In this “Free-for-all Good Friday,” Trent sits down with Word on Fire fellow Bobby Angel to talk about Christians deal with grief and how the recent MCU series WandaVision provides a framework for sharing the Gospel.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to a special Good Friday free for all episode of the Counsel of Trent podcast. I was debating even doing an episode today because it’s Good Friday and I’m actually going to be taking Easter week off from the podcast. But then I read an essay online and it moved me and I felt like this is what I want to talk about because it deals with important subjects, grief, good, evil, and the Marvel cinematic universe, all important. And here to help me talk about that today is Mr. Bobby Angel. Bobby, welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast.
Bobby Angel:
Good to see you, Trent, in real life, in Texas.
Trent Horn:
In Texas, because you guys live here now, because now you and your wife, Jackie, you work for Word on Fire for Bishop Barron, and you relocated from Anaheim, California right out here to the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex area. Tell us about that and about what you guys are doing at Word on Fire.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah, we, like everyone, was hit over the head with the pandemic and that affected things economically and just where we were discerning where God wanted us and did a novena to Padre Pio. Watch out when you ask that guy for help.
Trent Horn:
We did the novena to Saint Joseph.
Bobby Angel:
And I remember, you had us on the show about the early pandemic and it was like-
Trent Horn:
I remember, yeah.
Bobby Angel:
We were all kind of shell shocked from the grocery stores being shellacked and toilet paper being out, and it was like, is this going to be two months, is this going to be till the summer?
Trent Horn:
I remember Laura said, “If it goes past May, I’m not going to be able to handle it.” And here we are.
Bobby Angel:
And here we are. And so after we do this novena to Padre Pio, a couple of days later, I get a call from one of the members of Bishop Barron’s team asking us if we would consider working for the Institute. And it happens to be here in Dallas, Texas. And a lot of different puzzle pieces God had moved behind the scenes to prep us and get us ready for something like this and within a month, our house was in escrow and we’re here in Texas now. You were a couple weeks ahead of us where God was moving you.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And somebody I think texted or emailed Jackie and was like, “Did you know Trent Horn is going to Dallas too?”
Bobby Angel:
Right.
Trent Horn:
Yeah and then I just got the call from you guys. I couldn’t believe it. I’m like, “Everybody’s going to Dallas. Take that, California.”
Bobby Angel:
It’s the other Holy Land. I mean we’re going to be developing content and working for the Institute and helping to evangelize the culture in this way that, again, is not this running away from the culture, but looking for seeds of the word and looking for what is true, good, and beautiful, and helping to again create content for me specifically parishes, for Jackie, marriage and family life. So a lot of it is stuff we’ve already been doing, but it’s kind of like the next chapter or kind of like the next evolution God’s bringing us to, which is awesome. And I love that they gave me the creative freedom for my first official essay at Word on Fire to be on comic books.
Trent Horn:
I love it, confronting the culture. So to backpedal a bit, when I said take that, California, there’s good people in California. Though there is not a great culture there in many places so you have to… We need the good people there and the good people everywhere to face our culture, both the bad elements but also the good elements, and show where they ultimately point back to Christ. And I think you did a really good job with that. I was going through my phone, going through Instagram and you have a very Instagrammy family. So I was going through and said, “Oh, Bobby did an article for Word on Fire on WandaVision.” It was on the subject of WandaVision and grief. I thought that was really appropriate for any show we would do on honestly, but especially for today on Good Friday when we’re talking grief is a central subject.
Trent Horn:
We think about how the disciples were grieving obviously the death of their leader, the Messiah. Jesus seems to be a failure because of this. And I had just finished, well Laura and I, we kind of binge-watched. You guys had already watched WandaVision. We binge-watched it in about two days. At first we were like, “Oh, we’ll just watch it one episode each night.” And then the next day we’re like, “Kids, sit on the couch. I don’t think that it’s inappropriate for you. Just watch it with us.” So I want to get into your essay to talk about that and how it connects to this larger issue of grief. But let me put on my comic book nerd hat here. We’ll put your hat on as well. And I think we’re going to have to explain some backstory to Marvel to do that.
