SPOILER WARNING: This story vaguely discusses a single scene in Marvel Studios’ “Eternals” that has been released by Disney, as well as a hypothetical future for Dane Whitman, Kit Harington’s character in the MCU.
After spending eight seasons as one of the leads on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” Kit Harington decided to trade one massively popular cultural juggernaut for another, joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in director Chloé Zhao’s “Eternals.”
Moving on from Jon Snow — the taciturn medieval warrior and erstwhile king of the North — Harington’s role in “Eternals” is Dane Whitman, a modern London bloke who happens to be dating Sersi (Gemma Chan), one of the titular Eternals, at the start of the film.
In the Marvel comics, however, Dane has more in common with Jon Snow — or, at least, a world of swords and sorcery — than Harington’s performance in “Eternals” would suggest. Dane’s family lineage stretches back to the medieval legend of King Arthur and the persona of the Black Knight, a warrior connected to the cursed Ebony Blade that bestows whoever wields it with terrific power — but at the cost of their sanity.
In the comics, Dane fights alongside the Avengers, and wrestles between heroism and villainy thanks to the cursed Ebony Blade. It’s no spoiler to note that none of that happens in “Eternals,” which casts Harington’s Dane as, in the actor’s words, “a good guy” — one of the only normal humans in a film otherwise concerned with ageless superheroes who first arrived on Earth roughly 7,000 years ago. Continue reading »