WandaVision 1x09 Review: “The Series Finale” (Goodbye) [Guest Poster: Hannah E.]

"The Series Finale"

Original Airdate: March 5, 2021

Everything and more happens in the super-sized finale of WandaVision. This episode is definitely a bit of a hot mess express, but I actually kind of love it. A lot of the plot machinations the show had been dragging its feet on have to be dealt with here, and some of the stuff with Hayward and Monica doesn’t really work for me. But overall the stuff this episode gets wrong pales in comparison to how much it gets right. 

Watching the first and last episodes back-to-back would feel like a jarring tonal shift, but the show finds a clever way to work that into Wanda’s character. It started off as a mystery box, but only insofar as Westview was a mystery box for Wanda; all of the discoveries we made as the audience were through her eyes, and we weren’t allowed any insights that she didn’t have. We realized she was running Westview at the same time she did, discovered Geraldine was Monica who worked for SWORD when she did, and discovered how Westview was created when she did. It was a nice side effect that hiding things from the audience gave them a reason to tune in every week, but the show was only structured that way because of what it meant for Wanda’s character; because WandaVision is a world she created, the show was in denial just as much as she was. Once she worked through all five stages of grief, finally reaching acceptance, there was no reason for the show to be hiding anything because Wanda no longer was, which is why the finale isn’t focused on any mysteries. 

In general, I think WandaVision ran into a problem of the audience having completely different goals than the show. Fans wanted more Marvel or comic book elements, like Ralph really being Quicksilver from Fox’s X-Men or for Wanda to break open the Multiverse, but those were always secondary in WandaVision. The primary goal of the show was a character study of Wanda. I understand why people who came into it expecting one thing were disappointed — because the actual comic book elements are the weak point of the series — but the character work done with Wanda and Vision is, in my opinion, so much better. I wouldn’t trade a single character beat in the series.

THE SCARLET WITCH

The pacing of Wanda’s fight with Agatha is a little too rushed, but the character work is incredibly solid. Structuring the sequence around Wanda’s most central character trait of denial — refusing to accept her mantle as the Scarlet Witch — takes the inherently fantastical nature of a fight between two witches and grounds it within the main themes of the show. Having Wanda win by using runes and finally accepting her new mantle shows how much she’s grown over the series with handling her denial. It places the emphasis on character growth instead of whose power is strongest, making the victory feel much more meaningful than if Wanda had simply overpowered Agatha. 

There’s a moment where Agatha offers Wanda everything she’s ever wanted: if Wanda gives up her power, Agatha will let her keep Vision, the kids, and her idealized Westview while also freeing the people and letting them live in peace. Agatha most definitely would’ve used her newly-acquired chaos magic for nefarious purposes, but if Wanda were offered this deal in the first episode there’s no doubt she would’ve said yes; the wellbeing of the world was less important to her than her family. The fact that Wanda doesn’t fall for Agatha’s trap in the finale and chooses to sacrifice her family shows how far she’s come. Choosing to lose Vision and the kids instead of putting Westview at risk is proof that Wanda takes the harm she caused seriously, intent on righting her wrong instead of getting what she wants. It’s a really significant moment of character growth for her, and helps to make the ending sit easier with audiences. 

The moment Wanda powers up into her full Scarlet Witch persona is so clever in the way it subtly subverts tropes. Comic books, largely written by men, have always been fascinated with the trope of Mad Women. Many of the most famous runs are slight variations on “a woman gets powers, has emotions that turn her evil, and must be subdued by her male counterpart,” and Wanda’s House of M story in the comics is no exception. WandaVision follows a lot of the same beats but flips them around to empower her instead: Wanda runs from her emotions, creates Westview, and denies her powers. And she finally succeeds by accepting her emotions and her power. Instead of power making her turn bad, it’s the acceptance of her power that allows Wanda to start undoing her mistakes. Moments like that make me so happy Marvel let a woman be in charge of Wanda’s narrative for once. 

DOUBLE VISION

I don’t think the writers get enough credit for how well-formed a character Vision is. Considering he’s a robot, it would be very easy for writers to go too far in one direction and give him no personality, or go too far in the other direction and make him feel too human and divorced from his origins. The team behind WandaVision struck a perfect balance, and the introduction of White Vision really highlights that. 

There are two lines of dialogue, one from real Vision and one from White Vision, that serve as a masterclass in character writing. The first, from White Vision, is when he tries to kill Wanda and says: “And they told me you were powerful.” The line is merely a statement of fact, but the context the writers have placed it in tells you so much more. First, it says that this version of Vision is cold and feels no love for Wanda, but also that he — extremely unlike the real Vision — takes pride in his status as a weapon, almost braggadocious in his ability to so easily defeat Wanda. And because he doesn’t have human emotions, he doesn’t realize that he was only able to best Wanda because she walked up to him completely vulnerable and was under the belief that he loved her. 

Then in contrast, there’s a line from the real Vision during his fight with White Vision where he asks, “Might we resolve this peacefully?” Again, the line is merely a statement of fact because Vision is still a robot, but the writers do an incredible job of imbuing it with his personality. It shows that not only has he transcended his intended purpose as a weapon, trying to resolve things peacefully, but he also has a sense of humor. He sarcastically adds, “A no, then” after his peace attempt fails. 

Both Vision and White Vision’s lines could’ve lacked all personality, but instead the writers found a way to make them showcase both synthezoids’ character. The addition of White Vision, as cold and unfeeling as he is, works especially well in light of what we’ve seen from Vision through the first eight episodes. We’ve seen him married and raising a family, but more importantly we’ve seen the way he uses his robot otherness as a way to connect with Wanda. As the only other being with a connection to the Mind Stone, he’s the only one she can relate to and his unusual perspective on humanity is the one thing that keeps her grounded. To see White Vision have all of the same robotic qualities as Vision but weaponize them to hurt Wanda is almost as painful a gut punch to the audience as it is to her. 

SHADES OF GREY

The most controversial aspect of the finale is the show’s handling of Wanda’s actions in Westview. A lot of people think the show let her off the hook, but I really don’t think that’s the case. 

Unlike other Marvel heroes, Wanda won’t always do the right thing. She can be at turns selfish and selfless, depending on the situation she’s in. The finale actually does a really good job exploring the bounds of her grey morality. Trying to protect her family pushed Wanda into her biggest moral transgression, taking over a town and making people play roles in her dream sitcom life. But it also pushes her to be selfless; she throws herself in front of Vision and the twins to protect them from Agatha, knowing Agatha will use the opportunity to drain her magic. Wanda’s love for her family is her primary motivation, and it isn’t inherently good or bad. She can become a villain because her motivation isn’t to be a hero; it’s just to protect her loved ones.

And even in her selfishness, Wanda does try to minimize harm as much as possible. She doesn’t let Agatha kill the SWORD agents, catching them before they hit the ground, even though they were trying to hurt her kids. Throughout many episodes we’ve seen Wanda try her best to avoid people getting hurt — protecting Monica, not hurting the SWORD agents stationed outside the Hex, and sparing Fake Pietro. She never wants to hurt anyone: she just wants to keep her family and is willing to ignore the side effects.

Wanda’s denial is central to her morality. The reason she keeps the town running for so long is because she believes the people are happy, ignoring any evidence to the contrary. Vision tells her in the fifth episode that Norm is in pain and as a telepath, Wanda’s subconscious must make the choice not to feel the townspeople’s emotions. The force of Wanda’s denial lets her believe no one is getting hurt, which is the only reason she keeps the Hex going. 

It doesn’t excuse Wanda’s actions that she wasn’t intentionally hurting people, but it does complicate them. So many of the debates that have been had over the morality of Wanda’s actions are just so boring because they fail to consider the way denial affects everyone’s choices. Every time you speed on the freeway, you’re increasing the chance that someone will die in a traffic accident. Yet you do it anyway because you tell yourself that you’re not going to get in an accident, even though statistically someone will be getting in a traffic accident on the freeway. We collectively as a society have decided it’s morally acceptable to risk someone’s life over something as small as getting to work on time because the consequence of that action is so far removed from the action itself. There’s just enough space to deny that you could hurt someone.

If we’re all willing to potentially risk someone’s life over something as small as getting to work on time, imagine the choice you would make if your husband and kids’ lives were at stake. Wanda had no choice in making the Hex and didn’t realize she controlled it until after Billy and Tommy were born. Taking it down would not only mean losing them, but it would also mean she would be personally responsible for their deaths. And Vision and the twins were real and alive; their deaths matter just as much as anyone else’s.

Most problems people had with the finale center around the last scene between Wanda and Monica; they think it’s the show using Monica to let Wanda completely off the hook, but that’s not how the scene is meant to be interpreted. Head writer Jac Schaeffer said the scene was re-written after they realized it was the only time in the finale that Monica and Wanda would get to talk. It needed to very quickly make all the reasons Monica felt such a strong connection to Wanda clear; because the scene had so much to do, it’s definitely over-written which creates the room for people to misinterpret it. But the scene was not meant in any way to excuse Wanda’s actions. This quote from Jac Schaeffer makes that pretty clear:

When you bring up what I said about black and white villains, I mean what it makes me think of is Wanda. I’m interested in all the sides of Wanda. You know, seeing her flaws and her selfishness and how reactionary she is and how big her anger can be.

I think analyzing where this scene went wrong — how what the writers intended to convey became so divorced from the meaning people took from it — is pretty fascinating. 

