Time for a slightly lighter essay…

I know this is completely out of the chronological order I have been attempting to follow, but I wanted to address Spider-Man: Brand New Day while the ideas are still fresh in my brain and I can make some sense of my increasingly crazed notes.

There is something about Spider-Man that makes New York feel less like a setting and more like a character. This has always been true, of course. The city is practically built into the mechanics of the character: Spider-Man needs buildings to climb, streets to cross, bridges to swing from and rooftops to leap between. Remove New York and you remove something fundamental about Spider-Man himself. He could exist somewhere else, but he wouldn't quite be Spider-Man in the same way.

What I particularly liked about Brand New Day, though, is that it seems to remember that the city isn't just architecture.

It is people.

This sounds almost embarrassingly obvious when written down, but I think it is something superhero films can forget surprisingly easily. Once the stakes become sufficiently enormous, ordinary people tend to disappear from the story. Cities become anonymous landscapes for enormous CGI battles. Brand New Day feels much more interested in the neighbourhood part of friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.

This is a big theme in the movie: the idea of little potatoes and big potatoes. I have a lot of thoughts about how I resonated as a humanitarian researcher, which I will reflect on in the margins, but I think this really sets the focus of this ground-level hero.

We get a sense of the people who actually keep a city functioning. First responders, emergency workers, ordinary residents and all the other people whose jobs don't involve stopping an intergalactic invasion but who nevertheless have to respond when something goes wrong. I particularly enjoyed that the emergency workers don't simply exist to demonstrate how spectacularly incompetent normal people are compared with superheroes. They know what they're doing. They have their own forms of expertise. They are part of the response.

Because at the end of the day, what is place?

It is tempting to answer that question geographically. New York is a particular patch of land, with particular boundaries, buildings, streets and infrastructure. We can put it on a map, give it a name and draw a line around it. But that tells us remarkably little about what makes somewhere a place rather than simply a location.

For Yi-Fu Tuan, that distinction begins with experience. In Space and Place, Tuan describes space as something open and undifferentiated, while place emerges as that space becomes known and meaningful through experience. A location becomes somewhere when we develop familiarity with it: when a street becomes the route we take home, when a building becomes somewhere we remember, when a particular corner becomes associated with a person or an event. Place, in this sense, is not simply where we are. It is somewhere that has acquired meaning through the ways we experience it.

Spider-Man's New York is almost entirely built upon this kind of familiarity. He doesn't encounter the city as a map. He knows it through movement. He knows which buildings he can swing from, which streets he can cross, which rooftops connect to which others. More importantly, he knows the people within it. His relationship with New York is therefore experiential: the city becomes his place through the accumulated encounters that make its spaces familiar.

But there is something potentially limiting about stopping at this distinction between space and place.

It can, if taken too literally, make meaning seem like something that humans simply add to otherwise empty spaces. There is a faintly uncomfortable implication in imagining an unvisited forest, an uninhabited island or a landscape beyond human experience as somehow less of a place because nobody has yet developed a relationship with it. It also raises the question of whose experience counts. Who gets to decide what makes somewhere meaningful? And what happens when one person's meaning is imposed upon a place at the expense of another's?

I wouldn't go so far as to call Tuan's formulation inherently colonialist, but it is certainly possible to see how a purely human-centred understanding of place could be co-opted into a colonial logic: the idea that land acquires significance, value or legitimacy through the presence, knowledge or intervention of particular humans. That becomes especially uncomfortable when we remember that colonialism has so often involved declaring places empty, unused or meaningless in order to justify taking possession of them.

There is another problem too. Tuan's emphasis on experience can become quite individualistic. My New York might be different from your New York, which might be different from Spider-Man's New York, and so on. There is truth in that, but it doesn't quite explain the city itself. Our experiences do not happen independently of the structures around us.

There are buildings that have been designed and constructed. Streets have been laid out. Property has been bought and sold. Transport systems have been built. Laws determine what can happen in particular spaces. Some people can afford to live in particular neighbourhoods while others cannot. Some people are welcomed into particular spaces while others are excluded from them. We do not simply arrive in a place and give it meaning. We arrive in places that have already been shaped by other people, other systems and other histories.

This is where Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space takes the argument somewhere considerably more complicated. For Lefebvre, space is not an empty container waiting for social life to happen inside it. It is produced through social relations and practices. The spaces we inhabit are shaped by the ways we organise society, by institutions and representations, by economic systems and by everyday activities. Space is therefore not merely the setting for social life. It is one of the things social life continually produces.

The city that Spider-Man moves through has been produced by millions of actions that have nothing to do with him. Its streets, buildings and infrastructure are the accumulated result of political decisions, economic interests, architectural practices and generations of everyday use. The fact that Spider-Man can swing between two buildings is dependent upon an entire urban system that existed before he arrived.

But production does not stop once a building has been constructed or a street has been paved. Space is continually reproduced through its use. Every person moving through a city participates, however unequally, in making that city what it is.

This is where the people of Brand New Day become more than scenery.

There is something about the way this film populates its world that I particularly enjoyed. It often feels as though there are no simple extras. Every person is a potential interaction. Every character seems capable of becoming part of the story. You find yourself watching a scene and wondering whether the person in the background is simply there to make New York feel populated, or whether they might become important two minutes later with all the mind-jumping shenanigans.(how awesome was that scene btw?).

That gives the film a strange sense of collective possibility. The story does not feel as though it is happening around a group of passive people while Spider-Man gets on with the actual plot. The story itself emerges from interactions between people.

And that takes us neatly from Lefebvre to Doreen Massey.

Where Lefebvre asks us to understand space as something produced through social relations, Massey challenges the idea of places as bounded, coherent entities with a single identity. In Space, Place and Gender and her other writings on space and place, she instead understands places through the relationships that constitute them. Places are formed through connections extending beyond themselves: through histories, movements, encounters and different trajectories that happen to meet in the same geographical location.

New York therefore isn’t simply produced by New Yorkers.

It is produced through migration, tourism, trade, media, finance, politics, infrastructure and countless movements between New York and elsewhere. Its identity is not something contained neatly within its geographical boundaries. It is continually negotiated through the relationships that pass through it.

And, whether intentionally or not, Brand New Day is itself part of that identity.

Every representation of New York contributes another version of the city to the enormous collection of meanings through which we understand it. Spider-Man's New York is fictional, obviously, but fictional places can still become part of how real places are imagined. The city that exists in these films becomes part of our cultural understanding of New York: the skyline, the streets, the bridges, the neighbourhoods and the particular mythology of a person swinging between them.

That distinction matters because there is a tendency, particularly in superhero narratives, to make the hero the central agent of the city. The city is threatened; the hero saves it. The city is damaged; the hero restores it. The city becomes the object of heroic action.

Brand New Day is more interesting when it makes Spider-Man part of the place rather than placing him above it.

He participates in New York.

He is one trajectory among millions.

And this brings us back to the little potatoes.

The distinction between big and little problems is funny because superhero stories are almost entirely organised around scale (especilly in that awkward post infinity war era). The bigger the threat, the more important the hero appears. Saving the world is obviously more spectacular than helping one person. Stopping an alien invasion produces a more satisfying third act than making sure someone gets home safely.

But if we take Tuan, Lefebvre and Massey seriously, the apparently little things are not peripheral to place. They are part of how place comes into being.

It is produced through repetition: the same routes taken every morning, the same shops opening, the same people meeting in the same places. It is produced through relationships: neighbours recognising one another, workers responding to emergencies, strangers helping strangers. It is produced through movement: people arriving, leaving, commuting, migrating and passing through. And it is produced through power: decisions about who can access which spaces, who can shape them and whose presence is welcomed or resisted.

A city isn't made once. It is made over and over again, by people with wildly different amounts of power, moving through the same physical spaces and giving them different meanings. Some of those people wear superhero costumes. Most very much do not.

THE MARGINS

The margins are where I wander a little further. Here you’ll find personal reflections, behind-the-scenes thinking, and connections to the wider ideas and essays that make up the Actually it is that Deep archive.

For now, the margins are open to all free subscribers. If you’ve made it this far, why not subscribe and keep following the conversation?

Subscribe now

This is Essay #8 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

2. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.

3. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Before we start, how good is that ‘Time in a Bottle’ scene with Quicksilver?!

