I think a really underrated part of Thor: Ragnarok is the character of Skurge and his journey.

He's not A Bad Guy.

He is a bad guy. I mean, he's not good. His motivation is something inherent in Asgardian society -- DO DEEDS, GET RENOWN -- but he takes it in toxic directions.

Skurge is the very down-to-earth banality of evil on the planet of cosmic melodrama. He's a venal, envious little man of little courage or moral compunction (he of all Asgardians definitely knew something was wrong with "Odin" but he got a sweet gig out of it!)...

...but you find out he did fight alongside Thor in retaking the Nine Realms from chaos, there was just no glory or recognition for him, the mere soldier, fighting alongside gods. And probably considerably more risk.

But he's *supposed* to be a brave warrior and do great deeds, even without the superpowers.

So Loki offers him Heimdall's job and he's probably attributing it to his own cunning or some other inherently noble trait, where Loki just sees someone willing to do the job.

Someone who knows which way the wind is blowing, as Hela notices after she kills the Warriors 2/3.

And we see how uneasy he is with the whole thing from the beginning, and he just gets more and more concerned the deeper he gets, yet he keeps going along with it even as it escalates.

And it's more happenstance and the fact that Hela the Goddess of Death doesn't actually need much from him that stops him from doing more than *going along* with it. He never gets blood on his axe.

But you can see in his eyes that he knows, he's complicit. He's complicit in the slaughter. And you can see in his eyes that he would have brought the axe down.

When Loki made him the new Heimdall he could tell himself it was his big break, that finally he was getting recognized for his bravery and courage and initiative. With Hela, his illusions fall away. He knows what he is and he knows why he's doing it.

And he keeps doing it.

Then he reaches his breaking point and tries to flee anonymously, and then he reaches his other breaking point and he reveals himself to save the people he'd turned on.

And when he steps off the ship, allowing himself to be overrun... it is not apparent, watching the scene, that he needed to do that. He could have escaped with the ship, covering its retreat through the port as he had been.

He decides he has no future there.

Because he knows he would have brought the axe down.

And he knows with what he was complicit.

And probably he sees two very different futures, one where he lives a long time with the eyes of his fellow Asgardians on him, judging him, and one that is much shorter, but where he does the thing you're supposed to do, and that's all anyone knows of him forever.

And maybe he knows he can't spend the rest of his life -- his very long life -- doing the right thing, but he can do it for thirty seconds. For a minute. For however long he lasts.

And Tragically Flawed White Man Spends Whole Life Doing The Wrong Thing But Then Does Good is a terribly overdone genre of storytelling but of course Skurge is not the focus of the movie.

The main reason he exists in the narrative is so that Hela has someone to exposit to. If he had not bowed to her in the bifrost chamber, the only change to the movie right up to the end would be that we'd know less about her history, or she'd be talking to herself.

He does nothing. He really does nothing.

He does nothing when she appears and slaughters the Warriors 2/3, he does nothing when she slaughters the soldiers and Hogun, he does nothing while she sends her legions of the dead to hunt down the commoners.

He does nothing.

If the movie was any more about him and his pain it would probably have been obnoxious but it's just little moments and Karl Urban's acting.

And maybe at first, the first time you're watching it, you can laugh at what an inept coward he is. But then it keeps going on, and it's almost painful. Like cringe comedy so black it becomes cringe horror.

And his ending comes from two epiphanies:

1. I don't have to go along with this.

and

2. I can fight this.

And he couldn't have the second one without the first one.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about Skurge, and it's not "Oh, he's a great guy, underneath it all!" because he's not. And it's not "He's a victim of a society that does not understand him!", though I think Asgardian society shaped who he is.

If there's a lesson to generalize from this, it's that: the worst guy -- not the most Eeeeevillll like the Fruuiiits of the Devillll guy but just the worst guy you know -- still makes a choice every day. With every action. With every inaction. It's always a choice.

Skurge, The Worst Guy In Asgard, made a series of choices in Thor: Ragnarok. Basically every time we saw him.

And at the end, nobody like saved him or redeemed him or educated him. He just... chose differently.