The first disconnect is how people reacted to the framing of Wanda’s Walk of Shame through a street of very angry townspeople. People reacted to this as if the show was trying to paint the townspeople in a bad light, as if we were supposed to feel sympathy for Wanda, but that wasn’t the intention. They were actually trying to show the audience that Wanda was not forgiven — that she had wronged people here in a way that had no real fix. But because audiences are so used (especially in Marvel products) to being wholly on the side of the protagonist, people interpreted it the wrong way.

Then there’s Monica’s line: “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them.” I don’t think the writers did themselves any favors here, because understandably what the audience took this to mean was that Monica believed Wanda was an unsung hero wrongfully accepting the scorn of the townspeople. And if that was what the show was trying to communicate, I would agree it’s a dicey moral message. But I don’t think it was. Monica’s line is meant to be interpreted much more as a simple statement of fact — unlike her, no one else in Westview will ever understand the why of Wanda’s actions. Wanda’s response makes this pretty clear: “It wouldn’t change how they see me.” Wanda knows she doesn’t deserve the town’s forgiveness, which is why she doesn’t try and ask for it. She, and the show, understands that her actions at the end don’t justify her actions in the middle.

Wanda asks Monica: “And you, you don’t hate me?” which highlights another problem this scene ran into. The show a little bit takes for granted the perspective of the townspeople, only highlighting the perspective a few times throughout the season. Outside of Wanda, most of the perspectives we get comes from either Hayward — who hates Wanda to a cartoonish, unsympathetic degree, or Monica — who is incredibly sympathetic to her. The average townsperson’s perspective gets lost in the shuffle. This scene is supposed to feel like Monica is the only safe harbor Wanda has in town; it is a moment of Wanda saying Everybody else rightfully hates me and I’m really glad you’ve somehow managed to forgive me. But because the only time the audience sees the whole town actively hating Wanda is the scene from earlier in this episode, that perspective is lost; it ends up feeling like the only perspective the show gives on Wanda is sympathetic. I personally think the show did a good enough job on this front, but I understand why others don’t. 

The reflective dislike of Wanda definitely gets at some larger social biases though: Thor, Loki, and Tony Stark are each to varying degrees responsible for an attempted genocide. Compared to that, Wanda’s actions are tame. Yet audiences clamor for Loki to be redeemed and never once questioned Thor and Tony’s place as heroes. Huh, I wonder if that might possibly have something to do with their gender? 

People also took issue with Monica’s line, “Given the chance and given your power, I’d bring my mom back. I know I would” because they felt it was meant to excuse Wanda’s actions, but again, I disagree. It’s definitely worth it to do the mental exercise of putting yourself in Wanda’s shoes: in the middle of your normal life with your perfect family, you’re hit with the realization that your husband actually died two weeks ago and you’ve taken a town hostage, and now in order to save a bunch of people from evil, you have to kill this version of your husband and kids. Even the best person would have a hard time doing that. I think it is an undeniable fact that given these circumstances and Wanda’s power, literally anyone would have acted the same as Wanda. I’m sure there are some perfectly good people who would’ve struggled for much longer than two days with the decision too. So, when Monica says she knows she would have done it, she’s not saying “It’s okay that you did this” but she is saying, “I understand how you could do this.” 

I also think all the handwringing over the very specific ins and outs of Wanda’s behavior throughout the series is such an uninteresting way to analyze media. I get critiquing media that way when it could affect the real world. For instance, I understand why people critique earlier MCU movies that glorified Tony Stark’s misdeeds — because a rich white guy getting away with hurting people in developing countries accurately describes roughly 99% of all human rights violations. Glorifying Tony’s behavior contributes to a real-life culture that enables abusers. Let’s just say I’m less convinced WandaVision will contribute to a culture that enables witches to take over small towns in New Jersey, and that widows and the grieving are definitely not an overprivileged class in our society. One TV show that arguably treats a widow too kindly is not going to hurt anyone — especially because the moral of the story was absolutely that taking over a town is not an affective way to handle your trauma! No one will ever watch this show and come away with the impression that they should do what Wanda did, because the whole point of the story was Wanda learning to not do it. The entire show is a journey through the stages of grief, after all.

Some people were also upset that Wanda gets to leave at the end instead of going to jail or something. Because WandaVision has to connect with the ever-ongoing narrative of the MCU, the writers were in a really tricky place as far as her ending. From a Doylist perspective, it’s obvious that Wanda doesn’t go to jail at the end because she has to appear in the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where her search for her kids will cause some seismic damage to the fabric of reality. If she faced some sort of “punishment” at the end of this series to learn her lesson, they’d have to narratively backtrack in the next movie, undoing all the character development. Unlike in most TV shows, Wanda’s story isn’t allowed to end here and has to serve as both an ending and as a branching off point for the next phase of her story/the MCU. She has to leave at the end because anything else would step on the toes of Doctor Strange, written by an entirely different team.

And if you think about it from a Watsonian perspective, Wanda had no other choice but to leave town. If she turned herself over to the authorities, she’d never be allowed to go through the regular justice system, instead going to SWORD or a sister agency. You know, the same people who spent years studying Vision’s powers to turn him into a weapon. Through the Hex, Wanda has seen the amount of damage that can be done if her powers are used by someone who doesn’t understand them. Why would she have any faith that a government agency wouldn’t try and mess with her powers, accidentally hurting people? Especially considering her experience being wrongfully and inhumanely imprisoned during the events of Civil War?

Going out to the middle of nowhere shows that Wanda is starting to take her powers more seriously. She still doesn’t understand them, so the safest thing she can do is get as far away from other people as possible and study her abilities. She’s taking active steps to try not to hurt anyone again, which is really the only thing she can do. There’s nothing she can do to change what happened in Westview, and turning herself in to the authorities would just increase the odds that her powers would fall into the wrong hands. 

THE SHIP OF THESEUS

Resolving the fight between the Visions with the Ship of Theseus debate was a stroke of genius. Considering they’re both made of the same parts and powers, a physical fight between the two would inevitably end in a stalemate. Having the real Vision come out victorious needed to showcase what about him was different, and having him raise the question of the Ship of Theseus highlights one of the biggest things that sets him apart from White Vision — he’s moved beyond his programming as a weapon. White Vision can only think to win a fight physically because that’s all his programming allows; but the real Vision, in his attempt to be peaceful, manages to gain the upper hand. I also really like the subtle nod to the idea of the pen being mightier than the sword; real Vision proves to be the better weapon because he is in fact not a weapon, beating White Vision in a battle of wits rather than physical force. It provides a bit of connective tissue between this and Wanda’s victory over Agatha — neither win because they’re more powerful, but because they manage to outthink their opponent. 

From a storytelling perspective, the set-up and payoff in this scene is perfectly executed. All the way back in the fifth episode, it’s revealed that Vision has the ability to wake the townspeople up from Wanda’s mind control. And then we see him do it in both the sixth and seventh episodes, constantly keeping it in our minds. It’s been so seamlessly woven into the narrative, it feels like a puzzle piece snapping into place when he finally uses that ability on White Vision, freeing him from Hayward’s control by restoring all of his memories. 

It also does a great job highlighting the inherent humanity within the real Vision. As far as mankind is currently aware, we are the only species that question what it means to be what we are. Burdened by self-consciousness, humans are constantly pondering questions of free will and souls and what makes every person unique. Vision not only having his own sense of self-identity, but also questioning what about that identity truly defines him, is perhaps the most recognizably human trait he has. His arc throughout WandaVision is about slowly learning to question what’s around him: first with his job, then his marriage and family, then his relationship to the outside world. Having that culminate in him questioning his own sense of self is the logical endpoint, and the Ship of Theseus is the perfect way for him to do that in a grounded, human way. 

SO LONG, DARLING

It says all you need to know about WandaVision that Wanda vs. Agatha, Vision vs. Vision, Monica’s fight and escape from Ralph, the fight with SWORD, and Hayward’s fall is all crammed into less than 30 minutes, while Wanda’s final goodbye with her family is given a full ten minutes of its own. It played around with a lot of MCU stuff, but at its heart this show was always a character study of Wanda and her love story with Vision, and everything related to that is done so well. 

I can think of very few shows that utilize parallels to as great an effect as WandaVision, and I think my favorite of them all comes at the start of this sequence. Vision says he knows Wanda can set everything right, just not for them, to which Wanda replies, “No. Not for us.” Her “no” parallels the scene from the second episode when she sees the beekeeper emerge from the storm drain and rewinds time to rewrite her show. That was the first moment the audience was clued in to Wanda’s control of Westview, and it symbolized her complete denial of reality that she would go so far as to rewind time to escape it. In this episode, her “no” symbolizes the complete opposite; it’s the first time we hear Wanda accept the fate of her family, finally able to let them go and start to move on. Having those two moments be in explicit conversation with each other is a deft choice on the writer’s part to subtly highlight Wanda’s arc from the beginning to the end of the series. 

Having Vision and Wanda switch from their superhero uniforms to normal clothes before entering their house is such a perfect little detail. Wanda makes great strides in this episode accepting the part of herself that’s the Scarlet Witch, but the truest expression of her character is still the mom in jeans and a sweater. That’s especially true of her life with Vision, and it feels right that the two of them would leave their costumes at the door; their house was meant to represent a small quiet life, and that’s how they choose to enter it for the last time. 

