Nightmare Fuel / Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

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"Well, of course I have issues! THAT'S MY FREAKING FATHER!!!"

At first glance, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is presented as a quirky comedy filled adventure (akin to the first movie). But the second that Ego reveals his true intentions with one line that will change everything, Vol. 2 could easily qualify as one of the darkest in the MCU.

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• The Abilisk. No wonder the Sovereign didn't want to fight it. Hell, its appearance alone is guaranteed to unsettle you at best.
• The scene where The Ravagers loyal to Yondu were Thrown Out the Airlock by Taserface and his mutineers. The sight of dozens of frozen corpses floating in space is pretty unsettling to watch, not to mention the sheer sadistic glee with which the mutineers do it all.
  • Of note is Yondu's last supporter, Oblo, who goes out tearfully begging his captain to save him. And unlike Kraglin, who's clearly horrified to see his former comrades tortured to death, the rest of Taserface's faction take sadistic pleasure in killing people they've lived and fought alongside for years. There's been plenty of death in the MCU thus far, but cruelty on this level has been almost unheard of.
  • We get to actually witness people dying for being too long in outer space twice: one with the last loyal Ravager Tulik, and then with Yondu.
• The Ravagers' treatment of Baby Groot. While Taserface refuses to kill him because he's too adorable, his fate is not a pleasant one. He's locked in a bird cage, put in clothes he then desperately tries to take off and drenched in someone's drink, all the while everyone around him screams at the top of their lungs. And if you're thinking that that's not so bad, keep in mind that this is a baby we're talking about. Groot is suffering horrendous abuse by creatures twenty times his size, and there's nothing he can do about it.
• Despite its upbeat tone, there are elements of Yondu's arrow-rampage against his traitorous crew that are genuinely quite frightening.
  • In particular, Yondu takes the time to snuff out the lights in one room, meaning the targets can't even see their cause of death but instead just the red trail it leaves behind...
• Nebula putting herself together is the moment where it becomes clear how much of her body has been replaced by cybernetics, and how much pain it can cause her.
  • One line of dialogue in particular sheds a lot of light on this. Nebula tells Gamora that, because Gamora won all of their fights, Thanos' cybernetic "enhancements" included tearing off her arm, plucking out her eye, and ripping her brain from her skull.
  • Consider that in all three GotG movies, Nebula gets her body more or less crushed. We get to see her pop every bone and joint in her entire body back into place, showing how extensive her cybernetics must be.
  • After the crash but before Gamora pulls her out, Nebula is trying to free her leg from under the debris. It's very obvious that her leg is trying to heal itself, but every little movement keeps re-breaking it. Ouch.
• Ego. This is a guy who looks like he's just walked fresh off the set of an 80s' action movie, all smiles and charm to the Guardians, and his planet is an idyllic paradise of bright colors and gorgeous scenery. Then over time, it becomes clear that Yondu calling him a "jackass" was NOT a snide jab; he's a genocidal lunatic hellbent on assimilating the universe like an intergalactic tumor and remaking it all in his image, sees those who have his powers as only batteries and those who don't as unneeded trash. He killed Meredith Quill — and not even quickly, but by planting a brain tumor in her head, ensuring her death is slow, painful, and utterly terrifying — because in his eyes, the love he had for her got in the way of his plans. He's easily one of the sickest, most vile characters in the entire MCU, and one can only imagine what would have happened if he DID achieve his goal.
• Ego's human form reforming himself, from bones and nerves to muscles and everything, while talking all the way. It's almost a creepier version of Dr. Manhattan's genesis in Watchmen. Speaking of Dr. Manhattan, Ego implanting a tumor in Peter's mother is exactly what Manhattan was falsely accused of doing to others, making Ego's action all the more inhuman.
  • When he's reforming himself the second time after getting smashed by Yondu's ship, he's screaming in rage and looks like an extremely pissed-off ghost.
  • The third time he reforms (pictured on this page), he's walking slowly towards the trapped and immobile Guardians, in the form of his nervous system. When he starts talking again, he mainly appears as a skeleton with glowing blue eyes and a moving jaw (pictured above), which looks very unsettling.
  • Whenever he reforms, the missing parts of his body produce his "light" in a strange vaguely humanoid shape resembling his nervous system.
  • When he finally dies as his brain is destroyed, it's disturbing to see his human avatar slowly crumble into dust from the inside out. It's also deliciously satisfying considering what he's done.
• Gamora and Nebula discover a glowing cavern stacked from top to bottom with skeletons on Ego's planet. These are all Ego's children that Ego killed simply because they did not have his Celestial powers.
  Gamora: Oh my god...
  Nebula: We have to get off this planet.
  • You just know how bad this scene is when even Nebula — a cold and ruthless Dark Action Girl that has seen and suffered her fair share of nightmarish stuff — is horrified by what she sees.
    • On top of that, mere minutes earlier she was trying to violently murder Gamora. The second they stumble upon the mass grave, she instantly stops cold and prioritizes getting off of Ego's planet.
  • Adding on to it... Ego is the planet. The caves are inside his body. He is keeping the bones of his murdered children in himself and probably only has them stashed where people can't find them instantly because it would ruin the view. He doesn't bother burying them or getting rid of the evidence; once they're dead, they simply do not matter any more. If it weren't for Peter's Celestial abilities, the whole crew would have died and Ego's plan would have succeeded.
  • In particular, some of the skeletons look horribly mutilated, and some screaming in agony. Ego using Peter as a battery was nightmarish enough, but we can only imagine how he killed his other children, that he would have previously greeted in a fatherly manner like he did to Peter, after he found out they didn't have the genes. Ego promised Yondu he wouldn't hurt his children, then states that he didn't hurt them because "they never felt a thing". What isn't painful for a God is likely very painful for regular living creatures.
