by Nathaniel R
DO NOT READ OR COMMENT IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED WANDAVISION - SPOILERS
Today we were treated to the final episode of Disney+'s hit WandaVision, returning us to the Marvel Cinematic Universe by way of streaming sidebar. Watching WandaVision was a like a meta experience on steroids. The show itself was intentionally constructed that way using Wanda Maximoff's (Elisabeth Olsen) love of TV sitcoms to comment, however broadly on them, but more pointedly on nostalgia and the human need for escapism...
ep 1 "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience"
We knew from the first frames that what we were watching wasn't "real" in more ways than you usually understand as a viewer that what you're watching onscreen is unreal...
Even the leads themselves were out of place in the initial episodes which were a mismash of tropes, beats, and styles from I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke and Bewitched.
ep 2 "Don't Touch That Dial"
Wanda and Vision were often unable to remember context and/ or adequately perform their assigned roles. Especially when pressed to by their coworkers and neighbors. Sometimes quite literally as in episode 2's Magic Show wherein chewing gum mucks with Vision's insides and Wanda has to rescue his fake magic show with her real magic... while still making it look fake. Kathryn Hahn's Aggie was an immediate delight in the early episodes doing a heightened "nosey comic relief neighbor" that is familiar from just about every era of television. But more on her in a bit.
Several early criticisms of the show revolved around how weak a job the show did at actually capturing and understanding sitcoms. But that's missing the point entirely if you ask me. This is (magical) window dressing. People don't think too deeply about mainstream entertainments as is evidenced by literally every annoying complaint about critics not enjoying blockbusters (never mind that they often do). You know the one, "just turn off your brain and enjoy it".
ep 3 "Now in Color"
I'd be shocked if the intent of WandaVision was ever to faithfully reimagine old sitcoms or even too comment on the form in any meaningful way beyond the escapist gloss of their relatively easy and happy surfaces. All entertainment is illusion but most movies and television aim to immerse you in a heightened reality that you're supposed to buy into as "real" contextually. Not so here.
WandaVision very quickly begins to dispense with any context of even an internal reality as the rules keep changing. Now we're in color. Now there are impossible children. Now the citizens of Westview begin to malfunction in the way Wanda and Vision do, perturbed by things they don't quite get. Like (The wonderful Teyonnah Paris) who is, cryptically, "new"... "She has no home!" And the show even begins to pick fun at Elisabeth Olsen's performance with jokes about her come and go accent work as Wanda. (Olsen's accent work has always been spotty but she's otherwise wonderful, and able to stretch her jumping from era to era and from light silly comedy to angsty drama and the gradations inbetween.
- What are we looking at here? Is it an alternate reality? Time travel? A cocamamie social experiment?
- It's a sitcom.
ep 4 "We Interrupt This Program"
WandaVision's bizzare false reality or even its malfunctioning fantasy doesn't make it revolutionary entertainment, mind you. Many films and shows before it have mined showbiz nostalgia (Pleasantville, Truman Show, every musical episode of a non-musical show, etc...) and/or constructed false realities within a real narrative (Buffy, etc...) or revealed our own to be the illusion (The Matrix, etc..) or generally played with the mutable nature of life and identity (Eternal Sunshine etc...) to comment on various themes.
But WandaVision was delightfully slippery in this regard. Just four episodes in it abruptly and brilliantly changed course, acknowledging what was obvious from the jump -- its complete unreality. While also having a ton of fun by pretending it wasn't acknowledging just that with all the mumbo jumbo about the town of Westview changing people on a cellular level and familiar Marvel Cinematic Universe faces Jimmy Choo (Randall Park) and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) running to catch up with what the audience already understood in comic fashion. They theorized aloud and comically about what was going on, essentially acting out an imagined version of the audience discourse online.
ep 5 "On a Very Special Episode..."
ep 6 "All-New Halloween Spooktacular!"
ep 7 "Breaking the Fourth Wall"
The middle episodes were when WandaVision's true theme emerged: Grief and its repercussions for those who don't allow themselves to feel it and make peace with it. By denying her pain, Wanda has only made things worse. Curiously, and authentically if you ask me, Wanda seems to understand this for other people, if not for herself. When her rapidly (magically) growing boys, already pre-teens, lose their new dog she senses their avoidance.
Don't age yourself up. The urge to run from this feeling is powerful."