The scene tucking the children into bed is heartbreaking, and I think it’s Paul Bettany’s strongest performance of his entire run as Vision. He’s so close to breaking into tears at every line, but manages to just barely keep it together as Vision tries to wear a brave face in front of his kids. Again, the show uses parallels to devastating effect, having Wanda repeat the line “family is forever” to Billy and Tommy. When she first said it in the fifth episode, it spoke to Wanda’s stunted ability to cope with loss; she felt the only way she could hold on to Vision was to keep a version of him going even after death, no matter the harm it caused to others. Here, it speaks to her newfound acceptance — she knows that family truly is forever, that it can live on even after death through her love and memory, which allows her to let go. Elizabeth Olsen’s instincts as an actor are so sharp and the way she plays Wanda tucking Tommy into bed, giving him a playful nose scrunch to hide her own tears, is devastating. 

As Vision and Wanda go to shut the door, Wanda’s last words to her kids are: “Boys, thanks for choosing me to be your mom.” It is already such a tragically beautiful line, but this quote from writer Jac Schaeffer makes me love it even more:

There’s something really beautiful about that sentiment. I do feel that way about my children. In this world for Wanda, Vision, and the children are the only entities that she cannot control, and it’s because they were created whole cloth by her. There’s something mystical about that, and that’s how I feel about my own kids. Like, where did they come from? I don’t know. Yes, I’m responsible for bringing them into this world, but at some point that responsibility, that ownership, has a limit and then there’s this huge chasm of mystery. There’s a notion they had some agency in it.

Wanda’s magical family disappearing as the borders of her fake town overtake them could feel too fantastical, but lines like this do such a good job at grounding it. It’s also so true to the heart of the series that Wanda’s last line to her children be that, centering her gratefulness at meeting them over the grief of saying goodbye. Her arc was to come to terms with loss, and that line highlights how far she’s come. It recalls Vision’s line from the previous episode, of grief being the perseverance of love rather than something to drown under. 

In a small act of kindness, the show spares both Wanda and us from seeing Billy and Tommy disappear. Instead, the camera follows the collapsing border of Westview as it sweeps through the circus, turning back into SWORD. The tents and clown cars reverting back into highly militarized vehicles is a stark visual. As Billy and Tommy disappear, so too does the innocent world their mother built for them. It’s the right thing for Wanda to let go of Westview, but it’s worth mourning that the real world isn’t as kind as the false one she created. 

As the sequence transitions from Wanda’s goodbye with her kids to her goodbye with Vision, the town’s theatre marquee advertises “Tannhauser Gate” which is a reference to the final scene from Blade Runner and its very famous “Tears in Rain” speech. The monologue loses a lot of its beauty out of context, so if you haven’t seen the film I highly recommend giving it a watch. The idea of something beautiful and magical being lost, and accepting that fate, is what ties the speech to WandaVision and particularly Vision’s final moments.

Wanda leaving the lamp on for Vision is a tiny microcosm of why their love story is so beautiful. She wants to let him go in the dark, to close her eyes and open them again when he’s already gone so she doesn’t have to see the love of her life leave her one more time. But Vision wants to see her for the last time. So she lets him, putting aside her own sadness to make space for his. Like I said before, Wanda is selfish throughout the show but it’s counterbalanced by how selfless she is in protecting and comforting her family. 

From his perspective, Vision wants Wanda to be the last thing he sees before he dies. The two of them have always been intertwined, not only through the Mind Stone but because Vision only exists as his own entity, separate from Ultron, because Wanda decided to switch sides to the Avengers. In birth and death, Wanda is Vision’s raison d'être, his reason for being. In each life she’s been the first thing he sees, and here he makes sure she is again the last. This scene creates another parallel to the second episode, from the scene when the two are going to bed and Vision asks Wanda to get the light; it was a slice of life scene, from a time when Vision thought they’d have countless nights to share together. The contrast of him now turning the light back on emphasizes the finality of this moment, as Vision clings to the last experience they’ll ever have together. 

Vision asking Wanda, “What am I?” is such an emotionally intimate exchange. He’s a synthezoid, supposed to know every single thing in the universe, but with Wanda he reveals how unsure of himself he is in the most literal sense. He asks the question of Wanda not only because she created this version of him, but because she has known him better than anyone else. In his insecurity he turns to the person he trusts the most to comfort him. And Wanda’s answer shows how much she loves him; creating Vision and Westview was her most painful memory, so much so that she had locked it away from even herself. But to ease Vision’s doubt she relives it, sharing for one last time how much she loves him. Vision sheds a tear and Wanda wipes it away, clinging to the tangible proof that her love made him real again, if only for a few fleeting days. 

“We’ve said goodbye before, so it stands to reason we’ll say hello again” is the perfect encapsulation of the sad and hopeful tone of WandaVision. The show does such a good job highlighting the unique nature of Wanda and Vision’s relationship, seemingly destined to repeat itself over and over through time and space. Vision’s promise to Wanda is such a beautiful way of incorporating his synthezoid nature into the character; he knows he’ll be reunited with Wanda in some way because he always is, it just makes mathematical sense. This moment could feel oppressively said, so I love that the show manages to smuggle a tiny bit of hope into their good goodbye. The way Elizabeth Olsen plays Wanda’s hope as she realizes they will say hello again is just phenomenal. 

As we saw in the previous episode, Vision was the first person to get through to Wanda and give her a way to move forward from the death of her brother. What is grief, if not love persevering is the cornerstone that Wanda’s character arc in WandaVision is built upon. Vision giving her the tools to eventually let him go creates a clever thematic connection to Wanda’s victory over Agatha. She gave Wanda the lesson in runes, becoming her own undoing. Agatha was a villain of the show, but she was not the main one. Having Vision’s fate occur in the same way as Agatha’s goes to show that the main villain of the series was always Wanda’s grief. That’s why Wanda’s goodbye with Vision is saved for last, the true resolution of her arc.

There are a few more scenes to the episode, most notably Wanda’s final moments secluded in her cabin, but the true end of the story is this goodbye. Vision’s “So long, darling,” leaving Wanda alone again is the perfect final note. She flips up her hood and walks away, leaving the past behind her.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON WANDAVISION

I really do love this show, and the more I think on it the more reasons I find. It definitely got a little messy at points, and some of the plot-heavy elements didn’t quite work; like most creators with a unique voice and vision, I think Jac Schaeffer chaffed a bit against the limits of Marvel’s vast cinematic universe. But there’s something very real at the heart of WandaVision, a kind of unshod genius. Where the plot may lag, the character writing is impeccable, quickly making Wanda Maximoff one of fictional characters I’m most invested in. It scares me that a new writer will be handed the reins for Wanda going forward, but I’ll show up in theaters opening night to see her next appearance in the MCU. 

Odds and Ends:

• It’s an incredibly minor moment in the finale, but I absolutely love that one of the only character traits given to Tyler Hayward is an affinity for puns. 
• “Boys, handle the military.”
• This episode is a bit hard to rank because some of it isn’t my favorite, but the highs are so incredibly high. I think my ranking of the entire season has to go 7>3>1>2>9>4>6>5>8.
• WandaVision deserves all the Emmy nominations for set design, costume design, makeup, and direction. What the crew was able to pull off through so many different eras of filmmaking is nothing short of incredible.
• Elizabeth Olsen has the bad luck of vying for a win in the most competitive Best Actress in a Limited Series race the Emmys has ever had. I wish she, Michaela Coel, and Kate Winslet could all win somehow. Even if she doesn’t, it’s nice to finally see her generating the kind of awards season buzz she deserved after Martha Marcy May Marlene and Sorry for Your Loss.

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WandaVision 1x08 Review: “Previously On” (A Clip Show of Trauma) [Guest Poster: Hannah E.]

“Previously On”

Original Airdate: February 26, 2021

Wanda walks through a clip reel of her traumatic past in this WandaVision episode.

Spoilers for all nine episodes of WandaVision!

“Previously On” is the crown jewel of WandaVision. Everything the show set out to do is delivered upon so beautifully in every scene. It plays on the idea of two TV tropes — the "previously on" segment and the clip show, and stretches them to their limits. I love the episodes that are straight-forward pastiches, but I also love the transformative approach this episode takes to the genre recreation. And apart from two brief scenes at the very beginning and end, the episode is able to devote every moment to Wanda. Every scene of this show knows its main character so well that layer upon layer of meaning can be found in almost every line. The more work you put into this episode, the more you’ll get out of it; the attention to detail makes every scene worth analyzing...

ENDLESS NOTHINGNESS... LET'S START THERE

Using the idea of a "previously on" segment as a framing device to give Wanda exposure therapy is absolutely brilliant. So much of the previous episodes had been dedicated to the subtle build-up of Wanda’s character and motivation; her grief and trauma was the undercurrent that ran through all previous episodes, pushing the show downstream. By making Agatha’s motivation be finding the root of all that pain, the writers give themselves the perfect excuse to stop dancing around their central theme and give it the center stage it deserves. And because the show is so focused on moving on from grief, it’s great that they found a clever way to show how important therapy is for mental health. 

The opening scene between Wanda and Agatha is the first time we get to see them interact free of artifice. I think the show slightly misses the mark on Agatha in the finale, but in this one they hit the bullseye. Free of having to force her into the trappings of a Marvel villain, here she’s scripted somewhere between a therapist and a bully. Much like a member of the audience, Agatha has been studying Wanda; while she’s been doing it for nefarious purposes, the insights she gained are true. Seeing Wanda through Agatha’s eyes is the most ruthless the show gets in laying bear Wanda’s shortcomings. The insecurity that made it so easy for Agatha to trick her. The denial that runs so deep that even now, as Wanda knows she can control the town, she still doesn’t believe she created it — telling Agatha she can’t explain how it exists because she didn’t do it.