I will reflect more on this in the margins, but this is an essay I have been nervous to publish. Not because I doubt anything I say in it, or because the ideas are particularly unfamiliar to me (quite the opposite), but because this conversation has become hostile. I’m writing anyway because I think refusing to have difficult conversations gives the hostility more power.

As Anthony Bourdain said in his episode on Palestinian food for Parts Unknown, “there’s no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody off.”

So, let’s begin.

I remember one of the first lectures I gave. It was a public lecture to the Women’s Institute on how to read buildings politically. We looked at the reuse and collaging of Greek and Roman architectural practices throughout history to convey different political ideas. One thing I remember from it is that we keep going back and forth between the messaging of our architecture. One period mimics the empire and power of Rome; another returns to the intricacy of Greek architecture; another rejects both in favour of the apparent mundanity of modernism, only for Rome to return again.

This isn’t because of the building, or even necessarily the architect. It is because of the context in which the building is designed and for whom.

Architecture is political, and politics are recursive.

I have been thinking about this while rewatching X-Men: Days of Future Past. It is hard not to, with the impeccable character building of Magneto, the time-travel premise and the film’s themes of genocide, segregation, political violence and diaspora. What interests me most about the film is that its violence is never simply presented as something that happens. It is produced. The Sentinels do not appear out of nowhere; they emerge from fear, political rhetoric, scientific experimentation, state power and a particular understanding of who constitutes a threat. By the time we meet the future, this violence has become almost ordinary. Mutants are hunted, detained and killed because the political system has already decided that their existence represents a danger.

The film then does something rather clever with this. Instead of asking its characters to defeat the violence where they find it, it asks them to travel backwards and interrupt the chain of events that produced it. Days of Future Past is therefore not simply a film about political violence. It is a film about historical memory: how did we get here, and can knowing that change what happens next?

That question takes us directly to two words that have carried an extraordinary amount of political weight since the end of the Second World War: Never Again.

It is not subtle. Erik Lehnsherr is a Holocaust survivor, and the dehumanisation of the mutant population is laid on thick throughout the film. The Sentinels initially target mutants, but their logic expands to those who protect mutants and eventually to humans whose genetic inheritance might produce mutant offspring. The category of the threat keeps growing. It recalls Martin Niemöller’s famous postwar reflection on Nazi persecution, often reduced to the phrase “First they came”: persecution begins with a group that can be dismissed as somebody else’s problem, before the boundaries of who is threatened gradually expand.

But the phrase Never Again is older, stranger and more complicated than its casual use today suggests.

I. Where does “Never Again” come from?

Murder had a name. Why was it a named crime for one person to kill another, but not for a government to kill millions of people? Shouldn’t states be held accountable for trying to destroy entire peoples – their lives, cultures and histories?”

— Raphael Lemkin

The modern political life of Never Again is inseparable from the Holocaust, but it is worth pausing over what the phrase meant when survivors first began using it. At Buchenwald, prisoners liberated the camp on 11 April 1945, before American forces entered later that day. Eight days later, on 19 April, survivors gathered for a memorial ceremony for those who had died. The ceremony ended with what became known as the Oath of Buchenwald, a collective pledge to continue fighting until Nazism was destroyed and to build “a new world of peace and freedom.” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021)

That is rather different from the way Never Again can function as a commemorative slogan today. The survivors were not simply asking the world to remember that terrible things had happened to them. Their memory was explicitly political. They were looking backwards at an atrocity and forwards towards a different political order. Memory became a demand. It was angry, and it was action.

The postwar creation of the Genocide Convention makes this even clearer. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide”, spent the final years of the Second World War trying to give the destruction of peoples a legal name and, crucially, a legal response. His work helped shape the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, which established genocide as an international crime and created obligations for states to prevent and punish it. The United Nations itself describes the Convention as part of the international community’s commitment to “never again” after the atrocities of the Second World War. (UN, 2025)

This is our never. Never is absolute. It closes the door and draws a line: this must not happen again.

It is again that makes the phrase so much more complicated. To say “again” is to acknowledge the possibility of recurrence. Something happened once, we recognise it as intolerable, and then we make a promise that it will not happen twice. Never Again therefore sits awkwardly between history and prophecy: it is a statement about what happened and an instruction about what must happen next.

There is a long philosophical tradition of thinking about history in terms of recurrence. Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence is perhaps the most famous, although it is often reduced to the claim that everything literally happens again forever. Nietzsche’s formulation is more complicated (and interesting) than that. Recurrence becomes a thought experiment: if your life and every decision within it were to repeat endlessly, could you affirm what you have done?

I am not suggesting that the Holocaust, Cambodia or Rwanda were cosmically destined to repeat themselves. The more relevant idea is that conditions can recur.

Political history does not need to reproduce the past exactly in order to repeat it. The actors change, the technologies change, the language changes and the populations being targeted change, but familiar structures can reappear: a population is classified, its difference becomes threatening, exclusion becomes defensible, violence becomes necessary, and eventually that violence becomes ordinary. The repetition is not a copy. It is an iteration.

That is what I mean by political recursion. And it changes how I understand Never Again. The phrase cannot simply mean we will remember what happened. It has to mean something closer to we will learn to recognise the conditions that made it possible.

And suddenly the title of this essay makes a little more sense.

Again and again and again…

The question is whether we are watching history repeat itself, or whether we are simply failing to recognise the pattern until it is too late.

II. Cambodia: Never Again did not prevent recurrence

It happened, therefore, it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”

— Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor

If Never Again is a promise, Cambodia is one of the places where we have to ask what that promise was actually capable of achieving.

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge transformed Cambodia according to an extraordinarily violent revolutionary vision. Under Pol Pot, cities were emptied, families separated, religion and education suppressed, minorities persecuted, and millions subjected to forced labour, starvation, imprisonment and execution. Historian Ben Kiernan, whose The Pol Pot Regime remains one of the major studies of the period, places the violence within a complex combination of revolutionary ideology, racial hierarchy, political power and genocide. Estimates vary, but approximately 1.5 to 2 million people died.

The striking thing about Cambodia is not simply that mass killing happened again. It is that it happened in a world that already possessed the vocabulary with which to understand it. The Holocaust had happened. The Nuremberg trials had happened. Lemkin had coined genocide. The United Nations had adopted the Genocide Convention.

The promise existed. The language existed. The warning existed.

And yet people died still.

This challenges the comforting assumption that remembering atrocities naturally produces moral progress. Hannah Arendt spent much of her work resisting explanations of political violence that rely upon the existence of uniquely monstrous individuals. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she examined the political conditions through which populations could be isolated, organised and subjected to domination. Later, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, her controversial concept of the “banality of evil” shifted attention towards the ordinary bureaucratic processes through which extraordinary crimes can be carried out.

This is where the Sentinels become such an effective image. They do not need to hate mutants. They only need to identify them. They scan, classify, calculate and eliminate. There is no rage in the machine. There is procedure, mundanity, bureaucracy.

The horror lies partly in how little emotion the violence requires.

Political violence can return precisely because its beginnings rarely announce themselves as historical repetition. It arrives through administration, security, classification, necessity and efficiency. The people participating in it may not think of themselves as recreating history. They may believe they are protecting their community, following orders, enforcing policy or responding to a threat.

That is what makes the word again so frightening. Recurrence does not necessarily look like recurrence while it is happening.

Cambodia therefore asks whether Never Again can mean more than remembering the final atrocity. If the promise is to have political force, perhaps it requires something more demanding: learning to recognise the processes through which people are gradually made into acceptable targets before the violence reaches its most recognisable form.

III. Rwanda: What happens when we become bystanders?

“The genocide in Rwanda was a failure of political will.”

— Roméo Dallaire

If Cambodia asks whether Never Again can prevent political violence from recurring, Rwanda asks a different question: what happens when we recognise the warning signs and still fail to act?

Between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered in Rwanda. The genocide was not hidden from the international community. Radio broadcasts incited violence; identity cards marked people as Hutu or Tutsi; lists of targets were compiled; roadblocks were established; killings were carried out in homes, churches and streets. The world was receiving information about what was happening. United Nations peacekeepers were already there.

What was missing was not simply knowledge. It was political will.

