WandaVision, Season 1, Episodes 1-3:
I had intended to review every single movie from the MCU throughout the month of March, but real life got in the way and that project had to be put on hold for the moment. I'll try to get at least Phase I (from Iron Man to The Avengers) done later this month or the next.
Instead, we get the first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Four, and I absolutely love just how integrated this TV show has been not only to the MCU, but also how unabashedly it knows that its audience will be familiar with the MCU as a whole. The show is near-incomprehensible without at least background detail on these characters, but I really do love just how much they trusted in the fandom that they would tune in and watch (and crash Disney+ with how quickly they are to tune in). And while I understand that Falcon and Winter Soldier was supposed to be the first Disney+ show, the sheer confidence that Disney-Marvel has in their fandom and their product that they're okay with releasing the... less-attuned-to-the-layman-viewer WandaVision first as their first major project? Kudos to them.
This, I feel, is how I'll be reviewing superhero TV shows from here on out, especially since I'm no longer interested in getting a review up as early as possible. Anywhere between two to five episodes in a longer article, with more time between article releases. And since WandaVision, from what I've seen (I'm up to episode 7 at the time of writing this) is a show that seems to be neatly split into three acts, I feel like it works especially well here.
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Episode 1: Filmed Before A Live Studio Audience
And, well, episode 1 feels like an utter parody, like a huge-budget sketch for a late-night show to promote an MCU movie or something. The last time we saw these characters, after all (again, spoilers for basically the rest of the MCU, you have been warned) the Vision got killed twice in quick succession, and Wanda "Scarlet Witch" Maximoff was turned into dust, revived, and the unleashed all sorts of holy hell on Thanos. Unlike the rest of the deaths in the final saga of the Avengers, Vision was one of the handful of deaths that was permanent.
...and now, for some reason, they're in a sitcom? And, egads, we have shenanigans; Vision forgets his anniversary date and thinks that Wanda is preparing for a dinner with his boss! Shenanigans! Only, instead of being a regular family in a sitcom, Wanda and Vision have to hide the fact that they're superhumans! And yet, just like the in-universe characters, the comedy of the show is so infectiously fun that you stop really questioning why it's going on and just going in with the flow. Episode 1 isn't really all that groundbreaking, mostly there to act as a parody and introduce some background characters, and without mentioning specific jokes I really don't have much to say. But I absolutely love the sense of eeriness throughout some parts of the show. There is, of course, the sudden mid-episode advertisement with a reference to Stark technologies for one. And then, of course, the creepy scene near the end of the episode where after some dinner hijinks, the question of 'where did you come from' causes Wanda to be confused, confirming that, yes, this is actually happening in MCU canon, something is seriously wrong and some reality warp/dream world/alternate timeline/personal purgatory thing is happening.
As Vision's boss chokes and his wife just laughs and says 'stop it' like a malfunctioning video-game NPC (the actress has to be commended on looking like she's panicking while her face is grinning like a happy camper), the idyllic dinner gets interrupted with superhero business as Vision reaches in with his intangibility powers and extracts the strawberry lodged in his boss's throat, and then the 'comedic episode' just continues on as normal, with laugh tracks and everything.
And then the faux-credits to the show-within-a-show rolls, and we zoom out to see someone from SWORD (the post-SHIELD organization seen in Spider-Man: Far From Home) switch off an old-school television. Again, a pretty interesting episode, even though it's actually pretty uneventful -- this is where the TV show format really shines, because doing this in one-ninth of a movie will have us rush through the parody and not get the buildup to the 'wait, something is wrong' moment.
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Episode 2: Don't Touch That Dial
But then there are even more things that are 'wrong' in Westview, that seems to really hint at the existence of the 'real world' outside of it. As someone familiar with the comics and Wanda's (in)famous House of M storyline, I thought that it's what they were adapting, but it's actually pretty ingenious how they managed to get the format of this show as a black-and-white period parody to work so well with the sheer unsettling vibe when colour gets introduced to the monochromatic world.
The first thing that was wrong is a deep, bright red helicopter with the SWORD symbol that drops in front of Wanda's porch, shining and glistening and a sign that something is wrong. And later on, we get the very creepy bit with the radio talking to Wanda, asking her 'who's doing this to you, Wanda?' as the fucking creepy music builds up, and Dottie gets cut in her hand and it starts to gush with bright-red blood... while also being utterly blasé, similar to Mr. Hart in the previous episode. And, of course, there's the utterly creepy showcase of the man dressed in a beekeeper's outfit rising from a manhole, which is just such a terrifying, unexplained image. And Wanda just... rewinds the whole sequence, showing us what we expect -- Wanda has some control over what's going on in Westview.
And that's not to mention other things that are unsettling that the episode doesn't actually point out as well -- the manhole that Beekeeper Man rises out from doesn't exist in previous shots; all the talk about the talent show being 'for the children' is particularly unsettling because not a single child shows up throughout these two episodes, and we get another odd mid-episode advertisement for Strucker watches -- Strucker, of course, being the monocled Hydra baron that turned Wanda and Pietro Maximoff into superhumans.
And then, of course, at the end of the episode, we've dealt with marriage jokes, community jokes and work jokes. We're moving straight into parenthood as Wanda becomes pregnant, and, well, WandaVision is now in colour as Wanda's magic turns the whole black-and-white world into, well, technicolour! Again, while I do have some inkling of what's going on, I do absolutely love just how ambiguous these early episodes are on the nature of the Westview anomaly, and whether Wanda is the victim or the perpetrator, and just how much she's aware of what's going on in there. The fact that both Bettany and Olsen are utterly hilarious in their roles also cannot be understated in making this series work so damn well.
