So if Baron Zemo had to get a kidney transplant, you would want him to change his name to has
to go to the bathroom more often?
No.
Super powers are weird.
Let's talk to Tom and Nina to answer this question.
What are the most useless superpowers in the MCU?
Nina, what are the most useless powers in the MCU?
So when you asked me to think about this question, I knew my answer immediately, because I remember
when I saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2 in theaters, I took one look at Mantis and was like, "Why?"
And her super power being just a general vibe check does not seem super useful to me.
I don't know enough about kind of her comics incarnation to know if she has some other
good power, but I just did a rewatch of Infinity War and End Game.
And when she's just on Thanos's head camping out up there and is like, "He's mad."
It's like, "Yeah, we know he's mad, Mantis.
That's not helpful.
Punch him or something."
So yeah, her energy reading thing is dumb.
I don't like it.
It's not a good superpower.
But a fun character.
That's my hot take.
Let's be real.
She's a fun character and I like the actress.
It's just give her something else to do other than be a super psychiatrist or whatever she's
out there doing.
I don't see that being useful in any ... I haven't seen it be useful yet and I don't
foresee a way in which it will ever be useful.
Well, James Gunn is going to prove you wrong in Guardians of the Galaxy -
I hope he does.
Again, I like the actress, I like the character.
He's got to do something weird and cool, which he's more than capable of doing.
Have you seen Slither?
I haven't, but I know I probably should.
Yeah, you should.
My pick for most useless superpower in the MCU is Claw -
Okay.
- played by Andy Serkis in Avengers: Age of Ultron and in Black Panther.
So his deal is that he has a prosthetic arm that can shoot concussive pulses, and that's
pretty neat, I guess.
His hand got cut off by Ultron, And then he got a robot arm and it shoots sound.
You know what might've been more useful?
I don't know, a gun, just a gun.
Just carry a gun.
Right.
Your arm -
To use with your other arm, even.
Right.
It turns it ... it shoots sound waves, which I guess is cool to talk about, but at the
end of the day, what about, I don't know, a ballistic missile or -
He figured out guns awhile ago.
They would do the trick.
- bullets.
Yeah.
They're pretty effective.
Yeah.
And let's also talk about this.
I've known about this character for many, many years.
It doesn't make sense that his name is Claw, does not have a hand, but it is not a claw.
His name is Claw.
He should have at least one claw.
So what you're saying is if somebody has a defining feature about them, they should have
to change their name?
I'm saying that if you are going to go out of your way -
If you're going to name him Claw, he should have a claw.
He should have a claw, or at least be claw-like in some way, like Dr. Claw from Inspector
Gadget.
That's exactly what I was thinking.
He doesn't have a claw, but that's okay.
He's evil-ish.
It's fine.
This is a problematic worldview that you've got right here, Brian.
He sucks.
Claw sucks.
He shows up in one movie, he's evil, he gets his arm cut off.
He shows up in the next movie, he gets killed like a chump.
Claw, he sucks.
And his power sucks.
Use a gun.
So if Baron Zemo had to get a kidney transplant, you would want him to change his name to has
to go to the bathroom more often?
No, I'm just saying that Claw is a fairly menacing sounding name.
A claw is a weapon.
What does he fight with?
He fights with his claw.
Not a claw, yeah.
Wolverine fights with claws.
Claws are a thing.
And he has nothing to do with Wolverine.
Nothing to do with Wolverine.
No.
Nothing to do with claws!
as a character without turning to narrative crutches, like naming yourself after the thing
that's on your body.
So you're pro Claw is what you're saying?
You like Ulysses Claw?
Oh, I'm sorry, man.
Can we go back?
Can you reintroduce me?
Instead of calling me Tom, could you just call me skin tag he's trying to hide on camera
right now.
Oh my God.
You need to pull your life together.
You need to change your worldview.
Okay.
So skin tag you're trying to hide on camera.
Please tell us, what are the most useless superpowers in the MCU?
I'm canceling you.
First of all, Nina, I hate to disagree with you, but Mantis is you can talk to, and I'm
on board with that.
That's basically all I've been looking for my entire adult life.
I don't think that Mantis is useless.
Just a sensitive girl with a little ping pong balls on her head?
Well, now that you put it that way, maybe you've awakened something, but I'd rather
shift topic.
Yeah, that's fine.
I don't think that Mantis is useless.
Who I do think is useless is everybody else in the MCU.
Roast battle.
Nobody's safe.
Starting out with Captain America, you took human growth hormones from Germany and you
threw a garbage can lid at some people?
Are you trying to be a superhero or my stepdad Chip?
Boom.
Iron Man, I just rewatched your first couple of movies.
Your power is that you pull the pads from electronics to make a bulletproof suit that
you wouldn't let the government take away from you?
Got bad news for you, man.
You're not original.
I live above a methadone clinic.
You're a dime a dozen.
Boom.
The Incredible Hulk, you got exposed to something that makes you get angry and weirdly muscular.
It's not gamma radiation, it's called the Joe Rogan experience.
Black Widow, you look like Scarlett Johannson and I've had a crush on you since I went to
see Lost in Translation with my stepdad Chip.
What are you, my stepdad Chip?
And finally, Hawkeye.
Hawkeye, I appreciate that you found something that was important to you and you've learned
how to excel at it.
I think that's really important, not to mention the fact that you did it while supporting
a family of three children and a lovely wife.
Good for you, man.
Two children.
You remind me of my stepdad Chip.
What?
It's two children.
Didn't they have a third kid?
I don't think so.
I thought that was the whole thing, in Age of Ultron.
