WandaVision S01E07-09 Review: Scarlet Witch

WandaVision, Season 1, Episode 7-9

Episode 7: Breaking the Fourth Wall

So in the previous episode, we get Wanda, in her increasing ball of anxiety, anger and grief, expand the sheer influence of her Hex world thing... and this episode ends up continuing to be a show parody. Except the show itself is clearly not quite right. Things quite literally glitch in and out of place as Wanda talks to an unseen interviewer, and the episode itself cuts back and forth between this faux-fourth-wall-breaking 'interview' style* and an attempt to actually have a proper show-within-a-show go on, which isn't even being held firmly. Wanda, it seems, have stretched her power a bit too thin, and kudos on Elizabeth Olsen for really channeling a great "ha ha everything is fine" mood.

*Again, I don't know enough about sitcoms to really pinpoint what this is homaging

Hell, even the title sequence is bizarrely off, showing just "WANDA" without Vision. There's also a pretty unsettling single frame of "I know what u are doing Wanda" in that title screen. Billy and Tommy are kind of clueless on what to do with mom, and it seems that only friendly neighbour Agnes is willing to babysit the twins. More on that end later. But Wanda is just filled with self-loathing and general guilt and just wants to slum in her pajamas alone in front of the television. Very relatable. Meanwhile, in her interview segments, the unseen interviewer just keeps asking her if she deserves happiness and stuff, really breaking her spirit and she doesn't even realize it because she thinks it's just 'part of the show'. 

Meanwhile, Vision ends up waking up in the hex and frees Darcy from being a carnival performer and Darcy basically gives Vision a little recap on his entire MCU life from Age of Ultron to Civil War to Infinity War. Which... I mean, I don't know how you can even begin to follow this show without being aware of the MCU, but it's a nice recap to have. We also get the fourth-wall breaking interviews with them, and I love the absurdity of Vision having a little tape-on mic on his chest and bumping into a mic stand at one point. Ultimately it's just Vision realizing what's going on and deciding to help out his wife and rescue everyone in Westview, but man, Vision and Darcy are just a treat to watch. 

Outside Westview, we get a surprisingly lengthy sequence of Jimmy Woo and Monica Rambeau trying to enter the Hex with some sort of huge sci-fi space travel vehicle or something, and ultimately Monica just goes 'fuck it' and walks through the Hex. The previous episode and this one note that her cells have been altered by going back and forth through the Hex wall, so to the surprise of no one, this is how she gets her Photon superpowers. Oh, and it also makes her immune to seeing the false reality of Westview. Monica's confrontation with Wanda causes Wanda to get hostile almost immediately, but having also lost a loved one recently, Monica is equipped to try and get Wanda to try and accept the death that has happened... which is surprisingly nuanced for the live-action superhero genre! 

But then Agnes just pulls Wanda away, letting her sit back at the couch... and as Wanda asks where her kids are, she walks down the basement where it's been decorated to look like some sort of hideous demon dungeon out of Dungeons & Dragons, and turns out that Agnes... well, it's Agatha all along! With a musical! (And she killed Sparky, too!) I don't want to say that I 'called it', but I did realize in this episode just how much Agnes has been one of the more major recurring Westview "NPC's", and in retrospect there have been a lot of great warning signs -- her not being fazed by the twins growing up or Wanda using magic openly, her showing up in the most appropriate times, and as the episode itself goes into a little montage-musical, her little mental breakdown in the Halloween episode or talking to the chainsaw neighbour are even engineered to fuck with Vision and get him to question things. And, hey, if nothing else, Billy noting that auntie Agatha is 'real quiet on the inside' should probably be a huge red flag in this episode. 

And apparently half of the fandom had called it out -- it's not something I particularly care to really do much research about before watching the episodes, since I found that trying to speculate too much basically ruined a lot of my enjoyment in watching a lot of the other superhero TV shows, so the huge plot twist that, yes, this secondary character that's actually pretty prominently in the background is not only part of something sinister, she's also the main villain! Kudos to Kathryn Hahn, whose portrayal of 'Agnes' and 'Agatha' actually do still feel like the same character. Many times with these surprise plot twist traitor characters it feels like we're seeing two separate people. 

