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. 

WandaVision S01E04-06 Review: Now in Technicolor

WandaVision, Season 1, Episodes 4-6

Again, I don't think I have to say that this review will feature massive spoilers for the Marvel Cinematic Universe up to Endgame. You have been warned. 

Also as a disclaimer, the contents of this review were written before I watched episodes 7-9. 

Episode 4: We Interrupt This Program

Finally, after three episodes of 'okay, this is a sitcom parody, but it's supposed to be in the MCU, right?' with bits of questioning, fourth-wall format abuse and confusion as to what the true nature of Westview is, 'We Interrupt This Program' finally, well, interrupts the slew of sitcom parodies and actually takes us to the real world.

I keep saying that this is why a story like WandaVision could never work in a movie format, and works best as a TV show. Imagine if the sitcom parody lasted only for 20 minutes in a 2 hour show... the audience would still be in 'questioning WTF is going on' mode instead of 'cautiously accepting the comedy' like how we are by the time we reach the Geraldine scene in the final parts of the third episode. Again, the balls on Marvel/Disney+ for releasing this utterly bizarre show with an unconventional concept as their flagship show for the MCU's fourth phase! And, if all these news about the viewers tuning in and crashing the streaming service every time a new episode of WandaVision pops up, it's a risk that is certainly rewarded. 

Episode 4 of WandaVision brings us back to the MCU in a big way -- as we catch up to some of the more forgotten side characters in the movie franchise. Vision and the Scarlet Witch are certainly two characters that would be the biggest offenders of this syndrome -- they do have a story told throughout the four movies they've shown up in, but they get the bare minimum of a story told and it's frustrating to be fans of these characters before Vision got killed off in Infinity War. And so, seeing them get the screentime they deserve has been a marvelous treat. It seems that the show is very much interested in extending the same screentime to the MCU's other second-stringers. 

We start off with the reversion of 'the Blip' that happens in Avengers: Endgame. Something that takes place mostly off-screen in Endgame and played off mostly for laughs in Spider-Man: Far From Home, we get the true identity of 'Geraldine' -- an adult version of Monica Rambeau, the little girl from Captain Marvel. The rest of the world wasn't surprised, but not paying attention to casting calls and news solicitations, I sure was! After that marvelously terrifying scene of everyone returning back in the hospital when Thanos's Snap was reversed, we learn that Monica's mother, Maria, passed away in the intervening years between the Snap and the final battle of Endgame -- and what a rollercoaster of emotions that must be? To be told that her mother's cancer has gone to remission, only to go to a nap and wake up and learn that not only is she dead and gone; the world had moved on for five years? 

And as she tries to pick up where she left off in life, we get a bit of a glimpse into what's going on. Monica returns to SWORD, and talks to acting director Tyler Hayward, who's the only new character in this episode. While the two are cordial, Monica learns that she is grounded, which is why her simple 'get your foot wet' mission ended up with her investigating a missing persons case... which leads her to meet good ol' Agent Jimmy Woo! From Ant-Man and the Wasp, but I actually know this guy from the comics first, which is just absolutely fun. Again, I love that anyone paying attention to the MCU is rewarded with returning characters, but honestly the show doesn't require you to remember every single detail about Monica Rambeau or Jimmy Woo to understand what's going on. 

And then, well, we get some seriously fun X-Files or Twilight Zone shit going on as none of the local cops are able to remember that there's a town called Westview at all... and then Monica's attempts to touch the weird magical barrier causes her to get sucked in -- hence, 'Geraldine'. We also get the origin of the SWORD drone from episode 2, and generally this episode goes off to explain just what went on to cause all the weirdness throughout the first three seasons, the bits of the real world that bled into Westview. 

So of course, after Monica's disappearance, come the government agents -- the military camp we saw at the end of episode 3. And with SWORD, come a very, very unexpected character -- Darcy Lewis, one of the most criminally underused characters in the entire MCU. Easily one of the most charming and funniest character in the two Thor movies, she also suffers from being utterly irrelevant in those movies. Having rewatched the entire MCU recently (you guys will have to wait for when I have the energy to edit some 20+ movie reviews) I have gained a newfound appreciation for Darcy, and I am so, so happy to see her back. She easily steals the show at this point, and alongside Jimmy Woo, basically are the guys the audience is supposed to follow. They figure out how to tap into the broadcast frequency embedded into the 'CMBR', or cosmic microwave background radiation... which is a bunch of sci-fi handwave to explain why our SWORD heroes are able to witness basically the same show that we did in the first three episodes.  