In these busy plotty chaotic middle episodes the show toys with whether or not Wanda is the villain of WandaVision and the whole idea of the fake TV show begins to fade from view. Technically 'the show' is still on but we're not definitely outside of it and inside of it simultaneously. it's frequently being edited and interrupted. The Vision himself begins to realize that Wanda is controlling the citizens of Westview. He attempts to escape Wanda's false reality only to begin to disintegrate. When Wanda realizes this she merely expands her avoidance of reality, by expanding the magical border of her fake world.
With the return of Wanda's brother Pietro/Quicksilver in the form of the actor Evan Peters (who played him in the Fox movies) rather than Aaron Taylor Johnson (who played him in the MCU movie) fan theories exploded along with everything that was happening within the show. Wanda and Vision were even more confused about this reality created specifically for them. And here were have yet another layer (but not the final layer) of the show's meta elements. The flimsy ever-shifting reality of the show starts to feel like the fan theories themselves, coming to life and evolving, and all completely illusory. Consider: Wanda, or, rather, MCU guru Kevin Feige and his various franchise teams, could just change the reality again. Nothing is ever permanent or fixed. We're already living in the famed "multiverse" of Phase Whichever that we're entering. We've been there all along actually.
At the end of "Breaking the Fourth Wall" we get the "Agatha All Along" reveal -- a new funny theme song -- when the show rewrites its early episodes essentially to make Agatha Harkness (turns out she's a witch) the big bad. Still, it's worth noting that she wasn't the original antagonist and still isn't the sole antagonist. That was and still is mentally unstable grieving Wanda who is her own worst enemy, protagonist and antagonist. They're now two warring Big Bads... at least in terms of the town of Westview where real people are just puppets for two sorceresses to play with.
ep 8 "Previously On"
And the final layer of WandaVision's meta-watching on steroid is revealed as Agatha takes Wanda on a tour of her past, to figure out how she cast the Westview spell. As in Avengers Endgame, we begin to revisit a past that we're already familiar with to glean new information or shift the narrative. In the penultimate episode WandaVision essentially becomes a fan watch-party, or fan-fiction corporatized, rather than traditional fiction. Marvel just keeps rewriting the previous realities. Nothing is ever fixed.
We also learn that the government has officially figured out how to reanimated the dead body of The Vision so now we have two Visions, one real but essentially soulless and one "real" who is also essentially an illusion. This is chaos magic, after all.
ep 9 "The Series Finale"
Unfortunately WandaVision can't quite stick its landing. Which is no wonder with all the inverted tucks, twisting dives, back flips, round-offs, triple axels and quadruple whatsits it's perpetually attempting. The tell is even in the title. Yes, it's cutesy TV blunt just like the previous clever titles but it lacks their in media res fun. It's too generic and also impotent with dishonesty. As with every Marvel show or movie, nothing really ends. It just begins again or rewinds. We'd claim this was also WandaVision commenting on the art of television except that superhero comic books preceded both television and the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it has always been thus.
After two uninspired aerial fight scenes (Vision vs Vision and Scarlet Witch vs Agatha Harkness), we do get a lovely existential goodbye scene between Wanda and The Vision (Paul Bettany is really wonderful in this sequence... but when isn't Bettany wonderful?) before he and the magically-created Maximoff twins dissolve into nothingness leaving Wanda back where she started before WandaVision ever aired, morose and alone, as she finally lifts her spell from Westview.
The End. But not.
Wanda has come into even more power on this journey and the fake Vision is now sort of the real Vision, since he has his memories back; who knows where he was flying off to after he realized how fucked up his programming was.
The usual "stingers" after the credits are a further reminder that this Finale isn't "final". One stinger is a commercial for Captain Marvel 2 as Monica Rambeau is invited by a Skrull to travel to galaxies uknown. And in the final stinger, after the second round of credits, we see Wanda being chill and lonely in a remote home in the middle of nowhere, drinking tea. Only there's another version of her in the next room -- an astral projection? -- doing what looks like heavy duty complex spellwork while studying "The Darkhold" and hearing her fake children crying for help. This is, then, undoubtedly a commercial for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness coming to movie theaters in a year's time on March 25th, 2022.
But it's a bit disappointing in retrospect that whatever causes this 'Multiverse of Madness' wasn't directly a part of this nine-episode journey... but presumably began haphazardly right here, in this final second, stubbornly undramatized until 2022.
All episodes of WandaVision are currently streaming on Disney+. It's normal 'new episode every Friday' schedule will now be taken over by Falcon and the Winter Soldier which debuts on March 19th.