Grief and Comfort

So this week’s newsletters are a little late, owing to a couple of funerals and some other bad news that totally broke my schedule, as such things will do. To decompress, Kate and I watched The Marvels last night. My second viewing, her first, and I’ll have a lot more to say about it once it comes to disc in the new year. But seriously, best Marvel movie in years and Iman Vellani gives Kamala Khan the perfect kid-sister vibe. Give her all the awards.

When the movie opened last month, certain critics griped about the fact that it introduced characters from the Marvel shows produced for Disney+, and that catching up to Monica Rambeau on WandaVision and Kamala Khan on Ms. Marvel might feel too much like homework for casual theatergoers. Which, thirty-three movies into the larger Marvel project, seemed sort of disingenuous: Surely anybody who’s this invested in these movies would already have seen those shows, and all the other ones. Anyway, there’s enough in there to get you caught up. But if you haven’t watched WandaVision, well, guess what just came to disc.

That’s right, the complete WandaVision – which premiered in January of 2021 on Disney+ as the first Marvel streaming series since those Netflix shows – is now on disc, part of Walt Disney Home Entertainment’s wave of fancy steelbook releases styled as collectibles. The first season of Loki kicked it off earlier this fall, teeing up that show’s excellent second season; the other titles announced in the same wave have been positioned as potential holiday gifts, which seems pretty reasonable to me.

I’d only been provided with the first three episodes of WandaVision when I reviewed the show for NOW, and while I’m not sure the show fully stuck its landing, Jac Schaeffer’s concept – in which Elizabeth Olsen’s traumatized Wanda Maximoff reconfigures a small town and its inhabitants into a playset where she can live a perfect sitcom existence with her beloved Vision (Paul Bettany) after the sentient android was murdered by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War – was ingenious and frequently brilliant, even if each subsequent episode wound up reducing the series’ ambition, ultimately turning it into a standard Marvel CGI blowout.

I guess one can’t complain about falling back on the wizard-hands thing when one of the characters is an actual witch, and Olsen is terrific as the various versions of Wanda we see over the course of the series, riffing on classic sitcom performances by Mary Tyler Moore, Elizabeth Montgomery and Florence Henderson, among others, while also layering in aspects of the Sokovian survivor we’ve come to know over the last few years. Bettany has less to do as Vision – he’s loving and supportive, but the demands of the story mean the character has very little agency – so it falls to Kathryn Hahn and Evan Peters to steal scenes as carefully recalibrated versions of the stereotypical neighbor and wacky uncle, while Teyonah Parris, as that Monica Rambeau person I mentioned above, infiltrates the shows within the show for external reasons. All that really matters for The Marvels is that Monica’s superhero origin is an almost incidental element of Wanda’s grief narrative here; you don’t need to watch the whole series to understand that.

But watch the show anyway, because it’s good. It’s clever about what it’s doing in the larger Marvel universe, but more importantly it’s a weird, unpredictable project made by people who are really enjoying themselves. That’s detailed at length in the hour-long episode of Marvel’s Assembled documentary series, included on Disc Two of the WandaVision boxed set, which is the highlight of the supplemental package. (There’s also a featurette on the different production designs of each episode, a gag reel and two very brief deleted scenes.)

Obviously, the 4K discs offer a level of video and audio fidelity that’s light-years ahead of the streaming presentation; the massive increase in bitrate that a physical disc offers, combined with the consistency of delivery, allows us to see WandaVision as Schaeffer and director Matt Shankman hoped an audience would be able to see and hear it, with a complex and considered HDR grade and expertly deployed Dolby Atmos audio. Each version of “reality” we encounter is given a distinct look and feel, from the 4:3 black-and-white of broadcast television to the glittering widescreen sprawl of the Marvel universe as we know it, and the discs showcase each episode’s mutable aesthetic even better than the streaming versions. The steelbook package also includes a trio of art cards, making it even more collector-friendly I guess? I don’t know, I’ve never seen the appeal of art cards. Does anyone do anything with them besides glance through them before taking the discs out of the case?