And just like how the audience is rewarded for knowing who Monica Rambeau and Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis are; so is the audience in a smaller scale as this episode explains everything bizarre about the first three episodes. The voice in the radio in Wanda and Dottie's meeting was Jimmy trying to contact Wanda. The beekeeper was an agent whose protective suit was transformed when he crossed through the magical border around Westview. The colour changes and the sudden cuts actually happen in real life, and both Jimmy and Darcy act baffled when they encounter it. And, more importantly, the SWORD team are slowly able to piece together a working theory about what's going on -- and identify that all the secondary characters in the WandaVision show are actual missing people from Westview, given new names and personalities. It's so spooky, and reminds me of some of the best sci-fi horror I've read in the past. I also love Jimmy and Darcy sort of speculating about what's going on, all the hexes, and even a little easter egg in their board of conspiracies question if it's a Skrull conspiracy. 

And around three-fourths of our way through the episode, we finally see Wanda's conversation with "Monica" that caused her to be launched out of Westview. And it's pretty interestingly unsettling to see Wanda's mask drop just a little... and I absolutely love just how ambiguous the show is on whether Wanda has gone evil and is doing this on purpose, or if she's being mind-controlled by some other villain... or if it's just her mind gone mad with grief and denial. She does seem exquisitely lucid and menacing when she reverts back to her original Sokovian accent and blasts Monica out. Monica says 'it's all Wanda', while Wanda herself seems somewhat aware of what's going on, telling Vision that they can't go wherever they want. Also, there was also that gloriously executed cut-scare of Wanda witnessing Vision as a walking corpse with a concaved forehead for a brief shot. That was well done, and I think the effect is emphasized so much more after the audience has seen the funny, bumbling happy and alive Vision for the past three episodes. 

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Episode 5: On A Very Special Episode...

Episode 5 is an episode that returns back to the sitcom hijinks (parodying the... eighties? Or something?) and the WandaVision show-within-a-show has the plot involve the children, who... are growing up remarkably quickly. Again, the jokes are hilarious and the performances by Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany are golden, but knowing what we now know about the nature of Wanda's sitcom Westview, there's now the burning question of what's actually happening there, and what Wanda Maximoff is doing to the people of the place. 

That said, the Vision seems to be a bit more aware of the... inconsistencies in the setting. He's always been a bit more aware, like that incident with the neighbour and his chainsaw, his suspicion about what happened to Geraldine... or, in this episode, Agnes's odd question about whether they want to 'take it from the top'... and later on uses his powers to awaken the true personality of one of his co-workers, who is utterly terrified that 'she is in [his] head'. 

Oh, and, of course, the fact that the twins, Billy and Tommy, quite literally age up from baby to five years old to ten years old, adopt a dog and have the dog die within the span of minutes. The sitcom parody works surprisingly well with some pretty well-done acting on the part of Olsen, Bettany, Hahn and the child actors, and if the death of 'Sparky' seems to mean anything, it seems to be yet another indicator of how terribly Wanda Maximoff is dealing with the death of her loved ones. The children (who may or may not be real) and Agnes ask Wanda whether she should use her powers to 'fix the dead'.

Outside of Westview, SWORD is having some housekeeping problems of their own. Monica Rambeau is recovered and confirms to the audience that she only survived being tossed through town because Wanda doesn't want to kill her, but something's not quite right with her body after spending so long in 'the Hex'. Meanwhile, Tyler Hayward is basically going full-on into his role as the angry government agent, taking the place of a character like General Thunderbolt Ross in this story. He's very quick to call Wanda the 'victimizer', brings up her destructive tendencies and ignores her time served in the Avengers, and shuts down Monica, Jimmy and Darcy during a briefing -- it's pretty clear that the show is trying to paint a 'this guy is evil' sign on top of Hayward's head... but when Hayward points out that Wanda is holding a town hostage, and shows us footage of Wanda storming the SWORD base to steal Vision's body, things get a bit blurred. On the other hand, SWORD seems to be dissecting Vision to make a weapon out of his corpse; I would do the same thing Wanda did in her position. 