Agatha is the perfect foil to break through Wanda’s denial. Her whole goal is to discover how Wanda runs the Hex, and nothing is going to stop her from getting what she wants. She knows from her spy, Pietro, that the feeling of “endless nothingness” is the last thing Wanda remembers before Westview. Unlike the other two characters we’ve seen try to break through to Wanda — Vision and Monica — Agatha has no love or sympathy for Wanda and doesn’t hesitate to cast a spell forcing her to relive all of her most traumatic memories. 

One of the things that makes this episode so good is the amount of care that went into the small moments, making sure every line added to characterization. When Agatha first pushes Wanda to start her walk down memory lane, Wanda refuses; having to relive her memories is the most extreme version possible of facing past trauma — it would completely destroy Wanda’s coping mechanism of denial. She would never agree to do it, even under threat of death. But the one thing Wanda cares most about is her family; she would do anything to protect them. As soon as Agatha threatens her kids, Wanda relents. With that, the two witches take their first step into the past.

SOKOVIA

The first flashback brings us to Sokovia in 1999 when Wanda was just a kid, and her parents and brother were still alive. We watch as the four Maximoffs form the perfect family. The theme they composed for Sokovia, that plays over adult Wanda watching her younger self, is eerily reminiscent of the Stark theme from Game of Thrones and any time I hear that cello, my eyes immediately tear up. 

There’s something tragically beautiful in the way Wanda’s mother sees the men fighting outside and chooses to close the window and go back to her family. Their homeland is war torn and fighting rages right outside the window, but inside their home none of it matters. Much like Westview, Wanda’s childhood home was a refuge from the real world, complete with sitcoms — Wanda gets to pick her favorite episode which is The Dick van Dyke Show, “It May Look Like a Walnut.” In that episode, the horror of Rob’s life slowly escalates into an episode of The Twilight Zone until he wakes up and realizes it was all just a nightmare. It’s not hard to see why Wanda loves it so much. 

Then comes the moment when Wanda’s life changed forever. Bombs rain down on the Maximoff family home, obliterating it. Wanda and Pietro, buried in rubble, are forced to watch as a bomb that landed in their living room beeps and beeps, never going off. On the side is written STARK, the name that would motivate Wanda and Pietro for the next 10 years. We know from previous MCU films that they were left in an orphanage and never adopted. Eventually they went on the run together, making do the best they could on their own, waiting for the opportunity to kill Tony Stark.

It’s a huge evolution for Wanda’s character that she’s the reason the bomb never went off. When Wanda was first introduced to the MCU, Marvel Studios didn’t own the rights to the X-Men franchise. In the comics, Wanda has always been a mutant, but the movies weren’t even legally allowed to use the word. That’s why in Age of Ultron they say she didn’t have any powers until she was experimented on by Hydra. WandaVision is the first MCU project to come out since Marvel acquired the rights to X-Men from Fox, and presented a great opportunity to redo Wanda’s origin and make her a mutant. Even though this is definitely a retcon, it doesn’t feel like it because they do such a good job incorporating it to the story Wanda told in Age of Ultron, of the defective Stark bomb. If there’s one thing we know about Tony Stark, it’s that he doesn’t sell defective tech. Of course Wanda saved her and her brother’s lives with her latent mutant ability. 

Again in this scene we see Agatha accidentally helping Wanda through her trauma. When she says “the only way forward is back,” she means it to be condescending and cruel — one more jab at the fact that she’s forcibly dragging Wanda into the worst memories of her life. But she’s not wrong; the only way Wanda can move on from her pain is to acknowledge that it exists, and there’s no better way for her to do that than to go back through her past in a form of intense exposure therapy. Agatha doesn’t know it but even as she moves one step closer to her goal, she plants the seeds of her eventual loss.

WE WANTED TO CHANGE THE WORLD

The next stop along Wanda’s memory lane is the moment Hydra experimented on her with the Mind Stone. Marvel made some pretty huge missteps in the changes they made to Wanda’s origin story, but I actually really like the specific change of her powers coming from an Infinity Stone; the comics never provide a good explanation for why she’s so powerful, and they’ve given it many, many attempts (each attempt makes it progressively funnier that Pietro is just like, a normal speedster — even though he endured all the same things that made his twin into a god). Having her be exposed to an Infinity Stone is such a simple way to explain her powers, and having the Mind Stone also be the Infinity Stone that created Vision adds another layer of meaning to their love story. 

The shot where the Mind Stone reveals itself to Wanda is the most stunning visual in the entirety of the MCU. The image of the Scarlet Witch, shrouded in golden light as if haloed by the sun itself, reflected through Wanda’s irises, is breathtaking. The force of the vision knocks Wanda out. When the Hydra agents watch the footage back, the whole scene is missing; even before Westview, Wanda was editing out the parts of her life she didn’t want.

It’s another great moment of character consistency that as the door appears to lead Wanda into her next memory, it’s the only one she doesn’t fight; as soon as she sees that it’s the door to the Avengers compound, she walks through eagerly. Wanda doesn’t want to face her past, but even more than that, she just wants Vision back — and she’ll face any bad memory in the world for a chance to see him again. 

IT CAN'T ALL BE SORROW

In a TV season full of great scenes, this is the greatest scene of the show and it’s not even particularly close. In three and a half minutes the show articulates all of its themes, pays tribute to the love story at its center, and writes some of the most insightful lines to explain grief I’ve ever heard.

It’s a small moment, but I love that when Wanda is explaining to Agatha the significance of the Avengers’ compound, she says she felt all alone in a new country. The only time previous films ever addressed that Wanda is an immigrant was a throwaway line from Civil War in which Tony implies she doesn’t deserve human rights because she’s not a U.S. citizen (the absolute biggest of yikes to how casually the MCU made its leading hero parrot anti-immigrant sentiment!). WandaVision is the first time where her immigrant status is meaningfully incorporated into her character. She feels like an outsider in this foreign place and it’s part of what draws her to Vision, and vice-versa; he too is an outsider, human enough to want to be human, but not human enough for humans to see him that way. Except for Wanda.

The scene takes place right after Pietro died, and Wanda’s description of grief — the feeling of waves crashing over and drowning her — shows the writers did their research to portray it accurately. A very famous study of grief from 1944 described it thusly: Sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen.

Grief takes on physical side effects, and the most common experience is waves that feel like drowning. The description of “emptiness” Wanda gives in episode six is textbook. A lot of television portrayals of grief seem more consumed with the idea of it, the pageantry of sadness, rather than the reality. This show took its time to make sure they presented the real thing.

Like I’ve said before, the one thing I think the MCU consistently does well is understand that its heroes are humans — it’s cool to see Captain America and Iron Man punch stuff, but the emotional core of the films comes from Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. They have normal lives they want to go back to. That concept is never more true than when it’s applied to Wanda and Vision. Both of them are extremely reluctant heroes. What Wanda wants most in life is to go back to the small, normal life she had before her parents died. What Vision wants most in life is to simply have a normal life, one that would let him fully understand what it means to be human. They’re the two most powerful beings in the universe, constantly thrown into the biggest and craziest events in the world. But there’s nothing they’d rather do than sit down in a room together, watch a sitcom, and share a laugh. 

The show never takes its central love story for granted; in this scene they really put in the work of showing why these two people love each other. Wanda’s barely keeping her head above water as she struggles with the death of Pietro, and Vision gives her the one thing she needs to keep going: a way to understand her loss. Vision sees death from a perspective only he can see, as something slightly apart from humanity. He’s able to see the forest where humans only see trees. The way he puts it to words is just beautiful: "I’ve always been alone, so I don’t feel the lack. It’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve never experienced loss because I’ve never had a loved one to lose. But what is grief, if not love persevering?"

The people who genuinely disliked this line fundamentally misunderstand the nature of profundity. Sometimes something’s great because it’s simple. Great lines don’t stick with you because they’re a complicated puzzle you have to solve. They stick with you because they managed to say something profound about humanity in a way that resonated. There’s something beautiful in Vision, a man trying to become human, taking something as insurmountable as grief and distilling it down to one sentence that makes Wanda smile. 

The line is also deceptive in its simplicity. Grief is almost always portrayed as a burden that must be overcome, something the main character must move on from to be happy again. But moving on from grief is its own problem; no one wants to forget the memories they shared with someone they loved. Presenting grief as the perseverance of love manages to synthesize the idea of moving on and keeping the memories. It finds beauty in moments that would otherwise be the worst of Wanda’s life.

A less talented team of writers probably would have ended the scene there, letting their best line hang in the air for the audience to think on, but this team were smart enough to give Wanda and Vision one more moment. Instead of ending on a statement of the profound, the scene again draws the attention back to the small moments of normalcy between them. Vision laughs at the show, now understanding the humor Wanda helped him see in it. He looks back at her, desperate for approval, for evidence that he’s starting to be human, and she meets his eyes, laughing too. He was able to give her something profound in his understanding of grief, and she was able to give him something equally profound in return — a loved one to lose. 

I JUST WANT TO BURY HIM

Seeing Vision right in front of her, so close but impossibly far away, is enough to push Wanda forward into the memory Agatha’s been trying to reach this whole time: the moment she created the Hex.

This scene does such a good job slyly subverting expectation. Hayward’s lie from episode five already made us believe Wanda went to SWORD to resurrect Vision. The vision Wanda has in the Hydra flashback, of the Scarlet Witch coming down like an angel, puts the idea in your head of her as an almost godlike figure. This should be the moment when her power is unleashed. She should never feel less human than she does in this moment. The scene even leans into expectations at first, having her power walk across SWORD like a woman possessed.