Now, to the other Disney streamer steelbooks: The first two seasons of The Mandalorian hit the shelves on Tuesday, each packaged in a two-disc set in your choice of 4K or Blu-ray. (There are art cards in these, too.)

I was sent the 4K sets of season One and Two, and they are stunners; as with WandaVision, The Mandalorian looks and sounds better, brighter and more textured than it ever could over streaming; the image and sound on offer in the second-season opener “The Marshal” – the one with Timothy Olyphant and a really big dragon – is goddamn spectacular, just some of the finest disc authoring I’ve seen this year. I liked it plenty on Disney+, but that pivotal moment where the frame opens up and the soundtrack expands along with it? Well, that’ll pull the ears of a Gundark.

The whole show is beautifully crafted, really, and the reliance on extra-narrative lore that would bog down The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka (and Mando’s third season, if I’m being honest) isn’t a problem just yet; the first season is entirely self-contained, and the second season doesn’t get too thick with it, introducing Temuera Morrison as Boba Fett and reintroducing Katee Sackhoff’s Bo-Katan Kryze – a character created for the animated Clone Wars series – but using them as supporting characters in our hero’s larger quest. And if Gina Carano isn’t the liveliest performer as sidekick Cara Dune, the show is smart enough to surround her with actors who can help her carry a scene. Paul Sun-hyung Lee’s brief appearance as New Republic flyboy Carson Teva is especially instructive; just watch the way his reactions work to bolster Carano’s performance.

(Side note: MY FRIEND PAUL IS IN A STAR WAR AND NOW I HAVE HIS EPISODES IN 4K ON MY SHELF FOREVER. THAT'S HIM RIGHT THERE.)

The expanded cast is nice – and having Timothy Olyphant show up as an easygoing space marshal who hangs out in a bar run by his old Deadwood co-star W. Earl Brown tells us Favreau and Filoni know exactly what they’re doing – but as a drama, The Mandalorian necessarily hangs on the armored shoulders of its hero. And Pedro Pascal and his stunt performers create a compelling, even magnetic leading man for a guy who doesn’t say much and keeps his face hidden behind an inexpressive mask. That’s not an accident: Din Djarin has the presence of Clint Eastwood’s iconic Man with No Name, or Tomisaburo Wakayama’s Itto Ogami, to draw the most direct comparison to the show’s inspiration. After Gareth Edwards finally made Star Wars’ samurai roots explicit in Rogue One, Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni’s elegant reworking of the Lone Wolf and Cub feels right at home in a galaxy far, far away.

Closer to home, we have another streaming spinoff that’s become a beloved cornerstone of an ongoing franchise: The second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has just arrived on 4K and Blu-ray in limited-edition steelbooks, the better to enjoy the unbridled nerd energy of a show dedicated to – if I may quote myself – “the joy of racing into the unknown with your space pals”.

In its second season, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers have boldly gone even further into the notion that Star Trek can be fun as well as thrilling, riffing on classic Trek concepts like ethics-challenging court-martials, weird alien nightmares and time-travel shenanigans (twice!) while also making the interior lives of the crew as important as their roles aboard the Enterprise. It’s a delight, though weirdly I’m one of the few who didn’t think the much-ballyhooed musical episode worked all that well. The cast can carry a tune just fine – especially Celia Rose Gooding, who has a frickin’ Tony – but the visual execution just wasn’t there, with camera angles that repeatedly undercut our appreciation of the performances and choreography. Maybe it’s just that starships aren’t built to host production numbers.

Nine of ten ain’t bad, though, and the rest of the season knocks it out of the damn park, with a winning mix of underplayed comedy, inventive character beats, the obligatory Trek world-building and complex action, which is handled particularly well in the episodes involving the series’ reinvention of the Gorn. Reintroduced in the first season as Alien­-style lizard monsters, they’ve grown more insidious in season two – setting up a cliffhanger that puts Melanie Scrofano’s recurring Captain Batel in grave danger.