Reclaiming her husband's body, that is. The jury's still out on whether what Wanda did to Westview was out of malice or something else, and I love that the show makes it as ambiguous as possible.

And what about Vision, is Wanda sleeping with a reanimated robot zombie every night? 

Monica gets the idea of sending in a drone with 80's technology, which wouldn't be rewritten to match Wanda's new reality, and manages to communicate with her... but Hayward hijacks the drone and causes it to fire on Wanda. All this ends up doing is escalating the situation, with Wanda walking out of the Westview barrier for once and tossing the drone at their feet, and warning SWORD to stay away with her thick Sokovian accent. She then makes a mockery of the military presence by having all the soldiers point their guns at Hayward. Again, the conversation really paints a picture of Wanda being consciously aware about what she's doing to Westview. 

After this confrontation (and the Sparky death scene), it's the Vision's turn to have a word with Wanda, asking her about Norm from the office. He's starting to see that Wanda is changing reality, but he wants some answers... like the fact that he has no memories before Westview. He also points out that there are no children in Westview -- something that I thought was weird in the magic show when all the adults are talking about how it's 'for the children', but never actually paid much attention to. This leads to an interesting moment where not even the fictional credits rolling can stop the Vision, and the two of them argue and fly up into the sky... 

...and then the doorbell rings, and we get the arrival of Wanda's long-lost brother, Pietro "Quicksilver" Maximoff.

...played by the actor from the X-Men movies.

...I did not expect that. 

Of course, knowing the nature of the show-within-the-show, it's most likely that Evan Peters is playing some Westview resident who's been 'brainwashed' with the role of Pietro, but the hilarious reaction from Darcy and Jimmy ('she recast Pietro?') was fun, and as a meta-joke it's hilarious. I don't think that this show will go as far as doing some multiversal alternate-universe character shenanigans... right?

Still, whatever the case, I did not expect a Quicksilver appearance. Let alone this Quicksilver. 

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Episode 6: All-New Halloween Spooktacular

It's as if the show is trying its best to one-up itself on making meta-jokes, but as much as I love the tacky Halloween costumes, nothing can really match the sheer audacity of "let's use the X-Men actor for Quicksilver to play the other Quicksilver in the MCU movies". Again, I don't think that they're actually merging the MCU with the Fox movies, but it's still so utterly and gloriously unexpected and bizarre to see Evan Peters' Quicksilver interact with the MCU cast. 

This episode is all about Halloween, and... and we get the glorious, glorious Maximoff family in comics-accurate costume. Or, well, budget costume versions of them, anyway. Wanda, Vision, Pietro, Billy and Tommy all dress up as Scarlet Witch, Vision, Quicksilver, Wiccan and Speed, and as a comic book nerd I am so happy. And for the most part, as we get around to wacky antics, we learn that "Pietro" still has his Quicksilver powers, so there's something going on here. Of course, Vision is supposed to be dead and he has no trouble phasing through walls, so...

Anyway, after the Halloween costume antics, Vision goes off to help the neighbouhood watch, seemingly going 'off-script' and almost daring Wanda to fight with him again. This leaves Wanda to take the kids trick-or-treating with Pietro as the cool uncle. And... well, things don't go swimmingly. Oh, sure, Pietro and the twins go around smashing pumpkins and causing all sorts of chaos, but then Herb starts talking to Wanda, and when she finds out that Vision isn't actually with the neighbourhood watch, Herb's question, a repeated 'is there something I can do, Wanda? Is there something you want changed?' causes Wanda to pause. She's also not 100% sure what's going on with "Pietro", who deflects all questions about their past, and she seems just as surprised as the audience when Tommy starts showing super-speed, and Billy starts showing vague magical powers.

And Vision? Hoo boy. I love the contrast between the lively town around where Wanda and the kids are, but when Vision reaches the edge of the town, it's dilapidated, and there's a woman trying to hang decorations like a glitching video game NPC, just moving in the same repeated directions over and over again. It's utterly creepy, and when Vision sees Agnes in a car, barely moving, we get a gloriously terrifying appearance from Kathryn Hahn as, temporarily freed from Wanda's spell, Agnes absolutely chews the scenery and laughs and chants about how Vision is... well, "YOU'RE DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!" like a broken record before relapsing back to her howdy-neighbour role. Good lord, Agnes's breakdown was utterly terrifying. This bit causes Vision to finally go beyond Wanda's borders, and try to see what the hell's going on outside the Hex. 