Then it pulls the rug out. Wanda’s not here to resurrect Vision. All she wants is to bury him, the most human form of grief imaginable. Elizabeth Olsen is never better than in this episode, and in this scene she’s devastating. The writers knew how to take lines that were already sad and make them hit even harder. Take this line for example: "When I came back, he was gone — his body."

At first she says that Vision was gone when she returned from the blip, but then has to stop herself. Vision was already gone before that. She’d already lost him. She corrects herself and says that it was his body that was gone. The only piece of him she thought she hadn’t lost. 

An artist who worked on the show released the Storyboard for this scene, and the original dialogue read like this: "I’m sick and tired of everyone acting like Tony Stark is the only person we lost. Like he’s the only Avenger there ever was. Too bad, then, if you’re Natasha, but at least she was flesh and blood, right? But where are the memorials for Vision? No moving tributes for the synthezoid?"

I wouldn’t have begrudged them if these lines made it to the final episode, but I really love how subtle the version that made air is. The show never outright says that people are bigoted against Vision because he’s a synthezoid; instead, they leave just enough evidence for the audience to notice if they pay attention. It feels subtle and pervasive the way real world prejudice does; no one will ever say outright they’re a bigot, and we live in a world too often willing to turn a blind eye. Especially re-watching the series, there’s so many moments of Hayward treating Vision like less than human; it’s clear in the way he only ever calls him “The Vision,” cruelly parades the body in front of Wanda, refers to him like a computer, and the way he calls him “this thing” in the post credit scene. 

When Wanda is begging for his body back to be buried, she says, “He deserves a funeral at least.” Then she adds, “I deserve it.” Vision is not a person to SWORD, and she knows that. Appealing to what he deserves won’t get her anywhere because they don’t believe he’s human. She says, “I deserve it”, because she’s human and they can’t deny that. If they refuse to see the humanity in her husband, all she can do is force them to see the humanity in her.

The scene where Hayward shows Wanda the corpse is genuinely heartbreaking. Because Hayward sees Vision as less than human, he shows Wanda the body as it’s being taken apart; a gesture so casual in its cruelty I think some of the audience missed it. He doesn’t show her Vision in an act of compassion; he shows her Vision because he knows she’s capable of bringing him back to life. He lies and says they’re dismantling Vision — we know from the post credit scene that SWORD spent all five years trying to resurrect Vision — because telling the truth would incriminate him if Wanda ever told anyone. So instead of taking a risk in asking Wanda to bring Vision back, he tries to emotionally manipulate her. Throughout the whole scene he’s baiting her, trying to push her over the edge. He wants her to snap because then his toy will work again. 

At first, Wanda doesn’t recognize that it’s Vision. She’s the only one who ever saw him as completely human and can’t comprehend as she watches SWORD agents take the person she loved apart like a car being scrapped for parts. He was a man and they treat him like nothing more than a machine. If you pause the screen at the right second, you’ll see that Wanda breaks the glass in the shape of a heart as she flies down to say goodbye; every second of this episode was crafted to add something to the story, and here the visual effects bring the emotion of the scene to life — it literally breaks Wanda’s heart to see Vision’s corpse. 

Having all of Hayward’s men point their guns at Wanda also creates a parallel to a similar scene from an earlier episode. In this one, Hayward tells his men to stand down because he thinks Wanda is about to resurrect Vision. He decides to hand over control to Wanda because he thinks it will get him what he wants. But he bit off more than he could chew; in episode five he and Wanda are in the exact situation, but when Hayward tells his men to stand down it’s because they’re pointing guns at him and instead of taking orders from him, his men are under Wanda’s control. Hayward played with fire and got burned. He bears some amount of responsibility for Wanda creating the Hex (which is why he’s so desperate to clean up the mess before anybody finds out).

The line “I can’t feel you” is a callback to the last words Vision ever said to her, but also a tragic parallel to their first meeting in Age of Ultron. As a telepath, Wanda can read anyone’s mind; but Ultron, the prototype for Vision, wasn’t quite advanced enough to be human — Wanda couldn’t read his thoughts. The first sign that Vision was truly alive came from Wanda being able to look inside his head. Now, as he lays in pieces on the table, Wanda tries for one last time to read his thoughts. But she can’t feel him. The thing that first let Wanda know he was alive is no longer there. Vision is gone. Wanda doesn’t steal the body, as Hayward claimed. Instead, she hangs her head and leaves. 

Finally we see why Wanda came to Westview. Not to resurrect her husband or kidnap the town. She came to see the home Vision bought for them. All of their shared dreams and desires made real in a small plot of land; the promise of home, of normal life, that both of them wanted for so many years. Everything Wanda ever wanted was right in her grasp until it slipped through her fingers like water. Instead of seeing a home for her and Vision, she sees a vacant lot. When Vision bought it he saw promise – a blank space for him and Wanda to build upon together. Now instead of holding their future, the emptiness just holds nothing. Endless nothingness. 

Wanda opens the deed on which Vision left her a note: "To grow old in."

And suddenly the heart on the calendar from the first episode makes sense. As Wanda drove through Westview, she saw a dreary town hit hard by the Snap. Wanda’s chaos magic bursts forth in an involuntary extension of Wanda’s subconscious, changing everything she saw that was broken down and rewriting it to be brand new again. The sad people sleepwalking through their lives are rewritten into the happy characters we see in Wanda’s sitcom. She turns everything that made her sad into something that brings her comfort. That’s why the heart Vision drew, which had become a symbol of the future she would never get to have with him, is rewritten on the calendar to mark a future date. It becomes a promise that her and Vision have more days together. 

The opening title sequence from the first episode, of Vision and Wanda driving into town, is nearly identical to the scenes of her driving into town alone in this episode. The first thing Wanda’s subconscious chose to broadcast was re-writing that memory into what it was meant to be. Her and Vision were supposed to come here together to settle down. As viewers we intellectually know that Wanda made the Hex to get back her life with Vision, but making that real through visual storytelling is a great touch. 

It’s no coincidence that we see Wanda recreate Vision in the same episode that we see Hayward resurrect him. The two scenes work as incredible foils to highlight how different Wanda and Hayward are. While both of their actions may end up in the same result, their motivations could not be more different. Hayward takes one weapon — the missile — to make another, even more powerful weapon out of Vision. He takes all the life away from him — literally drains him of his color — to make him the robot he always saw him as. 

Wanda does the opposite. The things she loved about Vision was not his power or his abilities. What she remembers most about him is what made him human — his kindness and compassion, his sense of humor, the way he smiled. When she brings him back, he literally comes from her heart. The Vision she creates is even more human than before. And unlike the one Hayward revives, stripped of his free will, Wanda’s Vision is entirely his own, uncontrolled by her. She didn’t want to bring back a puppet. She wanted the real Vision. 

The musical score in the background of this scene is titled “Genesis.” Fitting, considering this is Wanda’s creation myth. As the story goes in the biblical genesis, God created Adam and seeing that he was lonely took one of Adam’s own ribs to create Eve. A piece of Adam lived forever in her, tying them together as the only two things in the whole of creation who were alike. Wanda, straddling the fence between god and mortal, plays the role of both God and Adam in her genesis. Through her loneliness, Wanda’s subconscious took a piece of herself — the piece of the Mind Stone that lives in her — and gave it to Vision, recreating his memory around a fragment of the stone. The only two beings in the whole of the universe to share a piece of the Mind Stone. 

Wanda loved Vision to the point of invention; an entire world built to hold her love for him. In a parallel to the first time Vision was created, in Age of Ultron, Wanda is again the first person that he sees. His life always begins with her. 

The moment after Wanda creates Vision, when she steps forward, is achingly beautiful. It parallels an earlier scene from the episode, from the flashback of her and Vision in the Avengers Compound; in that scene present-day Wanda stepped forward, reaching out to touch past Vision, but he disappeared, only a memory. Here, there’s a beat that’s just Wanda looking at Vision, trying to comprehend what she sees in front of her. Then she steps forward; just like before, she can’t help but reach out to him. As she takes the step she transforms into black and white, entering the world of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Her denial wasn’t a conscious choice but merely a side effect of how much she loves Vision.

As the scene draws to a close, for the first time, present-day Wanda fully understands what she’s done. Her eyes well with tears as they run over the studio set and cameras, destroyed by the realization that none of it is real. 

Odds and Ends:

• Even though the first seven episodes of this show are largely dedicated to Wanda and Vision playing house, it’s still such a weird feeling to watch a superhero do something as mundane as drive a car. Just imagining Wanda taking a driver’s ed course is so funny to me.
• “Vhere are vy children? That accent really comes and goes.” Kathryn Hahn’s delivery of that line is so funny, and it’s nice to see the MCU poking some fun at how inconsistently they’ve had Elizabeth Olsen do the fake accent. It’s so funny to me that Infinity War and Endgame were shot back-to-back, but Wanda has an accent in one and not the other.
• “Fake Pietro. Fietro, if you will.”
• It’s a strong piece of continuity that Wanda’s description of her grief to Vision is nearly identical to Monica’s description of what it felt like to be in the Hex. Both were expressions of the same feeling.
• Hayward tells Wanda it’s his “legal obligation” to dismantle Vision. Sometimes I think I must be watching a different show than other people, because one of the main criticisms of WandaVision I’ve seen is that they never explain what Hayward did that was illegal. But on multiple occasions, through several different characters, the show states that Hayward resurrecting Vision is a violation of the Sokovia Accords.
• As it’s being rewritten, the theatre marquee changes to advertise “Big Red” and “Kidnapped.” I wonder what that could mean.
• In the very last line of the episode, Agatha becomes the first person to ever drop the name Scarlet Witch in the MCU. That’s been a long time coming. 
• Having a government agency re-assemble Vision free of his personality and color is a plotline ripped straight from a West Coast Avengers comic book run. I personally hate the direction that comic went in and much prefer the way White Vision is used here.

