The only HFIL 10 things I can provide at the moment because I’m quite normal for TFS Cooler. I am grateful for the exquisite food. The overall episode is indeed a bit fast paced but it did have hidden gems in it.
we make a lot of jokes about miguel being catholic-coded with his mexican-irish heritage and his insane dedication to the idea that to live is to suffer and to suffer is righteous. and that really is true for catholicism, but another aspect i find very interesting about miguel’s catholic-coding is that he doesn’t question the Canon.
catholicism and christianity discourage free thought. that isn’t meant to be an own on the religion, catholicism and christianity just much prefer conformity. the church teaches its disciples that their lives and their futures have already been preordained by God, and His word is final and infallible. to question Him and His teachings is pointless, bc He’s laid it out clear as day in the bible. which you don’t need to read, actually. just leave the interpreting to God and the popes and the priests, sweetie. they’ll tell you how to think.
and that’s the headspace that miguel is coming from. once the Canon is established in miguel’s mind as the end-all, be-all of dimensional stability, he wholly dedicates himself to it. from what we can see (in part one at least), after the incident in miguel’s adopted universe that caused it to completely unravel, miguel, either by choice or in ignorance, never once considers the implication of mitigating the destruction caused by an unraveling.
i want to really draw attention to my use of the word ‘implication’ here, because it’s not that miguel hasn’t thought of mitigating that damage. on the contrary, during pav’s dimensional crisis, we see that miguel has not only thought of, but assembled, a task force that — and i cannot stress this enough — can HALT the progression of dimensional breakdown. we are literally shown in the movie that miguel has already come up with a way to minimize, if not eliminate, an unraveling event.
and of course he has! because he’s a genius! just like every other spider-person, miguel is BRILLIANT. he sees a problem, and he finds a solution that will save millions of lives. because that’s what spider-people do.
but miguel is a catholic(-coded) spider-person. so that’s where the thought process ends. you don’t question what that ability to interfere means for the Canon, because the Canon is infallible. so there’s no reason to look deeper and try instead to fortify these unraveling-elimination tactics. the Canon has the last and only say. it’s a coincidence that these things can be mitigated. and it’s much easier to just follow the Canon anyway.
it’s extremely ironic, honestly. that miguel not only has the answer to the Canon question right in front of him, but was the one to solve it himself. hell, he even knew that miles’s dimension was stable despite miles himself being an “anomaly.” all of the piece of this puzzle are laying themselves out in front of him, but miguel, blinded by his relentless devotion to the Canon, refuses to see them. it’s all very funny.
honestly what i find interesting in this whole situation is that peter b parker, a jewish man, hailing from a group of people notorious for deep dives into meaning and interpretations and who mercilessly question the torah and each other, has gone along with this blind faith interpretation of the Canon for a whole year. he really was totally focused on that baby, huh?
menion leah, on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion for the third time this week: “hey so in case i die can i quickly just get a normal amount of stuff off my chest about my best friend who is a literal ray of sunshine and who i regularly invited to my castle to have late night sleepover gossip sessions with and did i mention that i love him”