Depending on who you ask, WandaVision was off to a rocky start, with a duo of episodes which didn't give away much. Then a third episode which gave away a little more, but still not enough for a show that's three episodes into a mystery that it wants you to be invested in and care about. But regardless of how you felt about episodes 1 to 3, THIS episode right here is the one we were all waiting for. The one that will push those who were on the fence into seeing the entire show through.Although, let's face it. You were always gonna watch this shit. 'Cos I know you want that money's worth out of your Disney+ account and that you ain't been watched shit on the service since The Mandalorian's second season finale aired.
After 3 episodes set in a sitcom, we finally get an episode filling us in on what exactly has been happening in the world outside of WandaVision. Surprisingly starting from the day the blip got reversed at the end of Endgame, and bringing us right up to the moment we left off in episode 3 when Wanda sent Geraldine's afro flying outta Westview.
The first 5 minutes of this episode are a roller-coaster. Those who knew who Teyonah Parris was cast as always knew she was Monica Rambeau, but we finally hear her called by her name in this episode, with nods and references to boot, so that everybody knows this is truly who she is. We see that Monica got blipped, but her mother didn't, and that her mother passed away in the 5 years that Monica was dust. We also immediately see that Monica is an agent of S.W.O.R.D and find out that her mother was actually one of the founders, which makes complete sense given the events of Captain Marvel and that she was friends with Nick Fury. I don't know S.W.O.R.D history in great detail, but I'm pretty sure Monica wasn't the founder of it in the comics. S.W.O.R.D was co-created as part of Marvel Comics canon by Joss Whedon, whose seeds sown in Avengers: Age of Ultron have led us to WandaVision. So it doesn't have as long a history within Marvel lexicon as S.H.I.E.L.D, and therefore gives Marvel Studios a lot of leeway to write the history of it to make sense within their universe. Therefore making Monica a founder doesn't have any large canonical clashes or wipe out a defining part of some iconic character. It's is a logical call and gives Maria a cool history. After the events of Captain Marvel, of course Maria would go back into action and be involved with some big ol' institution which deals with shit in space. It's also cool that S.H.I.E.L.D and S.W.O.R.D both have founders who were women, with one of them being Black. I love it.
The opening sequence of WandaVision does a stand-up job of filling gaps in terms of who the agent formerly known as Geraldine is leading into the chain of events which ended with her to rolling in the grass at the end of episode 3. However, the dialogue feels pretty clunky, and the exposition doesn't always feel as natural as it could. The way we find out Monica's full name, who her mother is, how much time had passed since the Thanos snap, how Monica grew up - it's a little rough around the edges. We're also breezed through everything so quickly that we don't have a chance to really sit with any of what transpires, which is so relevant to understanding Monica and S.W.O.R.D in addition to really grounding us into how somebody adjusts back into a life that's moved on 5 years from whence you left it, as it's not a perspective we've seen in the MCU aside from Spider-Man: Far From Home which humorously summarised it and then it was back to normal. I get that this is a story about Wanda and Vision, so we're not going to get a Monica origin story here. But I would have appreciated just a moment of things slowing down. One of the best parts of Avengers: Endgame was seeing how the likes of Natasha and Steve were coping with this new life in the wake of the blip. I wish Monica were given a similar moment. Given that WandaVision is now fully over it, and Captain Marvel 2 won't dwell too much on the blip, I can't imagine we'll ever get it, which is a shame. But hopefully Marvel consider bringing back their One Shots or finding a way to show these moments somehow. Or they coulda just...I dunno...made the episode 50 minutes instead of 20.Oh. And it was low-key triggering seeing a hospital be overrun, with doctors saying their hospital is at capacity. Shout-outs to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We saw Agent Woo in the WandaVision trailers and thought we may have heard his voice in episode 2, and now we finally see him in an episode.The setup for S.W.O.R.D's involvement interestingly was to find Monica who had gotten herself sucked into Westview, which happens as a result of her being put on a mission to assist the FBI, which is how she partners with Agent Woo who is on a missing persons case, which then becomes a where-the-fuck-is-an-entire-town case. The whole time we were led to believe that S.W.O.R.D's mission was to recover Wanda, but it was to recover Monica. Although given the discovery of Wanda and her potential part in ensnaring an entire town by Sentient means, S.W.O.R.D will absolutely be about her ass now. And given that we know Wanda will feature in Doctor Strange and The Multiverse of Madness, and what we see of her powers in WandaVision, this show is not going to end in a nice little bow, but in a whole fucking mess, and I'm here for it. Because I love me some mess.
