The magic of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is often overlooked because of the franchise’s world-conquering success. It’s easily dismissed as popcorn nonsense at best or everything that’s wrong with cinema at worst. But like, whatever—everyone doesn’t have to like the same stuff. But those critiques do miss the magic, and they dismiss what viewers connect to most in this franchise: the characters.
Marvel Studios didn’t invent the superhero movie, not by a long shot. What Marvel did, when it cast Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow as Tony Stark and Pepper Potts in Iron Man, was emphasize the acting. This is, after all, what set Marvel Comics apart from the competition in the early ’60s: they made you care about the person under the iron helmet first and foremost. And by casting the right people in the right roles again and again, the MCU added an automatic depth that we’ve never seen in a franchise like this, on this scale, before. Marvel Studios cast actors who knew how to add little moments, the way they turn their head or cast a glance or touch a hand, that amount to so much. It’s why even overcrowded superhero slugfests like Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Endgame feel conversely small and intimate. The backstories, emotions, and stakes are all there, in the way one character looks at another if not explicitly in the text.
We watch sitcoms for the performances and the characters, not the plot. The same is true for the MCU, and that is its greatest strength. That’s why the franchise endures. That’s why WandaVision, a show built on two team players with literally 10 minutes of screentime together across three feature films, works—because Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany put lifetimes of love into the subtext. And now through WandaVision, Marvel Studios is actually able to slow down and let us live with this love… and this grief. WandaVision is Marvel as prestige TV.
But first, witches!
We learned last week that Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) is actually a sneaky, super powerful witch named Agatha Harkness. How powerful is she? Well, she hypnotized all of the internet with her theme song. That’s pretty powerful! She’s pretty powerful in-canon, too, and that power goes back centuries to Salem, Massachusetts in 1693. Apparently Agatha is just too curious for her own good. She went and meddled with dark magics above her pay grade and pissed off her coven—including her mother. Tied to a stake, Agatha pleads for help understanding this magic, as wielding it came naturally to her—but mama’s not buying it. Agatha toyed with the wrong magic on this day—but this coven toyed with the wrong witch.
Agatha turns the coven’s power back on them, frying their life energy and leaving Ms. Harkness surrounded by mummified husks. She snatches that brooch off of her mother’s corpse because yes, Agatha is 100% that witch.
Back to the now, we pick up right where we left off last week. Agatha’s holding Wanda in the moldiest, creepiest rumpus room ever, one with runes plastered on every wall as opposed to old Led Zeppelin posters and half dim neon signs.
After weeks of playing the nosy neighbor, we get to see Hahn really cut loose as Agatha during this villain monologue—and it turns out she wasn’t really acting as Agnes! From mocking Wanda’s inconsistent accent to calling Evan Peters “Fietro” (Fake Pietro), this witch’s wit is not stuck in the 17th century. Oh, and it turns out Fietro is just a real someone (maybe the MCU’s version of the actor Evan Peters?) who Agatha was piloting from afar. After all, the real Pietro’s body is so far away and riddled with holes! It turns out that yeah, Wanda didn’t recognize Pietro at first, as was hinted. Grief does wild things to your perception of reality! And besides, Agatha can’t raise the dead, nor can she just create life willy nilly. That’s impossible…
We learn that Agatha has been waiting—waiting for Wanda to disclose her secrets. She was drawn to Westview because of the tidal wave of magic that crashed onto it. As Agatha explains (again, Hahn is just the only one), Wanda’s utilizing ridiculous levels of magic.
A mind control spell isn’t so hard, but one that washes over thousands of people to the outskirts of town? Even more impressive is Wanda’s transmutation skills. Agatha turns a big ass bug into a bird with ease, but she’s had over 300 years of practice. Wanda’s affected every cell of everything around her. And on top of that, Wanda doesn’t even recognize those runes on the wall! Wanda is keeping no secrets because she truly doesn’t know what’s going on. “You’d rather fall apart than face your truth,” says Agatha, saying the elevator pitch for WandaVision. The only way Agatha’s going to figure this out is to just cut to the chase and guide Wanda through her very own clip show.
Clip #1: Sokovia. Papa Maximoff comes home to the family’s meager apartment in the war-torn Eastern European country. He has a suitcase in tow, one filled with DVDs (that he assures his wife he will sell soon). The DVDs will look familiar to anyone who was like me in college. They’re all sitcoms, far beyond what we’ve seen on WandaVision. Who’s the Boss?, The Addams Family, I Dream of Jeannie, I Love Lucy, Bewitched, and Malcolm in the Middle (which places this flashback circa 2002, as that’s when Malcolm first arrived on DVD—why do I look these things up?). It’s TV night, Wanda’s favorite night, and she has something special she wants to watch: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Season 2, Episode 21. I knew exactly which episode she wanted to watch before I even looked it up, because it’s essentially the genesis of all of WandaVision: “It May Look Like a Walnut.”
Sidenote: While “It May Look Like a Walnut was the 20th episode of Season 2 when it aired in 1963, it was the 21st produced. The DVDs are in production order, not airdate order, which makes it Season 2, Episode 21. WandaVision knows the details.
