It’s the Mission that Matters

I’m not going to lie: I am genuinely baffled at the approach Kevin Feige and Marvel are taking with the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.. It was a couple of years ago when we heard that Marvel was going to cool off with films, take a step back, let their cinematic universe ease off the throttle. They only released one film in 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine, and more recently we’ve been told that Marvel is going to refocus, releasing less films overall, and far less TV productions, all so they can win fans back and make everyone feel like what they’re releasing isn’t homework. That’s great, I’m on board with this. People need to be able to cool off and come to want to see MCU films again.

That’s because right now people don’t seem to care about the MCU. Thunderbolts* is almost universally praised (I say almost because I had some qualms with the film, even if I thought it was pretty good), and it’s considered one of the best MCU films to come out in a long time… and yet that film didn’t do well in theaters and is actually considered a Box Office flop. Critics also had high praise for Fantastic Four: First Steps, with the general consensus being this was another big win for Marvel… except the film cratered in its second week of release (especially in North America where it dropped a full 80% week to week, which is a massive, staggering drop in the primary market it’ll be playing in) and it’s likely going to have to fight to make anywhere near enough money to break even. Why aren’t audiences showing up for these films?

The answer likely lies, in part, over on Disney+ where the company continues to pump out slop for the masses as Marvel burns off everything they had in production. We just had them quietly drop the six episode Ironheart on the streaming service last month, and it was might with a shrug by the masses, and now we have Eyes of Wakanda, a weirdly truncated four episode series that has also come and gone with almost no comment. This comes after a series of other shows no one cared about – Echo, Agatha All Along, Secret Invasion, multiple seasons of What If…? – that led to the general sense that MCU projects were homework more than events, so why bother paying attention?

And yes, I’m lumping Eyes of Wakanda into that list because despite strong production values, interesting ideas, and good voice acting, the series feels slight and unnecessary. Is it nice getting more stories about Wakana and fleshing that place out to feel like a real place with real people? Yes, it absolutely is. But that’s the kind of task that should have been handled better in the movies (and, I’d argue, wasn’t done very well then). But here, on this anthology show (that, spoilers, isn’t really an anthology show) the very concepts the series is playing with are lost in a short episode count and truncated run time. I’m not sure what Ryan Coogler (who produced this) and his team were going for with this series, but it’s more homework that gluts Disney+ without giving us compelling Marvel projects to watch. I honestly have no clue why Marvel released this series at all.

The series is set in four time periods – 1260 BC in Crete, 1200 BC at the Battle of Troy, 1400 AD in China and Wakanda, and 1896 AD in Ethiopia – with each period seeing a Wakandan agent of the Hatut Zaraze heading out into the world to find and collect a lost Vibranium artifact from the outside world. In Crete, a man named the Lion (Cress Williams) was a former Wakandan agent before he stole tech and fled into the world to build his empire, prompting an agent, Noni (Winnie Harlow), to pursue him to get it all back. 60 years later, another piece of tech shows up in Troy, with another agent, Memnon (Larry Herron), fighting his way alongside his Grecian ally, Achilles (Adam Gold), to get into the city for the sake of Greece… and secretly Wakanda.

From there we jump way ahead to China with the next agent, Basha (Jacques Colimon), sneaking into a forbidden temple in China to take the vibranium tongue from a dragon statue so he can bring it back home. Unfortunately the tongue doesn’t come out easily so he ends up stealing the head of the statue. This choice brings trouble back to Wakanda when Bashi (despite his protestations otherwise) is followed by a dangerous foe: an Iron Fist. And then finally, in Ethiopia, two agents, Kuda (Steve Toussaint) and his young trainee, the Wakandan Prince Tafari (Zeke Alton), run into trouble after retrieving a lost vibranium axe, and it changes the course of their whole mission.