The history of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) is particularly painful. Its commander, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, repeatedly warned of preparations for mass killing and attempted to communicate the scale of the threat to the international community. After ten Belgian peacekeepers were murdered at the beginning of the genocide, Belgium withdrew its troops. The UN Security Council subsequently reduced UNAMIR from approximately 2,500 personnel to around 270. The people who remained were left to watch a catastrophe they did not have the resources or mandate to stop.

Rwanda therefore exposes another weakness in Never Again. Recognition is not the same as intervention.

We can know. We can document. We can investigate. We can issue statements, establish committees and construct legal frameworks for prevention. None of these things necessarily becomes the action demanded by the survivors of Buchenwald.

This is where Stanley Cohen’s work on states of denial becomes relevant. Cohen examined the ways individuals, institutions and societies can acknowledge facts while simultaneously avoiding their implications. The information can be available without becoming politically actionable. We can know something is happening while finding reasons why it is not yet our responsibility to respond.

Rwanda is therefore not simply a story about people who failed to see genocide coming. It is a story about the distance between seeing and doing.

The lesson of Never Again cannot simply be that we should recognise genocide when it has already begun. By then, as Rwanda demonstrates, recognition may arrive alongside hesitation, bureaucratic constraints, political calculation and the fear of intervention.

Perhaps Never Again therefore requires a more uncomfortable commitment: when the warning signs are there, believe the people raising the alarm, even when acting on that warning is inconvenient.

IV. Bosnia: Never Again within Europe itself

Bosnia makes Never Again particularly difficult because the recurrence happened not in some distant place that Europe could imagine as fundamentally different from itself, but within Europe, only fifty years after the Holocaust.

During the Bosnian War, Srebrenica was declared a United Nations “safe area” in 1993. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran it. More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered, while approximately 25,000 women, children and elderly people were forcibly expelled. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia subsequently determined that the killings constituted genocide.

The symbolism is almost unbearable. A population had been designated as needing protection. The international community had created a mechanism for that protection. The Genocide Convention had already existed for nearly half a century. And yet the people inside the supposed safe area were not safe.

The United Nations later acknowledged its failure. Its 1999 report on Srebrenica examined the establishment of the safe area, the role of UN forces and member states, the failure to understand Bosnian Serb war aims and the institutional failures that contributed to the massacre.

There is something particularly haunting about this failure because it undermines the comforting idea that international law represents a straightforward progression away from the violence of the past. By the 1990s, Europe possessed precisely the institutions that were supposed to make another genocide less likely. There were treaties, peacekeepers, designated safe areas and an international legal framework explicitly built in response to the destruction of the Second World War.

But there is another important layer here. In 2007, the International Court of Justice found Serbia responsible for failing to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica, even though it did not find Serbia legally responsible for committing the genocide itself. The judgment established something significant: prevention is not merely a moral aspiration. Under the Genocide Convention, states have a legal obligation to take measures to prevent genocide when they know, or should normally have known, of a serious risk that genocide will be committed.

The problem, just as with Rwanda, is the distance between having an obligation and exercising it.

The lesson is not that international law is meaningless. Quite the opposite. The law gave the world a framework through which Srebrenica could be recognised, prosecuted and remembered as genocide. But a legal framework cannot act by itself. Never Again requires people, institutions and governments willing to act before the historical record has already been written.

V. Palestine: Again becomes contested

And this brings us, inevitably, to Palestine. Not because Gaza is the only place where the question of Never Again matters, and not because the Holocaust provides a template through which Palestinian history should be understood, but because here the phrase itself has become part of the political struggle. The argument is no longer simply over whether political violence can recur. It is over what the recurrence of historical violence is supposed to teach us.

For many people, particularly after the attacks of 7 October 2023, Never Again carries an intensely particular meaning: Jews must never again be left defenceless in the face of mass violence. The fear behind that interpretation is real. It is rooted in centuries of antisemitism and persecution, culminating in the Holocaust, and it has been violently renewed by the murder and abduction of Israeli civilians on 7 October. To dismiss that fear is not a serious engagement with Jewish historical memory.

But Never Again has never belonged exclusively to that interpretation.

Yechiel Klar, Noa Schori-Eyal and Yonat Klar identify four competing moral “voices” within Israeli Holocaust consciousness: never be a passive victim; never forsake your brothers; never be a passive bystander; and never be a perpetrator. What matters here is that these are not simply four ways of saying the same thing. They can produce very different political responses to the same historical memory.

The first two pull towards protection: never again will we be powerless; never again will we abandon our own. The latter two turn the lesson outward: never again will we stand by while another population is persecuted; never again will we become the people inflicting the violence.

There are Jewish people and organisations who understand Never Again precisely as a universal commitment. Holocaust survivors and descendants have publicly argued that the memory of Nazi persecution creates an obligation to oppose the suffering of Palestinians, including through the explicit formulation Never Again for anyone (Jewish Voice for Peace, 2026). Others reject comparisons between the Holocaust and Gaza, arguing that such comparisons distort Jewish history and can become a vehicle for antisemitism or for denying Jewish security. Those disagreements should not be flattened into a simple Jewish-versus-Palestinian binary. The dispute exists within Jewish communities, just as it exists across Palestinian, Israeli and international political movements.

And this is precisely why I think Never Again for anyone is the only position I can truly defend. It does not require me to argue that the Holocaust and Gaza are the same. They are not. It does not require me to deny the reality of 7 October, Israeli civilian deaths, antisemitism or the particular history of Jewish persecution. Nor does it require me to believe that Palestinian suffering somehow becomes more important because it can be compared with Jewish suffering. Instead, it asks a much simpler question: if the lesson of history is that human beings should not be dehumanised, displaced, imprisoned, starved, persecuted or killed because of the group into which they were born, then why should that lesson stop applying when the victims are someone else?

This is where political recursion returns. The danger is not that Gaza is “another Holocaust”. The danger is that we learn nothing from historical violence if we only recognise its political mechanisms when we identify ourselves with the victim.

Again should teach us to recognise patterns beyond our own immediate experience.

And this is why the legal language matters too. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, finding four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention and concluding that the required genocidal intent had been established.

The argument, then, is not that history is repeating itself perfectly. It is that political history is recursive. Categories, exclusions, fears and justifications can return in new forms.

And perhaps that is what Days of Future Past understands better than we initially give it credit for. The X-Men do not save the future by defeating the Sentinels in the future. They save it by going backwards and changing the conditions that produced them. The film understands that political violence has a history, and that if we only fight the final form of violence, we have already arrived too late.

Hate speech is an alarm bell - the louder it rings, the greater the threat of genocide. It precedes and promotes violence.”

United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres

…and that is perhaps the simplest version of the argument I have been trying to make. We do not have to wait until the Sentinels exist.

This essay only scratches the surface of what Never Again can mean. I could have taken this much further through Sierra Leone, Sudan, Myanmar, or any number of other histories in which the question of recurrence looks different. That is partly the point. The more I looked at again, the less comfortable I became with treating it as a simple repetition of the past.

Political violence does not return neatly. It mutates, adapts and finds new language. Sometimes it is spectacular; sometimes it becomes administrative; sometimes it happens slowly enough that we barely notice it happening at all.

And perhaps that is why Days of Future Past is such an interesting film to think about alongside all of this. Its answer to political recurrence is not simply to remember. It is to intervene. Wolverine is sent backwards because by the time the Sentinels exist, it is already too late. The future cannot be defeated from within the future. The chain has to be interrupted somewhere earlier.

We, as far as I know, do not have a powerful telepath who can throw us back through time, so we have to do something much less exciting: learn from history, listen to the people warning us when they recognise its patterns, and act before the ending is already written.

This movie ends with the mutants very publicly saving the day, a striking change from First Class, where their existence and actions are still largely hidden from the world. That shift raises another set of questions about what happens after dehumanisation: about exceptionalism, belonging, visibility, and the expectation that marginalised people must demonstrate their usefulness before they are considered worthy of dignity. I explored some of this in THE MYTH OF THE 'PERFECT REFUGEE' - PART I. and I suspect it will keep returning throughout this series.

Because there are still eight or nine X-Men films left, and plenty more iterations of this story to come, there is a lot more to ask about segregation, diaspora, displacement, detention, resistance and the politics of who gets to belong.