“It May Look Like a Walnut” is a massive swing of an episode. The episode is a pitch-perfect homage to The Twilight Zone, as Rob (Dick Van Dyke) wakes up in a reality where all of his family and friends have been turned into walnut-eating, air-drinking Twiloites. It’s a gutsy, ambitious half hour—especially for an episode so early in the show’s run. But The Dick Van Dyke Show, just like WandaVision, had the nerve.
The Maximoffs watch the episode and it’s… it’s just beautiful. It’s just right. It’s exactly what it felt like to be a kid watching a sitcom with your family, where the entire world hushed for 25-ish minutes and all of you, as a unit, gave in to laughter. Earnest laughter. And it all makes sense. It’s all Wanda because this is all Wanda wants; she wants to go back to that last moment when it was just her, her family, and the laughter.
Because then her apartment building is bombed, killing her parents and trapping the Maximoff twins under a bed and rubble. Now Wanda and Pietro are watching a Stark Industries missile, its red light blinking like the toaster in Episode 1.
But behind the missile, the TV is still playing “It May Look Like a Walnut’s” happy ending where Rob wakes up and the nightmare is over. Wanda reaches out…
Agatha gets it—or at least part of it. How in the world did Wanda and Pietro survive for two days staring at a bomb that never went off? A probability hex, she surmises, the kind that could be cast by a “baby witch” unknowingly with no training. Then how’d Wanda become an Olympic gold medal winner of spell-casting?
Clip #2: HYDRA. As seen in the post-credits of 2014’s Captain America: Winter Soldier, the Maximoff twins volunteered for HYDRA experimentation using Loki’s scepter from 2012’s The Avengers—a scepter that contained the Mind Stone. Now we see what Wanda volunteered for. She steps into a chamber, observed by a pair of HYDRA scientists who expect her to die. She doesn’t. The blue gem lodged in the scepter breaks free and it comes right to Wanda, and then it cracks open to reveal the yellow Mind Stone. Its power expands, washing over Wanda—and in the glow, Wanda sees a comic-accurate silhouette descend from on high (it’s her Scarlet Witch costume).
Safe to say that hasn’t happened before.
Later, in her cell, Wanda’s watching the Brady Bunch episode “Kitty-Karry-All Is Missing.” This is notable because Episode 3 was a Brady Bunch riff that featured a screen-accurate Kitty-Karry-All doll. It’s also notable because of the scene we see: Cindy’s trying to put her doll to sleep. Bobby, the youngest Brady brother, is annoyed and starts trash-talking Kitty. Cindy tells him to stop hurting Kitty’s feelings, to which Bobby replies, “She doesn’t got any feelings. She’s full of sawdust or rags of something.” So… Wanda, basically.
I gotta say, “full of sawdust or rags” is a pretty accurate description of what depression feels like!
But thematically, Wanda’s more powerful than ever. These two tweaks to her origin are significant. They put Wanda back in control of her own narrative. She didn’t survive that bombing because of luck, and her powers didn’t come from HYDRA. She survived—and her brother survived—because of her willpower. And While HYDRA experimented on her, the Mind Stone reacted to her and her innate power, amplifying it times infinity. Agatha’s now seen a lot, but she wants to know more (remember, this is a witch whose thirst for knowledge led her to be tied to a stake).
Clip #3: Avengers Compound. A scene between Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, the kind of scenes we previously inferred took place offscreen between films, and a scene we could only see on TV. Wanda’s still, glass-eyed, watching Malcolm in the Middle for the millionth time (I wonder how Wanda felt when she got to Avengers Compound and discovered they had Hulu?). She calls for Vision, almost instinctively, and he comes to her. He sits, he watches, and he sees Hank (Bryan Cranston) get clobbered by a collapsed awning. Vision wonders if Hank is hurt, but Wanda responds that no, this “is not that kind of show.” In her life, parents die. On TV, parents shake off catastrophes and move on. Her life is that kind of show.
Noticing that Wanda’s just passively letting this show—and, by extension, her life—pass by, completely emotionally detached, Vision offers to listen to her if she needs to talk. This irks Wanda a bit: “The only thing that would bring me comfort is seeing him again.” She immediately apologizes, saying that her grief comes in waves, washing over her again and again, crashing into her every time she tries to stand on her own.
“It’s just gonna drown me.”
The last year… the last four years but really the last year, have dragged me down further than I ever thought possible. I’ve always had fits of anxiety and depression, but never to the point of paralysis until the last four years. And the last year, isolated, I’ve been treading water. Watching old sitcoms, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Bob Newhart Show and Green Acres, has kept me afloat… but the waves keep coming. I literally drowned for a few hours last night, and then I drowned for most of last week, and that’s just… my life, it’s our lives. Wave after wave.
This scene, right here, airing right now in this year, is why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is important. It’s why people invest their emotions. It’s why this franchise is successful, more successful than every other imitator. It’s because those franchises are imitating the wrong things. They’re imitating the spectacle and not the emotion.