And then there's the character of Darcy from Thor, who is a far better astrophysicist now than she was during her days as Queen Amidala's intern. One would wonder why they reached out to her and not Padmé herself. Maybe Padmé recommended Darcy. Maybe Natalie Portman said 'Bitch, I barely want to be in a Thor movie, you ain't having me in your little TV show shit too'. But I guess we'll find out why in Thor: Love & Thunder.HENNYWAY.
S.W.O.R.D spend 24 hours throwing money away and just flying a bunch of their ugly drones into the Westview energy field, where-as Darcy is in the bitch for all of 5 minutes and manages to figure out how to see what's going on inside of Westview, and that all that was needed was a television. An old one though. Not one o' dem flat ones. So, the person with the S.W.O.R.D notebook at the end of episode 1? Yep. It was Max from Two Broke Girls.
Throughout this episode Darcy and Agent Woo are essentially us, the viewers. Watching WandaVision, wondering what the fuck is happening and why it's playing out like a sitcom. We also see the effects of Wanda's raggedy editing, and that she's editing more moments of her sitcom than we had seen. So far we have been privy to two edited moments. One when Wanda saw the bee keeper in episode 2 (more on him later), and another in episode 3 when Vision twigged that things weren't quite right. But Wanda has been Final Cut pro'ing this shit on the fly on numerous occasions. The moment when Wanda is called through the radio (by Agent Woo) and Dotty cuts her hand? Wanda edited that shit. The moment when 'Geraldine' ran her mouth about Ultron? Wanda edited that shit too. And at the very end of the episode we see another moment from The Shady Bunch episode with Vision and Wanda being very aware of existing in a place which is a warped reality, and that Wanda herself is in control of it.
This makes you wonder how many other moments that we'd seen that Wanda had edited. It's almost certain that the whole choking debacle that went down at dinner in episode 1 was edited the fuck out.
Episode 4 was clever in the sense that it made you feel like you were given a lot, but so much of the mystery is still unsolved and unaccounted for. We do get some reveals. But what the episode does more than anything is provide a much needed context. It also piques on many theories that the writers absolutely knew we would latch onto. What's the deal is with the residents of Westview? Is it even a real town? Why all the hexagons? Why is everything within Westview is playing out in the form of sitcoms? One of the solved mysteries is what happens to things that find their way into Wanda's Animal Crossing village, which answers what was a big question: Who is the bee keeper man? Turns out he is not a villain. It's not Mephisto. It's not Swarm. It's not an agent of A.I.M. He is just a regular agent of S.W.O.R.D in a hazmat suit, whose appearance shifted to match the era of the TV show he happened to enter at. We don't find out why he was manifested as a bee keeper with actual bees, but it confirms that the appearance of things change when they enter Wanda Crossing. As the poor guy crawls through the through the field, we see the wire and karabiner connected to him change into a jump rope. Oh, and that helicopter that Wanda found? It's Monica's drone that she flew in to find out what was happening in Westview. The appearance of which also changed to match the era it was in. Although we still don't understand why the helicopter was in colour amidst black & white, but the bee keeper (whose mask clearly had yellow mesh) wasn't in colour. And whilst Monica was accounted for, we don't know what the fuck happened to the bee keeper (Agent Franklin) once Wanda rewound on a bitch. Where is he now? Which Wanda Crossing resident is he now? Do S.W.O.R.D even care!?R.I.P to the bee keeper.
