I’m more of a Star Wars nerd so my frame of reference for my question is the nebulous amount of training required for The Force. In the OT, Luke gets what basically amounts to a crash course from Yoda even though he’s “too old” to begin the training, and he manages to take down Darth Vader, a lifelong force expert whose legendary power helps keep an entire empire in line. OK, so Vader was old and weak, and maybe he let Luke win a little.
But that’s all we get until the prequel trilogy, when we see just how much training goes into an average Jedi, and Luke’s force prowess makes even less sense. But then in the sequel trilogy we see people becoming force experts based on nothing more than the needs of the plot.
So it seems to be with Dr. Strange. Is he an exceptionally good sorcerer? How is he the sorcerer supreme if there’s an entire order of sorcerers who’ve been training for much longer? Is sorcery just that hard? And then how do you explain Ned being able to cast spells with no training? Is Strange’s training handled differently in the comics?
First point is that he’s not the sorcerer supreme in the MCU, Wong is currently.
The whole point behind Dr. Strange is that he was already a brilliant surgeon with photographic memory. He used the same skills he used to learn to be a doctor to learn to be a sorcerer. However, prior to the end of the first Doctor Strange movie, he was still just a novice. But he then proceeded to get stuck in a time loop in Dormammu (and then experience 14 million futures in the fight against Thanos). So basically he’s had multiple lifetimes of experience in the span of a few minutes.
As for Ned, Strange implies that some people have innate magical powers. And all he did was use a sling ring, which we learn in the Doctor Strange movie doesn’t take much skill, just belief that it will work.
A bit, yeah. Strange first appeared as a back up story in the anthology comic Strange Tales, and he’s presented as a “Master of Black Magic,” with no origin story provided. After a few more stories proved the character’s viability, they published an origin, which the MCU followed pretty faithfully - brilliant but arrogant surgeon cripples his hands in a car crash, bums around the the world trying to find a cure, until in desperation he tracks down a rumor about a man who can heal any injury with “magic.” The plot unfolds a bit differently, but it’s like an eight page comic, so that’s not surprising: almost as soon as he arrives at Kamar-Taj, he finds out the Ancient One 's apprentice, Baron Mordo, is planning to betray him. He foils the plan, and is taken on as the new apprentice. The whole thing is framed as a flashback, so once he’s taken on as an apprentice, that’s the end of that story, and the character’s next appearance, he’s back to being a fully trained wizard. How long ago this happened, and how long he spent training, isn’t explicitly stated, but it’s implied to have probably been a few years. The interesting thing to note here is that, for the first ten years of Dr. Strange stories, the Ancient One was still alive, and a recurring character. IIRC, the title “Sorcerer Supreme” doesn’t show up until the story where the Ancient One dies, and Strange takes over the role.
I haven’t seen the second movie yet, but in the first movie, it’s also made clear that he cheated the training time. Very early on, he finds the Eye of Amamato (which is actually the Time infinity stone), and with its help, even a novice like him is able to pull some time shenanigans. And he then makes use of those time shenanigans to do a lot of further training very quickly.
I don’t see the Dormammu time loop helping him learn to be a better sorceror. That was just a matter of ‘arrive, ask to bargain, get killed’ over and over and over again, who knows how many times.
The observation of the 14 million (and 6?) futures in an attempt to find a way to defeat Thanos was just that, observation. He might have seen something new to him in the likely limited time-frame he watched (from, say, where they were at that point to their total crushing defeat, and then, past the Blip to their total crushing defeat, over and over and etc again), but I can’t imagine, without the ability to practice this new thing, or even try it out once, it would be an improvement of any significance.
That isn’t what really happened. When he started using the Eye of Agamotto, Wong and Mordo burst in and berated him for using it. That led immediately to the first fight with Kaecilius in the London Sanctum. It’s pretty much nonstop action and some fast exposition/reveal of betrayal between that and the climactic scene with Dormammu, there are no stops for further training in between.
The training scenes we see before that indicate that (a) Strange is a fast learner with a photographic memory, and (b) he’s perfectly willing to skip a lot of steps to learn what’s interesting to him, essentially stealing books that are forbidden to a novice like himself.
His other “cheat,” as depicted in the training montage, was in using his astral form to keep studying while his physical body slept. As you note, he didn’t have the Time Stone yet at that point.
Though the surface text of superheroes is that anybody can become one, the subtext is that superheroes are actually special to begin with. The costume merely objectifies what is latent. That’s not as contradictory as it might seem. The concept of superheroes built on the then common saying that any boy could grow up to be President. American kids - well, a certain class of them - were led to believe that their apparent meaningless was just hiding their true shining inner qualities. All they needed was a push to let it out. Seeing their parents murdered. Or being born on Krypton. How many kids thought deep down that those boring people who raised them weren’t really their parents, because they were really an alien or a princess or a wizard and would some day show them all?
Probably the best example is the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordon. When Abin Sur crashed on Earth in Showcase#22, he searched for “a deserving Earthman … He must be one without fear! Entirely without fear!” His green beam scoured the entire world and found the One. How is that not figuratively touched by God? Ordinary everyday people don’t have that happen to them; only the hidden special souls do.
I don’t remember him fighting anything off in the first film - he’s show up, say his line, and be immediately ganked. Then he’d show up, say it again, and ganked in a different way. Am I misremembering?
Still, he probably picked up some good tricks from watching Dormammu kill him over and over.
Yeah, he was “fighting it off” in the sense that he’d futilely resist for somewhere from 0-3 seconds, then get killed, then immediately return and say “Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.” But some of the deaths definitely repeated, it’s not like he learned a valid defense against any of the attacks - Dormammu was just switching them up in the hopes he’d either find a way to break the cycle, or find something painful enough that Strange would surrender & willingly end it.
I think it was a combination of both. He learned…but he also knew he could never ultimately beat him. So it wasn’t like it was Dr. Dark Souls…sure he could have rolled left, blocked struck back, rolled right…but that would have just prolonged his agony.
And indeed, in the MCU, Dr. Strange was canonically already special. In Captain America: Winter Soldier (set well before Strange’s car crash), he’s listed as one of the “significant” individuals the surveillance is watching.
Although we never find out why he’s on the list. I prefer to think he was targeted because he’s a wealthy, connected, highly intelligent individual who would be opposed to being ruled by Hydra, and could potentially be a resistance leader of some sort, and not specifically because they knew he was secretly magical.
Zola’s algorithm looks at people’s history and behavior to predict their future potential to be a threat to Hydra:
The 21st century is a digital book. Zolataught Hydra how to read it. Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, e-mails, phone calls, your damn SAT scores. Zola’s algorithm evaluates people’s past to predict their future.". — Agent Jasper Sitwell