Vision hears this and, knowing he doesn’t understand grief because he’s basically brand new and never been close enough to anyone to lose anyone, still offers a thought after assessing that the totality of Wanda’s ocean of emotions has to include something other than sorrow, because…
This puts a new name to what Wanda’s feeling. Instead of feeling the shame that comes along with feeling grief, with experiencing depression, she can see her waves for what they actually are: her love for her brother. And there’s no shame in that. And—I dunno, I think Vision’s ability to lessen the density of Wanda’s grief is his real superpower. This is what she needed to hear, that her feelings were valid and real and something that she can embrace and use and move through instead of succumbing to. This is the moment that Vision not only really proved his humanity (no artificial intelligence would ever be programmed for this level of emotional complexity!) but it’s the moment Wanda fell in love with Vision.
Agatha can’t be bothered. Hahn swipes at her eye for a second, which looked like she may be wiping away a tear but, TBH, I think it’s probably because Agatha was bored and wanted them to get a move on already. With her parents, Pietro, and now Vision all dead, dead, dead, what ever would Wanda do now?
Clip #4: S.W.O.R.D. Freshly de-dusted and hot off of kicking Thanos’ ass, Wanda rolls up to S.W.O.R.D. HQ looking her dead lover’s corpse. I feel for this poor, poor front desk worker who woke up that morning and did not expect to have to deal with the most powerful Avenger asking to speak to his manager. She just wants to bury Vision and give him the funeral, and her the closure, they both deserve.
Turns out the manager—Directer Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg)—wants to speak with Wanda! In fact, it’s heavily implied that this dick probably told Wanda where the body was.
It’s all a ruse, and not even a very good one! Hayward has Vision’s disassembled corpse splayed out in a lab below his office! They just so happen to be cutting him up right as she walks in? Sure. BTW, Vision’s inner workings are in a hexagonal, honeycomb pattern… so, that’s probably where the hexagons come from and not A.I.M. And when Wanda tells this jackass that she just wants to bury Vision, Hayward’s like, “Oh, but wait—you sure you don’t wanna resurrect him? Even though you are the only person who could? You sure ’bout that? Okaaaay…” And when she storms into the lab, as seen in the security footage, Hayward tells his guards to stand down. Let the Avenger do her work! He wants Vision operational, clearly!
She puts her hand on his collapsed forehead, and—Olsen’s entire face starting to cave in with grief—says, “I can’t feel you.” Just to wreck you even more, the last words Vision said to Wanda before she had to kill him in Avengers: Infinity War?
Contrary to popular belief, Wanda did not abscond with Vision’s body and drag him to Westview. No, she left S.W.O.R.D., got into her shiny new car, and drove to beat-up, modern day Westview to… look at the plot of land that Vision had purchased so the two of them to retire and live out their lives in New Jersey. So there she is, alone, in a town she’s never been to, with no family. When the wave of grief crashes down on her this time, her dam bursts. Her reality-warping power floods the town, giving her exactly what she desires most in this moment of extreme vulnerability.
It’s not intentional, as she has no idea that she possesses magical abilities beyond what the Mind Stone gave her, and the warp—as we’ve seen in the first few episodes—extended to her mind too. Remember, she was equally confused as Vision in the first couple episodes.
But it’s not just her grief that warps reality. “What is grief, if not love persevering?” Wanda’s love warps reality too, creating—from absolutely nothing—a Vision for Wanda to grow old with.
When Wanda saw that flash of Vision’s corpse (and the same goes for Pietro’s bullet-riddled body), she wasn’t seeing the literal truth; she was, instead, seeing what she knew was the truth outside of her hex. And this is why Vision, unlike Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), was not able to exit the hex and live. That’s because he doesn’t exist outside of the hex.
Now Agatha’s seen enough. She claps for this revelation from the studio audience, and we see the show’s Episode 1 set in full color (which looks a lot like how the Dick Van Dyke Show set actually looked IRL!).
And back in the now, Billy and Tommy can be heard screaming from offscreen. Wanda rushes to their rescue to find them being held prisoner on magic leashes by fully witched-out Agatha Harkness, her face beat and eyebrows done.
And Agatha reveals what she now knows to be true: Wanda is something Agatha believed to be a myth. Wanda has the power to create life spontaneously. Wanda is wielding chaos magic. She is a Scarlet Witch. And clearly, if it’s got a bad bitch like Agatha all riled up, you know that’s not a good thing.
Fast-forward to the mid-credits scene: S.W.O.R.D. is ready to launch something, and Director Hayward is ready. Finally, after disassembling and reassembling this weapon countless times over the past few years, they finally found a power source that works. Using the energy radiating from that drone that Wanda threw at S.W.O.R.D.’s feet, S.W.O.R.D. has powered on Vision—Vision’s milky white robot corpse, reanimated, sans the Mind Stone that made him him.
This happened in the comics, too, when Vision was rebuilt as a ghostly, soulless version of himself. Wanda… didn’t like that very much. Probably gonna assume she’s also not gonna like it when it happens on TV, too.
Next week: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”
Stream WandaVision on Disney+