Bobby Angel:
You and I are of the same era. We grew up with the same X-Men cartoon and Batman the animated series and pogs and all sorts of delightfully-
Trent Horn:
I had a giant thick eight ball slammer. I took every pog from the kid on the playground.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. Just the delightful way of comic books and how they’ve kind of grown up with us, certainly cinematically. The movies are not for seven-year-olds.
Trent Horn:
It’s true. In the year 2000s when I was an awkward teenager, superhero movies were awkward. Like X-Men. It’s like, I see the potential here, but you’re still kind of young and awkward and we were in that same age gap basically.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. And Jackie and I just rewatched The Dark Knight trilogy and my goodness, the cinematic quality, the artistry behind those films, it’s not just a popcorn flick, it’s like some deep themes going on here.
Trent Horn:
And deep voices.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Because Batman had to talk like this.
Bobby Angel:
Where are the other drugs going?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Bobby Angel:
And so Marvel is no exception with their characters dealing with responsibility, dealing with acceptance, dealing with what does it mean to be family. And hats off to Marvel for in their first streaming series, WandaVision, giving some side characters room to grieve. The protagonist, Wanda, she came in on Age of Ultron. She’s got these powers to manipulate with telekinesis, manipulate like actual physical reality and she gets exponentially stronger as time goes on. But her home country has been devastated. It’s a fictional country of Eastern Europe.
Trent Horn:
Right. So, let’s.. I will do my best. Let’s see if we can condense it all.
Bobby Angel:
I’m trying to.
Trent Horn:
It’s hard. But you think of Marvel, it’s Iron Man, Hulk, the Avengers, these superheroes. In the Marvel universe, there’s this fictional country, Sokovia, that’s been torn apart by war and Wanda’s parents, Wanda has a twin brother, Pietro, and her parents were killed in an airstrike by actually weapons created by Iron Man when he was doing more weapons for war and things like that. That radicalizes them. They go to fight for radical causes. They end up under Strucker, I think it’s Baron Strucker of Hydra, the evil Nazi-like entity in Marvel, who experiment on them with an infinity stone, the mind stone, and it gives Wanda, as you said, she has telekinetic powers, she can move matter, she can cause hallucinations, she can read minds. Her twin brother Pietro gets super speed. And so he’s Quicksilver.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. He’s Dash from The Incredibles essentially.
Trent Horn:
Basically, yeah. And now in the comics, they were actually mutants and they were the children of Magneto. But the MCU has to change that around a bit. So then in Age of Ultron, Iron Man creates a sentient AI that ends up trying to destroy the universe, Ultron. And in order to stop Ultron, Tony creates another AI. And everyone’s like, “You’re a moron. You’re doing the same thing again.” But it ends up working and they create a beneficent, a good AI, with a super powered body and they call him Vision. The vision, he’s called Vision. And so they fight Ultron. And then Quicksilver, Wanda’s brother, ends up getting killed by Ultron. Though he gets shot and I’m like, “You have super speed, dude. You have no excuse.” But you know, whatever. So he dies and then she just loses it.
Trent Horn:
But then from that, she develops a relationship with this synthetic android artificial AI, Vision. And so in the Marvel universe, he’s basically a person, he’s just a synthetic person. And so they develop a romance together but then later on, when the big, bad Thanos shows up to get all the infinity stones to destroy the universe, or half the universe, Vision ends up getting killed. And Wanda has to watch that happen.
Trent Horn:
Well, first Wanda tries to kill Vision to sacrifice him so Thanos can’t get the stone that powers… I know it’s complicated, people. Watch the movies, you got to get through it. She kills Vision to try to save the universe and she kills him. But then Thanos just rewinds time and ends up killing him anyway. So this just… And so then when everything happens and after End Game and the big bad Thanos is defeated, Wanda is here but her brother is still dead, Vision is dead, and so WandaVision, it’s like in the Marvel universe, Wanda is alone and grieving. And then WandaVision opens up with just total weirdness.
