I appreciate that they went small plotwise in the end, and generally quite enjoyed the series.
I get that this wasn't satisfying for everyone though. The series started in a way that could have gone in very different directions, and it's natural that a lot of people in a situation like that are going to be disappointed that it didn't go somewhere they hoped to see.
That's kind of "the problem" when you do a series like this where you deliberately keep audience in the dark about what's going on and what the show is about exactly. A lot of good entertainment is about setup and payoff, and in a series like this, the payoff can basically never match the setup, because the audience really knows where the whole thing was going only after hey've seen the whole thing, and that's just not as satisfying as when you've been lead to expect the exact thing that you get in the end.
To me though, I don't mind. I thoroughly enjoyed the show for what it was, I appreciated what it did in the early parts, and even though those first episodes kind of had no relevance to "the main plot", I thought this was a a fun akd interesting (if not super original) comic book fantasy depiction of trauma and grief and their sometimes very unhealthy connection to nostalgia. Not dumb, but also not trying too hard for a superhero tv series.
I also enjoyed the meta stuff about nostalgia, outsider/insider dichotomy, independent women and people of colour crashing into the nuclear family fantasy etc. It wasn't super deep, but it was good enough to add some layers of flavor and extra meaning to everything.
In other words, because the exploration of themes and characters worked and they at least did some good stuff with the concept, I don't personally care at all that the plot itself was kind of just there.
I liked Agatha as a villain to a point where I would have liked more of her. I also really enjoyed how they successfully flipped the hero/villain thing upside down, where "the hero" was hurting a lot more people and was generally much more of a threat for the world, while the villain, though selfish, mean and clearly indifferent to other people's suffering, had plans that were overall a lot less destructive. It's far from the first "what if the super villain was on the right side" storyline, but this is instantly one of my favorites because for once the whole thing followed naturally from the setup, and they did it without in any way redeeming the villain, which I do think is kind of a first.
Agatha and the dick agent who's name I cant remember basically did save the people of Westview, even though they obviously weren't good people especially at the time when they were doing the world saving. That's just interesting and unusual and I appreciated it, even though the mechanics of especially the SWORD stuff was so disposable it was in some moments almost painful.
Biggest negative was Monica Rambeau, she shouldn't have been in this at all. She had no purpose in the story, no personal arc or even good lines. Cutting her character completely out and giving her Westview scenes to Darcy would have clearly been the right thing to do. As an origins story for her, this was just bad.
Overall, solid 4/5 series on my books, and I think I'll enjoy rewatching this at least a couple of times.
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