For the past year, so many of us have wished, whether aloud or within the confines of our minds, that we could control the world around us. We wish we could lower the positivity and fatality rates of a still largely uncontrolled virus. We wish we could mask-up the ignorant individuals of our respected societies. Above most else, we wish we could keep the impending darkness of tremendous tragedy and hurt outside the borders of our self-contained sanctuaries, even though it would still be waiting just outside the blockade for us.
I came into WandaVision as a casual fan of Marvel with the exception of X-Men, which ironically hasn't been a Marvel property in terms of legality for a number of years up until the recent past. I've always gravitated more told DC Comics material, though I was never wholly certain as to why. Now older and a bit more self-aware, I realize that a partial-explanation for this might be that from a young age I related more to women then men, and I found the women of DC Comics from Wonder Woman to Zatanna, from Harley Quinn to Martha Kent to be compelling, multi-faceted and strong. This is not to say that Marvel does not contain strong female characters, but growing up people were hardly talking about Gwen Stacy, let alone the fact that she eventually came into powers herself later on, and they certainly were not talking about Black Widow before Scarlet Johansson brought her to life on the big screen. The women of Marvel, again outside the world of X-Men populated by badasses like Jean Grey, Mystique and Storm, were just not within my sphere of consciousness. When I saw the promos for WandaVision, having a vague understanding from watching Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) a billion years ago, and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) while I was mildly intoxicated one evening at home, I was immediately beguiled not only at the pastiche-style with which the story would be told but that it would be told from the female perspective. A story of grief, in a year and a half, filled with it to the brim, that would seemingly also appease superhero fans, often-considered to be brutish and less invested in cognitive insight than in punching stuff. I had to see for myself if WandaVision could succeed with such lofty ambitions. The results were not just pleasantly surprising, nay. They reinvigorated my creative beliefs in how stories could be told across film and television, which demographics they could be told to, and most importantly, what they could be about on a thematic level.
The best way to describe the entirety of WandaVision is a masterclass on nostalgia, and the first three episodes are the perfect introduction into this world of strange-familiarity. The specificity in costume design, lighting, cinematography, dialogue, set design etc., is nothing short of magnificent, as if these eras of television never ceased existing in the first place, because on so many television every day, thanks to syndication and reruns, they haven't. Many have complained about the "slow start" of the first two entries, which feature zero "action" as would be defined by any superhero fan of the last two decades. Instead, "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience and "Don't Touch That Dial" ask you to sit back and relax and revel in the reminders given as to why Vision, Wanda and the loving bond they share was such a fan-favorite in the film franchise they came from in the first place. We get to see them as everyday people and recognize them as ourselves despite their extraordinary abilities. Without this set-up, we as the audience could not fully comprehend as richly as we do why Wanda yearned for normalcy and why she will so fiercely fight against anyone or anything that risks disrupting it, as made evident by her actions at the end of episode three to "Geraldine."
Episode 4
In many ways, the most uninteresting episode of the series, though that isn't entirely its fault. "We Interrupt This Program" does just what its title implies. It is an expositional dump the size of a New Jersey Highway, its the byproduct of WandaVision residing inside such a wide-spanning universe. Explanations must be given, characters must be established, and stakes must get raised if the rest of the series can be allowed to have the emotional gravitas it will most certainly possess. We forgive this episode's hefty narrative-obligations almost completely in gratitude towards actors Teyonah Parris, Randall Park, and the always delightful, Kat Dennings who give the supporting cast of character enough heart and humor to get us through this explain-a-thon. Even Josh Stamberg gives an appropriately-arrogant performance as Acting Director of S.W.O.R.D. Tyler Hayward. It isn't a series highlight as much as it is a necessity, but at least the creative team tried to make the vegetables as tasty as possible when feeding them to us.
Episodes 5-7
It's important to note that as the eras of television have progressed, the conflicts dealt within them have gotten more serious. This reflects the evolving landscape of American Television. In the 1950s and 1960s, most American audiences didn't want serious subject matter to be explored in their sitcoms. They wanted escapism from the hardships already outside their own front doors ranging from war to poverty, from political corruption to racial inequality. However, by the late 70-90s, audiences had grown to accept that tough times were a part of who they were and therefore should be exhibited in the characters they watched on TV each night. Episode 5, "On a Very Special Episode..." my personal favorite of the entire limited series, is the best example of the trust that had grown between television-makers and their audiences to handle a subject matter like death in a way that can be teachable and still entertaining. We see Wanda start to learn this lesson in this very same episode, and she tries to pass on the wisdom to her young sons, Billy and Tommy, that death is okay and the complex feelings that come alongside it are valid and imperative to the human soul to experience. It is the arrival of her brother (played by Evan Peters of Fox Marvel fame in a clever, if not infuriating, red herring) that stops this emotional maturity in Wanda before it can lead her to dismantle this self-imposed delusion of superb suburbia. We will later learn that this was done deliberately. For selfish reasons, a certain nosy-neighbor played by the incomparable Kathryn Hahn could not allow Wanda to have such an epiphany, at least not yet, and not unsupervised.
