What to Watch Verdict
Nothing's what it seems in Westfield, and that continues to do nothing but add to the story in WandaVision
Pros
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🔸We missed you, Darcy!
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🔸Teyonah Parris gets an opportunity to ~act~ this week and she takes it.
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🔸Some new players add an interesting new perspective to who could really be pulling the strings here.
Cons
- -
🔸The juxtaposition between episodes is a little bit jarring.
This post contains spoilers for WandaVision.
Check out last week's review here.
Some long-awaited information on Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is provided on this week’s episode of WandaVision, and somehow that’s only the tip of the iceberg. SWORD (Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division) plays a major role as we start to really sink our teeth into the mystery of Westfield. We’ll also see some involvement from the FBI, and see some old familiar faces as things unfold. (We missed you, Darcy. Please never leave us again.)
After Geraldine let something slip about Ultron, she finds herself yeeted back into reality by a very defensive Wanda. At the time, it feels like it’s rage about Pietro. Now that we have a little more context, we might be seeing something a little bit more sinister from the Scarlet Witch. Before we dive into what makes the town tick, we need to know more about Captain Monica Rambeau. Or, as many may remember, Lieutenant Trouble.
We meet Monica in a flashback right after Avengers: Endgame. Carol Danvers’ (Brie Larson) voice wakes her up from a deep sleep after her body reforms from the Snap. Captain Rambeau went into the hospital for her mother’s cancer surgery, managed to see her through a successful removal, and then found herself snapped out of existence with half of the universe. Maria Rambeau survived the surgery without issue. What she didn’t survive was the cancer’s remission three-years into her daughter’s lack of existence.
There were plenty of warnings that WandaVision was going to get rough, and we’ve seen enough hints to know they weren’t lying. But Maria’s death in the middle of it all hits hard. Before her passing, Maria founded SWORD, who we learn might not be the bad guys we had them pegged for (at least in this exact instance, they’re screwing up the same way SHIELD did on the sidelines). There’s something truly satisfying about both of the MCU’s major defense divisions being founded and run by women. Even if SWORD isn’t run by one right now.
After Maria’s passing, the agency shifted to the power of Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg). He’s got the aw shucks white guy routine with Monica and the tough guy agency leader routine with everyone else. Y’know what else he has? A big fat Nazi relative. Or at least he did before he died. We meet Brian Hayward on Agents of SHIELD. Ol’ Brian was a member of the Centipede (basically a cyborg program) project. Former United States Army and “current” Hydra member when he was killed on the series. All I’m sayin’ is keep your eye on this creep.
The fact that the series is making it so clear that this is of Wanda’s doing makes Hayward’s involvement even more suspicious. The Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t mess around with its twists—particularly in its serialized stories. The fact that they’ve all but told us that there’s a part of Wanda who knows exactly what she’s doing makes it obvious that that’s not the full story. Hydra is at play here, and Hayward is the biggest connection yet.
As if the jarring loss of Maria wasn’t enough, this episode also gives us a big face-full of a zombified Vision. Infinitely more jarring than expected given the fact that he’s basically just a very fancy robot, but it does go a long way to confirm that he is still extremely dead. What’s worse is that whatever this version of Vision is, he knows that this is Wanda’s creation. He’s sad and scared for her—and shout-out to Paul Bettany for being able to make that clear with a few glances because he’s only in the episode for a few moments.
Though Episode 4 is kind of an exposition dump that’s meant to give us background on a lot of information we already had, it’s definitely one of the more capable chapters of its type. There were a couple moments where I missed being in the town with Wanda and Vision, but those were quickly outweighed by thirst to know what in the hell was going on. We got partial answers to a lot of questions, and a whole new crop of them to keep us guessing until next week!
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