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WandaVision 1x07 Review: “Breaking the Fourth Wall” (Agatha All Along) [Guest Poster: Hannah E.]

“Breaking the Fourth Wall”

Original Airdate: February 19, 2021

Wanda has a breakdown, Monica gets her powers, and the villain is finally revealed

Spoilers for all nine episodes of WandaVision!

“Breaking the Fourth Wall” seems to be the consensus least favorite among viewers, and I have to agree. It’s still a very solid episode but a lot of the show’s seams are clear in the plotting. 

This episode is the first time it became clear that the show had too much on its plate, especially when it comes to Monica Rambeau. The writers already had so much juggling to do with Wanda, Vision, the Hex, Agatha, and SWORD’s plotlines, and the last thing it needed was to introduce a new superhero into the MCU. The problem with Monica getting her powers in this show is that a plotline like this normally has the space of a whole movie to breathe, but WandaVision only had about 10 minutes to spare for Monica. The writers’ room did a really good job breaking the story of Monica, but there was never enough time to actually get all of it onto the page. I really like this quote from Teyonah Parris explaining the character motivation behind Monica’s breaking-through-the-Hex scene:

"That was Monica's actual physical moment to grieve and to just scream and let it out, whereas before she's been trying to get through it by helping Wanda, by throwing herself into work. But in this one moment here, she got to really sit in her grief and move through it physically. We saw the physical manifestation of Monica moving through her grief."

Conceptually, the idea that Monica is too overwhelmed to tackle her own grief and that’s why she latches on to Wanda — to process her grief vicariously — is really great. But if you haven’t read that Teyonah Parris interview, would you be able to understand that by what’s on the page? Not really. 

The more I think on how Monica was used, the more I’ve come to the conclusion she really deserved her own Disney+ series. I don’t think the writers of WandaVision meant to sideline her, but she was always meant to be a supporting role to the two leads of Wanda and Vision, and that was never going to do her justice. Trying to introduce and power up a new character while also dedicating most of the screen time to the actual leads of the series was an impossible task. Head writer Jac Schaeffer recently said in an interview that Monica was originally going to go through therapy across the show, paralleling her and Wanda’s journey through the five stages of grief, but they had to cut the story for time. I would have loved to see that play out and think it would’ve done wonders to really flesh out the connection Monica feels with Wanda.

Unfortunately, Monica ends up falling into a long line of Black characters in the MCU who are brought on to play sidekick to the main superhero — Rhodey, Sam Wilson, and even Monica’s mom Maria Rambeau. 

That being said, the actual visuals of Monica getting her super powers as she enters the Hex again are incredible. Especially compared to the superhero shows on The CW, WandaVision just looks like money. Not since Game of Thrones has a show had effects to this level of quality. 

I also like the confrontation Monica has with Wanda. In previous episodes the show focused on how much sympathy Monica had for Wanda because of their shared grief, but this one gives a much-needed shift and lets Monica be pissed at Wanda. Even if Wanda didn’t fully understand her actions or know that she was causing Monica pain, she still dressed her up in 60s and 70s garb and made her perform like a puppet on strings. Monica has every right to be mad, and letting her yell at Wanda makes the relationship feel more believable and less like Monica exists solely to prop up and defend Wanda. 

Besides Monica’s story, the other problem with this episode is SWORD and Tyler Hayward. Like I’ve already mentioned in previous reviews, the show feels very disinterested in everything to do with him. Whereas all the other plotlines are really creative and out-of-the-box for Marvel, the SWORD stuff is aggressively formulaic. The scenes we spend with Hayward this week feel obligatory — “he has a plan and it’s launching today!” The one thing I like about the way he’s used is that it’s sparing — obviously the ideal case scenario is a great villain with proper build up, but if you’re forgoing those things the next best thing you can do is give him as little screen time as possible. The show knows Hayward is a plot device and graciously doesn’t make us spend any more time with him than we absolutely have to.

Vision and Darcy’s plotline this episode suffers from one of the same problems SWORD’s does, feeling like the scenes are only there because they have to be. Wanda, Agatha, and Monica’s scenes are only made possible because Vision is gone, which means he can’t be with the main cast in this episode. But he also can’t be doing anything with SWORD, because he’d die if he left the Hex. That means that his story is basically stuck in neutral for an episode. We need scenes checking in with him after his near-death last week, but his story can’t progress forward because the other main characters aren’t ready to enter Act 3 yet. What sets his scenes apart from Hayward, though, is that both him and Darcy are great characters who I love watching on my screen. Especially because Kat Dennings feels so at home in the mockumentary style. Between her talking heads and Vision’s Jim Halpert-esque looks to camera, I’m entertained even though nothing of substance is happening. 

There is one Vision scene that actually feels integral, and it’s his last. Ever since he discovered Westview isn’t real, he’s been suffering from a crisis of personhood, and finding out from Agatha last episode that he’s dead in the real world certainly didn’t help. Hearing from Darcy all the trauma he and Wanda endured before Westview helps to clarify one thing for him: the love he has with Wanda is real. He still doesn’t know what he is, but he does know that he’s Wanda’s husband and has to be there for her, which is why he’s able to break through the sitcom format and fly home. 

The strongest part of this episode by far is Wanda’s descent from bargaining into depression. It was a really smart choice on the writers to have her lowest episode also line up with the mockumentary sitcom parody, because mockumentaries famously make it really easy to up the jokes-per-minute ratio; while Wanda’s plotline could feel oppressively dark, the episode’s format makes it easy to pull the show back from the brink with a well-timed talking head. Her saying she’s given up all hope and no longer finds meaning in the universe is followed by a pun about her kids inheriting Vision’s “tough” Vibranium skin. The show dips in and out of two different tones — Wanda’s breakdown and sitcom humor — just as Westview wavers between worlds as Wanda loses control.

This episode does such a good job subtly exploring all the facets of Wanda’s grief. The talking head where she says, “I don’t understand what’s happening. Why it’s... why it’s all falling apart and why I can’t fix it” says so much with so few words. The one constant in Wanda’s life has been a lack of agency — her parents died, she was forced to live in an orphanage, then sacrificed her freedom to HYDRA, then was forced to kill Vision to save half the universe (which ended up being in vain). All of those were things that happened to her, not things she chose for herself. Not only is Wanda attached to Westview because her husband and children depend on it, but because it offers her the one thing she’s never had in her life: control. 

We also get to see where Wanda has drawn the line morally for herself in Westview. She has the chance to hurt or kill Monica and threatens to do so, but Monica calls her on the bluff and Wanda backs down. Throughout the show Wanda’s been trying her best to minimize the collateral damage — purposefully making sure Monica wasn’t hurt as she was launched out of the Hex, releasing Hayward’s soldiers when she could have easily killed them and solved a lot of her problems, and again sparing fake Pietro’s life at the end of last episode. The only reason she keeps the Hex up is because she doesn’t think anyone is really getting hurt. 

I think the show made in error in letting the audience know all the way back in the fifth episode that the citizens of Westview are in agonizing pain, and then waiting four more weeks before we find out Wanda doesn’t know that. They do a good job laying hints that Wanda wouldn’t be intentionally hurting these people, but you have to pay attention to pick up on them. They gave the audience too many weeks to sit on the fact that Wanda was hurting people before revealing that Wanda didn’t know she was. Especially because the time that’s passing in the show is so much shorter than the real-life time for viewers — three days in-universe versus four weeks in real time. 

Leading with the knowledge that the Westview residents were in pain also shut down any potential moral debate on how bad Wanda’s actions really are. Obviously, taking away people’s free will is wrong. But consider for a second if Wanda had been right in thinking the residents felt happy and at peace. She created a virtual Utopia — she improved the quality of everyone’s houses and jobs, eliminated homelessness, poverty, and crime, kept couples and families together, and gave people their real personalities. That doesn’t actually sound like too terrible a trade-off, considering Wanda didn’t mean or know she’d done it until her husband and children’s lives depended on it. There’s even precedent for Wanda to believe what she’s doing wouldn’t hurt people — in Age of Ultron she saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives by mind-controlling citizens of Sokovia to evacuate before the fighting started. She knew she was capable of using her power without pain bouncing back on the people she controlled, and she knew she had used it to help in the past. 

Having the audience know first thing that the people of Westview were in pain stops them from contemplating the above moral quandaries. Of course Wanda’s actions are bad because people are in pain. It’s much harder to empathize with her when we know this. People have accused the show of following Wanda’s perspective too closely — at the expense of the Westview residents — but ironically the reason they feel that way is because the show gave us the residents’ perspective before we got Wanda’s. 