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Episode 8: Previously On

And then we've got this episode, where it's... it's a very, very interesting one. One of the best things about modern MCU -- and this show in general -- is how much it builds up on the continuity in the previous decade plus of movies while also telling something new. Just like how Civil War, Infinity War and Endgame worked because the audience is invested in the characters in those movies;  WandaVision would not have worked as well if the viewers weren't invested in the stories of these characters. 

That said, having rewatched the entire MCU in the past couple of months, it's actually astounding that this episode, which is essentially a recap of Wanda's life, ends up filling in the bits between her appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War; between that and Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame; and before that. It quantifies Wanda's backstory while also adding some additional retcons, while it is told to us from the package of Agatha Harkness trying to dig out what makes Wanda's magic so powerful without formal magic training -- because, well, after its first batch of movies are really hesitant on doing it, we all know magic is real in the MCU. So this show also emphasizes that, not only for Wanda but also for the antagonist, Agatha. 

After a bit of a flashback that quantifies her as a straight-up real magic witch that has lived from the Salem trials, Agatha goes on a bit of a villainous monologue, and kudos to her actor for really still projecting the same 'friendly neighbour' vibe even as she does crazy things like feed a magic-created moth to her pet rabbit Senor Scratchy, or monologue about her magic wall-runes. She wants to know how everything works, and she really doesn't care about anything else other than figuring out the powerful magics that Wanda can employ... again, knowing that Fake Pietro (or 'Fietro') was her agent, the scenes where Fietro and Agatha are pushing Wanda and asking her how she 'did it' ends up making a bit more sense -- everything else in Westview, including the 'autopilot' NPC's, are caused by Wanda's subconscious desire to run away from reality, while Agatha is subtly manipulating things to figure out how Wanda did it without magical witch training. 

Holding her children as hostage, Agatha forces Wanda to go through several moments in her life. Previously only told to the audience from a couple of throwaway lines when the Maximoffs talked to Ultron in Age of Ultron, we get to see the incident where their parents were killed and the twins were forced to hide under a bed while a Stark missile didn't go off. Only there are a couple of extra additions that end up being such a huge impact to the events of this show. As we probably could've guessed, as a child, Wanda's biggest entertainment with her happy family was watching old American sitcoms to escape momentarily from the war that ravages Sokovia, ostensibly to learn English and escape from the war-torn country. It's escapism -- something that WandaVision's Wanda does on a far, far greater scale. 

Another important element to this? Agatha notes that Wanda used a 'probability hex' to stop the bomb from exploding. We don't get any particularly huge explanation, and I think it's a way to toss in the whole Mutant concept without using the 'M' word. If nothing else, it basically notes that Wanda is already special, and the Mind Stone just amplifies what was within her. I absolutely love this little explanation, which makes the Maximoff twins feel more extra-special. (Which, incidentally, also explains something that never made sense to me but I've always just rolled with; how the heck did the Mind Stone give Wanda reality-warping magic powers and Pietro super-speed?)

The next revelation tosses in more stock to the 'Wanda has a destiny before her' thing going on, with us seeing her under experimentation in Hydra prior to Age of Ultron, where the Mind Stone in Loki's scepter shows Wanda a vision when it granted her superpowers... a vision of a woman in a dress with a crown-like tiara. Again, sitcoms play a role here as it's one of her only entertainment in a Hydra cell. 

Yet another scene seems to take place somewhere prior or during the events of Civil War, where Wanda's neighbour Vision ends up trying to befriend her and they end up watching sitcoms together. It's a surprisingly touching scene, and one that shows how Vision ended up becoming more human and less robotic as Vision's child-like desire to understand others and make friends end up with him questioning a lot of things, like the comical injuries in a comedy show. Vision also has always been there for Wanda, and while he doesn't fully understand her initially, he tries to be supportive and be there for her in her time of grief. Vision gets a wonderful line about 'what is grief, if not love persevering?', and I really have to give Bettany and Olsen absolutely wonderful kudos for their great acting not only as their characters in WandaVision, but them through their different parts of their life. 

