This is one interesting episode. I’m going to present two readings of it. The first is what’s on the surface, a story about love, loss and what we’ll do to hold onto the past. The second, a deeper reading, is about the arrogance of powerful men and how they set about destroying everything and everyone else – so they don’t have to face the realities of life.

The story asks what if Stephen Strange lost the person he loved rather than his hands. It follows him as he does everything he can to bring her back from the dead. – including becoming Sorcerer Supreme. Interestingly it suggests he ignores resurrecting her in favour of trying to stop the circumstances of her death in the first place. Given the nature of the mystic arts in the MCU, it’s a little bit of a shake my head moment because he’s both smart and magical – and, given how the episode turns out, a much better solution than the one he opts for. Nevertheless, I can see how it would simply be too confusing in an episode to have two possible solutions (I’m not sure it could work within the constraints of a film either).

The episode does a good job of exploring his obsession and growing mania right through to the end. Strange is unable to see the damage he’s doing both to himself but also to the rest of the world. What’s fascinating is that others have been through the same loss but they’ve come out the other side yet Strange refuses to contemplate life beyond that defining moment.

When someone points out that his loved one’s death is a fixed point – that he himself can’t exist as he does if it’s changed he’s too far gone to see the ineluctable logic of the situation. By the way – fixed point? Hello, Doctor Who.

The emotional heft of Strange’s situation doesn’t quite hit for me but there are some good reasons for this, not least of which is that Strange is portrayed as such a smug know-it-all it is hard to empathise with him when he loses something precious.

Secondly, I don’t think the pace of the episode allows for us to quite build the connection we need to feel the emotional gap in Strange’s life. It’s a shame because I think with another three to five minutes to the run time we could have seen and felt more poignancy in the unfolding events.

There’s a third reason why I don’t think Strange’s loss hit me, and it was only on the second time of watching that I twigged what it was. Strange is privileged. He is powerful, smart, a White man in a society where that grants him supremacy and rights others don’t have. Each and every person to warn him off is either a woman or a minority and here is the deeper message of the show – that those who are used to seeing the world serve their purpose find it that much harder to accept it when the reality of loss and nature’s indifference to our feelings becomes apparent.

Ironically, it’s Strange’s very position as Sorcerer Supreme which makes his loved one’s death a fixed point which he can’t change without undoing himself. Yet Strange insists he has the right not only to try to change that but to sacrifice everyone else in his attempt. You see this kind of attitude from powerful people all the time – that the lives of others are not as real as their own and therefore can be used, exploited and, ultimately, spent to get what they want.

When he’s called out he can’t see it, can’t acknowledge his own arrogance in assuming his pain is worse than anyone else’s. Nor can he begin to imagine that it’s not deserving of special treatment, that he doesn’t get to override the lives of others to get what he wants. Yet this is the default for the privileged when they face a loss of power. There are fewer more conscious of status than the powerful. We see it in the opposition to progressive movements throughout living memory (LGBT+, Black Lives Matter and others) – where the very idea of others having rights the same as those who are powerful is considered heretical and worthy of opposition.

Strange doesn’t oppose others – he is simply moving to protect what he considers to be his by taking and taking and taking until there’s nothing left to take. The rest of the world can burn if he can only get what he wants. You might argue this is the blindness of all consuming grief but with Strange it’s hard to accept he feels this way simply because he loves someone. In my mind at least it’s a misunderstanding of what love is – it’s not forever, it’s precious precisely because it’s rare and because it can end. Our time in love is limited and all the more valuable because of it.

For Strange love is clearly a possession as much as it’s a fulfilment of who he is as a person. (Not to say that people can’t have absolutely fulfilled lives without romantic love by the way.)

I come back to my detachment from Strange’s emotional journey and I find I’m held at a hand’s distance because my view of the world doesn’t match Strange’s. I see his arrogance, his privilege and am repulsed by it. His view of the world pushes me away as much as it his loss draws me in.

I like this clever underlying exploration of how power corrupts even our ability to love and grieve, twisting us up until we consider ou           r own loss to trump that of all who came before.

Strange’s solipsistic point of view was in place long before he was subjected to loss – it was the ground in which that seed feel and bloomed into a more profound tragedy still.

A last comment to finish up – the Watcher. They have come a little bit more into focus with each episode. Something to watch…

Verdict: Of all the episodes so far this one feels the most complete, the one with the deepest sense of being its own story. I liked it despite its bleak message, its warning about assuming we are the meaning in the world.

Rating? 7 absorbed creatures out of 10.

Stewart Hotston