On the topic of Wanda’s sins, she gets some karmic punishment this episode. She’s spiraling out and instead of doing anything to help, Agatha intentionally makes the situation worse by telling her she deserves all the pain and anguish she’s feeling. Then Agatha separates Wanda from her kids, knowing that will make her feel even worse. Finally, she interrupts Wanda and Monica’s exchange right before Monica can get through to Wanda and explain what’s really going on outside the Hex. Agatha’s whole plan relies on Wanda eventually breaking down and revealing the truth behind her magic, and all of that would fall apart if Wanda simply took down the Hex. Agatha has to keep pushing at Wanda, stepping in every time she considers letting go of Westview. Of course, Wanda is ultimately the one responsible for her own actions in a way that the Westview residents couldn’t be, but the way Agatha consistently manipulated her emotions without Wanda knowing isn’t entirely removed from the kind of mind control Wanda is capable of. 

Agatha’s machinations brings me to the last plotline of the episode, which is the reveal that Agnes is really Agatha Harkness. Judging by what I’ve seen of the audience reception, mileage seems to vary on how much you think this “twist” worked (twist in quotations because the show wasn’t exactly holding its cards close to the vest). Agatha got plenty of time to shine in the role of Agnes, but her sitcom persona has little to do with her actual character as a villainous witch, so it does come off feeling as if the actual villainy of her character goes underexplored. This is just my speculation, but reading between the lines of some cast interviews it seems to me that showrunner Jac Schaeffer did not want Agatha to be written as a villain — wanting her to be more like her comic book counterpart, a morally grey mentor figure — but head of Marvel Kevin Feige wanted to stay true to the MCU format of heroes and villains. One thing that Jac Schaeffer has confirmed is that she didn’t like the idea of two women fighting, considering the long history of the trope, and actively wrote Agatha with that in mind. The show attempted to walk a very fine line in making Agatha a villain while also trying to keep her relationship with Wanda not entirely antagonistic and sometimes they didn’t quite pull it off.

Personally, I don’t really mind that. Marvel has an infamously tough time writing villains; every once in a while they strike gold with a Loki or Killmonger, but they’re largely bland and boring and take up way too much screen time. I like that WandaVision took the Thor: Ragnarok route of hiring a really fantastic actress and just letting them have fun with it. Kathryn Hahn is absolutely electric in the role, especially in this episode, and that’s all I really need. The hero’s story is more interesting and I like that Wanda gets to keep most of the focus. 

And while I do think the show didn’t quite pull off what they wanted to with Agatha, I think they did much better than most people give them credit for. A huge problem I have with the discourse around this show is that people complain about it doing too much explaining to the audience — characters like Darcy have a lot of lines that exist solely to handhold the audience — which is a criticism I don’t entirely disagree with. But then at the same time they miss about 50% of what the show is doing. They complain when the writers hold their hand, but don’t pick up on subtext if the writers don’t. This episode provides a really great example of that.

In the brief time we spend with Hayward, we learn that Wanda has discontinued her broadcast — WandaVision is no longer airing as an in-universe television show. Then we get a scene where Wanda asks Tommy and Billy if they know where Vision is, implying she doesn’t. Both of those pieces of information contradict what the audience believes to be true: that Westview is currently being run like a 2010’s sitcom because Wanda is broadcasting it that way, and that Vision is stuck at a traffic light because Wanda doesn’t want him to come home. Combine that knowledge with what we learn in the "Agatha All Along" montage — that Agatha is the producer asking questions in the talking heads, and that she’s been working behind the scenes to mess things up the whole time — and it becomes clear that Agatha is the mastermind of this episode. She’s the one stopping Vision from getting home, running the theme, and controlling the cuts. 

I’ve seen some people confused on why Agatha is the “villain” because they don’t think she did anything wrong, but that’s just ignoring what’s on the page because the writers didn’t put it in bold font and underline it. She has no qualms with taking over Westview’s residents to serve her own purposes, put Ralph Bohner in harms way by turning him into Pietro, and on many occasions intervenes to prevent Wanda from bringing down the Hex. Agatha exists in largely the same space Loki does; they’re not evil for the sake of enacting some evil plan, they’re just self-interested to the point of not caring about anyone or anything around them. Agatha wants Wanda’s power and if helping the residents of Westview helps her do that, she’ll help them; but if hurting Westview’s residents helps her, she’ll do that, too. 

In the same vein, I’ve seen people complain that "Agatha All Along" was misleading, since Agatha wasn’t actually running anything. But the brilliance of "Agatha All Along" is that it’s diegetic — the song exists in universe as a creation of Agatha’s. Of course she’s going to overstate her role in things. Much of WandaVision is a meta-analysis of television itself — sitcom and story tropes, audience expectation, and perspective. The show is called WandaVision because it is quite literally a TV show from Wanda’s perspective. 

"Agatha All Along" rips us away from the story we’ve been getting to give use the show from Agatha’s perspective — in her mind, she’s the protagonist of this story, and frames it to us that way. Even though the interruptions she’s been causing aren’t the biggest plot points of WandaVision, they are the biggest plot points of Agatha’s story, so that’s how she explains it to the audience. I think that’s a tremendously clever idea. 

Odds and Ends:

• This week in commercials is a big one. On the surface it’s an ad for an antidepressant called “Nexus.” Comic book readers will know that it basically confirms a bit of lore from the comics — that Wanda is a Nexus being. Nexus beings are constants throughout the multiverse, meaning no matter which version of earth you’re on, there will always be a Wanda Maximoff and she will always be the Scarlet Witch. They function like tentpoles for reality, keeping their universes from crumbling. That’s one of the many explanations Marvel comics have thrown out for why Wanda is so overwhelmingly powerful. Considering her next MCU appearance is slated to be a film named after the multiverse, I can’t imagine this won’t be relevant.
• The local radio station for Westview is W.N.D.A
• On Wanda’s milk gallon, there’s a huge poster for missing kids. I’m sure that won’t become relevant in a couple of episodes.
• One small thing I like about this show is that the characters are never written as dumb. Even when it’s not a focal part of the narrative, the writers make sure to think through the actions of side characters. Since Hayward now knows Wanda could expand the borders at any moment, he makes camp eight miles away.
• All of the actors are great in this episode, but Kathryn Hahn and Elizabeth Olsen especially are just amazing. Olsen’s Julie Bowen impression (Claire from Modern Family) is spot on, and Hahn has never been better as Agnes. I’m starting a petition demanding Marvel make a prequel just to show us how Agatha once bit a kid.
• Darcy once again takes up the role as audience stand in, telling Vision that she’s been watching WandaVision and knows the love he shares with Wanda is the real deal. 
• “And I killed Sparky too!” If you haven’t already, give yourself a treat and watch the Avengers Assembled documentary for WandaVision. There’s about five more seconds of Agatha hysterically laughing at the end of "Agatha All Along." 
• This is the first episode to follow the time honored MCU tradition of post-credit scenes. Monica investigates and finds Agatha’s witchy basement, only to be intercepted by fake Pietro. 
• This is the last opening theme of WandaVision so now is a good time for me to gush over how good all of them were. Not only are they fun and catchy songs (I may or may not listen to the episode 5 theme quite a bit...), they also help to tell the story of Wanda’s unravelling. The first two themes, when Wanda is completely unaware of the Hex, are just like real sitcom openings. Then in episode three, as more of the outside world breaks into Westview, the opening theme has lyrics like: Some sudden surprises/come in all shapes and sizes/but it’s rainbows and sun/it’s you and it’s me, as Wanda’s subconscious works to fit the intrusions into her show’s narrative. The theme from episode 5, once Wanda is consciously aware of the Hex, is titled “Making It Up As We Go Along,” a nod to Wanda still not fully understanding what’s going on but choosing to just go with it anyway. It has lyrics like: Through the highs and the lows/we’ll be right, we’ll be wrong and we’re makin' it up/'cause we got love, again reinforcing that the Hex stays up because of her love for Vision. The next one is aptly titled “Let’s Keep It Going” as Wanda struggles with whether or not to keep the Hex up, and cleverly sings: Don’t try to fight the chaos/Don’t question what you’ve done, which is a nice nod to the fact that Wanda’s false world is run by Chaos magic. Finally, this week’s theme is purely instrumental; as Wanda moves into the depression stage of grief and gives up, the theme presents her with no comment. 

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WandaVision 1x06 Review: “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!” (Ghosts) [Guest Poster: Hannah E.]

“All-New Halloween Spooktacular!”

Original Airdate: February 12, 2021

Pietro returns from the dead, Wanda sees a ghost, and Vision talks to a witch, all as Halloween comes to Westview.

Spoilers for all nine episodes of WandaVision!

Starting the episode before last, WandaVision strung together three weeks of absolutely incredible television culminating in “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!”A lot of people consider this the show’s best episode and while I don’t have it quite that high, I really love this episode. Not only is it extremely well-written, it’s just fun to watch. I’ve seen it five or six times and it holds up on every watch.

Starting with the weakest point of the episode, I do think everything to do with SWORD begins to have diminishing returns at this point in the season. As I’ll get into later, it’s normally a strength of the show that almost everything, plot and theme, is tied to Wanda. Westview is literally a physical manifestation of Wanda’s psyche, and through that the show has a great avenue to dive deep into her arc and the themes that accompany it. Vision is a natural extension of her, and his plotline dovetails nicely with hers while sharing the same climax and themes.

Then there’s SWORD. Apart from existing within the same TV show, it has very little connective tissue to Wanda. Where everything inside the Hex thrives on its strong themes and characterization, SWORD exists solely as a plot device. The typical role of an antagonist in a story is to provide conflict and push the main character forward, but both of those roles are already filled in better ways by other characters in the narrative — Wanda’s grief functions as the main antagonist, and Agatha serves to externalize Wanda’s inner conflict. That means SWORD’s, and more specifically Hayward’s, role in the narrative is already redundant twice over. Everything that happens in this storyline starts to feel expendable because it is. 