And then we get everything in clarity, as we finally see the events that caused the whole WandaVision situation to take place. Wanda trying to find Vision's body after the events of Avengers: Endgame. Showing up in the SWORD base and meeting Haywood, and the absolutely heartbreaking scene as she sees Vision being torn apart like a machine... and when she floats down, she realizes that Vision is... well, he's been reduced to a corpse. (Haywood shows a doctored version of this scene to Monica and the others in episode 4, cutting off the end where Wanda leaves peacefully) Also, knowing that Haywood's essentially evil also means that he knows that he is essentially egging Wanda on to bring Vision to life in a way. And the scene of Wanda just saying in a broken way how Vision is gone and slowly just gets into her car and drives away? Man, that's sad. 

She ends up driving all the way to the small town of Westview, where Vision has apparently purchased an empty plot of land to 'grow old in' and good god the feels from this whole scene. I can't really do it justice here without going too in-depth about every single scene in the episode, but the sheer amount of grief and trauma that gets piled on and on and on onto Wanda's life? Yeah. What she did to Westview was still absolutely wrong. But in that moment, in that moment where Wanda gets her family taken away from her, and the only good thing in her life dies and gets dissected and reduced to nothing but machinery? In that moment, you really can't blame Wanda's emotions from taking over and releasing a massive burst of magic which, well, transforms Westview into a sitcom show. And, more importantly, recreates Vision with her magic -- so Westview-Vision is actually something new, something born out of Wanda's memories and has nothing to do with the Synthezoid that died in Infinity War. 

With the massive emotional explanation, we finally get the setup for the finale of the season -- Agatha is in full evil witch mode, holding Billy and Tommy with magical ropes in the middle of the street. She tells Wanda that her powers make her the "Scarlet Witch"... and the post-credits scene show that Haywood still has the original body of the Vision that was taken apart in the SWORD base... and has rebuilt him as a white-coloured, heartless Vision. (Cataract? Anti-Vision? The internet seems to have settled on 'White Vision') DUN DUNN DUNNN!

Again, this is probably my favourite episode of the series. Wanda has always been one of my favourite secondary characters of the MCU, and this series has only reinforced that a thousand-fold. All the build-up as we go through Wanda's story throughout the MCU is really interestingly done and, most importantly, emotional and makes us really sympathize with her. 

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Episode 9: The Series Finale

And then we have the series finale. Season finale seems more apt, though, because, well, there has to be a follow-up to this, right? 

And this ending is pretty amazingly well-done and strongly emotional. Which isn't to say that it's perfect -- there are a couple of parts which I felt detracted from this episode as a whole, but honestly? The good of this episode and the show in general most certainly and absolutely win over its shortcomings. 

One of the major complaint that I have is, well... the secondary characters really don't end up mattering, huh? And that's almost disappointing if I wasn't so invested in Wanda and Vision's story. Agent Haywood really end up being static and his presence feels so much like an afterthought in this episode compared to Agatha and White Vision. Darcy, after her bit role in episode 7, also basically disappears after her one scene, and I wonder if the actress was simply unavailable and they just tossed in that 'briefings are for the weak' handwave. Jimmy Woo and Fietro* are also basically just there, getting enough face-time to wrap up their respective side-plots, but ultimately are forgettable. Monica gets a bit better, showing off her Photon powers in the climax to save Billy and Tommy, but ultimately also feels a bit squandered. 

*A lot of fans were upset that 'Fietro' wasn't actually a dimension-jumping X-Men movies Quicksilver, but I honestly never actually thought that it'd be the case, that it's just a meta-casting gag, and so I wasn't anywhere as disappointed as people are that this wild shot in the dark didn't turn out to be true. 

Agatha's big plan seems to just to drive Wanda into despair and goad her into using her Scarlet Witch magic against her so that she can drain them. Typical supervillain plan, honestly, and it's a good thing that she's so entertaining. Oh, and the Darkhold -- a recurring evil magical plot device that has shown up in three different MCU-adjacent TV shows -- also show up, but it also feels like a random addition to the climax. What doesn't feel like a random addition, though, is Wanda setting everyone's minds free and, well, understandably, they are all horrified. 'Dottie' begs Wanda to let her child have a minor supporting role 'if [she] likes the plotline', noting how her daughter's been stuck in her rooms for days. 'Norm' tells Wanda that they all share Wanda's grief and nightmares. People beg Wanda to be let free, or that she could let them die... and man it's hard when we get to see Wanda's emotional "NO!" accidentally strangle these poor, poor traumatized people. 