Bobby Angel:
Right. And the nature of these films, they have 20 to 30 heroes on screen at the same time, which is, again, a storytelling feat to do it well. So Wanda never really gets any on screen time to grieve, to watch her process that. And so the show starts out with Wanda and Vision living in an idyllic ’50s sitcom like I Love Lucy. So it’s delightfully weird. And as we left Wanda, like, wait, what is going on?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, like, why is Vision alive? Why are they in a 1950s sitcom? What’s going on here?
Bobby Angel:
Every episode jumps a decade. So the next episode starts with them living in-
Trent Horn:
It’s like Bewitched.
Bobby Angel:
Bewitched.
Trent Horn:
A 1960s sitcom where it gets a little bit wackier.
Bobby Angel:
And so every episode there’s stuff, there’s weird things happening. What would be a normal sitcom, all of a sudden, there’s someone trying to get to Wanda talking through a radio. There’s some kind of weird coincidence or outside interference. By the third episode, stuff starts unraveling and we get a bigger picture of what’s really happening.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And I think, well, I’ll announce some spoiler alerts here and there, but we’re not going to reveal the whole plot. But I think by now you can know, if not, skip this part over, just go to WandaVision if you want to just go through it blind. But a key plot hole is that Wanda has used her powers to bring Vision back to life and she has also created an ideal sitcom world in the fictional town of Westview, New Jersey.
Trent Horn:
But she has taken the 3000 residents essentially hostage and uses her powers to make them act like they’re in a sitcom as well. And so she’s doing this. That’s enough I think we need from the story and then things start to unravel from there. So it’s actually a very bad thing what she’s done.
Bobby Angel:
Right.
Trent Horn:
I mean these people, they know they’re in this world but she’s turned them into puppets. They know they’re being forced to act against their will and Wanda does this because she’s so grief-stricken over the loss of her true love, over Vision, she creates this world to try to escape from her grief.
Trent Horn:
And so to bring this back then, you wrote an essay for Word on Fire talking about how WandaVision, it teaches us important lessons about how do we manage grief? How do we as Christians manage grief? So let’s dive into that a bit more.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. And how, again, how profound that, if we’re on one of the holiest days of the year, Good Friday, where we’re called to walk the way of the cross and to grieve with Christ. For me, I can’t ever just watch a movie. I’m always like three levels of theology trying to find the themes and the story and all that. Unless it’s Pacific Rim and it’s just monsters fighting robots.
Trent Horn:
And we just want giant robots fighting giant monsters. Couldn’t we just make giant cannons? No, we need robots.
Bobby Angel:
Don’t overthink it, just enjoy it. But for the most part, I’m always looking for what’s the theological or philosophical nuggets happening beneath here? And with WandaVision, grief. Grief and there is no big bad. So many of the movies are building up Thanos or they’re building up this great villain. And there’s some-
Trent Horn:
There are antagonist elements. There are antagonists but the central thing that’s really bad is just grief.
Bobby Angel:
I read that from one of the main writers. They said, “We purposely didn’t have a villain because grief is the big bad. It is the thing that we all try to avoid. We all repress, we all run from.” And hats off to Marvel for devoting an entire series to allow a character to process grief.
Trent Horn:
And so the most poignant example that you bring up in your essay in WandaVision is that she’s describing grief, and she describes it in a very powerful way, that it’s like being hit with a wave and you’re knocked down and you try to get back up and you’re just knocked down again. I think anyone who has especially dealt with the death of a loved one, an illness, a disability, a financial loss, how grief compounds often. And you feel like you keep getting knocked down and you can’t get up. And there’s just like a hopelessness there. But then Vision says, “Well, it can’t all be…”. And her grief is over the death of Vision. But he says, “It can’t all be bad though. It can’t all be bad.” And he says, “What is grief if not love enduring?” It’s like, “Oh man, way to go, Vision.”
Bobby Angel:
The actual line is what is grief if not love persevering? I wrote enduring, and then one fateful nerd corrected me. And so I need to change the essay.