Episode 8
While the acting in the penultimate episode "Previously On" is phenomenal, with Olsen, Bettany and Hahn putting in their best performances in the entire series here, the lack of imagination in its set-up warrants some criticism. Surely the writers could have found a way to embark on this journey to the past in a way that felt less "A Christmas Carol" in its execution and more aligned with the television tropes the series as a whole had been so expertly celebrating up to this point. Still, with an opening witch-burning unlike any other and a quote that has already sparked memes upon memes, the episode manages to be a triumph despite its conventional, borderline literary structure. We get the explanations we need in a much-more visually absorbable method than in Episode Four.
The episode also sparks surprising criticism against big-government and the military not often seen in the Marvel Franchise, which frequently positions its heroes as brave militants or subsidies like Tony Stark, fighting the good fight with noble intentions. Here we see faults acknowledged in spades, from Wanda and Pietro's loss of their parents due to war to her mistreatment as next of kin to the person she loved the most in the world. Hayward's holier-than-thou argument that Vision must be destroyed to protect society at large is proved to be bullshit when they turn a version of him back online later in the episode. They would never not take advantage of such a power source, not when it can be used as a means of war and domination. Still, though corruption is acknowledged and briefly explored, the series does not completely deviate into a piece of Anti-War propaganda. After all, Monica and Jimmy are military and law enforcement personnel, respectfully, and they each play a positive role in ensuring that alls well that ends well. It challenges conventional notions but doesn't completely follow through.
Full disclosure, as I've just watched the finale now, this part of the review is the first that I am writing. "The Series Finale" as it is so aptly titled, will in little doubt enrage many fans. Almost every single popular theory, from the arrival of the ominous comic book Big Bad, Mephisto, to the true identity of Evan Peter's Quicksilver imposter, fans were left with few Easter Eggs to fry for breakfast Saturday morning. Even the one cameo we all thought would be definite, the arrival of Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange, turned out to be a non-starter. Showrunner, Jac Schaeffer and her team for eight straight episodes hardly pulled focus off of Wanda and Vision's journey for other such fanfare with the exception of setting up an origin story for Monica Rambeau, so why would we expect the finale to dedicate a significant portion of time to other MCU properties? That isn't to say the finale didn't provide fan-service. Many of those who came here for the kind of subdued pensive introspection we got in Episode 8 would be, at least somewhat disappointed to find a large portion of the finale dedicated to those hallmark fight sequences that superhero films cannot survive without. Others argue that the finale didn't explore the mythos of witchcraft enough, nor Wanda's guilt for what she had done to hundreds of people trapped inside the Hex. These are valid oversights, but at least they can be remedied in future installments of her journey in the films. Still, despite some fair grievances, this started as Wanda's story, and it appropriately ended as such.
Some will have wanted it to end as a film, which in the case of superhero franchises, explosively sets-up the next enthralling chapter to come. Still, with a dedication to homaging Television of Great, WandaVision doesn't sacrifice its devotion to the medium that helped bring it to life in its final bow. How many sitcoms have ended with the simple flicking off of a lamp? How many one-hour dramas finish with the main character setting off on a new and exciting journey usually away from the primary setting? The bad guys neutralized, the kids tucked in. It was time to go, and go it did, with the elegance of understatement and subtly which defined some of the best parts of this nine-episode journey. Paradoxically, the final episode manages to break cinematic conventions through a television-lens context. Vision defeats his identical counterpart not with his fist, but his words, a rarity in a battle between men on the big or small screen, well, in this case, android-men, but I digress. When Wanda inspects underneath the car for Agatha's body, she finds only her shoes, a clever nod to the Wizard of Oz (1939), another story of hope and heartache begetting a fantastical world of seeming paradise. In these moments, "The Series Finale" is giving small but noticeable "thank you's" to the medium that allowed it to get to this point in the journey, film.
Conclusions:
Much will be written, and rightfully so, about how the finale most importantly represents Wanda's acceptance of grief. She makes the ultimate sacrifice a matriarch can make, her family. However, we do not see her dissolve into an inconsolable heap. This time, Wanda finds strength in her loss. Though White Vision is out there, he is not the person she fell in love with, and I'll be honest, it would likely be a sizable disadvantage to the emotional resonance of the material if he were to become himself again. If our losses are permanent, so must be Wanda's, not because of some twisted sense of fairness, but because Wanda has always been since Episode 1 an extension of us, of our entrapment due to lockdown, of our grieve over a life un-lived or cut short. If she can survive it, we can, with or without magical powers.
In the post-credits scene, Wanda hears the voices of her sons. In the context of the Marvel Franchise, this insinuates that they are out there somewhere. Maybe not in this universe but another. However, for those who have only come to visit Westview to witness Wanda's cathartic journey, to the casual viewer, and those that have lost loved ones they can never get back, this moment means something else. It means that if grief is love persevering, then a life lived after loss is a life shared with those departed. That's why Wanda and Vision, in their tearful goodbye, show hope because perhaps his next life will be lived as a memory inside of the woman who loved him for the man she knew he was within himself. He won't be a physical manifestation, living, breathing and tripping over an ottoman, but a voice to guide her in her dimmest moments moving forward. The most magnificent thing Wanda could do for him and herself was to allow him back inside her mind, for that is where he is meant to exist now, as are so many gone too soon. Indeed, by the end of the series, we find that Wanda's greatest power possessed is to love others more than herself. It's the creed every superhero needs to live by. That's the vision of life she's found. That's WandaVision.