THE MARGINS

The margins are where I wander a little further. Here you’ll find personal reflections, behind-the-scenes thinking, and connections to the wider ideas and essays that make up the Pop Culture as Parable archive.

For now, the margins are open to all free subscribers. If you’ve made it this far, why not subscribe and keep following the conversation?

Subscribe now

This is Essay #7 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

2. Dallaire, R. (2003). Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.

3. Kiernan, B. (1996). The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79.

4. Klar, Y., Schori-Eyal, N., & Klar, Y. (2013). “The ‘Never Again’ State of Mind: Jewish-Israeli Holocaust Memory and Its Consequences.” Political Psychology, 34(6), 847–865.

5. Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

6. Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science.

7. United Nations (1948). Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

8. United Nations (1999). Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35: The Fall of Srebrenica.

9. United Nations (2025). From Words to Violence: Lives Behind the Fields of Death.

10. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (2025). Legal Analysis of the Conduct of Israel in Gaza Pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. UN Human Rights Council, A/HRC/60/CRP.3.

11. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2021). Buchenwald. Holocaust Encyclopedia.

12. International Court of Justice (2007). Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro): Judgment.

13. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (2004). Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić: Judgment. Case No. IT-98-33-A.

14. Jewish Voice for Peace (2026). Never Again for Anyone.

15. Niemöller, M. “First They Came.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia.

“It’s all Reed Richards’ fault. Him and his endless pursuit of progress.”

but was Harvey Elder aka Mole Man right?

In every iteration of the Fantastic Four, from the lycra-clad optimism of 1994, to the CGI adventures of 2005 and 2007, to the darker Fant4stic in 2015, and even the “smartest man alive” cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Reed Richards has always been presented as the team’s voice of reason. His leadership is justified by one thing above all else: his extraordinary intelligence (although after the whole Black Bolt incident with Wanda... perhaps not completely infallible).

It is an easy narrative to believe. Surely the person with the best strategy, the one who can think through impossible problems, balance competing risks and arrive at evidence-based solutions, would make the strongest leader. It is an academic’s dream.

But does intelligence automatically create legitimacy?

Unlike previous versions of the Fantastic Four, where we are introduced to awe-struck young scientists discovering their powers, First Steps presents us with an established team. These are astronauts, researchers and public figures. Reed Richards, played by Pedro Pascal, is no longer a university prodigy discovering the world. He is a man who has already spent decades trying to understand it. Ben Grimm, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, carries the same sense of experience, while Sue and Johnny Storm, played by Vanessa Kirby and Joseph Quinn, are no longer simply young heroes but influential political and cultural figures in their own right.

This iteration of the Fantastic Four are not just superheroes. They are political actors. They shape public policy, advise governments and determine the future of their world. In many ways, they embody the logic of technocratic governance.

To summarise an entire field of political philosophy: technocracy is the belief that political decisions should be guided primarily by expertise, scientific knowledge and evidence-based reasoning. The word itself comes from the Greek techne, meaning skill or craft, and kratos, meaning rule or power: quite literally, rule through technical knowledge.

The idea itself is far from new. Plato imagined philosopher-kings ruling through knowledge and wisdom rather than popular opinion. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis envisioned a society guided by scientists and empirical discovery. Later thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon argued that increasingly complex societies required leadership from experts, engineers and industrial planners.

As societies became more technologically advanced, these ideas became increasingly influential. Modern states rely on technocratic institutions every day: central banks setting monetary policy, scientific panels advising public health decisions, engineers designing infrastructure and experts modelling climate risks.

The appeal is obvious.

Complex problems require knowledge. Evidence is often better than ideology. Long-term planning is often better than short-term popularity.

Reed Richards represents this ideal perfectly. He does not seek power because he wants control (that is usually the role Victor von Doom occupies in these stories, despite only appearing in the end credits here). He seeks responsibility because he believes understanding creates an obligation to act. As Elder puts it, his “endless pursuit of progress” comes from a desire to make the world safer. Reed wants to “baby-proof the whole world” because he believes every problem has a solution if only humanity can gather enough information, enough '“variables”, and enough understanding.

Not everyone, however, accepts that authority.

This brings me back to Harvey Elder, the ruler of Subterranea. Better known in the comics as the Mole Man, he is usually portrayed as an eccentric supervillain. Here, however, he feels closer to an anti-hero, in much the same way Poison Ivy is often written as a villain trying to save the environment. He becomes Reed’s political opposite as much as his narrative foil.

I think that is deliberate.

Reed Richards and Harvey Elder represent two competing ways of making decisions. Reed believes the best solutions come from expertise, planning and scientific knowledge. Elder, by contrast, repeatedly justifies his actions by claiming to represent the interests and wishes of his people.

Political scientist Cas Mudde describes populism as a worldview that divides society into a morally pure 'people' and a corrupt 'elite’, arguing that legitimate politics should reflect the general will of ordinary people. Importantly, Mudde’s definition also highlights populism’s anti-pluralist tendency: the assumption that there is one authentic ‘people’ whose interests can be clearly identified. Those who disagree can therefore be dismissed as outsiders, corrupt elites or enemies of the public good. Whether or not Mole Man is correct, he consistently frames Reed as an out-of-touch elite imposing his own vision of progress from (quite literally) above.

Both of these positions carry genuine appeal. Both also carry genuine risks. Technocracy can become detached from the people it is meant to serve, mistaking analytical clarity for moral authority. Populism can collapse complexity into a single imagined “will of the people”, using that claim to silence disagreement and justify decisions that may ultimately harm those it claims to represent. The danger, then, is not expertise itself, nor is it popular participation. The danger is believing either one is sufficient on its own. Both are also vulnerable to being co-opted by authoritarian leaders.

A technocratic authoritarian does not need to claim that people love them. They justify their authority through competence: the belief that difficult problems require decisive action, and that experts should be trusted to make necessary choices without interference. Political disagreement becomes framed not as a legitimate difference of opinion, but as an obstacle to efficiency and progress.

The populist authoritarian takes the opposite route. Rather than claiming authority through expertise, they claim to embody the will of the people. They position themselves as the only true representative of ordinary citizens, with opponents portrayed not as political rivals but as enemies of the people themselves.

The irony is that these two forms of authority, despite appearing opposite, can arrive at a similar destination. Both can become hostile to pluralism. Both can treat disagreement as illegitimate when their own source of authority is considered unquestionable. Both can argue that their source of legitimacy is the only one that matters.

If my research on governance and design has taught me anything it is that: The best decisions rarely come from above or below alone. They emerge through negotiation.

THE MARGINS

The margins are where I wander a little further. Here you’ll find personal reflections, behind-the-scenes thinking, and connections to the wider ideas and essays that make up the Pop Culture as Parable archive.

For now, the margins are open to all free subscribers. If you’ve made it this far, why not subscribe and keep following the conversation?

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This is Essay #6 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Bacon, F. (1627). New Atlantis. London: William Rawley.

2. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.

3. Malkki, L. H. (1995). Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 495–523.

4. Mudde, C. (2004). The Populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563.

5. Saint-Simon, H. de. (1825). The New Christianity. London: Hurst, Chance and Co.

6. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

In the last article of the doomsday countdown, I spoke about how weird it is for people to weaponise the sacrosanctity of mythological and fictional adaptations. But now let’s talk about how weird it is for people not to do that with real historical events.

I’ve noticed it before, but rewatching the Marvel universe from beginning to end has made me realise just how prolific this trope really is. Again and again, the MCU quietly inserts fictional characters into real historical events, not as bystanders, but as the hidden architects behind them. Here are just a few examples I pulled from the MCU timeline:

...among many, many others, including the central premise of X-Men: First Class, where Sebastian Shaw engineers the Cuban Missile Crisis. What fascinates me is not that these stories are historically inaccurate. Of course they are. They are superhero films. What fascinates me is how they choose to be inaccurate.

Notice that Marvel rarely changes the outcome of history. JFK still dies. Hiroshima still happens. The Vietnam War still devastates millions of lives. The Cuban Missile Crisis still brings the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The facts remain recognisable. What changes is responsibility.