Trent Horn:
Actually, Vision says it’s grief persevering. Man, I hope somebody got fired over that one.
Bobby Angel:
I know. But I sat up in my seat and was just like… Out of Marvel’s entire run of films, there’ve been some good lines, some profound lines such as, “Why is Gomorrah?”
Trent Horn:
The other one for me is, “Tony, we need a plan of attack.” “I have a plan. Attack.”
Bobby Angel:
Right. We have a Hulk.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Bobby Angel:
This line was just so profound. And the Christian overtones were just so like… My mind went to CS Lewis and A Grief Observed where he writes about processing the death of his wife. Mine went to a friend of his, Sheldon Vanauken.
Trent Horn:
Vanauken.
Bobby Angel:
Vanauken, I never get it right, who wrote A Severe Mercy, which is like The Notebook times 10.
Trent Horn:
And also not creepy and awful.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. Read A Severe Mercy if you haven’t. The processing of grief, and again, not something we run from or surrender to hopelessness, but something that we enter into and, yeah, there’s an element of I’m out of control, this thing comes like waves. But I experience it in my humanness and Christ Himself is not one to just be an uber mentsh Superman to never feel any pain or…
Trent Horn:
Well, John 11:35, Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus.
Bobby Angel:
Right. Jesus experienced grief over His loved ones. We don’t hear about the death of Joseph in scripture, but you’ve got to imagine like he grieved his-
Trent Horn:
His father’s death.
Bobby Angel:
His father’s death at some point. And then on Good Friday here to walk the way of the cross with Mary alongside us to grieve what Christ goes through for our sake, not to turn away from it, not to just skip on forward to Easter Sunday, but you got to go through the passion and you got to feel it, and it comes in waves and there’s some stations, some parts of the story that hit you, sometimes it hits you differently the older you get and the more you process it. I mean, a lot of people, I think of our generation too, it’s hard to imagine scourging. What does that even mean? It takes the film, the power of film and story, something like the Passion of the Christ, where you’re like, oh, this is He did. This is what He did for you. This is what he did for me.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So when we look at a Christian approach to grief, and I think that line from WandaVision is so helpful, what is grief if not love persevering? As a Christian, when we look at that to see 1 John 4 says that if you don’t know love, you don’t know God, because God is love. God is love. 1 John 4 is just a wonderful just whole treatise on God and love, because it also says in perfect love casts out fear. So the idea here is that when we rest in divine love, in the love God has for us, I think we can avoid those twin mistakes when it comes to dealing with grief. One error is to say, oh, just ignore it, escape from it, and that’s what Wanda basically does in WandaVision. She creates this town and everything seems perfect. And then it’s interesting in the series as it starts to unravel, because another side plot is SWORD, sentient weapons observation research division.
Bobby Angel:
I love when they make the acronym and work backwards.
Trent Horn:
Totally. SWORD. We’ll figure it out later what it means. They are trying to get Vision and stop Wanda. They’re trying to rescue this town basically. Some of them have ulterior motives. They’re trying to get into the town and the townspeople are trying to free themselves from the mind control they’re under. And so every now and then stuff will break through and Wanda just says, “No, no, no, no.” And she rewinds or she runs credits and she always tries to run away from the grief that she’s enduring. She never, ever wants to face it. She always tries to bring up the fancy. And then near the end episodes, it’s interesting they’re all sitcoms. You get to the last one it’s basically like a parody of The Office.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
If you’ll notice in the credits, because they all do, look this online. The credits are just amazing. I’m sorry, the intros for each sitcom. They’re perfectly matched to the older intros they’re emulating.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. The melodies and the… Yeah.
Trent Horn:
The one for The Office, the last one it’s WandaVision But it says created by Wanda Maximoff. If you’ll notice, all the other intros don’t have that. So the last one she just admits, yeah, I created this fake world, but I don’t care. And there was even a line where she says, “Maybe I am the villain.” That’s where I was like, yes, we’re getting so close that she’s willing to say, I don’t care who I hurt even, I just don’t want to feel bad. So there’s escaping the grief. The other error would be dwelling in it and thinking that the grief has defeated you. So, I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit about how the Christian way threads the needle between the two.