I hate to pull rank on you, man, but I think that you are so wrong about that number.
I thought they had two kids?
Oh, was there another kid on the way?
There was the third kid on the way.
And I think that they had to name it after Aaron Taylor Johnson, because they felt bad.
Oh, okay.
Well, sorry.
Sorry, I screwed up.
So let me tell you briefly about porcupine future telling lady.
Wait, is this a real thing?
Yes, this is a real thing.
This is from Agents of Shield.
Again, Agents of Shield.
Porcupine fortune telling lady in Agents of Shield.
Now it makes sense.
Okay.
Yeah, that checks out.
So in Agents of Shield, there's this great character played by Ruth Negga and she's great.
Oh, I love Ruth Negga.
Her name is Raina and I believe she's known as the woman in the flower dress or something
like that.
Okay.
Yeah.
She's very manipulative and creepy and she's after -
Oh, that's right.
I forgot about her.
- she's doing bad guy things, and that sets up the Inhumans arc, where they're going to
go through Terrigenesis and she wants to go through Terrigenesis so she can get her inhuman
powers and be super powerful and be super bad.
And so she does, and she gets porcupine quills all over her and she's really upset about
it.
As happens, yeah.
Yeah, she's not into it at all.
That's also fair.
She's like, "This stinks."
That's what she says.
Direct quote, "This stinks."
But eventually she learned she can also tell the future.
So that happens, Inhumans.
But there's no porcupine bite involved in this.
No, it's purely Terrigenesis.
Wasted potential.
She goes to Terrigenesis and she comes out looking like a -
Like a porcupine.
Yeah.
Interesting.
How do you feel about the Inhumans as a basis for somebody getting super powers?
I recognize that on paper, there's nothing that makes it more or less ridiculous than
being a mutant, but for some reason I just never got on board with it.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think the Inhumans have potential.
I think that there's fun to be had in the Inhumans, but at the end of the day, I've
been kind of hot and cold with them.
I think that there's a lot of interesting things that you could do with the Inhumans,
but it's not my jam, as it were.
Well, I mean to bring it back to what you said at the beginning, or actually in a different
episode, because time is a flat circle, I'm sure nobody thought Guardians of the Galaxy
would ever be popular because it's really weird.
So I think with the right director and the right cast, almost anything in Marvel, with
some exceptions, could work on screen, but you need the next kind of James Gunn type
to really make it into something good.
So I think the Inhumans just needs a really cracked director and cast if it's going to
-
Can we talk a bit about the Inhumans and some of their useless powers?
Could we?
Black Bolt.
Do you have feelings?
How do you feel?
How do I feel about Black Bolt?
Yeah.
Well, in general ... man, I got to say, I don't know.
It's just one of those subjective things where ... it's the same thing with magic in comics.
Like I have the same problem with magic, like Doctor Strange.
I could never get into Doctor Strange because the fact that he used magic always felt like
a cheat code.
It was always like, "Well, he can just magic harder, and then he'll get out of the situation
that he's in."
But at the same time, everybody in Marvel, everybody in comic books, they're all magic.
It's just different.
They just put different labels on it.
Iron Man is technology magic, and Spider-Man is sticky people magic.
And everybody's a different kind of magic, but for some reason it just doesn't click
with me.
And that's the thing with Inhumans.
I mean, if there had been ... I don't know, maybe it's just I never got into them when
I was a kid, but Black Bolt, not any different than an X-Man.
There could be an X-Man who can't talk or he'll explode a thing.
I like Black Bolt.
I like looking at him.
Sure.
I think he's got a cool character design, but Black Bolt's power is that every sound
he makes is super-duper strong, super-duper laughs so loud that it will disintegrate matter
in front of him, so he doesn't talk.
As a character, it's kind of hard to connect when not only can they not say anything, they
can't really even do anything.
Right.
So he just kind of stands around a lot and gestures at people vaguely in the comics.
See, I don't know.
I feel like that could be ... cinematically, that could be really fascinating.
It could be interesting.
Doug Jones made that movie Mute.
Really anytime ... if you could just get a good actor behind it, then it kind of rocks.
Yes.
If you have somebody who can't talk and it forces the audience to treat that character
as a mirror, I think that could be fantastic.
100%.
Instead what they did was they had a cranky guy when they made the -
Inhuman show.
IMAX, ABC.
Yeah, the TV show.
Right.
Okay, but -
It was just the guy who looked kind of vaguely perturbed to have to be doing the show most
of the time.
That doesn't do anything.
I agree with everything you're saying, but his very power is so powerful that he can't
even use it.
That's the bit.
I think that kind of rocks, man.
I think that that's cool.
I think it's the same thing that makes it interesting when Superman holds back when
he's fighting the bad guy.
Yeah, but he still flies.
The fact that he could explode everybody.
Yeah, he does.
Yeah.
I'm saying he still flies, he still lifts cars, he still will throw a punch, he'll still
do a laser vision or a cold breath.
Black Bolt just doesn't do anything.
I want to like Black Bolt, but he's engineered to not do things that you want to watch a
super hero do, which is use their super powers.
Okay, let's take this from a different angle then.
For the last 13 years we've been looking at Marvel characters who all have the exact same
traits, namely they're overconfident and they talk too much.
This could be a huge change in tone for the entire franchise, to just have one character
who shuts the hell up the whole time.
I'm not against that.
You want a quieter, more introspective approach to them.
Yeah.
I think that could be the most progressive movement that the MCU has ever made is to
introduce a white character who does not talk.
Wow.
That would be very different.
Just sits on his throne not talking.
Just shut up, yeah.
All right.
Thanks for joining us.
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