Deadpool & Wolverine’s Best Scene Ruins The MCU’s Greatest Character

Before we can get into the Deadpool & Wolverine stuff, it’s important to take things back to the beginning. Specifically, the beginning of the Loki series which shows how one version of our title character grabbed the Tesseract (as comic nerds, it will always be the Cosmic Cube to us) and escaped in Avengers: Endgame. The Loki show reveals how he landed in the Obi Desert and was soon confronted by TVA agents, one of whom temporarily slows down time around Loki and knocks him down with hilarious slow-motion ease.

Narratively, the purpose of this scene is simple enough: Loki had previously been presented as a super-powerful god, the kind of guy who can be a threat to entire planets. On his own show, Loki needed to have foes who would be capable of putting him in his place, and this early scene with the TVA helps establish these guys as a new threat while putting Loki on the back foot. Nothing is inherently wrong with this scene, but the beginning of Deadpool & Wolverine retroactively makes Loki look like a complete chump in his own show.

As one of Marvel’s most violent characters, Deadpool has always benefited from having some nameless, disposable foes that he can dispatch in hilariously gruesome fashion. In Deadpool & Wolverine, the TVA agents fill this role: they try to attack the Merc With a Mouth after he goes to retrieve Logan (really, Logan’s adamantium-lined skeleton). Sure enough, Deadpool makes mincemeat of these guys, eventually giving himself the dead Wolverine’s claws as a way to harness his own not-so-berserker rage. 

It’s obviously a great scene, one that sets the tone for the movie that follows. However, we can’t help but feel like this ruins Loki by showing how easily someone far less powerful than him can take out a small army of TVA agents when this literal god got knocked down and captured by a single one of them. Back in the Loki show, it was easy to believe these guys were just that powerful, but seeing how easily Deadpool can dispatch TVA agents makes us wonder how this god could have ever lost in the first place.

Honestly, it’s bad enough to retroactively make us wonder how much of a threat Loki ever presented in Thor or the first Avengers film. The guy that nearly destroyed New York and conquered the world got beaten by a single hit from the same kind of TVA agent that was insanely easy to defeat in Deadpool & Wolverine. After seeing all that, it’s hard not to think that even someone as weak as Hawkeye could have taken Loki out.

Some would say that we shouldn’t take all of this too seriously, and that’s always good advice when it comes to the MCU. Nevertheless, Disney wants us to take these movies and shows as serious business, and because of that, they should be more consistent with the power level of these characters.

Knowing that former heavy hitters like Loki are only as strong or as weak as the script needs them to be just cements how much Kevin Feige and crew are making this up as they go along, something that bodes very ill for movies like Avengers: Doomsday and its follow-up, Secret Wars.