What we are beginning to realise about Wanda is that whilst she has extreme control of Wanda Crossing, there are moments where she loses that control and it affects things around her; which seems to be when her concentration is momentarily broken and she remembers this world she's in isn't truly real. We saw this for the first time in episode 1 when Vision's boss choked after Wanda was caught off guard due to being bombarded with questions she couldn't answer. We saw it in episode 2 when the glass shattered in Dottie's hand whilst Wanda was transfixed on being called through the radio. We see it again in episode 3, when Herb glitches and cuts through the wall whilst Wanda's is going through her accelerated pregnancy. And we get a HUGE ass moment in episode 4, when Wanda is distracted after having just sent Monica flying through walls and outta Westview like a Dragon Ball Z character. And when she turns to look at Vision in his true form. Zombified, with the colour drained from him and the crater in his head where Thanos fisted his face in Infinity War. So much of Wanda Crossing seems integral to Wanda's well-being and mental state. Good luck to the team trying to pull Wanda out of it. Because, chile...
We also realise that Vision is very much in on what's happening, but is saying 'I do not see it' because he loves Wanda. I initially thought that the edits we were seeing in episodes 2 and 3 were to keep Vision from knowing anything and were essentially memory wipes. The rewind giving him no recollection of the bee keeper. The cut in episode 3 giving him no recollection of realising that things are wrong. But it seems to be for the purpose of the broadcast, and that Vision may still recall these moments. The one thing he doesn't seem to know is that he's dead. So whilst Vision is in on things, he's still not completely in the know, which is also Wanda's doing. But we know he eventually figures this out from one of the trailers, when we see Agnes tell him that he is dead.Vision is key here, because not only is he the reason Wanda is doing *Gestures* ALL OF THIS. But we're still not 100% sure of how Vision is back in the first place, something which Darcy immediately makes note of when she sees him on screen. I figured that perhaps he was a figment of Wanda's imagination, but then again everything in Wanda Crossing technically is. One thing is for sure, is that if S.W.O.R.D manage to pull Wanda outta this world where she could lose her kids, and experience losing her man for a third time, she's gonna be pissed to high hell, and everybody is gonna have a far bigger problem on their hands than some town being sucked into a re-run of sitcoms. If y'all didn't already know it, Wanda is PO-WUR-FUL. This is the same woman who destroyed a whole ass infinity stone with one hand, whilst keeping Thanos at bay with the other, who already had four of the stones AND killed a bunch of people and beat the Hulk into hiding when he only had one of them. And then she flat out almost killed Thanos single-handedly. If S.W.O.R.D have no comprehension of how powerful she is, then they'll soon learn. But if they'd done their research, then they'd know. And when Monica is shot out of Westview, her first words are 'It's Wanda. It's all Wanda'. So they gon' learn.
Wanda's power and threat level may tie in directly with the question as to what the hell is going on with these residents, none of whom seem to be in Wanda Crossing of their own will, except MAYBE Agnes. We've seen residents have control of their own cognition in selected moments, again when Wanda is distracted, which may insinuate that they are under a spell. This could partially explain why Monica was going along with the charade when she found herself sucked into Wanda Crossing. And if you look back to episode 3 when Monica drops the bomb about Ultron, it seems to be after a moment of shaking herself back into cognizance. But another theory could be that residents are just playing along out of fear of being killed. Whilst this episode did reveal that some of the Westview residents are indeed real people, we still got no confirmation on whether they're alive or dead. And seeing that Wanda is able to bring Vision back in Wanda Crossing means that she could do this for anybody else who happens to be dead. It all hinges on whatever Herb was about to tell vision in Episode 3. 'We're all...'WHAT Herb? Ya'll are all WHAT!?
Whilst everybody was wondering if Wanda was trapped, episode 4 showed that she isn't, and that she is 100% aware of this TV foolishness of a reality and that she is responsible for the whole damn thing. There could still be a twist that she's under the influence of some other powerful being with an agenda, or that she made a deal with somebody in order to live her corpse husband fantasy. But either way, there is a willingness that Wanda had shown / is showing to live in Wanda Crossing in order to be with Vision. It's also toying with the idea that Wanda is the villain of the show itself, which would be a great twist which completely subverts the exception of a superhero TV show having this wholly separate antagonist, in addition to completely debunking the most popular theory amongst Marvel fans that the bad guy in play is the devil of Marvel comics, Mephisto. But with a few episodes yet to go and things maybe not being so cut and dry, we could still get another player who is partly responsible for all that's happening. I wouldn't write off that acting director of S.W.O.R.D dude, Tyler Hayward. Especially after we saw who the head of S.H.I.E.L.D turned out to be in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Just throwing that out there. Although would Marvel really do that shit again?