French historian Pierre Nora argued that societies do not simply remember the past; they construct it through lieux de mémoire or ”sites of memory” that give history symbolic meaning as part of a “Collective Memory”. Popular culture has become one of the most influential of these sites. For millions of people, historical understanding is formed as much by cinema, television and video games as it is by school or the archive. I remember walking through the streets of Rome some years ago and getting a history lesson from a friend, who, despite not having sat in a history class in some time, knew copious amounts of detail about how and why each building was formed from their time playing Assassin’s Creed (much to my dismay as a then architecture student).

Marvel, in this case, is not simply borrowing history as a backdrop. It is participating in the production of historical memory. Yet what fascinates me is the way it chooses to remember. Again and again, historical agency is relocated away from institutions and toward fictional individuals or secret organisations.

This matters because historians have spent decades pushing against what is often called the “Great Man” theory of history. Thomas Carlyle famously argued that history is “the biography of great men,” shaped by extraordinary individuals whose decisions altered the course of civilisation. Modern historiography has largely rejected this. Social historians, Marxist historians and the Annales School instead emphasised structures: institutions, economics, geography, bureaucracy, ideology and everyday life.

Marvel appears to reverse that shift. Its version of history is populated not by impersonal systems but by hidden actors. If a war begins, someone engineered it. If an assassination occurs, someone secretly ordered it. If political instability emerges, a conspiracy lies beneath it. This is, perhaps, inevitable. Superhero stories require villains. Bureaucracy rarely makes for compelling cinema.

The political theorist Hannah Arendt offered a very different understanding of evil. Writing about Adolf Eichmann, she argued that the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century were often committed not by theatrical monsters but by ordinary people embedded within bureaucratic systems. Evil, she suggested, was frequently banal.

Marvel’s villains are anything but banal. Hydra is visually spectacular. Sebastian Shaw literally feeds on nuclear energy. The Red Skull seeks cosmic artefacts. By concentrating historical responsibility into comic-book antagonists, history becomes emotionally legible. Evil acquires a face. Yet in doing so, something is inevitably lost.

The structural conditions that make violence possible begin to fade into the background.

Which brings us back to X-Men: First Class.

On one level, the film is simply doing what superhero stories have always done: inserting extraordinary people into extraordinary moments. But read through the lenses of Nora, Carlyle and Arendt, something more interesting emerges.

Pierre Nora reminds us that popular culture is not merely entertainment; it is one of the places through which societies construct collective memory. Millions of people will never read diplomatic histories of the Cold War, but many will watch X-Men: First Class. The film, therefore, becomes part of the cultural memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis, regardless of whether audiences consciously distinguish fact from fiction.

Thomas Carlyle would have recognised Marvel’s approach immediately. History once again becomes the story of extraordinary individuals. Except Marvel goes one step further. Rather than placing “great men” into history, it invents hidden ones. Structural explanations become personal ones. Imperialism becomes Hydra. Cold War brinkmanship becomes Sebastian Shaw. Political assassination becomes the Winter Soldier. History is rewritten not by changing what happened, but by changing who is responsible.

Arendt, however, offers the most uncomfortable challenge to this way of remembering. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she argued that the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century were rarely the work of theatrical monsters. Evil emerged through ordinary institutions, bureaucracies and individuals carrying out ordinary jobs. The true horror was not that evil was extraordinary, but that it was banal.

Marvel’s villains are anything but banal.

Hydra, the Council of Nine and Sebastian Shaw provide identifiable antagonists with clear motives and satisfying defeats. They transform structural violence into personal conflict. In doing so, they make history dramatically coherent, but perhaps also politically more comfortable. If the Cuban Missile Crisis happened because of Shaw, if the Vietnam War was manipulated by Hydra, or if political assassinations were the work of one brainwashed super soldier, then responsibility becomes concentrated in fictional villains rather than dispersed across governments, institutions and societies.

That is not to say Marvel has remained static. In many ways, the franchise has matured alongside American political culture. Earlier entries often externalised responsibility through secret conspiracies and hidden architects, making historical violence easier to personalise. More recent stories, such as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, have become increasingly willing to acknowledge that injustice can emerge from institutions themselves, from racism, colonialism and systems of power rather than from a single mastermind. The evolution says as much about changing American political culture as it does about superheroes.

But the question remains.

What happens when our stories teach us to look for Red Skull instead of bureaucracy? Hydra instead of ideology? Sebastian Shaw, instead of the political decisions that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war?

The danger is not that audiences leave believing a mutant engineered the Cuban Missile Crisis. The danger is subtler. If we forget what Arendt called the banality of evil, if we come to imagine that history is always driven by hidden masterminds and spectacular villains, we risk overlooking the far more ordinary ways that evil enters the world. There is no secret battle between Shaw and Magneto taking place behind every historical catastrophe. More often than not, atrocities emerge from institutions, ordinary people, incremental decisions and systems that appear entirely unremarkable until it is too late.

Perhaps that is the greatest irony of X-Men: First Class. The film reminds us that one person can change history. Arendt reminds us that history is far more often changed by countless people who believe they are simply doing their jobs.

If we only learn to recognise evil when it wears a red skull or a mutant's helmet, we may fail to recognise it when it arrives in a suit, behind a desk, or wrapped in the language of bureaucracy.

This is Essay #5 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

2. Carlyle, T. (1841). On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.

3. Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24.

This show is kind of gnarly. I love it.

Watching Eyes of Wakanda, particularly the second episode, "Legends and Lies", I couldn't help but think about another story that has dominated pop culture conversations this year: Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey.

The 2026 Odyssey has been met by polarised reviews, but what is more revealing is the polarised anticipation. A BBC article labelled it "the most anticipated film of 2026 – but also the most contested." Despite coming off the critical and financial success of Oppenheimer (on the surface, a far more contentious premise than a public-domain and frequently adapted Homeric epic) Nolan has been hit by a wave of criticism over the casting, costuming and dialogue before audiences had even seen the finished film.

It has become something of a lightning rod for broader political and cultural grievances. Some criticism has been well-founded, such as discussions around the lack of Greek actors or Nolan's apparent inability to resist casting every major Hollywood star available. Other criticisms, however, seemed to have little to do with filmmaking at all. The casting of actors such as Elliot Page, Lupita Nyong'o and Zendaya became flashpoints, despite all three delivering some of the strongest performances in the finished film.

Lupita Nyong'o's casting as Helen attracted particular outrage. One article by from February documented the response, highlighting a series of viral posts questioning whether Helen could or should be portrayed by a Black actress. The discussion inevitably returned to Homer's description of Helen as "white-armed", presented as definitive proof that the casting was historically inaccurate.

But let’s be honest here. Homer never described Helen as “white-armed”. He didn’t even speak English.

Those words belong to a translator. They are themselves an interpretation, filtered through language, culture and centuries of scholarship. Even beyond translation, many classicists argue that Homer was not inventing these stories from scratch. The Odyssey is generally understood to have emerged from an oral tradition stretching back generations before it was ever written down. It was never a single, fixed text. It was the product of countless performances, countless storytellers and countless adaptations.

In other words, The Odyssey is itself an adaptation. Every version we consider "classic" was, at one point, somebody's reinterpretation.

So why are people being so weird and weaponising the sacrosanctity of adaptation?

You probably know the answer without me spelling it out.

It sells.

Outrage sells. Culture wars sell. Political identities sell. And people are buying it.

That is why figures such as Elon Musk felt compelled to join the conversation. The debate was never really about Homer. Homer simply became the latest battleground for modern political anxieties.

Helen herself has never existed as a singular character. Depending on which version of the myth you read, she is born from an egg after Zeus, disguised as a swan (or perhaps a goose) assaults either Leda or Nemesis. In some traditions, she willingly leaves with Paris. In others, she is abducted. In one, the "real" Helen never even goes to Troy at all, with only a phantom taking her place while she spends the war in Egypt.

Contradictions have always been part of the story.

Adaptation has always been part of the story.

Perhaps the most famous continuation of Homer's world, Virgil's Aeneid, wasn't interested in faithfully preserving Greek mythology. It repurposed it to create a Roman national epic, reframing the Trojan War through Roman ideals and presenting Rome as the destined heir to Troy. Christopher Marlowe borrowed Helen centuries later to write Doctor Faustus, giving us the immortal line, "the face that launched a thousand ships." Shakespeare borrowed Homer. James Joyce borrowed Homer. Homer borrowed from Homer (in The Simpsons). Every generation has inherited these myths and reshaped them to reflect its own fears, politics and ambitions.