Meanwhile Vision ('Westview' Vision; but I'll call him Vision for the rest of this review) is fighting against White Vision, and as exciting as it was and as fun as the action scenes are... it's pretty typical superhero stuff and I really don't have much to talk about. That scene where White Vision tries to crush Wanda's skull in is very terrifying, though.

Wanda, being a hero, finally stops trying to rationalize her magical puppeteering and breaks open the Hex to let everyone out... which also lets Haywood's SWORD soldiers in. Unfortunately, opening the Hex also means that Vision, Billy and Tommy will disintegrate. And... and looking from the outside or writing up this summary, it's so easy to dismiss them as deluded creations of Wanda's. Magical puppets that make her feel happy but aren't actually 'real'. But if we consider the original Vision 'real' despite being robots, are these three beings not 'people', too? Which makes the ending of this episode even more sad. 

After the badass family last stand pose, we divide the climax up into three battles. Billy and Tommy use their respective superpowers to make a mockery out of the soldiers, and Auntie Monica shows up and uses her Photon powers to save them before Darcy clocks Haywood with a truck. Vision and White Vision continue their fight and land in the library, leading to an absolutely well-written discussion between the two. Vision uses the "Ship of Theseus" parable to get through to his counterpart -- which is a very, very fascinating comparison. It's a parable where the legendary ship of Theseus is constantly repaired and had its rotten planks replaced while it is on display in the museum. If all the original planks had been replaced, is it still the ship of Theseus? And if all the removed planks are put back together, is that the ship of Theseus? Both Visions come to the conclusion that neither of them are the true ship/Vision, but both of them also are. Westview Vision accepts his place as an 'echo' of the original, but also helps White Vision to gain access to his original 'data'. I kind of wish we had something more out of this, but after getting his memories and 'data' restored, White Vision just flies out of Westview and the show. Still, that's a powerful scene and while I'm most certain that we'll get something more out of White Vision, I'm also somewhat baffled that we don't get any more conclusion beyond that. 

Agatha and Wanda... well, they alternate between flying up in the sky to shoot magic bolts at each other, and at one point they go into the Salem witch nightmare. Agatha gives Wanda a bit of a tempting offer -- give Agatha her power, and she'll correct the mistakes made in the Hex's magic (she's lying, but Wanda doesn't know that at the moment) and, well... I honestly kind of expected this to be the case when I watched the previous episode, that the runes will somehow be relevant to the ending, but it is -- pretending to just lob magical blasts randomly and missing, Wanda carves magical runes into the massive forcefield walls of the Hex. She has control over her powers, and I have to admit that I openly cheered when she glows with her magical tiara and transforms into a proper, live-action version of the Scarlet Witch costume. I love that everything about Wanda's victory honestly actually does come from herself -- Vision's only part of it tangentially, and we don't get any last-minute cameo by the Avengers or Dr. Strange or Captain Marvel or any other character to come save the day. I like that, this is the WandaVision show and the fact that Wanda and Vision both deal with their respective opposite numbers on their own is great. 

(I also have to freely admit that a significant portion of my excitement is Marvel Studios finally embracing the fact that this is a character called the Scarlet Witch and she runs around in a red tiara -- making it a huge "I AM [X]!" badass moment out of it is just a very welcome bonus)

Obviously, Wanda is a hero. And heroes have to fix things. She turns Agatha back into 'Agnes' as punishment, while also opening a way to have her still be relevant as a 'mentor' of sorts if Wanda needs her. But then there's also the fact that she needs to move on... in a way. The episode dedicates around one-thirds of its runtime as Wanda recalls the Hex back into its center, as she and the 'Westview Vision' tuck their children in to sleep at night and say their goodbyes, knowing damn well that Wanda has to give up her happiness for the greater good. The whole sequence is just heartbreaking and without going scene-by-scene, let me just say just how well the farewell scene is, as the walls of magic close in, as Wanda and Vision finally have a farewell that isn't "out of time" the way Vision's original death in Infinity War was. And, well, how utterly sad it was when everything is reduced to Wanda standing in the empty plot of land. Wanda finally accepts reality, that she can't keep living in a dream and she has to move on and accept her grief... and it's really sobering. 