I have a strong issue with this series of four episodes, and it's something that the series never really answers properly (and, in fairness, the films didn’t really answer it well, either): the Wakandans have this impression that they’re the only ones allowed to have any access to vibranium, so they go out of their way to take it back when pieces of the stuff end up in the outside world. This choice, to make them the gatekeepers of the material, which they refuse to share with the “outside world” kind of makes them look like dicks. They invade other countries, fight and kill and steal to get back what is “theirs”, sometimes no matter the cost, and then they go home feeling like the good guys. That’s not good guy behavior, and after a couple of episodes of this, I was already tired of the concept.

The third episode at least calls them out on this a little, and it is the most enjoyable episode of the four. The Iron Fist, Jorani (Jona Xiao), is rightfully pissed off that Bashi stole a sacred relic from her people (especially after she let him into the forbidden temple to begin with). They eventually compromise and she takes the tongue out of the statue so she can take the head back home but, still… he stole from them, she has a right to fight back, and then she simply forgives and forgets and gives Bashi what he actually wants. It’s not a great ending for an enjoyable episode. At least she calls him on his bullshit, but she still gives him what he wants in the end.

And that’s not even getting into the plot of the fourth episode which hastily tries to tie everything together with a very weird plot that comes out of nowhere. I don’t want to spoil anything here (although there’s every chance I might in a podcast down the road from now) but suffice it to say that the effort to tie these four disparate stories together by the end of the series feels tacked on and weird. It throws a narrative curveball into the story that the series, up to that point, hadn’t earned, and then it barely pays it all off afterwards. On the whole, it just doesn’t work.

I think somewhere in this we could have had an interesting story. Seeing Wakandan agents go out into the field to see where vibranium has ended up and what it’s being used for is an interesting concept for a series. Vibranium is powerful, we’re told, and that power should be tempered. I buy into that. But when the artifacts aren’t being used at all, such as in the case of a purple vibranium gem that is purely decorative, or the tongue of a statue that sits in a high temple, why do those artifacts have to be stolen back for Wakanda? No one knows what they do, and no one cares. Instead those items should be left alone until someone does something evil with them.

All this comes while Wakanda is shown to be so technologically advanced that they’re easily two thousands years of advancement ahead of whatever civilizations they’re visiting. It’s like if we could time travel back to 200 AD and see the way people lived near the fall of the Roman Empire. Wakandas were living like that already, and they didn’t do anything to improve the lives of any civilization around them. They hid, they went isolationist, they gatekept. We’re supposed to view this civilization as the good guys but… I just don’t see how. Having a series exploring their history only highlights all the ways this place is kind if fucked up when its compared against the rest of the world.

And this doesn’t even get into some serious anachronisms that crop up in the series, like having a Viking warrior and a Samurai show up in Crete in 1260 AD. Even with some of the narrative turns this series takes, there’s absolutely no explanation for how that happened at all. That’s a big oops.

The biggest issue with this series, though, is that it doesn’t justify its own existence. It’s short and over quickly enough, but we have little reason to care about this story or these characters. It’s just another piece of disposable Marvel media at a time when Marvel is supposed to be cutting back on all that. They only have four films coming out in Phase VI, at a pace of a couple a year, but in that time they’ll also have six shows, with Eyes of Wakanda being first. That’s too much filler without enough meat, and it’s likely only adding to the idea that everything Marvel is homework… especially when shows like this are just bad.

I want to like Eyes of Wakanda, much like I wanted to like Echo and Secret Invasion and so many other shows we’ve had over the last couple of Phases. Marvel really wants to get people to care about their universe again, but then they release underbaked material like this and you have to wonder why? Even if they wanted to burn off everything in the pipe so they could start fresh, with a show like this I have to think it would have been better to either completely rework or, if they didn’t want to spend the money to do that, cancel it and shove it in a can. Eyes of Wakanda is slight and not that interesting, and all it really does (as well intentioned as this series may be) is damage the brand. Marvel needs better than this if they want to win their audience back.