Speaking of Vision finally realizing that, he's not the only one. Wanda and "Pietro" have a sit-down while Tommy and Billy are going around. Pietro has been so effortless in his energy and enthusiasm, and the scene between her and Wanda talking about their parents and their past starts off heartwarming... then Pietro starts asking Wanda about how she pulled this off, how he died like a chump in the street and woke up here, and how far she's gone since she just 'shot red wiggly-woos' out of her hands, and we get a bit of a jump-scare with Pietro with bullet-holes in his body. 

 

In the real world outside of Westview, the conflict has basically been drawn to Hayward being a dick to everyone, shutting out Monica, Darcy and Jimmy. They don't condone what Wanda did, but they're trying to negotiate and find out what's happening instead of going in with guns and drones. The points they're bringing up -- like the fact that they don't know what's going to happen to Westview's residents should they even be successful at killing Wanda -- are pretty valid, but all we get is a pretty simple reinforcement that Hayward's the villain of the show. I guess it's just as well we get this out of the way; the Maximoff family antics are way more entertaining. Team Monica find out that Hayward has a way of looking inside Westview and is tracking Vision's Vibranium, but it's mostly just ominous set-up. 

All this leads up to the scene of Vision's attempts to escape the Hex... and he starts breaking apart into pieces as he floats out of the town. Billy's telepathy senses this and he tells Wanda, which leads to a surprisingly nasty jab from Pietro about how "[her] dead husband can't die twice". Wanda blasts Pietro away, and then expands the Hex shield out of the town, which consumes not only Vision's broken body, but also Darcy and a significant portion of the SWORD base. Again, still very ambiguous of how much control Wanda has, but she's most certainly conscious of any decision that protects her family... and now that she's consciously escalated, I wonder what this means, and what actually happened to cause her to create the Hex. 

Speaking of creepiness, the Yo-Magic ad this time around doesn't seem to have anything to do with significant moments in Wanda's life. It's darkly hilarious, and I wonder if it's a hint that something is leeching off of Wanda's magic. 

Again, I love the creepiness of what's going on. The juxtaposition of the hilarious antics that Pietro has with the family to the bizarre unsettling everything that's really going on in Westview is really well done. Honestly, I know the internet got into a huge tizzy about trying to figure out who the real big bad is or what the deal is with Pietro. I'm honestly very much content with riding this out, accepting each episode as part of a season and a piece within the MCU instead of going too full-in on theorycrafting or whatever. It's so much more enjoyable that way, and WandaVision has been an absolute blast, tossing us twists and interesting story hooks that, most importantly, make sense from an in-universe standpoint. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• As usual, we've got a lot of Easter Eggs in these episodes. Again, we're only doing mostly MCU and Marvel-specific Easter Eggs:
• Episode 4:
• Darcy Lewis was a supporting character in Thor and Thor: The Dark World, having been absent in the MCU since then. Jimmy Woo was in Ant-Man and the Wasp, and briefly showcases his little card trick which he finally managed to learn from Ant-Man. Monica Rambeau was last seen in Captain Marvel as a child, and we also last saw Maria there, too.
• Also, obviously, the 'Blip' (as Far From Home established its name in-universe) happens during the events of Endgame; and Vision's corpsified appearance is how his corpse looked after his death in Infinity War.
• We hear Captain Marvel's voice from her own movie calling Monica "Lt. Trouble" in the opening credits. 
• 'Background cosmic radiation dated to the big bang' has been some of the explanations over the various MCU movies on what the Infinity Stones are.
• Monica Rambeau's callsign is "Photon", which is one of her many comic-book superhero alter-egos. She's also called "Captain Rambeau" a lot of times, a nod to her time as the second Captain Marvel in the comics. 
• Among the theories in Jimmy's blackboard, you could make out 'Skrulls?' as one of them.
• Episode 5:

• Throughout the entire series, Billy and Tommy's clothes all allude to Wiccan and Speed's superhero colour schemes (blue/red for Billy; green/white for Tommy).
• The ad in this episode talks about a tissue brand called Lagos, 'for when you make a mess you didn't mean to', a hilariously dark joke to Wanda accidentally killing a building's full of people in the opening scenes of Captain America: Civil War in Lagos, causing the Sokovia Accords to be written. 
  
