Hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to look back on the Netflix era of Marvel Television and say “that could have been better.”
So that’s exactly what we’re going to do. 13 seasons of streaming TV released across four years was always going to be a tall order, but the narrative casualties remain hard to stomach the better part of a decade after their debut. For every Daredevil hallway fight scene, it seemed like two Copperhead-was-your-brother-the-whole-time reveals were waiting behind the next corner to jump out and disappoint us. Characters running the gamut from “beloved” to “just sort of okay” were robbed of the opportunity to live up to fans’ ever-lowering expectations.
But that was the past, and Disney has ushered in a new era of storytelling for the Netflix family of characters. With a singular purpose, Marvel Studios has proven that it won’t waste the potential of its IP again. Except with Secret Invasion. And Baron Zemo. Falcon and the Winter Soldier could’ve used another pass, and WandaVision sort of fell apart in the third act, and it’s weird that Kamala Kahn’s powers were reimagined, so – you know what? Not the point.
The point is, the MCU has a long list of characters that are overdue for reconsideration in a post-Netflix world. Here’s a look at some of the more egregious examples.
Nuke
Nuke, you perfect slice of Frank Miller pie. You half-conceived deconstruction of American comic book heroes, imagined at the exact moment when people stopped telling the future director of The Spirit “no.” You marble deity, carved so that teenage edgelords could interrupt conversations about Captain America and say “you guys know who Nuke is, right?” It’s me, I was the teenage edgelord.
If fans of the comics didn’t recognize Nuke when he debuted on the first season of Jessica Jones, it was only because the showrunners had changed his name, the way he looked, his backstory, and his motivations. It’s what would later be termed “Taskmastering” in the wider MCU, or “The Talia al Ghul maneuver” in the Nolanverse.
In the comics, Nuke was more than just a problematic boyfriend with an enthusiasm for pills and a nasty habit of dying meaninglessly. He was a grim reflection of Captain America – a super soldier molded by the ideologies of the Vietnam War era, lied to by his country for the sake of the stars and stripes. His face was tattooed with the American flag. He even got a crazy robot skeleton in later stories. Where’s my amphetamine-popping merciless killing machine with Terminator bones, Disney?
Iron Fist
Even fans of Iron Fist went into Iron Fist with low expectations. He’s not the sort of character that makes your ears prick up when you find out he’s getting a show. He’s the sort of character who you spot in the roster of playable video game characters and scroll past him so you can play as someone more interesting, like Nomad or Marge Simpson.
Yes, it takes a special kind of writer to make Danny Rand interesting. Then again, it took a lot of talent to make Moon Knight into something better than a photo negative of Batman with a severe mental illness. Iron Fist might not be the hero we need, but he’s part of a rich universe, and he deserved better than “good enough.”
Hellcat
Very much in the same category as Iron Fist, the fact that fans were disappointed by Hellcat said more about the writing on Jessica Jones than it did about Hellcat. In the comics, she’s a lot of things – she started out life as the Cracked to Archie Andrews’ MAD Magazine before making the transition to superheroics in the 1970s. Then she married the son of Satan, was driven to end her own life, and was brought back to the land of the living with unearthly abilities. Life is complicated in comic books.
If there’s a repeated theme in this list, it’s that a character is only as good as the writing they get, and nobody deserves the playground training montage that capped off Trish Walker’s story arc. Not even Hellcat.
Kilgrave
To be clear, in this one particular case, the word “wasted” is being used in this case the same way that the TV screen uses it when it tells you that you just exploded in Grand Theft Auto.
The first season of Jessica Jones ruled. The metaphors were apt, the writing was grimy, fresh, and unique to the MCU, and man, what a great villain. David Tennant’s performance as the guy Marvel Comics called The Purple Man was once in a generation. The story was already there, but that portrayal elevated it. He’s the guy so good at gaslighting that he’s convinced he’s the victim. It’s borderline hypnotic.
Then, in a genre that can’t swing a stick at the third act of traditional story structure without hitting six heroes explaining that they won’t kill the villain because that’s not what heroes do, Jessica Jones kills the villain. The Punisher didn’t even kill the villain in the first season of his show, and his superpower is that he kills everyone. The showrunners scraped off the most compelling bad guy and the most charismatic actor they had. Who doesn’t want to keep working with David Tennant?
Head canon: Kilgrave, in defiance of both halves of his last name, never died. He used his juiced-up powers of persuasion to convince Jessica that she killed him, and now he’s living rent-free at a Sandals resort, persuading the staff to bring him banana daiquiris. Some bad guys are just too good to throw away.
Owl
In the comics, the villain known as Owl is a little bit of everything – a dash of mutation, a smidge of human experimentation, plenty of gadgets designed to wreck a superhero’s day. He has Wolverine hair. He has Wolverine claws. He probably owes Wolverine royalties, now that we look at it objectively.
Which made it a stone-cold drag when Leland Owlsly spent most of his time being nervous and doing accounting work during Netflix’s Daredevil. There were hints that something else might have been going on, sure. When he tased his way out of a bummer situation, it was almost like the showrunners were pushing the character towards more exotic forms of self defense. But then came the perfect opportunity for a big reveal, when he was pushed down an elevator shaft. What could have led to a shot of the freshly-minted supervillain hovering in the air, blasting chumps with whatever bird-themed gizmo he’d commissioned from the Tinkerer, he just laid there, all motionless and squished. What a waste.
Night Nurse
For a second there, Rosario Dawson’s Night Nurse was a killer addition to the Netflix family of Marvel shows. She started out as a Daredevil ally, then became the connective tissue between the different shows, helping street-level vigilantes in their quest to not bleed to death.
But what started as a fun idea quickly became a gimmick. By Iron Fist, Nurse Claire Temple had decided to take martial arts classes and… and that’s why she was around. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they twisted characters to fit stories instead of stories to fit characters, the way I just twisted a quote from a book to suit my argument instead of bothering to read more. Another in the Netflix stable of “good enough,” this chimeric reimagining of a couple of comic book characters isn’t even necessarily worth reviving just for the sake of the source material. Rosario Dawson mostly just deserves better.
The Whizzer
What’s your game, Defenders saga? Do you think comic book characters are a joke? What, you think it’s funny that there’s a Marvel character called “The Whizzer” who streaks across the page in a costume of brightest yellow? You don’t think it’s worth taking seriously that he got his powers when his dad juiced a mongoose and then gave his son a transfusion with the stuff that came out? That a super-speed hero with mongoose blood is too dumb to commit to film?
Yeah, fair enough. We can skip this one.
Sigourney Weaver
“But Sigourney Weaver isn’t a character, she’s an actress.” Is she? Point to a scene from The Defenders that backs that statement up.
If that was harsh, just go with us. It takes an almost inhuman amount of incompetence to make Sigourney Weaver come off as boring. She’s the one person besides Rick Moranis that nobody was mad at after Ghostbusters 2, and she walked on screen as the lead villain in Cabin in the Woods five minutes before the movie ended without ever seeming out of place, all of which is to say that The Defenders really wet the bed. Indicative of the wildly shrugging approach to storytelling that the series took, it managed to make it hard to care about what an evil Ellen Ripley was up to in Superhero World. Then, astonishingly, the showrunners killed her character three quarters of the way through the miniseries as a shock-value twist. Marvel, baby, there are only so many exceptionally talented, charismatic celebrities out there. You’ve gotta pick your shots better.
Anyway, it’s been six years now and nobody remembers The Defenders anymore, not even Finn Jones. It’s time for you guys to bring Sigourney Weaver back as a character that you wrote ahead of time, instead of plotting out her story arc on the elevator ride up to the studio, please and thank you.