While I'm thinking about "redemption stories" and "what even does redemption mean?" I really liked Skurge's story in Thor: Ragnarok. The whole thing.

You read between the lines of his lines about having fought in Vanaheim or whatever and it's: this is what life can be like, for someone who's an Asgardian but not one of the Aesir, not one of the Big Gods or their friends. He fought and probably almost died, he's no superhero...

...and he fought because that's what you were supposed to do and because there was supposed to be glory in it, but because it was what he was supposed to do, there wasn't any glory in it, and he just stayed a nobody until one day "Odin" shows up acting weirder than normal...

...and Heimdall questions his identity and is a fugitive hunted under threat of execution, and Skurge sees an opening for a guy who doesn't ask questions, and a way to get what fighting in the Realms didn't: wealth, power, women. Acclaim, if not glory.

Then Thor comes up and smashes the new order to pieces and he's a nobody again, and while he's a nobody, the NEW new order arrives and kills two of the special shiny superhero people in front of him like THEY were nobodies, no glory, and he doesn't want to die like that.

So he goes along to get along, it worked well enough when Loki was on the throne, but Hela isn't Loki, she doesn't want to build monuments and commission plays, she wants bloody conquest and slaughter of innocents.

And here's where Karl Urban really shines: under ridiculous make-up and in armor that looks like something you would snap around a He-Man action figure, that he can barely move in, he does the most acting when he has the fewest lines.

It only works because you can see his discomfort, it only works because when he's ordered to execute an old woman, you believe that even he doesn't know if he's going to do it, before he's interrupted.

And probably? Probably he would have. In order to survive, he would have. Told himself it was her or him, and he would have chosen himself.

And I believe he never stops thinking about that.

And at the end, when he sees a chance to escape and he takes it... hides himself among the refugees, covers his head and cowers... and then the ship is stopped, and he sees another chance: to do the thing. The right thing, the thing he was looking for on Vanaheim.

And he could have tried to break the restraint and cover the retreat from on the ship. He didn't *need*, for any practical reason, to call Hela out and bring attention to himself.

He needed to, though, because of what he *almost* did. Because of what he'd let himself become.

Is he redeemed, in a "forgiven of sins" or "bring balance to the force" sense? Is he redeemed, as in "now he's a good guy"?

Don't ask me. I think in part he died because he didn't think he could change who he was.

I think he knew that if he didn't seize the moment with both hands, moments akimbo as it were, and go out in a blaze of glory... he'd meet a far worse end and not long after. He'd go back to making the easy choices.

By the standards of his people, he died an honorable death. A glorious death. Making up in a material way for his earlier choices, dying to protect those who could not fight, dying in a battle he could not win but making his death count.

I think of the way he was written and the way Karl Urban played him and I imagine him staying up nights thinking, "Why couldn't I have died on Vanaheim?" and then answering himself, "You know why you didn't." and remembering - freezing, hiding, maybe even just hesitating.

But key to the story, and incidental to any choices he actually made: through happenstance and no action of his own (except maybe his hesitation), he never does much more for Hela but carry water and issue pronouncements.

He picked the wrong side. He was party to her atrocities, but under threat of death and it was never his hand on the weapon that delivered a blow.

He was a craven coward, but also as close to a "normal guy" as we see among Asgardian warriors with names.

And so he presents a challenge for the audience. We hate him from the first moment we see him (as a person, not necessarily as a character), but if we watched imperious death incarnate kill two superheroes in front of us while we were holding a mop... what would we actually do?

We all want to believe we would be Elderly German Man refusing to kneel before Loki. I suspect many more of us would, like Skurge, go along to get along, at first because we didn't see what else we could do, and then because we'd already gone along so far.

We'd tell ourselves we're looking for the exit, looking for a chance to get away, and that requires living, and there's no glory or honor or point in the kind of quick and grotesque death she was dishing out.

Skurge found his exit, and then gave it up.

I'm not holding him up as a paragon of heroism for suggesting he may have done better, in the end, than most would have in his situation.

His flaws brought him to that point.