What I discovered in My Last Name is a story that has continued to help me process not just the grief and disillusionment of these last several months, but diagnose some of our current cultural ills, as well.
The Mysterious Benedict Society poses deep, perhaps insoluble, questions related to the subject of truthfulness.
The Mysterious Benedict Society insists that true unity proceeds through difference, not in spite or in opposition to difference.
In her stand-alone film, Black Widow steps out of the shadows of an overly sexified characterization and becomes elevated.
The Mysterious Benedict Society episode “A Whisper, Not a Shout” shares with its source material an emphasis on the importance of small, seemingly insignificant acts.
It feels weird admitting that something as trivial as a Marvel movie thrust open theism back to my consciousness.
Mr. Curtain in The Mysterious Benedict Society series differs from his counterpart in the novel but nicely satirizes the quintessential twenty-first-century tech baron.
The Variant Lokis embody the literal thousands of branches the God of Mischief’s life could have taken.
With Bridgerton, viewers show up for an uncharacteristically steamy Regency romance that delivers on the tropes but also delivers a thoughtful exploration of female agency in male-dominated Regency England.
Can The Mysterious Benedict Society, a book that skewers screen-based media culture, be fully realized on just such a screen?
Perhaps Loki’s moment of self-clarity all the way back in episode one was actually describing the TVA itself: “It’s part of the illusion. It’s the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear.”
So now you had a nationwide craze over a genre of music that barely existed (having just broken off from Motown and R&B), based on a piece of long-form journalism that was entirely fictional and a movie made by people with no real connections to the original disco scene.
At the very least, even if you learn that much of what you loved was an illusion or enchantment, your pain is the grief of something real.
With the introduction of the Multiverse, this is the sort of plot device that will bring about resurrections and connect all sorts of stories that weren’t supposed to be connected.
But the idea that people go through a stage of “friends as family” and then graduate into “real” family is one I find to be a less-good story.
And while Loki can’t articulate why he wants to rule, he is certainly attracted to power.