That is what adaptations do. They are mirrors. They tell us far less about the ancient world than they do about the society choosing to retell it.

Sometimes Helen becomes a warning against female temptation. Sometimes she is recast as a tragic victim. Sometimes she represents irresistible beauty. Sometimes she becomes a symbol of political legitimacy. The details change because every adaptation is trying to persuade us of something about the present, not simply reconstruct the past.

In that viral tweet, the Google GenAI response itself unintentionally demonstrates this point. It links to the interpretations of later poets and playwrights, such as Sappho and Euripides, as though they reveal a single, definitive Helen. Instead, they reveal the opposite: that Helen has always been a character in conversation. Each writer inherited the myth and reshaped it to explore their own concerns, whether those were love, war, gender, race, morality or power.

So perhaps the more interesting question isn’t whether Lupita Nyong’o is the “correct” Helen. It is why some people are so invested in convincing us she cannot be.

Perhaps that’s what makes Eyes of Wakanda feel so refreshing.

The second episode follows B'Kai, operating under the alias Memnon, as he finds himself caught up in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Rather than adapting either the Iliad or The Odyssey, it deliberately inhabits the space between them: after Hector's death but before Odysseus begins the long journey home. It explores a period that scholars believe was once covered by the now-lost poems of the Epic Cycle, filling those gaps with its own mythology and its own perspective.

It is, in many ways, doing exactly what Virgil did two thousand years ago. Exactly what Marlowe did. Exactly what Nolan is doing now. It doesn't treat Homer as untouchable. It treats Homer as living.

That is the real lesson of oral tradition.

Stories survive not because they remain unchanged but because they remain meaningful. Every storyteller inherits the same foundations, yet each generation rebuilds the house according to its own values. The myths endure precisely because they are never finished.

Adaptations aren’t mirrors of the past. They’re mirrors of the societies that create them.

If anything, refusing to reinterpret these myths would be the least faithful thing we could do.

This is Essay #4 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. BBC Culture. (2026). The most anticipated film of 2026 – but also the most contested: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

2. Homer. (c. 8th century BCE). The Iliad.

3. Homer. (c. 8th century BCE). The Odyssey.

4. Joyce, J. (1922). Ulysses.

5. Marlowe, C. (c. 1592). Doctor Faustus.

6. Virgil. (c. 19 BCE). The Aeneid.

7. Accessible Art History. (2026). Was Helen of Troy White?

“And what is he?”

“Retired.”

We meet Ben Reilly in a very different position from the typical superhero origin story. A total 180 from how we are introduced to Steve Rogers or Peggy Carter. We are in the Prohibition era (yes, I know we are now going back in time, I messed up the chronological order, sorry) between wars, with our protagonist: a war hero, science experiment and retired vigilante once known as The Spider, portrayed by Nicolas Cage, who perfectly captures the strange, grizzled private investigator.

He is a man who, no matter how down-on-his-luck or bruised, cannot quit. Not in a Steve Rogers “I can do this all day” way, but from a tragic, introspective ache and agony that drives him to keep going regardless of the suffering. That feeling, that compulsion, that thing inside that makes desire feel like a scratch on the surface of your skin, makes passion feel like a flesh wound. His curiosity and need to protect are compulsive and all-consuming.

I thought that yearning was reserved for detective shows and eccentric fictional characters. Then I began studying refugee camps and was introduced to the field of humanitarian research.

Curiosity is often described as an innocent trait; something we praise in children but perhaps discourage in cats. We celebrate curiosity as the foundation of discovery, but rarely discuss the cost of constantly searching. It is the itch that demands scratching, the question that refuses to leave you alone until you find an answer. The human psyche is marked by a lifelong tendency to seek and acquire information. It is that very tendency that the makers of algorithms exploit, because curiosity can become almost addictive. The reward systems in our brains create a cycle where the anticipation of discovering new information becomes motivating in itself (Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath, 2014). The more we learn, the more we realise there is still to understand.

The tragedy of Spider-Noir comes from knowing that one person cannot repair a broken city. There will always be another case, another injustice and another person who needs help. Purpose has become inseparable from identity; he has been consumed by the responsibility he has chosen to carry. Researchers encounter the same reality. One thesis cannot transform an entire field. One intervention cannot solve displacement. One paper cannot end misinformation. The scale of the problems we study often exceeds the contribution any individual can make. It is a frustrating realisation and can make the pursuit of knowledge feel almost impossible.

Yet every contribution still matters. Every paper adds something to the global discourse. Every conversation, every mind changed, and every person inspired becomes part of something larger than the individual who started it. Even when it feels like you are gritting your teeth watching public trust collapse, misinformation spread, and political decisions made at the expense of vulnerable people, knowledge and curiosity still matter.

This is where I want to introduce you to one of my academic inspirations (and perhaps someone who will become one of yours, too): Gil Loescher

Born in 1945, Loescher became one of the most influential scholars in refugee studies, combining historical research with humanitarian practice. His work examined how displacement is shaped by politics, institutions and the complex realities of international protection.

Loescher’s career embodied the same curiosity and relentless pursuit of answers that define Spider-Noir. Forced displacement has no simple ending. Political circumstances change, new conflicts emerge, and millions of people continue to be forced from their homes. There is no single intervention, policy or publication that can make refugee crises disappear. Yet Loescher continued researching because understanding a problem is part of responding to it. Before societies can create better solutions, they must understand how systems developed, why failures occur and whose experiences have been overlooked.

His book Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis challenged the idea that refugee protection could simply be viewed as an act of generosity. Loescher explored how refugee responses are shaped by international cooperation, political interests and the responsibilities of states. Humanitarian action exists within systems of power, and understanding those systems is essential if we want to improve them.

In The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path, Loescher examined the difficult position of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: an organisation created to protect displaced people while operating within the political realities of the international system. His work highlighted the tension between humanitarian ideals and the constraints placed upon those trying to achieve them.

His final book, Refugees: A Very Short Introduction, reflected another important part of his legacy: making complex research accessible. Academic knowledge has its greatest value when it can travel beyond universities and contribute to wider conversations.

In a tribute from the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre, Alexander Betts described Loescher as: “the single most important academic to work on the international relations of forced migration.”

Across decades of research, Loescher transformed how scholars and policymakers understood refugees. He demonstrated that refugee crises are deeply political, shaped by the actions and failures of states, international organisations and global systems. His later work on protracted refugee situations challenged the assumption that refugee camps are temporary spaces, highlighting the need for approaches that recognise refugees as people with agency, autonomy and futures.

But perhaps the clearest example of Loescher’s commitment came in August 2003.

While advising on the humanitarian response for displaced Iraqis, Loescher was present during the bombing of the United Nations compound in Baghdad. The attack killed 22 people, including UN Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, and left Loescher with life-changing injuries, including the loss of both legs below the knee.

Despite the challenges caused by his injuries, he returned to teaching, research and engagement with refugee communities. His later fieldwork included working with disabled refugees in Burmese border camps in Thailand, while his scholarship continued to explore protracted displacement and alternatives to long-term encampment.

This is what makes Loescher’s legacy so powerful. It was not simply the number of books he wrote or policies he influenced. It was his belief that research should remain connected to the people and communities behind the concepts.

Research can feel frustrating because the problems we study often remain after we are gone. Refugee crises continue. Political systems remain imperfect. New questions emerge before old ones are resolved. But Loescher’s career demonstrates why unfinished work still matters. Every investigation adds another piece of understanding. Every researcher contributes to a conversation larger than themselves. Every person who learns something new becomes part of how knowledge moves through the world.

Loescher’s legacy offers a lesson that extends far beyond academia. None of us will solve every problem or have every answer, but progress has never depended on one person doing everything. It comes from people asking better questions, challenging what came before and leaving behind stronger foundations for a better understanding of the world than the one we inherited.

This is BONUS #1, making the real number of essays 103

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Betts, A. (2025) Remembering Gil Loescher.

2. Gruber, M.J., Gelman, B.D. and Ranganath, C. (2014) ‘States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit’, Neuron, 84(2), pp. 486–496.