Bobby Angel:
Right. And I mean, Father Steve Grunow, our CEO at Word on Fire and one of our fellows, Andrew Petiprin, had a whole conversation, it’s on YouTube, on WandaVision and they hit on different themes. But he talks about Wanda essentially creates a safe space where she can just allow herself and only herself the comfort of ignoring everything else that’s going on. But how many people are hurt in that process?
Trent Horn:
Right.
Bobby Angel:
So sometimes again we want to stifle grief and we push it underneath, but we end up hurting other people too when we do this.
Trent Horn:
That’s interesting. So do you mean like relatives or friends that when we do this to ourselves, we’re not just hurting ourselves. We hurt our relationships with other people.
Bobby Angel:
Sure. Especially if we are abusing substances or kind of going down a dark alley so to speak like psychologically of like…
Trent Horn:
Sure. Or even like if you think about someone who’s married or who has children and is grieving the death of a parent or the death of a child even, and in their grief they’re unable to maintain those healthy relationships with their spouse, their other children, their other relatives and friends. The grief consumes you so much that you don’t care about your other relationships because all that matters is I just feel so bad.
Bobby Angel:
And that would be the dwelling on it. That would just be to the point of you can’t even get out of bed. Now again, there’s actual depression, there’s psychological serious stuff that we experience as humans and we got to ask for help.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
Bobby Angel:
And so I think we can end up negatively hurting those around us if we one way or the other, because let’s say again, we bury it, we repress it, it’s a volcano waiting to blow at some point and you could sweep it all under the carpet, but eventually you’ve got a very lumpy carpet that you’ve got to air it out at some point. And that I think again is the Christian way of we acknowledge it, we walk through it, but we don’t unhealthily dwell on it. For a melancholic like me, my temperament, I can be very like memento mori and like yeah, grief and death and I’m just going to wear black and all this stuff. But it’s like there is the resurrection.
Trent Horn:
Who are you grieving right now, Bobby? Who died. No, I get it. Same way. I want to put when I’m feeling bad, lock it up inside to not bother other people.
Bobby Angel:
Right.
Trent Horn:
But I really am bothering them because I can’t really successfully repress it all. I have to face this.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. Jesus wept. Mary stands by the foot of the cross. And it’s not to do it, it’s not to dwell on it forever, it’s to experience it in our full humanity to get to the resurrection on the other side for the sake of healing.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Bobby Angel:
A doctor has to clean out the wound if it’s actually going to really get healed and so there is the point of, let’s say I’m grieving someone or the loss of a job or a health situation, I have to acknowledge it. I have to ask for help. I have to talk it out to walk through it. So I think step one is kind of know thyself and know what you tend towards. Do you tend to dwell on negative experiences? Do you tend to repress it? And then to know how do I need to ask for help when it comes up next?
Trent Horn:
I think another thing that we should talk about when it comes to dealing with grief is a sense of responsibility. And it depends on the person. So I have I would consider an internal locus of control. This is the idea that in psychology, do you tend to blame others for things that happened to you or do you tend to blame yourself? If you have an internal locus of control, when something bad happens you immediately say, “I should’ve done this. I should’ve done that.” An external locus is they should have done this, they should have done that. And I think especially for melancholics like us, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go back to my podcast episode on the four temperaments, you won’t be disappointed.
Trent Horn:
But for people who have that internal locus sense of I’m in control, I’m going to do this, I think one element of grief is facing your own responsibility, either accepting when things are not your responsibility, and ultimately we are not in control of this universe. But there could be cases where we are grieving something we did, something that happened to us and something we did. Even there, we have to accept what has happened. So maybe we could talk a little bit about grief and dealing with our own sense of responsibility.
