mind-play is only after the movie, a take-home game, something we were not at leisure to enjoy during the film itself, which was dominated only by the Avengers’ blindness and Loki’s half-heartedness and boredom.

Have they intentionally created a movie which is more satisfying to think about than to actually watch?  If not, is the helf-heartedness of Loki’s fake plan just bad writing?  After the immensely subtle critique of gender in Norse culture which we took from the Thor film, we cannot assume pure clumsiness on the part of the planning team.  Right?

The best reading I can come up with is that this is a harshly contemporary self-critique of the history of Marvel’s attempts to offer escapist wish-fulfillment to its young and nerdy readers.  Many comics heroes but especially the principle Avengers, begin as very straight-forward wish-fulfillment for the intelligent, physically weak nerdy teen boy reader who turned to comics as an escape after a harsh school day of being bullied, rejected and ostracized.  Captain America (1941) accomplished this by offering a heroic alter-ego with the kid too weak to aid the war effort who, through the utopian power of science, becomes a hero and savior of his country.  Over the next decades, as war’s easy enemies gave way to peace’s complexity, the young comics nerd hungered not only for the promise of the possibility of becoming a hero, but for validation of the intelligence which made him an outcast.  Hence both Hulk (1962) and Thor (1962) were, in early days, nerdy scientific braniacs (in Thor’s case also physically disabled) who transform into physically powerful muscle-men and save the day, but also save the day through their intelligent scientist halves, proving that someday the intelligence which makes the nerdy reader alone will also make him valuable.

Enter Iron Man (1963), the selfish, rich industrialist engineered by his creators to be everything the sad young nerd does NOT want to identify with, since his selfish and effortless profit-seeking is contrary to the American good boy work ethic, his dabbling in weapons is un-charitable, and his general happiness and success makes him hard to identify with, yet through sheer good writing the creators win kids over with his charming, impish personality.  Next, advance a generation.  A new crop of readers feeling more alienated and self-identified as a sub-culture whom peers and grown-ups will never understand falls in love with the hated and feared X-men, who split the Marvel universe permanently into two semi-separate halves, the traditional hero stories and the mutant stories.  As decades advance, Marvel struggles to maintain reader interest in Hulk, Captain America, and in Thor, whose weak nerd persona is virtually and, later, entirely retired as new readers find more excitement from the myth-magic and family struggles of the gods than they do from the crippled medical student with whom they no longer identify.

Arriving at the third millennium, a series of movie revivals proves that the audience favorite is Iron Man, who, with his playful selfishness combined with the inevitable heart of gold and obligatory greenwashing, turns from weapons to sustainable energy and proves to the America of eco-guilt and rampant consumerism that we can have our Barbie dreamhouse, celebrity parties, flying sports car and be a jerk and still merit public love and a supermodel fiancée if we find what the current world dreams of: a way to save the environment without reigning in conspicuous consumption.  Tony Stark doesn’t even care about being an astronaut—he cannot be the intended alter-ego of the nerd kid who hides Heinlein and Asimov under the covers.  As for Captain America, Marvel judges (rightly) that modern audiences can only appreciate him as an historical artifact, a capsule of the loyalty, purity and politeness of a lost era.  So far we have come.  What now of the alienated brainy kid reader, who may not be the bulk of the film’s audience but has nurtured Marvel and its characters from their inky infancy?

Enter Loki, the smart, less-physically-impressive kid who can out-think his and every species and has lived in Asgard under the shadow of Thor, now reframed as the popular jock.  We cannot but recognize our nerd-alter-ego, suddenly recast as the villain!  With artistry he undertakes to revolutionize his universe, first exploring the depths of space, then taking away from Odin and the lazy Aesir the easy space-travel technology they have grown too complacent to use.  Thus he creates a new era in which Odin must (as the film specifies) conjure dark powers to send Thor from world to world, achieving a strange equality with humanity which is struggling so hard to touch the stars.  Surely now gods and men (who have had so little contact in recent, forgetful centuries) will reach toward one another once again, if only because doing so is now a heroic feat again on the part of bellicose gods who have no other great tests on hand.   No one notices.

Then our lonely genius hears of an initiative to assemble heroes: fellow geniuses Stark and Banner who might recognize his plan; great soldiers Black Widow and Hawkeye worthy, as few since the Viking age have been, to battle gods; the relic of the last great era of epic wars Captain America; and Thor himself who must surely, with such great help, finally realize what is happening.  This time he does not plan a small battle but a grand one that will change the Earth forever and re-initiate an age of greatness, monsters, many worlds and many races, Kree as good as Jotuns.  Remember, at this point in the Marvel movie continuity we are well past First Contact, but the government has concealed all knowledge of the extraterrestrial intelligences with which it has had extensive contact.  Loki will change that, crack the world’s shell and initiate a great (if dark) new age.  Think again of the young nerd who is obviously supposed to identify with Loki.  Here Earth already exists in the wished-for age of science-fiction, but government and hero alike—even our beloved, toy-loving Iron Man—is covering it up.  Today’s young nerd does not want peace and safety (as Captain America’s reader did) he wants Star Fleet and Farscape.  Loki makes that happen.  Giant space-fish corpses in Manhattan will change the human race forever.  Mankind will psychologically become Vikings again, warriors fighting back against a universe of cold and distant monsters.  Perhaps this will bring Aesir and Human close again, especially as the two races face the Kree together.  However, to achieve this sci-fi revolution, Loki has burned too many bridges to be welcome again on Earth or Asgard.

