The Wars to Come

Avengers: Endgame

starring Scarlett Johansson, Karen Gillan, Paul Rudd, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., Jeremy Renner, Tessa Thompson, Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brie Larson, Bradley Cooper, Evangeline Lilly, Danai Gurira, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Holland, Chadwick Boseman, Zoe Saldana, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista and Josh Brolin and probably like a dozen other people I'm forgetting

directed by Joe and Anthony Russo


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"The Long Night"

Game of Thrones

Season 8, Episode 3

starring Maisie Williams, Sophie Turner, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, John Bradley, Gwendoline Christie, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Liam Cunningham, Rory McCann, Joe Dempsie, Kristofer Hivju, Nathalie Emmanuel, Hannah Murray, Jacob Anderson, Conleth Hill, Alfie Allen, Iain Glen, Carice van Houten, Richard Dormer, Vladimir Furdik, Ben Crompton and Bella Ramsey

directed by Miguel Sapochnik


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YOU PROBABLY ALREADY SAW SPOILERS IN THE "STARRING" SECTION FOR ONE OF THESE. WHY WOULD YOU THINK THERE WOULDN'T BE MORE? GO AWAY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THESE, SERIOUSLY. GO. COME BACK LATER.

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Do I really understand spacetime? Like actually really, in a way that I could explain the rudimentary basics of it to another layman completely unfamiliar? Well, I could I guess if the layman in question is one of my children. I've been "explaining" stuff to them since they were old enough to have no choice but to listen to me talk, and most of it I'm winging. Remember, my career as a father predates even Wikipedia, so I had already established a solid parenting pattern of invented facts and dubious epistemological schema in the name of lazy, unverifiable pedagogy way before lazy, unverifiable facts in volume became a thing the internet did.

That part of my life is rapidly coming to a close now that I have one kid finishing up his second year at university and another a few months away from starting his first year. I'm about to live every parent's nightmare of his or her children achieving access to independently verifiable information. It would be more devastating if I were an evangelical Christian or a white supremacist,* but in this case the onset of early adulthood critical thinking is more of an inconvenience than a challenge to an unsustainable worldview I'd tried to inflict on my kids in their years of innocence and intellectual vulnerability. I can no longer tell them things like whales are just retired sharks. At some point, one of them is going to take marine biology as an elective and some professor is going to tell them that whales are actually... whatever whales are. See? It's already happening. I'm lost.

So I don't understand spacetime, fine. You caught me. Congratulations. I know it has something to do with gravity and movement and the relative position of the observer and you jumble all that together and somehow you end up losing track of Anne Hathaway. For rhetorical purposes, all I need to understand is that sometimes discrete events can coalesce to produce a circumstance where time seems to either compress or s l o w  d o w n.

I clearly don't follow the physics of it, but I'm pretty sure I've been experiencing exactly this type of time dilation over the last 19 months or so. The elastic stretching effect has been real as I've waited between the last new episode of Game of Thrones and the season eight premiere three weeks ago. Add to that the old-timey cliffhanger tension as I was slowly and systematically crushed in anticipation of the resolution of the Avengers two-parter waiting for Endgame to appear at the end of April. Months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, even seconds crawled by in the interim, smashed into two-dimensional nothing while everything outside the event horizon sped around me at an unfathomable "normal" speed, only for me to finally be ejected out in a geyser of plasma and radiation that would have killed a lesser man. You know, one with better balanced priorities.

All the gathering potential energy has been spent at once in a frantic explosion of light and sound, a furious release of fan service. A high-fat, high-protein bacchanal of food to overfeed starving eyes. This past week has been Peak Gluttony (a probably a couple other deadly sins) as I've finally taken in Avengers: Endgame and then the workmanlike logistical first two episodes of GoT season eight paid off at last with a thing we've all been waiting the better part of a decade to see in S08E03 "The Long Night."

I've taken them both on at once not just because of the coincidence of their release, but they also represent the same level of build-up, of investment, of integration into pop culture consciousness, both generally and personally. All 22 Marvel films constitute about 45 hours of run time over 11 years. Thrones is about 70 hours over eight years. That they both have culminated at roughly the same time is both thrilling and terrifying. Everywhere I look, it's Christmas. But I know, in the recesses of my brain less stimulated by colors and faces I recognize, I have the lurking feeling that right after all the wrapping paper is piled up and discarded, we're going to find out dad's moving out and we have to find a smaller place to live.

That's not exactly true of course as neither of these things are exactly over. Most obviously there are three GoT episodes left to savor, and we know already there are more Marvel films both in development and ready for immediate release. So nothing is really over-over.

But I'm sure acting like it is. I saw Endgame three times in three days (Thursday, Friday and Saturday), sort of by accident (some scheduling challenges with multiple parties) but definitely with enthusiastic intent once it became clear each screening was going to happen. And "The Long Night" episode of GoT I've seen** twice in its entirety since Sunday, plus bits here in there on purpose and by passive assault just by being a citizen of the internet. Seriously, for how everyone shits themselves about spoilers before a thing happens, not seeing something as soon as it is physically possible to see it (or in some cases even sooner) guarantees you'll encounter secondary info splatter as nobody can seem to vomit out every living detail fast enough on every available digital outlet.