The ending is... well, it's a lot of things. The residents glare at Wanda as she passes them. They're free, and I think they recognize that Wanda gave her ideal Westview up to save them. But they also recognize that Wanda caused the massive fuck-up in the first place. Monica and Wanda talk a bit, before Wanda flies away and the credits roll. Two post-credit scenes show up. During cleanup, Monica meets up with a Skrull sent by Nick Fury, setting the now-superpowered Captain up for a role in... whatever future space or Skrull related project. Meanwhile, Wanda is in a cabin in the woods... while also reading the Darkhold while the screams of her two children echo in her mind. Sure, Westview-Vision might accept that his legacy lives on in White-Vision, but the children? I know enough of Wiccan and Speed from the comics to guess where this is going, and honestly, seeing how 'alive' these two kids have been, I would totally be up for a second season of this to be about Wanda trying to get them back without breaking the world.

And... and I don't know. Again, I was pretty satisfied with the ending. It's certainly not perfect and I would also agree that it's the weakest part of the season in general. Still, between the Visions' conversation, the emotional farewell, and the simply uplifting and energetic sequence when Wanda embraces her Scarlet Witch powers? It's a messy ending, but I did like what we get out of it. And as the first part of MCU's Phase Four, what a show to start of with, huh? Pretty satisfying show, overall. 

I'll review Falcon and the Winter Soldier when it's done, and depending on how much content there is that I have to talk about I'll go in episode batches like WandaVision or a full season review. And in the near future, I'll finally finish editing reviews of all the MCU movies. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Less of an Easter Egg and more of a recap, but throughout these three episodes the events of Age of Ultron, Civil War, Infinity War and the implied-but-mostly-not-shown experimentation on the Maximoff twins by Hydra scientists and Loki's scepter are expanded upon.
• Also, while the specific clothes change, both Tommy and Billy still dress in outfits with colours that match their comic-book counterparts' superhero suits. 
• Oh, and Wanda Maximoff finally gets called by her comic book counterpart's moniker, Scarlet Witch. 
• Episode 7:
• Monica's suit when she enters Westview again specifically is based on her comic-book counterpart's Photon costume.
• When Monica goes into the Westview through the Hex wall, we get snippets of dialogue taken from Captain Marvel, starring dialogue from Captain Marvel, Nick Fury and Maria Rambeau.
• One of the opening credits pictures are the numbers 122822, a reference to Stan Lee's birthday. 
• The advertisement in this episode is on a 'Nexus' brand anti-depressant, which can mean a lot of things in the Marvel comics but I think the main consensus is that it's a reference to comics Scarlet Witch being a Nexus Being, someone who is a keystone to the balance of multiversal and timeline stability.
• 'Agnes', or Agatha Harkness in the comics is a witch who is associated with mentoring several characters, among them Scarlet Witch (of course) and Franklin Richards. She's usually depicted as a more benign figure than how she is here!
• Episode 8:
• Obviously, the silhouette of the classic comic-book Scarlet Witch costume with cape and tiara show up when Wanda makes contact with the Mind Stone. 
• The visuals of conjuring blocks of matter into place when Wanda creates her dream house seems to be lifted from the depiction of her reality-warping powers in House of M, which this series draws heavily from. 
• White Vision is taken from a run in the West Coast Avengers, where Vision was taken apart and rebuilt without his personality by government agents. Wanda coming across Vision being disassembled by scientists also comes from that same comic run. 
• Episode 9:
• The Darkhold returns after showing up (chronologically) in Agent Carter, Agents of SHIELD (during the Ghost Rider arc) and Runaways season two. It has a different appearance here, but it's a magical book, so... 
• Agatha mentions that the Scarlet Witch is more powerful than the Sorcerer Supreme, a nod to Dr. Strange. Like Dr. Strange, in the post-credits scene Wanda is also shown to employ astral projection to multitask.
• Wanda's final costume, of course, is a modernization of her classic look -- which is something that the comics have tried to do multiple times to make her tiara look practical. This look, as google tells me, is a hybridization of her 90's-00's looks. 
• Two Visions having a conversation about Theseus's Paradox is a homage to a similar scene from 2016 Avengers #6.
• Wanda zipping around behind Agatha in a jilted way before causing her to go into a nightmare is based on her doing the same to many of her Avengers during her stint as an antagonist in Age of Ultron. 
• Without spoiling too much about the backstory of Wiccan and Speed in the comics (which may be the focus of WandaVision season two), the twins' souls... come from somewhere else.