  • Hell, the sheer size of the room. If each individual skeleton is that of a child Ego fathered, there are several thousand of them in that cavern alone. And with how long Ego has been killing kids, that's probably not the only mass grave.
• Ego is cheerfully and happily explaining his plan to Peter, and chooses that moment to confess that he was the one who gave Meredith Quill a brain tumor. Just the casual way he says his plan was more important and he couldn't tie himself down is terrifying. Many audience members gasped loudly when he said this line.
  Peter: You said you loved my mother...?
  Ego: And that I did. My river lily who knew all the words to every song that came over the radio. I returned to Earth to see her three times. And I knew if I returned a fourth, well, I'd... I'd never leave. The Expansion... the reason for my very existence would be over. So, I Did What I Had to Do. But... it broke my heart to put that tumor in her head.
  Peter: ...WHAT?
  • Just to make things even creepier, Ego did... something to Peter so his eyes are all one dark color with a few light pinpricks. It doesn't help that the camera keeps doing close-ups on his face smack dab in the middle. It also nearly got Peter to side with Ego had the latter not made that confession regarding his mother.
    • Say nothing of how Peter acts during that scene, thanks to Ego's 'influence'. He's completely apathetic to hearing how all of his half-siblings were killed by Ego and grins slightly when Ego lays out his plans to destroy the entire universe. Even when he remembers that his friends will likely be killed, it takes very little persuasion on Ego's part to remind him that he's "above" that as an immortal. If it weren't for the news about his mother snapping him out of it, he might have gone his entire life as a mindless puppet, or however long Ego wanted to keep him.
  • Not to mention what happens after Peter snaps out of it. When Ego realizes that his son won't go along with his plan, he decides to do it the hard way, using him as a "battery". Peter gets stabbed through by tendrils of light and is obviously in pain.
  • Honestly, Peter's instantaneous reaction to learning that Ego killed his mother is absolutely terrifying once you take away the fact that Ego truly deserves it. He immediately starts shooting his blasters enough times to pulverize about fifty percent of Ego's upper body without even giving him a chance to explain himself (though nothing could explain that), all while sporting a look of pure rage on his face. The Vertigo Effect used to show Peter snapping out of his trance, coupled with the chilling "What?", only serves to make his coming outburst more unnatural and unnerving.
    Ego: Who in THE HELL do you think you are?
    Peter: YOU KILLED MY MOTHER!
    Ego: I tried SO HARD to find the form [changes form to David Hasselhoff] that best suited you... and THIS is the thanks I get?! [changes back to his normal avatar] You really need to grow up! [Ego pierces Quill with a beam of energy] I wanted to do this together... but I suppose you'll have to learn by spending the next thousand years as a battery!
  • Of note: goofy as it sounds, Ego turning into David Hasselhoff is rather creepy. This is Ego knowing exactly what Quill's memories and feelings are (including how young Quill wished Hasselhoff was his real dad) and throwing it all back in his face.
• Ego's plan. He plants fragments of himself into other planets, waiting to gather enough energy to activate them all, having them expanding to replace the whole planet with an extension of Ego himself, killing everything on the planet at the same time.
  • When the fragments of himself activate, we get several shots of cities on different planets being destroyed by the expanding material, overwhelming everything and everyone in its path.
    • Think you can hide from Ego by being on a wild planet, think again because as proven in a Freeze-Frame Bonus, even non-sapient life like the Orloni and wild planets such as the one in the scene were targeted by Ego.
  • We even see one mother and her child, as well as Peter's grandfather, survive when Peter thwarts Ego, but thousands more people weren't so lucky.
  • It can be seen as even worse than that. The uncontrolled growth of Ego's "flesh" into the planets he planted himself are gigantic tumors, like what he did to Meredith. Which makes them spreading across whole planets an even worse sight.
  • We briefly get a view from orbit of one of the planets, and Ego's outgrowth is clearly visible. If the planet is about the size of Earth, that means it expanded over a hundred miles just in those few moments Ego managed to make use of Peter.
• Until it is finally pressed, Rocket has no idea if the bomb-toting Groot will press the right button on the detonator (which will kill Ego, but give the gang a five minute escape window) or the wrong button (which will instantly kill everything within range, Ego and the Guardians alike).
• The cavern walls of the planet's core are very creepy. Ego is able to turn them into giant roaring versions of his face and fire beams of Celestial energy at his opponents, or create energy tentacles to block and launch attacks at will. Hearing him still speak with Kurt Russell's voice in this more monstrous form is a jarring sight.
  • Speaking of forms, Ego's definite true form which also serves as the core of his planetary body deserves some mention, even though it only shows up for a few scenes and has a fairly simplistic design. Basically, it's a gigantic, disembodied glowing brain which beats just like a human heart and has long, thin tendrils similar to nervous tissue that vaguely ressemble arms. Creepy. In a mixture between Nightmare Fuel and Moment of Awesome, look closely at Ego's brain/core the moment Baby Groot puts Rocket's bomb right on it and presses the correct button. You'll notice that it promptly begins to beat in a much more frantic, insane way as the bomb's countdown progresses, almost as if it's uselessly trying to avoid its imminent doom.
• Depending on how open Ego was about his extraspecies origin with the women he seduced, and whether they had the same frame of reference for a divine being fathering a child with a female of their species as a human Terran woman from 1970s Missouri, it's possible some of Ego's mating partners didn't even realize that him getting them pregnant was physically possible.
  • During that scene, while Ego starts explaining his plan, the shifting visual pod changes to that of his avatar standing in front of a little female child alien. Just... standing there... Before anything even happens, the screen cuts away. What happened?

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