Endgame I will say I watched while crying a lot. That's not the most objective pose for a review, but these are fake reviews and I'm a fake reviewer, so objectivity would have been a lie anyway. Besides, I started out talking about spacetime, so relativity is the watchword of this piece. I've decided to pretend it's a synonym for subjective. The only real question about it is whether or not it was actually any good. Since Captain America: The Winter Soldier, not only my favorite Marvel film but one of my all-time favorite films full stop, I've got a lot of faith in the Russo brothers. It was well placed here, even though it's possible this movie was made for just me specifically. I know over the last 11 years Marvel has gone to great lengths and expense to cultivate a worldwide fanbase of Just Me Specificallys. There's absolutely no chance this movie makes a lick of sense to anyone not fully immersed in the MCU canon. Alternately, the payoffs for those who are immersed is so thick and viscous, you'd happily drown in it if you could. Feeling nostalgic, I re-watched Winter Soldier this weekend. I had forgotten the Falcon-Captain America dialogue call-back "on your left" was a thing. A tiny touch, one of an umpteen number, that made me cry too, alone at home on a Sunday watching a movie I've seen 6-7 times as I put it together.

Walking out of the theater the first night I felt... kind of headachy. I could only get tickets to a 3D screening. So that was non-negotiable. But I also felt full. That's the only word I can use to describe it. I can't say I was surprised. I can't say I was challenged or pushed. I can tell you where the artisanship and the artistry lie (past masterful, genuinely stunning), but I'm not sure I could tell you what the art was in what I saw. And there are few things I have less time for, ironically, than a time-travel story. There were gaps, certainly, where the drips of cynicism could snake their way in only to expand as they froze over later, pulling my affection for the thing apart, but no, there was enough putty and shellac to seal it up. Sometimes you take in a thing to be transformed. Other times you just want the story you want. I got that here, maybe more than anything I've ever seen. In that way it was the exact opposite of my experience with Lost. You hear that JJ Abrams? You're already freaking me out with the mealy-mouthed, bet-hedging Rise of Skywalker trailer. You got some work to do, bruh.

My experience of "The Long Night" was a more complicated. I can't, for example, say I was fully satisfied at the outcome, but as it's episode three out of six, that's probably not fair. But fair or not, it was a culmination of a story of sorts, the resolution of the "winter is coming" portion of the Game of Thrones story, the existential threat looming over and making a farce of the petty human squabbles that so otherwise riveted both character and viewer for the seven seasons prior. Like this Night King bro waited 8,000 years to SWEEP SOUTH past the stupid magic Wall in order to bring eternal winter and entirely wipe out the world of the living, only to get as far as... Winterfell. Where like on a clear day, if you stood on top of a battlement, you could probably see the Wall. That has to be the fattest L in the history of all of Westeros. Pathetic non-achievement. A damp squib firing a soundless fart out of a musket made of wet paper. BUT I will say Endgame could not match it for engagement. The by-and-large beats of Endgame were somewhat obvious by the rules of superhero storytelling. It went about as it should, thrilling though the details were to experience as they played out. "The Long Night," I watched the whole thing pacing. Fretting. Hands wringing, brow at maximum furrow, barking out a staccato play-by-play just to cope with and absorb what it was I was (mostly) seeing. It cut to black and the credits and I collapsed onto my couch, trying to remember the last time I took a breath. But in the end, instead of being fulfilled, I found myself annoying myself with questions like "seriously, that was it?" even if "it" had just dragged me heart-first through a mile of broken dragonglass.

The disquiet has to do with a perfunctory resolution to a complicated (and narratively definitional) thing, the White Walkers descending upon the living. But the actual execution of the episode could not be questioned. It should have been every level of zombie fiction (swarming hordes AND shuffling hunters AND the sickly feeling of merciless inhumanity in human form reminding us of the cruel, insensate depersonalization of inevitable death) and it was, in all parts. A massive ton of credit to the logistical and artistic skills of Miguel Sapochnik, the go-to director for major battle episodes of the show, to shoot this single piece over two months. The parts of it that left me feeling hollowed out had to do with the greater context of the show as a single story and nothing at all to do with how the acting, lighting, effects, set design, sound design, camera work or anything else was executed. This is a stunning standalone achievement in the history of television and, story aside, should be understood as such.

By Sunday of course I was wrung out. It was one movie and one TV episode, both extra-long versions compared to the norm, but still it was about 4 1/2 hours of content to take in over the course of four days (Thursday to Sunday). Not much in the scheme of things, but that's only if you're misunderstanding the scheme. It's a decade-plus of knowing, building and accepting, paid off all at once. In an era of daily affronts to social and political normalcy, I've come to accept my mass culture as a balm.

That's probably problematic in a lot of political, social and economic ways. Especially considering we're dealing with Disney/Marvel, a conglomerate that now owns 40% of the box office and a heavy basket laden with hundreds of other media properties and outlets to boot. And the slim percentage of your entertainment dollar that isn't already earmarked for Disney is probably set aside for Time-Warner, which owns HBO and a bunch of other shit, a company I now pay directly for my Game of Thrones because of the monopolistic strong-arm tactics that stripped HBO from my Dish Network, a competitor to Time-Warner's DirecTV. Would George Orwell be happy with me? Probably not. Am I complicit in my own subjugation by masturbating my brain pleasure centers as I'm directed by my global corporate betters? Almost certainly. But come on. Captain America picked up Mjolnir! Jon Snow rode a dragon! How much of a self-actualizing human soul do I need anyway, when you think about it?


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*sure, there's a joke to be made about how those two things overlap, but be honest with yourself, do you really want me to? Really?

**well, seen as well as it could be seen