• Thanks to Agents of SHIELD, we know that Section 36-B of the Sokovia Accords talks about how you can't bring a sentient AI back to life to prevent another Ultron. 
• "Scarlet Witch" has never actually been spoken out loud in the MCU, and the SWORD agents note that Wanda doesn't actually have a codename.
• In the best casting gag in the world ever, Westview's "Pietro" in this episode is played by Evan Peters, who plays Quicksilver in the Fox movies, instead of Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who plays MCU Quicksilver in Age of Ultron), a fun nod to how Quicksilver was originally 'shared' between the two studios, but now Disney-Marvel owns the X-Men movie rights too.
• Sparky is the name of Vision's synthezoid dog from the 2015 The Vision run. In the comics, Sparky also died after eating leaves, though of a more magical sort. 
• Monica mentions needing protection from 'photons', which, like the previous episode notes, is one of her superhero codenames. Her connection to Carol Danvers also gets brought up a couple of times. 
• Episode 6:
• The Halloween costumes for the Maximoff family are all obviously intentionally put-together versions of Vision, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Wiccan and Speed's classic superhero costumes. Pietro even gets comics!Quicksilver's spiky horn-hairs!
• Pietro tells Billy and Tommy to 'unleash hell, demon spawns!' in the comics, part of their (much more convoluted) origins involves being created from shards of Mephisto's soul, making them figuratively demon-spawns. 
• The events in Age of Ultron, namely Quicksilver's death and Scarlet Witch using her powers creating nightmares in that movie, are brought up. Also, Pietro's line about how "it's not like your dead husband can die twice" is kind of appropriate since Vision actually did die twice in Infinity War courtesy of the Time Stone. 
• Tommy and Wanda repeats the word 'kick-ass' while discussing Pietro. Both Quicksilver actors (Evan Peters and Aaron-Taylor Johnson) starred in Kick-Ass. 

WandaVision S01E01-03 Review: House of W

WandaVision, Season 1, Episodes 1-3:

Spoiler alert for Avengers: Endgame and other MCU movies!

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 the thing is...  the first episode? The first episode just spends its entire runtime being a black-and-white parody of 50's sitcoms. 50's? The show actually notes that each episode is a parody of a different period in American television sitcoms, a genre that I have never touched in my life, so a lot of the homages and parodies actually go over my head, and that was why I was pretty hesitant to watch this show. But I gave it a chance and... and I am going to say that Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen are amazing. I always knew that they got the short end of the stick in the MCU movies proper since their roles are secondary at best. 

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

And episode 2 goes off with even more hijinks (apparently parodying the 60's this time around, but I have no idea, I'm just here for the ride), except the jokes in episode 2, I feel, landed far better with me. The magic show with a gum-drunk Vision accidentally showing his superpowers (fake-drunk Paul Bettany is hilarious!), and Wanda wiggling her fingers and pretending to make mundane explanations to Vision's magic tricks are pretty fun. And, again, for the most part, the episode is sitcom parody fun, complete with a laugh track, jokes, and wacky side-characters like Dottie the neighbourhood alpha bitch and Geraldine the nice lady that Wanda befriends. And the comedy is spot-on in these two episodes. I can't really talk too much about it because, well, describing a joke is tantamount to making it utterly unfunny, but suffice to say that I had a jolly old time watching these two episodes. 

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

Again, this episode spends almost most of its runtime in sitcom-land (including a unique opening sequence, which I'm going to assume is a parody -- I liked episode 2's animated one better, though), but we get even more cracks in the bizarre, idyllic world of Westview. Again, as usual, all the comedy here surrounds a basic sitcom plot, but with a superhero twist. Wanda's pregnant! Except she goes through nine months' worth of pregnancy in about two days, so some of the hijinks here involves, among others, accidentally conjuring a stork that walks around the house, creating some pretty nice coats, and trying to hide her sudden pregnancy from Geraldine. All of that, in addition to wacky jokes like fighting over names, breathing exercises and Vision practicing putting a diaper on a doll. 

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.