Bobby Angel:
I think again, it’s kind of recognizing what you had control over and what you didn’t and being willing to release again where I had no control over this disease or maybe getting fired or again the whatever, the disease that took my loved one, to relinquish that. And I think as people of faith, we know that we have to abandon things to divine providence. It doesn’t mean we get all the answers to why my loved one had cancer, why I lost my job. We give it to God in that way, which again is a process, which as Wanda says it comes in waves.
Trent Horn:
And then I think the other thing is then when we’re grieving something we have done wrong, like when we’ve hurt someone, that’s where something beautiful like the Sacrament of Reconciliation comes in. So we’re talking about Good Friday. Think about on Easter Sunday when we have Peter and Judas are grieving. Bad things they have done. They have both committed grievous sins. Peter is different because he chooses reconciliation, Judas chooses despair. So I think that that’s a lesson for us as well.
Bobby Angel:
I would say too on grief, Vision’s line of love persevering, love enduring is grief is in a way good because it shows that I loved this person.
Trent Horn:
Yes. You talked about that in your essay, about kind of like a godly grief.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. Like again, if I repress it, if I make myself numb to it, essentially don’t acknowledge it, well that’s a very… it’s an inhuman thing to do versus again to grieve something or someone means I truly love them. That love still exists in a very real way. I can’t grieve what I don’t love. And instead of running from it and not acknowledging it to experience it, not dwell in it unhealthily, but to experience it, to experience the passion, to experience the love of a God who suffered for us is a beautiful, holy thing.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Bobby Angel:
And think about kind of the modern shift away from funerals to celebrations of life. How it’s really I’m not going to acknowledge death, we’re not going to acknowledge the fact that he died. We’re just going to celebrate his life. Okay, I get it. But as a Christian, as we have hope in the resurrection, death is just a door, a door we all have to go through and it does not have the final say. Grief in this way is good, it means my love is enduring. Both my parents are still alive. As of recording, I’m still alive as we record this.
Trent Horn:
I’m still airing this even if you die. I think you would want that.
Bobby Angel:
I would want that. Put that in my will.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Bobby Angel:
It’s a love that endures is meaning that I can grieve. And it doesn’t mean, again, not all tears are bad. That beautiful way of Christian grief I think is a beautiful and holy thing.
Trent Horn:
But it’s a witness to the world also to show that we grieve death, but it does not destroy us. We’re cast down but not destroyed. First Corinthians 15, Paul says, “Oh death, where is thy sting?” And I think that’s important for us as Christians to be a witness to the world that while we are sad, we are not destroyed. And to give people that hope that their secular alternative of just a life celebration, it can provide a slight ease, but nothing compares to the hope of eternal life that we have. That’s the hope we have to share with people.
Bobby Angel:
And I think that’s why I sat up in my chair during WandaVision when Vision just articulates grief in such a holistic profound way. It’s not something we run from or avoid, but we enter into. It’s love enduring and it beats even death itself.
Trent Horn:
But there’s the thing. Unlike what Vision articulates, a secular humanist could also say. But I think where the Christian view succeeds is that when they enter into grief, they enter into the blackness and there is no escape really. You just get used and comfortable with the darkness. We enter into it knowing there is a light at the end.
Bobby Angel:
Right.
Trent Horn:
And I think that’s a key difference there.
Bobby Angel:
For me it was a time when secular media and film, they stumble into the truth. They stumble into the arena of yes, now you’re-
Trent Horn:
You’re getting there.
Bobby Angel:
You’re getting there. You’re pretty close to it.
Trent Horn:
You got to fill in the gaps. We got a few minutes left of the episode. Let’s just talk about the show itself, what you thought of it. I really enjoyed it. As I said, I was a big fan of, I love the quirky weird premise. I love the attention to detail. I loved sitcoms growing up. I mean, I grew up as a kid I watched I Love Lucy, Bewitched, Brady Bunch, Growing Pains.
Bobby Angel:
Nick at Nite.
Trent Horn:
Totally. So when I was watching this with Laura, I said, “Oh, they always did that in the shows. They always did that.” So it was very meticulous attention to detail. So overall when it came to, and I hope they do more of these streaming plus series, because it works better for comic book stories. I thought it was good and I think it’s well worthwhile for people to go and check out.
