Marvel has spent nearly eighteen years perfecting a formula. But right now, their best story in recent memory might be the one that completely abandons it.
There’s a certain kind of television episode that critics love to describe as “unlike anything the show has done before,” which is usually code for “this one’s in black and white” or “the main characters barely appear.” These detour episodes have become their own subgenre. They’re prestige TV’s way of saying look, we’re cinema now. Most of them are self-indulgent. A handful are genuinely transcendent. And once in a blue moon, one of them shows up in the last place you’d expect to find it. A Marvel show called Wonder Man.
Episode 4 of Wonder Man, titled “Doorman,” is the latter. And it might be the most interesting thirty-two minutes Marvel Studios has ever produced.
The setup.
For those just joining us, Wonder Man is Disney+’s latest Marvel offering. It’s a character study masquerading as a superhero show (or vice versa), following struggling actor Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) as he hides his ionic superpowers to pursue a career in a Hollywood that has banned enhanced individuals from the industry. The reason for that ban? Something called the “Doorman Clause,” which the show’s first three episodes mention in hushed tones like actors discussing Rowling.
Then episode 4 arrives, and suddenly we’re watching a completely different show. The main cast vanishes. The warm, sun-bleached Los Angeles cinematography drains to stark black and white. The score shifts from Joel P. West’s contemporary riffs to something that sounds like Bernard Herrmann having a nervous breakdown. And for the next half hour, we follow a totally new character. DeMarr Davis is a nightclub bouncer played with devastating vulnerability by Byron Bowers. We watch as he accidentally becomes famous, accidentally becomes a commodity, and accidentally erases Josh Gad from existence.
Yes, that Josh Gad. Playing himself. It’s as unhinged as it sounds.
The “Atlanta” comparison (and why it’s apt.)
Critics have been quick to compare “Doorman” to Atlanta‘s legendary “Teddy Perkins” episode, and the comparison isn’t just lazy shorthand. Both episodes share a specific structural audacity. They both abandon their protagonists entirely to tell a standalone story that recontextualizes everything around it. Both use stark visual stylization (Teddy Perkins’s haunted mansion horror vs. Doorman’s Old Hollywood noir) to signal that the rules have changed. And crucially, both understand that the most effective way to illuminate a protagonist’s fear is to show them what happens when that fear comes true. To someone else.
Where Atlanta gave us a psychological horror film about the price of Black excellence in the music industry, Wonder Man gives us a tragicomedy about the price of any excellence in the entertainment industry. DeMarr Davis doesn’t want to be a hero. He’s content working the door at a nightclub, and in any other story, that contentment would be his fatal flaw. It would be the thing the narrative punishes him for until he accepts his destiny. But “Doorman” inverts this. DeMarr’s tragedy isn’t that he refused the call. Nope. It’s that he answered it.
The visual grammar of doom.
Director James Ponsoldt has said he wanted the episode to feel like “an old Hollywood fairytale,” and the influence of Billy Wilder and Frank Capra is unmistakable. But there’s something more sinister underneath the glamour. The cinematography is beautiful in the way a Venus flytrap is beautiful. The high-contrast lighting that makes DeMarr look like a star in his early scenes becomes harsh and unforgiving as his life unravels. The camera movements that once swept us along with his meteoric rise start to cage him, holding on his face in tight close-ups as the industry chews him up.
The choice to shoot in black and white might seem like just an aesthetic flex at first. But the episode is really about a man whose superpower is to become a portal. People pass through him. He’s a doorway, not a destination. And the monochrome palette literalizes this because DeMarr exists in a world drained of color, a world where he himself is a negative space through which other people achieve their goals. When the episode finally cuts back to Simon Williams watching the news in full color, the effect is truly startling. We’ve been inside something airless and enclosed, and suddenly we can breathe again.
It’s no wonder his catchphrase is “Ding Dong,” which is what you hear before the door opens. It announces arrival but implies that someone else is the main event. DeMarr, in this way, is perpetually a threshold and never the destination.