As for Loki’s interest in the Avengers, there is in this reading more to it than his simple desire to use them to prove to Aesir and Kree that Earth is worth fighting.  For a lonely god, who would rather face fire and arrows on the battlefield than play checkers in Asgard, his one hope for companionship lies, not in winning over his status-quo-loving brother, but in attracting the attention of intelligences like his own.  Surely, if he leaves enough clues, Stark or Banner will realize.

No.

And here we see why Loki’s fake plan had to be so mind-bogglingly obviously fake: even when he leaves every clue he can to his true motives, the smartest men on Earth don’t notice.   It can’t be that they couldn’t see the clues, but the conclusion itself—that a genius like them is fighting FOR a brave new age instead of against it—was somehow incomprehensible to them.

What message are we to take from this?  The message I can see is this: The different kinds of nerds cannot communicate.  Banner is the nerd as portrayed in the 1960s and 1970s, the age when fiction focused on fears that, if science trespassed into God’s territory, we would, like Frankenstein, be struck down.  Banner has renounced his nerdliness, given up on research and human inquiry, and dedicated himself to the palliative care of the status-quo.   Offer him a sci-fi revolution and it falls too far outside his realm of understanding for him to recognize it.  Iron Man, meanwhile, has become the commercialized nerd of the Geek Squad and the Genius Bar, lauded in sitcoms on the understanding that he serves the economy by fixing our computers and creating faster, smaller iPads, that he will let us all be spoiled and happy our whole lives if we compensate for our luxury with sufficient technology.  He works for progress, but a progress which will give us better toys and more wealth, not social change, nor revolution.  Offer him First Contact and he’s more interested in hacking S.H.I.E.L.D. to make sure the government isn’t getting its bloody hands on our green energy future.  He wants to privatize World Peace, not change the world order.  Loki—the sci-fi nerd—can drop the most overt clues in the world, and he will not be understood by these other kinds of nerd—the self-fearing nerd of earlier literature and the commercialized nerd which contemporary society wants the young reader to grow up to become.  Even the hints dropped in Loki’s speeches about how mankind seems to want to live in complacent servitude fail to make anyone think of rebelling against a world government which has not only hidden the truth about aliens and gods from mankind but is hiding technology (airships and invisibility!) from the public as well.  Stark and Banner will not open the public’s eyes.

Loki will.  He will not give up on changing the world.  He will not be content as a caregiver, or a codemonkey.  He will be an astronaut, even if it means he has to be a villain.  He will create the World of Tomorrow, even if he has to live in it alone.  After all, with no one able to understand him well enough to pierce his intentionally-obvious blinds and realize his true intentions, he already is alone.  The fact that the only genuine setback Loki encounters is the physical assault by Hulk (the accursed scientist who tried to make himself a god, at once Frankenstein and Monster) suggests that the revolutionary who dares push past the bounds of the human will still be punished for his hubris, not by the divine/cosmological retribution of Nature which undid Frankenstein and Banner, but by the wrath of those generations who believe in such a law of Nature and will make themselves its agents, tearing down the revolutionary in service of a perceived cosmic justice.

Thus my conclusion: Marvel’s Avengers Assemble film is an elaborate commentary on the reduced funding the Space Program received in the last budget cycle, viewed through evolution of nerd culture, specifically the increasing frequency with which the “commercialized nerd” has appeared in mainstream popular media (from advertising to Big Bang Theory).  The film’s creators are arguing that, even as society is embracing and cultivating the commercialized nerd who helps the economy and supplies the consumerist status quo with toys and technological solutions, that public nerd-love is concealing the fact that society and the government are stifling and rejecting the revolutionary nerd who still aims at Mars and beyond.  The little boy who dreams of living in the future is being tricked into thinking the World of Tomorrow is merely the World of Today with more toys, and if he escapes that propaganda then he finds himself an enemy of the present, while his adversaries are armed with weapons built by his fellow nerds.  If Earth or the Asgardians had cared enough to try to rebuild Bifrost and continue contact (i.e. if the Space Program had more public support), Loki might have put his genius at the service of such ambitious races, instead of having to become their enemy.  By failing to realize the cultural importance of First Contact (read the comparative lack of discussion of the retirement of the Space Shuttle), Stark and Banner’s ignorance proves the revolutionary is truly alone (we must look to privately-funded space travel?).  That it is ultimately not Stark but Banner (the nerd who fears his own power) who defeats Loki suggests that the writers think the biggest obstacle is the nervous and comparatively conservative baby boomer generation of ex-comics readers, who dabbled in sci-fi as kids but gave it up on reaching adulthood, and can tolerate Stark’s playful goading but not Loki’s attempts to use science to achieve real change.

Anyway, that’s the only reading I can find which explains why Loki’s plan was so dumb.  I mean, it could’ve just been a poorly-thought-out script, but a bad script?  From a comics movie?  Never.

Now, when precisely to switch-on the Tony Stark brainwashing…  So many possibilities…

Click hear to read the next review in the series.