Bobby Angel:
It’s delightfully weird. I think it’s hard to drop into if you haven’t watched the 22 films that precede it.
Trent Horn:
It is hard. It’s hard. If you have no background, you should watch a Marvel catch-up video, not like on your burger. Catch up with the story. On YouTube they’ve got like 20 minute videos that will tell you here’s what happened in Marvel in the past 10 years. Watch it then watch WandaVision. But I thought it was good. Although you, I think you said you didn’t think they stuck the landing.
Bobby Angel:
I don’t think they stuck the landing and I read up on some of the production notes.
Trent Horn:
With the finale how it ended.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. The first eight episodes are tremendous. The last episode is okay, it doesn’t totally stick the landing in my opinion. And I read that COVID actually affected some of the production, what they were able to do or what they weren’t able to film or do the [inaudible 00:29:04]. Certain side characters who I thought were treated well didn’t get the sendoff they deserved. It’s not bad storytelling, it’s because of a flipping virus. That is a shame.
Trent Horn:
But overall, I still felt like they ended it well. It was not a bad ending. I think overall the whole thing was good. I do think the ending was a bit almost too marvel-ish. It’s like, let’s just end with a big Marvel fight basically. But I mean, they still had… I still think it was good. Yeah. I guess the only thing I didn’t like, I guess spoiler alerts. Now you know you can skip through but a lot of you, you’ll watch it anyways. I already knew what was going to happen and I still had to go see it because I liked it. Is with Wanda at the end, they really didn’t come to grips with… they kind of whitewashed over a little bit what she did. Spoiler, I’ll just say this. So one of the characters, Monica Rambo tells Wanda, the townspeople are giving her like death stares after she releases them from the mind control.
Trent Horn:
And Monica is like, “They’ll never know what you gave up for them.” And I’m like, I think what you should’ve said was they’ll never know what they were given up for. It’s like not what you gave up for them, what they were given up for in return. You took all of them hostage and in the show they make it very clear it’s a painful experience to be in. And she kept them in this. I’m like, we need a bit more. I just wonder going forward what they’re going to do with MCU, if there’s going to be a massive tide against superheroes and then there’ll be the superhero registration act and then we can have an Incredibles crossover or something like that.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. She just flies away at the end instead of having to face up to like, hey, you just kind of really wrecked this town.
Trent Horn:
It’s like, this is not going to just go. And I give them credit though. At least she didn’t just do an amnesia thing and everyone forgets what happened. So I give them credit that the damage is there and people are going to have to… And I think they’ll be able to go from that, though I personally think they’re going to bring mutants into the MCU because X-Men is part of Marvel. They can have X-Men now because Wanda’s reality warping it rewrote reality and rewrote people’s DNA, that might be a way that people who were in the Westview anomaly will get mutant powers.
Bobby Angel:
Well and now that Disney owns 20th Century Fox and they can officially bring the X-Men into the Marvel studio umbrella, we can finally get a crossover and I think the multi-verse is going to be the tool with which they do it. So they know how to craft the story, they know how to play the long game in terms of interweaving these things, but I think-
Trent Horn:
I will wait as long as it takes to see Wolverine fight the Hulk.
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. Yeah. Hugh Jackman forever.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Bobby Angel:
We’ll see what happens there.
Trent Horn:
All righty. Very good. Well hey Bobby, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Where can people go to learn more about what you and Jackie are doing at Word on Fire?
Bobby Angel:
Yeah. So we’re writing and creating content now for Word on Fire. We’re still doing YouTube videos with Ascension and then we do have a website, jackieandbobby.com where we’ll upload just other blogs and content.
Trent Horn:
Alrighty, sir. Well, thank you so much. Be sure to check out Word on Fire, everything they’re doing there. And be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com to support everything that we’re doing at the Counsel of Trent podcast. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed Good Friday and a blessed Easter. Thank you guys.
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