Articles by Matt Poppe

This week’s WandaVision takes us back to MCU’s most iconic event: Back when Bruce Banner un-Blipped every Blipped being back to their bereaved baes.

Whatever is happening, the world as I tend to frame it is far too small; my conception of it, too limiting.

WandaVision is zany and funny and nostalgic, with occasional bursts of creepiness and dread.

In the untrained hands of one so powerful as Grogu, the Force is a recipe for calamity.

We’ve had to do what we’ve had to do, which meant saying goodbye, for a time, to the good things—even some of the sacred things—in order to survive.

This episode did for Boba Fett what Rogue One did for Darth Vader.

My favorite idea of any Star War is when that dusty old Jedi teaching is shredded and burned to the ground.

And so it came to pass that in one fell swoop, the showrunners connected The Mandalorian to the worst ideas of the prequel and sequel trilogies.

Even if your inward-facing, self-replicating church—or Mandalorian group, for that matter—never becomes a cult, in my experience, it can (and does) start to get weird.

Look, I’m not a youth pastor, but if I were, I would tell you teens that just as the wages of sin is death, the wages of eating a Frog Lady’s eggs means getting eaten alive by a thousand baby space spiders.

But The Mandalorian also really really wants to delight and tickle its Star Wars fanbase. To a fault.

Why do I feel a jot of sadness when I drive past the cornfield that now occupies the space where my childhood home once stood?

Strange Negotiations peels the curtain back to show the emotional and relational cost that this seemingly successful business model extracted from David Bazan. 

There’s an insatiable appetite behind this ever-increasing desire for deeper escape and stories that never end.

Modern man and woman are acting out lives bereft of meaning, wonder, and purposeful work. Meador posits a better way, offering a vision of life and community that draws us more deeply to one another, to our Creator, and more deeply to ourselves.

Herein lies a tricky challenge for the Christian viewer of Good Omens: how comfortable am I suspending disbelief to enjoy an imagined story that flirts with my most preciously held beliefs?