What to Watch Verdict
This week's WandaVision takes huge swings, and they work!
Pros
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🔸Well, we know what that big cameo Elizabeth Olson was talking about now!
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🔸Big cracks in Wanda's reality bring up exciting new questions.
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🔸Learning that Wanda isn't fully aware has big implications.
Cons
This post contains spoilers for WandaVision.
Check out last week's review here.
This week, we see big cracks start to appear in the world that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olson) has created for herself. Agnes stumbles a line and asks her if she wants her to take it from the top, Vision (Paul Bettany) is starting to notice things he didn’t before — more on that later — and to make matters harder, Wanda can’t control Billy and Tommy. The two do make it a little bit more convenient for her by popping right out of infancy, but that’s a separate conversation in and of itself.
We’ve known from the beginning that WandaVision would be heavily rooted in grief, trauma, and how we deal with those emotions. Wanda and Monica (Teyonah Parris) make quite the pair with their respective agony. While it gives Monica a unique insight into the pain that Wanda feels, Wanda’s not ready to let anyone in just yet. Especially someone who’s running around with the S.W.O.R.D. logo on their chest.
Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) returns from wherever he scurried off to last week to make sure Wanda is villainized as much as possible. She has her defenders—both Monica and Jimmy are firm believers that she’s the hero they remember — but Hayward’s on a mission. When he can’t convince them with words, he pulls up footage of Wanda “stealing” Vision’s corpse before all of this started to unfold. He insists that she started all of it, and is torturing all of the people she’s holding captive. There’s just one problem there—Wanda doesn’t remember how all of this began.
Here’s my current theory on Vision’s sentience: bringing him back to life is something that Wanda is capable of doing as a product of the mind stone herself. However, it takes time. The longer this world continues, the more powerful Vision grows, and he’s starting to notice more and more of those aforementioned cracks as he does. With his powers come conflict, though. Tyler Hayward might be a big fat H.Y.D.R.A. agent in disguise, but he is right about Vision’s wishes. He never would have chosen to hurt all of these people. Now, whether directly intentional or otherwise, they’re in pain so Wanda and Vision can have their perfect life.
Let’s be clear: to some extent, Wanda knows what she’s doing. That becomes obvious when Hayward tries to blast her and she marches out of her own reality to chuck his drone back in his face. But Wanda isn’t fully aware of what’s going on around her. Not only does she not remember the beginning of the story, she also can’t recognize her own brother’s face.
Just to back that up a tiny bit, she does recognize Pietro. She just recognizes a different universe’s Pietro (Evan Peters) instead of her own. If Wanda was fully in charge of her facilities, Fox’s iteration of the character would have been disintegrated on sight. Instead, there’s a shocked albeit vaguely emotional reunion. No, ladies and gentlemen. Wanda Maximoff is not fully in control, and all of you who villainized her over the last week can go ahead and start eating crow whenever you’re ready.
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This week’s episode feels like it cracked things wide open, but in the thrilling way that only offers more questions and very few new answers. The series hasn’t gotten to the point where that’s a negative quality — especially while it’s bringing in major players like Peters — and given its pacing so far it doesn’t seem like that’s going to be an issue. It feels like all of the pieces of the puzzle have been grouped by color and the last few episodes of the season have the exciting job of putting them all together again.
Key players that are currently the most interesting include: Wanda and Monica’s relationship — let’s keep diving into this forever, please; Wanda and Vision’s conflict; Tyler Hayward being a big fat Nazi (“terrorist” getting dropped over Darcy’s intended “dick” while describing S.W.O.R.D.’s leader got a good chuckle out of me); and why S.W.O.R.D. is manipulating Wanda to do what they are. Weapon feels like the obvious call-out there, but a weapon against what? Wanda? The Avengers? We don’t know yet.
The biggest wild card so far as characters go at this exact moment is Agnes (Katherine Hahn). There are strong theories as to how she’s the antagonist here. Agatha Harkness — the witch that many theorize is galivanting as Wanda’s nosy neighbor — isn’t ostensibly evil. She’s just, y’know … complicated. We’ll get to Mephisto at a later date. All the same, Agnes and Dottie are the only two townsfolk who didn’t appear on Jimmy (Randall Park) and Darcy’s (Kat Dennings) missing persons board. I guess Pietro now plays a role here as well. Is this the beginning of the multiverses beginning to step on each other? Is whoever's doing this from the same universe as Pietro and doesn't know what Wanda's version looks like?
Stick around, folks. I'm sure we'll have plenty of theories to throw at you in the coming week!