Josh Gad, destroyer of worlds.
The Josh Gad celebrity cameo isn’t really a cameo. Gad appears here as a heightened version of himself. Friendly, charismatic, and absolutely willing to use a man with superpowers as a special effect for his heist movie franchise. The casting is diabolically perfect. Gad’s screen persona is warm and unthreatening. He’s Olaf, he’s LeFou, he’s the guy you’d trust with your kids. So when he casually converts DeMarr’s terrifying ability into a Hollywood gimmick, there’s no menace lurking beneath it. To him, it’s all just business.
And then he vanishes into DeMarr during a reshoot and never comes out. The moment is played equally for horror and dark comedy. A man has been erased from existence, and somehow also it’s funny, because the entertainment industry has always been about people disappearing into other people’s projects.
The implication that Josh Gad is still somewhere inside DeMarr, lost in whatever void comprises his body, is the kind of Lovecraftian detail that Marvel would normally never touch. The horror of it lingers. It disturbs me even now, days after watching. And critically, it all goes unexplained. Nobody knows what happened or if Gad can ever be recovered. The universe simply moves on, and DeMarr’s left holding the bill.
Why this episode matters.
We all know the Marvel Formula usually works. The interconnected universe, the third-act skybeam, the quippy banter during fight scenes, and so on. These elements became a formula precisely because audiences responded to them with cash. But formulas have a shelf life, and Marvel’s has been showing cracks for years. The phrase “superhero fatigue” has become a critical cliché because it describes a real phenomenon. At this point, audiences can feel when something has been manufactured by committee.
“Doorman” suggests a new way forward. Marvel doesn’t have to abandon its superhero stories, obviously. They’re still the filter. Marvel just needs to trust that audiences can handle stories about the superhero apparatus. Stories about what it costs to be processed by an industry that turns people into content. The Doorman Clause, by that measure, is a meditation on how we consume extraordinary people, on how quickly inspiration becomes exploitation, on how the system protects itself by discarding anyone who proves too dangerous to contain.
It’s also, frankly, a more honest depiction of Hollywood than many Hollywood satires manage these days. Normally, DeMarr would be crushed by a more specific villain. In this, he realistically gets whittled away by a system that destroys him as easily as it created him. The incident with Gad was clearly brought on by the stress and pressure of having to perform, when DeMarr’s schtick has worn out and this cash-grab sequel (literally) is his only way out of creeping debt.
And this one mistake, this one failure to be superhuman is what dooms any other actor who might also have powers. The liability is no longer worth it, so Hollywood forbids all other actors, like Simon, from being in the industry. That is, unless, they hide their true selves.
The risk that shouldn’t have worked.
There’s a moment about halfway through the episode where you realize Marvel has pulled off something transgressive. They’ve made you care deeply about a character you’d never heard of, in an episode that has almost nothing to do with the show you signed up for. And they’ve done it without any safety net. Iron Man never shows up to reassure you this is all still the MCU. We don’t get a post-credits tease to redirect our attention. We just have to sit with this sad man and his terrible power. A famous actor who may or may not be cosmically dead. An industry that responded to tragedy by inventing paperwork.
The fact that this works at all, that “Doorman” is being called the best episode of Wonder Man and possibly the best episode of any Marvel Disney+ series period, tells us something important. Audiences still love superheroes and superhero stories. Maybe more than ever. But they’re tired of being underestimated. They’re tired of spectacle deployed as a substitute for stakes. They want stories that trust them to feel something complicated.
Marvel has spent nearly eighteen years building a machine that can produce superhero content at industrial scale. “Doorman” is the episode where they let someone use the machine to make something else entirely. And hopefully they’ve discovered that the machine was capable of more than anyone expected.
Whether they’ll learn from it is another question. But for thirty-two airless, gorgeous, deeply strange minutes, the MCU remembered that the point of having a formula is knowing when to break it.
Wonder Man is currently streaming on Disney+.
Images courtesy of Disney
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts. He hosts the podcasts Thank God for Movies, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
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