3. Loescher, G. (1993) Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis

4. Loescher, G. and Scanlan, J.A. (1986) Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present.

5. Loescher, G. (2001) The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path.

6. Loescher, G., Betts, A. and Milner, J. (2008) The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection into the Twenty-First Century.

7. Loescher, G. (2021) Refugees: A Very Short Introduction.

Boy, is this a lot of TV…

Looking ahead at the remaining ninety-something entries in this challenge, I am beginning to question whether I have accidentally signed myself up for a full-time job. Perhaps a little more foresight would have been useful. Instead, I have committed to watching over one hundred Marvel films and shows before Avengers: Doomsday, writing an essay after every single one, and somehow balancing that with a PhD. Future me is going to have some strongly worded feedback for present me.

Thankfully, Agent Carter Season 2 made that commitment feel worthwhile; yes, even the musical episode, with Jarvis surrounded by feathers and sparkles, certainly makes it an interesting pause in the action drama. The season builds on the tensions, plots and character arcs of the first, but it also changes the stage entirely. Moving from New York to California, Agent Carter enters a world built around reinvention, celebrity and aspiration. New York represents the machinery of post-war America, but, California represents something newer. It represents the emerging cultural power of Hollywood and the promise that anyone can become someone.

Like most dreams, this one has a cost.

Behind the glamour of California’s sunshine and movie studios are the realities that make these dreams possible: racism, corruption, exploitation and the precarious position of immigrants trying to build a life within a society that does not always fully accept them. This season repeatedly asks who gets to participate in this new world, and what they must sacrifice to be recognised as within it. The synopsis tells us:

“Peggy discovers a new city, both old and new friends – and potentially a new love – she's about to learn the bright lights of post-war Hollywood mask a more sinister threat to everyone she is sworn to protect” - comicbookmovie.com synopsis

But perhaps that threat is more pervasive than the plot would have us believe. Through new additions to the cast like Jason Wilkes, Whitney Frost and Ana Jarvis, we start to see that California, to its core, is a place of performance.

This is where the idea of passing becomes important.

The term has a long and complicated history, most commonly associated with racial identity in the United States. Passing has most commonly referred to the experience of people whose appearance allowed them to be perceived as belonging to a more socially privileged racial category, often to access opportunities, safety or social acceptance denied to them otherwise.

One of the earliest and most influential explorations of passing came through Nella Larsen's 1929 novel Passing, which explored the lives of two Black women who could be perceived as white within segregated America. The novel asks what happens when social identity is not only something we experience internally, but something that is constantly interpreted by others. Passing becomes both an opportunity and a burden: it can provide access to spaces from which someone has been excluded, but it also requires navigating the fear of exposure and the denial of parts of oneself.

Later scholarship moved the discussion of passing away from the individual identity and towards the social structures that make identity meaningful. Passing reveals that identity is not only something we possess, but something that is interpreted, categorised and valued by others. It draws attention to the unequal conditions under which people are recognised as belonging.

Here, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) becomes particularly useful. This argues that all social interaction involves some degree of performance, and the act of passing reveals that these performances are not equally voluntary. Some people can choose when to step onto the stage; others are forced onto it simply to participate. Howard Stark’s persona is not comparable to Dr Jason Wilkes professional survival.

Wilkes is not passing in Larsen’s 1929 definition, but he is forced into a performance. His challenge is not concealing who he is; it is navigating a world that has already attached meaning to who he is before he enters the room.

As a Black scientist in 1940s America, Wilkes represents a contradiction. His intellect, education and professional success should make him unquestionably valuable, yet the society around him continually places conditions on that recognition. He is not simply required to be talented; he is required to be exceptional. He must be intelligent without appearing threatening, confident without appearing arrogant, and ambitious without appearing disruptive.

This connects closely to W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, introduced in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois described the experience of seeing oneself both through one’s own perspective and through the gaze of a society that has already constructed assumptions about who you are. The individual is forced to navigate not only who they understand themselves to be, but also how they are interpreted by others.

In many ways, Wilkes’ storyline continues the question raised in Season 1. Peggy Carter asked what happens when someone is capable but denied recognition because of gender. Wilkes asks a similar question through race: what happens when someone has already proven their ability, yet society continues to decide whether they belong?

Wilkes is not alone. Whitney Frost performs the glamorous Hollywood star while struggling against the classed and gendered expectations attached to that role. Ana Jarvis, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary, and Edwin and Peggy, both British immigrants, remind us that belonging is always negotiated. Throughout the season, immigration, nationality, gender and race become different expressions of the same underlying question: who is recognised as belonging, and on whose terms?

Perhaps this is why California works so well as the setting for Season 2. Hollywood is a place built on transformation. It creates stars, reinvents identities and turns performance into reality. Yet Agent Carter asks what happens when the performances required by society are not simply chosen, but demanded.

This is Essay #3 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk.

2. Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

3. Larsen, N. (1929). Passing.

“The war’s over, leave it to the professionals”

It would have been so easy for the MCU to pretend that Captain America somehow solved all of Peggy Carter's biggest problems. Steve Rogers recognised her. Howard Stark trusted her. Phillips realised her potential in the SSR. The audience is well aware of her capabilities. Yet when the war ends, none of that seems to matter.

It’s not a stretch to read Agent Carter Season 1 as an exploration of the changing political value of women’s labour in a post-war America. One of the first characters we are introduced to is laid off from their factory job to make way for the men returning from the front. During wartime, her labour was an invaluable service that kept America running: essential. In peacetime, she is disposable.

She isn’t alone. We see through Peggy that it is not one factory, nor a specific ‘typically male’ industry, but an entire societal shift impacting office workers, vetrans and everyone in between.

Having served and practically ran oporations with the Strategic Scientific Reserve throughout the war, Peggy now finds herself relegated to administrative work while the men around her take credit, make the decisions and dismiss her experience. Her first interactions with her colleagues are filled with some pretty aggressive misogyny: full of male bravado, slut shaming, fabricated lies about how Peggy acted during the war (with particular focus on her romantic relationships), weaponised incompatence and nearly every trick in the book to dismiss her and her achievements.

It is clear that we are in a very different time for women from Captain America: The First Avenger. There, Peggy was underestimated, but she still occupied an important place within the war effort. In Agent Carter, the war is over, and so, too, it seems, is the institution's need for women like her. With the men back, the demand has disappeared.

This tension has been extensively explored by feminist scholars who show that institutions do not simply reward merit; they actively produce and police it through gendered assumptions about who counts as a legitimate worker. Joan Acker argues that organisations are built around an “ideal worker” who is imagined as fully available, detached from care (no children or dependents), and implicitly male. Peggy’s wartime success proves her competence, but peacetime exposes the fact that competence alone is not enough when the institution is structured to restore masculine authority. Rosabeth Moss Kanter adds another useful insight here: women in male-dominated settings are often treated as exceptions, highly visible when useful, but never fully allowed to redefine the norm, something proven very true for Agent Carter within the SSR.

Silvia Federici helps explain why this exclusion is so durable. Her work on the devaluation of women’s labour shows how work performed by women is often treated as natural, supportive, or temporary rather than as a source of authority. Agent Carter dramatises this logic. The shift, while portrayed as economic, is ideological; it restores the fantasy that power belongs to men by default.

What makes Agent Carter so refreshing is that it does not simply point at sexism and say “that’s bad” or “that’s mean”. It explores labour and the inequality of efforts through changing times. It dives into how inequality was used within the working class to manufacture stability, both socially and economically, at the cost of women.

Note: While this essay focuses on women’s labour through Peggy Carter’s experience, this wider pattern of labour being valued temporarily and then discarded has historically affected many marginalised groups, including racial minorities and disabled communities.

This is Essay #2 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. Gender & Society, 4(2), 139–158.

2. Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and Women of the Corporation.

3. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

This will forever be one of my favourite films in the MCU. It has everything that makes Marvel work at its best: action, drama, compelling relationships and genuine character development, all tied together with brilliant period aesthetics. The dynamic between Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes and Peggy Carter is one of the strongest in the franchise, and even before the shield becomes an icon, the film gives us a hero worth believing in.

Although Iron Man was the first MCU film released, Captain America: The First Avenger is where most chronological MCU journeys begin. In many ways, it sets the moral tone for the next 102 stories. Before there were gods, aliens, multiverses or Infinity Stones, there was a simpler question: what makes a hero?