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Episode 3: Now in Color
The episode ends, more or less, with Wanda giving birth to two baby boys -- Billy and Tommy, which, of course, is kinda-sorta obvious to comic-book fans (I actually know who they are!) though they did go through a pretty fun sequence of the two parents cattily fighting over the names, as well as the little fake-out with post-birth Wanda's still-pregnant belly being hidden behind the sofa.
And then there's the whole creepy sequence at the end, when Wanda talks about how she was a twin as well, recalling her dead (and, as far as the MCU is concerned, basically forgotten) twin brother Pietro. Geraldine, who has been portrayed as more or less just the friendly neighbour, then name-drops Ultron, Wanda's Sokovian accent from the movies (which I completely forgot about) returns, and Agnes slowly drops hints to Vision that something's not quite right with that Geraldine lady. When Vision returns to the room, Wanda is surprisingly serene and Geraldine is gone. And when the two gets into an argument, in one of the creepiest and coolest use of the 'fuck with the format', we get a glitch-like cut back to the earlier scene, which actually made me think that my streaming service glitched. An absolutely great usage of the format, as well as showing just how powerful Wanda's reality-warping capabilities are. Just as Vision is about to question the odd dinner from the first episode, he just gets rewound back to his clueless kooky husband self. Again, this episode is starting to point out that Wanda is at least partially responsible for maintaining this reality and delusion... but we don't get any real answers.
Geraldine herself, an agent of SWORD, gets launched out of the city (and miraculously didn't die), landing outside the town of Westview which is covered by a magical forcefield, and there's a bunch of secret-agent people with guns outside. Ah, finally, next episode will give us some clarity!
Again, still mostly a wacky episode, but this episode increases the amount of unsettling behaviour in the episode. The rather off-handed remark from the doctor that his vacation is cancelled because 'no one leaves' is easy to miss, but we get a scene of Vision's neighbour Herb just cutting through his fence with a chainsaw and smiling and acting like he's done something silly like, oh, walk out of the house in his underwear or something. The laugh track even enforces it! But then we get Herb and Agnes whispering and discussing about this Geraldine woman while also trying to hide something, and I do think that while Wanda did rewind time when the two of them argued in the living room, this has succeeded in planting seeds of doubt in Vision's mind.
Again, these three episodes really work so much better viewed in one go, really painting a pretty cool picture of slowly building up to something unsettling, like something out of Twilight Zone, as we discover the creepiness behind the illusion and just how much everything that's happening here is unnatural. Throw in a whole lot of nice background details, genuinely hilarious jokes between Vision and Wanda, and the promise of something bigger that'll tie into the bigger MCU, and I am genuinely pleased that WandaVision exists and is so well-received.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- ...and beyond all that, we have a lot of Easter Eggs in these episodes, too!
- Episode 1:
- The ad in this episode is 'ToastMate by Stark Industries', which, in addition to referencing Tony Stark and Iron Man's sound effects, is also a nod to MCU Wanda's origin of having her family in Sokovia killed by a Stark bomb.
- Wanda makes a joke about Vision's 'indestructible head'... which, as Infinity War shows us, is patently not true.
- Wanda's wine bottle, Maison du Mepris, roughly translates to "House of Mepris/Contempt", or, well, "House of M". It's even got an M logo on the bottle neck. House of M, of course, is the infamous storyline in the comics where Scarlet Witch alters reality itself and creates an alternate timeline out of grief.
- The episode takes place on the 23rd of August. Issue #238 of The Avengers is about bringing the Vision back to life.
- Episode 2:
- This episode's ad promotes Strucker-brand watches, which, of course, is a nod to Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, secondary antagonist of Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Hydra leader responsible for the experiments that gave the Maximoff twins their powers. In addition to having the Hydra logo on the watch, the hands of the watch also vaguely resemble Loki's scepter that Strucker experimented on.
- The animated sequence has some bones and the helmet of the Marvel villain Grim Reaper between the floorboards. In the 2015 run of The Vision (which this show is partially based off), to keep his cover living in the suburbs, Vision's then-wife Virginia killed the Grim Reaper and buried him in his backyard.
- A statue of the Whizzer can be briefly glimpsed in the animated opening. Whizzer in the comics is an adoptive father figure of the Maximoff twins.
- "Auntie A. Cat Litter" is a reference to Wanda's "Aunt" from the comics, the witch Agatha Harkness, who owned a magical cat Ebony.
- "57" appears on the SWORD helicopter. Vision debuted in The Avengers #57. The Strucker watch shows the time of 2:42. Vision was reconstructed in a new body in The Avengers #242.
- Also in the animated sequence is an ad for "Bova Milk". Bova is a cow-human that raised Wanda and Pietro when they were young. No, really.
- "Glamour" and "Illusion" are the names of a pair of superhero magicians, Glynis and Ilya Zarkov, minor supporting characters to Vision and Scarlet Witch in the comics.
- Episode 3:
- Less of an Easter Egg and more of a plot point, but, well, Ultron killing Pietro in Age of Ultron gets brought up.
- "Hydra Soak", in addition to name-dropping Hydra, seems to actually be a reference to Agents of SHIELD of all things. In addition to having huge Tahiti vibes, at one point Coulson in season 4 mentions some Hydra-made mind-control soap.
- The opening sequence for this episode (and the closing sequence of the previous one) features a significant hexagon motif. Wanda's magic in the comics is called 'hex magic', and sometimes is displayed with hexagons.
- While this episode omits a few steps in-between (including being reincarnated and adopted), Billy and Tommy are based on William "Wiccan" Kaplan and Tommy "Speed" Shepard, a pair of twins magically born to Vision and Scarlet Witch.
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