Wanda being the show villain would be a twist and a half which could make for great conflict later on - with Vision realising that Wanda's refusal to accept his death is causing harm to innocent people which can't continue forever; forcing her to face reality and accept a life without him in it. Then there's Monica. Whoever the villain turns out to be, it would need to position her for whatever comes next in Captain Marvel 2 and beyond. Many are hoping that she will acquire her powers and become Spectrum as she does in the comics. But Marvel could also completely turn that on its head and have her become a non powered director of S.W.O.R.D, playing the same role in phase 4 of the MCU that Nick Fury played in the first. Having a boss bitch Black woman head up an agency like S.W.O.R.D to call shots would be great, but so would making her a superhero. She could do both, but I doubt Marvel Studios would do that. Also Monica doesn't seem like the type who would want both; knowing the level of commitment heading up an organisation and being a superhero at a galactic scale requires having seen her mother do one and her Aunt Carol do the other.
Episode 4 of WandaVision was a thrill to watch. But I still feel like the structure of the show feels a little off. A show that I always think of when it comes to an instance of a superhero style mystery done right is Watchmen. The structure of the episodes and the way in which things tied in was so masterful. This isn't going to mean shit to you unless you've watched Watchmen on HBO - but, WandaVision by comparison feels like watching episodes of Watchmen with only the scenes of Ozymandias. You're watching it on faith of seeing how things will eventually tie together, but are given so little in terms of how it possibly could. WandaVision features a slew of Easter eggs and clues, but so many of them feel like deep cuts which are reliant on your prior knowledge of the show, a taste of The Vision & The Scarlet Witch comics and also the MCU. I love me a good Easter egg, but making them such hard Marvel references and also making them clues to the story is locking out people who are coming into this with zero knowledge of any of this Marvel shit.The MCU doing regular MCU shit can hurt it sometimes, but sometimes it does great things to remind you that these stories all exist in the same universe and that it's not just the big players and heroes who cross over into each others shit. Bringing in Darcy from Thor and Agent Woo from Ant-Man and The Wasp was a great call, in addition to little references in regards to them; such as Darcy now having her PhD and Agent Woo learning the card trick that he was obsessed with since seeing Scott Lang do it. Such small things, but genius calls. I look forward to seeing the MCU bring more of their original, non superhero related characters into the mix in future shows. Honestly these types of crossovers do more for me than the superhero ones.
I've watched this episode 3 times, because it's a hoot of an episode to watch, which feels like it's acknowledging the questions you've been asking for the past 3 weeks. But I'm still uncertain of whether I like this episode because it is just a good episode, or because it's finally an episode which is providing context following 3 episodes of sitcoms with little context. Maybe it's both. One thing that was sorely missed in this episode though was the production value of the sitcom recreations, but we still got to see it from different perspectives, which was cool. Whilst on their own they may have been huge what-the-fuck moments that didn't move things all that far along, they looked great and were a nice deviation from your bog standard MCU look, which I wish to God didn't have every show and film look the same. I really am gonna need a little more stylisation and better colour grading in future productions in phase 4.With us now seeing things partially from the perspective of what's being broadcast, what's happening off broadcast and what's happening outside of Wanda Crossing altogether, I'm keen to know how WandaVision will juggle these. The sitcom setup is cute, but can we really just go back to it as normal now that we know what we know?
📒 My Episode notes
- I had to Google what the Bee keeper's wire turned into, 'cos I ain't ever seen a jump rope like that in my life. I'm assuming it's an American thing. Jump ropes in the UK don't look like that.
- What is it with men at S.W.O.R.D being rude to women?
- Wanda's 'No' when she saw the bee keeper was different in this episode to what it was in episode 2.
- Monica flew through two walls, a garden fence and was thrown onto the floor from 10 feet in the air. How is she not dead? A bitch best at the every least be in a wheelchair in episode 5.
- What will the format of episode 5 be? We cant go back to just regular-ass sitcom episodes now.
- There's gotta be more to the hexagons than just 'WANDA A WITCH, SHE PUT A HEX ON THE TOWN, SO PERIMETER OF THE SPELL IS HEXAGONAL'.
- Wanda was really 'bout to give that happy anniversary pussy to a corpse?