At first, the answer seems straightforward. Dr Erskine rejects the military's obsession with physical perfection, insisting that the super soldier serum should be given not to the perfect soldier, but to "a good man." Steve Rogers enters the film as a catalogue of deficiencies: asthma, poor eyesight, a body repeatedly judged unfit for military service. Yet every rejection becomes another opportunity to demonstrate courage. He keeps getting back up, and that persistence is what makes him stand out long before he ever becomes Captain America.

The grenade scene captures this perfectly. While the other recruits instinctively scatter, Steve throws himself onto what he believes is a live grenade. He expects to die if it means everyone else gets to live. But there is another person who moves towards the danger. Peggy Carter steps forward. It is a subtle moment, easy to overlook because Steve's sacrifice dominates the scene, but Peggy demonstrates the very same instinct. She does not run; she moves towards responsibility. If the film is asking what qualities make a hero, Peggy quietly passes the same test.

This is where The First Avenger becomes more interesting than a simple battle between good and evil. The film tells us that virtue determines who deserves power, but in practice, it shows us that institutions determine whose virtue is recognised. Steve is repeatedly rejected because his body fails to meet the military's expectations of what a soldier should be. Peggy is never considered for the serum at all, not because she lacks courage, intelligence or leadership, but because she is a woman. Both possess the qualities Erskine values, yet only one is recognised as a legitimate candidate.

This reflects what Michel Foucault argued about power. Institutions do not simply distribute power; they produce the categories through which power becomes legitimate. The military is not merely searching for a hero; it is deciding what a hero is allowed to look like (which in turn shapes the power structures of society). Steve only becomes Captain America because Dr Erskine interrupts that process of recognition and sees beyond a body the institution has already dismissed. But even that interruption has limits.

Political philosopher Iris Marion Young argued that injustice is often structural rather than individual, embedded within the assumptions of institutions themselves. Peggy possesses many of the same moral qualities as Steve, alongside years of military experience, strategic knowledge and professional competence. Yet none of these makes her eligible. Her exclusion is not a reflection of her character; it is a reflection of the institution's imagination.

Perhaps that is why the title of this essay is not What Makes a Hero? But is Good Good Enough? For Steve, goodness becomes enough only because someone in power chooses to recognise it. For Peggy, goodness is never enough because no one ever offers her the opportunity. Captain America: The First Avenger, therefore, leaves us with an uncomfortable truth: character may determine who deserves power, but institutions often determine who receives it.

As we move into Agent Carter, that question becomes even more compelling. What happens when someone has already proven themselves worthy, yet still has to fight to be recognised?

This is Essay #1 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

2. Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference.

So... the Doomsday trailer just came out.

As a Gen Z Marvel fan, for my entire conscious life there have been different iterations of these characters and stories on the big screen. From pretending to be older than I was so I could go and watch Iron Man in the cinema, to binge-watching the Disney+ shows with my brothers after being sent home from university during COVID, these films have been by my side for as long as I can remember.

I have been the annoying friend who convinced everyone to go and watch some of the less well-received recent releases, and the person waiting every Wednesday for the newest episode to drop.

So, it is safe to say I am excited about this new wave of buzz around the MCU.

But what is really interesting to me is not just the spectacle. It is what these stories teach us about who we are as people. How these characters, worlds and conflicts have developed over time to reflect our changing thoughts and feelings about war, violence, power, identity and belonging.

Captain America asks what happens when morality conflicts with authority. Spider-Man explores the weight of responsibility and the painful process of growing up. The X-Men reveal how fear can create the very monsters we claim to oppose. The Avengers ask whether individuals can overcome their differences to build something greater together. WandaVision examines grief and the temptation to escape reality. Loki questions whether we are defined by our past or capable of creating a new identity.

Across these stories, the same themes emerge again and again: power and responsibility, identity and belonging, justice and inequality, technology and humanity, grief and hope.

These questions matter because superheroes have become one of the defining mythologies of the modern age.

Ancient societies told stories about gods, heroes and monsters to understand themselves. Today, we tell stories about people who can fly, bend time, travel between universes and save worlds. Yet underneath the spectacle, the questions remain the same.

What is a hero?

Like Odysseus, Achilles and the countless stories of lives told long ago, our idea of a hero has shifted and transformed to reveal very real things about ourselves.

• Who do we choose to idolise?

• Who do we want to become?

• What kind of world do we want to create?

• What is worth saving?

Perhaps the reason Marvel has endured for so long is not because we believe superheroes exist. It is because we recognise ourselves in them. So, alongside the ever-growing list of PhD work I have to tackle, I want to set myself a challenge: to watch all 102 stories I have compiled as potentially relevant to the multiverse that will be on show in Avengers: Doomsday.

102 stories.
102 essays.
One question:

What does Marvel teach us about being human?

Welcome to the countdown.

If this interests you, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the releases!

Subscribe now

Glossary

Here I will keep an updated list of every story in the challenge. I will add links as each essay is published, alongside quick notes about why I think each entry is relevant and what themes it explores.

If you want to join the challenge, rewatch the MCU, or fill in any Marvel knowledge gaps before Avengers: Doomsday, hopefully, this glossary becomes a useful guide.

UPDATE - I have had to shuffle things around because I missed some pretty big releases so some will be bonus essays if I can fit them around my PhD research. I used this article to reorder the MCU Chronological Order of the MCU and took a stab in the dark with the others… dont worry if some bits are missing, they might get their own series but let me know if there is one I missed! so… here is my chronological order:

1. Eyes of Wakanda

BONUS: Spider-noir

2. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) and what makes a hero?

3. Agent Carter (season 1) and the Value of Women’s Labour

4. Agent Carter (season 2) and ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’

5. X-Men: First Class

6. Fantastic Four: First Steps

7. X-Men: Days of Future Past

8. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

9. X-Men: Apocalypse

10. Dark Phoenix

11. Captain Marvel

12. X-Men ‘97

13. Spider-Man

14. X-Men

15. X2

16. Madame Web

17. Spider-Man 2

18. X-Men: The Last Stand

19. Spider-Man 3

20. Iron Man

21. Iron Man 2

22. Thor

23. The Incredible Hulk

24. The Avengers

25. The Amazing Spider-Man

26. The Wolverine

27. Thor: The Dark World

28. Iron Man 3

29. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

30. Guardians of the Galaxy

31. The Amazing Spider-Man 2

32. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

33. Daredevil – Season 1

34. I Am Groot – Season 1 + 2

35. Jessica Jones – Season 1

36. Avengers: Age of Ultron

37. Ant-Man

38. Luke Cage – Season 1

39. Daredevil – Season 2

40. Iron Fist – Season 1

41. The Defenders

42. Captain America: Civil War

43. Black Panther

44. Black Widow

45. Spider-Man: Homecoming

46. Deadpool

47. The Punisher – Season 1

48. Doctor Strange

49. Jessica Jones – Season 2

50. Iron Fist – Season 2

51. Kraven the Hunter

52. Luke Cage – Season 2

53. Daredevil – Season 3

54. Thor: Ragnarok

55. Punisher (2)

56. Jessica Jones (3)

57. Ant-Man and the Wasp

58. Avengers: Infinity War

59. Venom

60. Logan

61. Deadpool 2

62. Avengers: Endgame

63. Loki – Season 1

64. Loki – Season 2

65. Marvel Zombies

66. What If...? – Season 1

67. What If...? – Season 2

68. WandaVision

69. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

70. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

71. Deadpool & Wolverine

72. Spider-Man: Far From Home

73. Venom: Let There Be Carnage

74. Eternals

75. Venom: Last Dance

76. Morbius

77. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

78. Hawkeye

79. Spider-Man: No Way Home

80. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

81. Echo

82. Moon Knight

83. Ironheart

84. Ms. Marvel

85. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

86. Thor: Love and Thunder

87. Werewolf by Night

88. Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special

89. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

90. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

91. Agatha All Along

92. Secret Invasion

93. The Marvels

94. What If...? – Season 3

95. Daredevil: Born Again – Season 1

96. Captain America: Brave New World

97. Thunderbolts*

98. Daredevil: Born Again – Season 2

99. Punisher: one last kill

100. Wonder Man

101. Spider-Man: Brand New Day

102. Vision Quest

Then… of course DOOMSDAY