So why did WandaVision include it at all? I think the answer lies in the broader cinematic universe WandaVision takes place in. Marvel had two main motivations for adding this plotline: The first is that they were taking a pretty big risk in anchoring a show around two minor characters from the movies and filming it as if it were a series of period accurate sitcoms. Most of the episodes in this show mark the biggest tonal and visual departure the MCU has ever had. By including SWORD, Marvel was able to give fans something that felt safe and textbook MCU. That’s why they filled the supporting cast out with familiar faces like Darcy and Jimmy. The second reason Marvel had for including SWORD is that they wanted to re-introduce the “real” Vision to the MCU and needed a way to resurrect him. It’s crucial to Wanda’s character arc that her Vision die at the end, which means they needed some outside force to make a second one. 

For those reasons, the SWORD plotline never really feels like it belongs in the show. Hayward is by far the least compelling character of the entire show. The writers attempt to give him a few motivations for acting the way he does, but there’s never enough time or interest devoted to him to make it land at all. Thankfully the writers seemed to recognize this and minimize him as much as possible for the rest of the season.

The best part of the SWORD storyline is Monica, and that’s because she’s the most closely tied to Wanda. Her grief for her mother plus the time she spent inside the Hex gives her a tangible connection to the best part of the show. There’s a particular line in this episode that really stands out to me every time I watch it; when Darcy tells Monica that her lab results show her cells changing at a molecular level because of her many times entering and exiting the Hex, Monica replies with: “I’ve seen enough bloodwork to last a lifetime. Cells metastasizing, cells in remission. I know what Wanda’s feeling and I won’t stop until I help her.”

One theme the show consistently returns to is reliving trauma. Wanda’s biggest moment in the MCU prior to this was when she had to kill Vision at the end of Infinity War, only for Thanos to rewind time and kill him again. And the nightmares we see Wanda have are literally reliving her past traumas, seeing Vision’s corpse in episode four and then seeing her brother’s corpse in this episode. The above quote from Monica shows that she too has had to relive trauma, going through the endless cycles of her mother’s cancer. One moment it seems like the cancer is in remission and her mother will live, the next she’s dying again. That line is the only time in the SWORD story where it feels thematically connected to everything happening in Westview.

That leads me to the Hex side of the episode. Like I said earlier, the strength of this show is how tightly rooted it is in Wanda, and this episode explores her character so well. Especially the way it ties Westview into her arc; the town is created by her and adapts itself around her desires, which is why this episode takes place in the theme of a 2000’s sitcom. Prior decades of the genre placed heavy emphasis on how perfect the married couple was, but the 2000’s opened the door to dysfunctional marriages. In an episode of Dick van Dyke, Wanda and Vision’s tension would feel out of place; but in Malcolm in the Middle, it feels at home. By advancing her show forward a couple decades, Wanda is able to tell herself her marriage will be happy by the time the credits roll.

It’s also no coincidence that it’s Halloween, or as Billy tells us a holiday all about the “thrill of getting to be someone else for a day”. Everyone on Halloween dresses up and pretends to be someone else. Of course, Wanda has been pretending for her entire time in Westview, but she was so deep in denial she didn’t even know it. This is the first episode where she has a full understanding of the role she plays controlling the events of Westview, which is why the town now consciously acknowledges everybody is pretending to be someone they’re not. Wanda can’t emotionally handle her own life and finds her only solace in pretending, so she dives even deeper into her only coping mechanism by making it Halloween. 

The episode’s best moments are between Wanda and Pietro. It’s a real shame that all the attention paid to his character became about the question, “Is he or is he not the Quicksilver from the X-Men universe?” because the writers did some really tremendous character work in his scenes that seems to go unnoticed. Wanda is thoroughly unconvinced he’s really her brother until he says the one thing he remembers is the feeling that she needed him. Elizabeth Olsen plays the scene so beautifully subtle; in that moment you see Wanda so desperately wants to believe her dead loved ones are out there somewhere, in some way feeling her love for them, that she’s willing to believe this imposter is her brother. Grief is the villain of this series, and here it makes Wanda act against her own better judgement.

Pietro, who is really Agatha, knows exactly how to exploit Wanda’s sadness. As soon as he appeals to her grief, she’s willing to open up to him. It really highlights how profoundly lonely Wanda is that she’s so quick to open up to a man with a stranger’s face, and makes it all the more insidious that Agatha is using her dead brother to manipulate her. This scene is one I go back to time and time again when people complain that Wanda didn’t get enough “comeuppance” for her actions in Westview. What Wanda does to the people of Westview, controlling their actions and emotions to serve her own purposes, is exactly what Agatha is doing to her through Pietro. Wanda never would have opened up if not for believing she was talking to her brother, so Agatha parades the memory of him around like a carrot on a stick. And once Pietro earns Wanda’s trust, Agatha uses him to push Wanda into keeping the Hex running. The more Wanda understands of what she’s doing in Westview, the more she has doubts; Agatha, through Pietro, invokes the memory of Wanda’s dead parents to convince her that what she’s doing is okay. Agatha can’t mind control like Wanda, so she finds other ways to push Wanda into giving her what she wants.

Besides functioning as some karmic emotional punishment, this scene also serves to show how powerless Wanda can be. In both the comics and the MCU, she’s almost ridiculously overpowered — she’s basically a god amongst men. Since there’s no real weakness to exploit to defeat her powers, writers have to come up with some other way to make her story interesting. In WandaVision, it’s the grief she’s suffering. Agatha’s been trying for weeks to break through to Wanda with no success, but as soon as she plays on Wanda’s feelings of loss she finally starts to get somewhere. Even though Wanda is a significantly stronger witch than Agatha, she’s helpless against this kind of offense. 

The other way Agatha manages to emotionally weaken Wanda is by separating her from Vision. Agatha pretends to be a normal townsperson caught at the border of town, tricking Vision into thinking he’s unearthed her suppressed personality. In a genuinely haunting moment, she tells him he’s dead. That’s the push Vision needs to finally go to the border of town and try to break through. 

The scene of him slowly being ripped apart as he leaves Westview is visually stunning and also a really strong bit of character writing. At this point, Vision doesn’t really have anything; he knows he loves Wanda and his kids, but he doesn’t even know who they are outside of Westview, which he knows is a fake town populated by people in pain. This is a Vision stripped of everything except his most core values. And in this moment we see that helping people is the most important thing to him. As he’s dying, he calls out not for someone to help him, but for someone to help the people of Westview. 

Wanda’s reaction to Vision’s near-death is another scene that perfectly illustrates the two sides of her. In one sense, this end scene is terrifying in how powerful it makes Wanda. We watch characters we’re rooting for, like Monica and Jimmy, barely escape the all-consuming borders of the Hex as another character we’re rooting for, Darcy, is re-written. But this scene also shows how painfully human Wanda is. Even though she has control over Westview, the whole thing rests on a house of cards. Her family could disappear in an instant and she knows it. Wanda may have powers that make her a god, but she only has human capacity to process the world around her. She’s a reactionary character — everything she does is in response to something, not of her own agency. The thing she reacts to most is grief. Everything she does is designed around denying that her grief exists — she creates Westview in response to seeing Vision’s corpse, changes decades when the outside world breaks in, and expands the borders when she’s confronted with the possibility of losing Vision again. She doesn’t do it to hurt anyone. When Billy tells her that Vision is in trouble, she reacts with sheer panic and does the only thing she knows will save him: She freezes time, expands the Hex, and consumes SWORD into her false world. 

Odds and Ends:

• Agnes’ Halloween costume is, of course, a witch.
• Billy and Tommy get their powers this episode. In the comics they go by Wiccan and Speed and are part of the Young Avengers, which it seems like Marvel is building up to in the near future.
• The theatre marque is advertising two movies: The Incredibles, obviously a nod to the Maximoff’s becoming a superhero family, and Parent Trap, about someone pretending to be someone they’re not, a nod to Pietro being an imposter.
• Vision and Wanda’s Halloween costumes are recreations of their original comic book outfits.
• There’s a quick shot of SWORD agents carting the missile Wanda threw out of the Hex back to base. That’s going to come back in a big way a couple episode down the line.
• This week in commercials is a claymation-style ad of a boy turning to bones as he struggles to open a container of Yo-Magic. The concept of magic bleeding someone dry is very relevant to Agatha which is to literally bleed other witches of their power and steal it as her own.
• Hayward’s secret file is called “Cataract” because something is wrong with The Vision. For that pun alone he deserves to be the villain.
• Darcy’s about to say the f-word until the Hex catches her and changes it to “fudge.” Glad to see Wanda’s keeping her show safe for Disney’s younger audiences.
• I would consider this the first episode in which Wanda is actually aware of her actions — unlike prior episodes, she understands she can shift narratives and control plotlines. But even if you’re being ungenerous, the earliest you could say Wanda is aware that she controls Westview is last week’s episode. That means Wanda only spends two days, three at most, knowingly controlling the citizens of Westview. Not to downplay her actions, but that’s really not a lot of time when the lives of her husband and children were dependent on her maintaining Westview — especially because she didn’t know the citizens were in pain. I’ll definitely have more to say on this when I get to the finale, but it just feels like there’s a very gendered way in which certain segments of the audience are fixated on wanting Wanda to be punished more. In comparison to the catastrophic death counts the actions of characters like Thor, Tony, and Hulk have caused, Wanda’s actions in Westview are relatively tame. 

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