Also back this season, with a lot more to do, is Paul Wesley’s James T. Kirk, future captain of the ship but currently just a hotheaded lieutenant who can’t understand why no one else wants to race directly into a punch-up. Wesley’s take on the character finds the balance between Shatner’s snappiness and Pine’s self-awareness – this guy’s not without charisma, but he hasn’t yet figured out how to channel it into leadership, which is a really interesting internal conflict – and while I’m hoping he remains a recurring character at best in season three, he’s used very well here.

Another actor who shows up in season two is Carol Kane, who is a boon to any project but is especially delightful in Strange New Worlds as the Enterprise’s chief engineer Pelia, a millennia-old alien who’s dropped in from academia to be an annoying foil to literally everyone around her; Kane’s natural comic energy turns out to be perfectly suited to the form of a jaded, dismissive genius who knows she’ll ultimately win any argument by outliving her opponent. Some guy named Montgomery Scott shows up this year, but he’s just a kid; she’ll run rings around him, surely.

As with the Disney releases, Paramount’s 4K discs are wonderful things, offering a downright reverential presentation of the show at a level streaming can only dream of. The animated sequences of the Lower Decks crossover episode Those Old Scientists are bright and beautiful – and revealing the joke of the episode’s opening title sequence a little faster at this resolution. Audio is DTS-MA 5.1; it’s not Atmos, but it’s rich and active and fidelity is excellent. And while there are no art cards, the 4K steelbook does include a set of magnetized portraits of key Enterprise crew members, so you can swap out Anson Mount's Pike for Ethan Peck's Spock, Rebecca Romijn's Number One, Jess Bush's Chapel or Gooding's Uhura whenever the mood strikes.

As with the first-season set, supplements are solid: Most of the episodes include deleted and extended scenes, most of which are unfinished and offer nifty peeks into the nuts and bolts of production, and there’s an hour and a half of featurettes produced and edited by Shoot the Moon’s Tracy Martinson.

“Producing Props” offers props master Jim Murray the chance to walk through the Vulcan tea set and other props he and his department extrapolated for the Spock-turns-human episode Charades from original Trek set decoration. “The Costumes Closet” lets costume designer Bernadette Croft show off similar upgrades to classic Trek uniforms as well as new concepts of Klingon wardrobe and planet-specific garb.

“The Gorn” expands on the series’ big bad both in terms of story and production, with particular attention paid to the development and design of the adult Gorn showcased in the season finale – which, as prosthetic designer and supervisor J. Alan Scott explains, turns out to have been largely realized with a stunt performer in a rubber suit, just as it was in the original series. The specifics of reverse-engineering a convincing non-human threat from the, ah, less-than-convincing classic design are really fascinating; I could have watched another half-hour on the tweaks and manufacturing of the creature suit alone.

“Singing in Space” is the showstopper, roping in everyone from the cast and producers to the choreographer and songwriters Tom Polce and Kay Hanley (who worked together in Hanley’s band that one time) to unpack the epic undertaking of Subspace Rhapsody from every angle – and while I have problems with the final result, it looks like it was a total blast to make. (And to see what absolute theater-kid commitment looks like, keep your eye on Celia Rose Gooding in the background of those choreography rehearsals.)

And just as it was in the Season One set, “Exploring New Worlds” lets Goldsman and Myers once again take us through the entire season episode by episode, focusing on forging connections between their versions of established characters and Trek canon, and the new characters they get to play with, like Pelia. Everyone pops in – even Carol Kane! – and it’s just a pleasure to spend a little more time playing around in the world of the show. Which is, of course, the fun of Strange New Worlds as well. And I needed some fun this week.

The complete WandaVision is available now in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Walt Disney Home Entertainment; the first two seasons of The Mandalorian are released in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions this Tuesday. Season Two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is available now in separate 4K and Blu-ray steelbooks from Paramount Home Entertainment; a Blu-ray set is also available in standard packaging, with a standard 4K set arriving in the new year.

In the next paid edition: New 4K restorations from Spielberg, Cameron and Bigelow require your attention. Upgrade that subscription so you don’t miss out!