After six years in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has finally become The Scarlet Witch. (Courtesy Marvel.com)
By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
March 11, 2021 — So did you watch “The Series Finale”?
Q: Which series finale?
A: You know what I mean. “The Series Finale” is the title of the last episode of WandaVision. Don’t pretend you didn’t watch it.
Q: I did, but I have some questions. Like, now that it’s over, can we say what WandaVision means?
A: It was Wanda’s vision of the perfect life for Wanda & Vision, as represented by WandaVision the show within the show. The title has a triple meaning.
Q: Yes, yes, but what was it about?
A: The beauty of the show is that the answer to that might vary from person to person. But my biggest takeaway was “grief.”
Specifically, Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) dealing with the grief of losing her parents, her brother and the love of her life. And blowing up a bunch of civilians in Lagos, which launched Captain America: Civil War, which cost her a home with the Avengers. I mean, the girl’s been through the mill.
In fact, you can even view the show through the lens of Kubler-Ross’ “Five Stages of Grief.” Wanda demonstrated denial with the Westview Hex and all that entails. Anger when she threw Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) out of the hex. Bargaining when she pleaded with Vision (Paul Bettany) to stay in Westview. Depression when she didn’t want to get out of bed. Acceptance when she allowed the Hex to disintegrate — and her husband and children with it.
Q: Yes, I teared up at that part. Does that mean that Martin Scorsese owes Marvel an apology?
A: I know what you mean. In 2019, Scorsese slammed Marvel movies in “Empire” magazine, saying they weren’t “the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being." “WandaVision” shows just how wrong he was, and I think, yes, he does owe Marvel filmmakers an apology.
Q: Are you holding your breath for one?
A: No.
The White Vision first appeared in the comics in 1989. (Courtesy Marvel.com)
Q: OK, so the show’s over, and everyone went their separate ways. Where did the white Vision go?
A: We don’t know. The product of “Project Cataract” (which affects your vision, get it?) was essentially a robot using Vision’s old body, when Wanda’s Vision, a product of her will and the Mind Stone, unlocked his old body’s memories. Well, up to the point where Vision 1.0 died in Wakanda. (Twice.)
But is he the same guy? Presumably, if he was the old Vision reborn, he would have raced to Wanda’s side. But this version of Vision flew away to parts unknown, so he’s obviously a different person — at the very least, he’s a person who’s not in love with Wanda Maximoff.
So, what’s the deal? Maybe we can get some hints from the comics.
Back in 1989, The Vision had been disassembled, and Hank “Ant-Man” Pym put him back together in an all-white form. This first achromatic Vision was identical to the original, except for color … and also that Pym didn’t have access to the brain patterns of Simon “Wonder Man” Williams to finish the job. (Long story.) That made Vision 2.0 essentially emotionless.
“He has all the information we can supply,” Pym told Wanda in West Coast Avengers #45, “but his emotional connection to that information is non-existent.” The white Vision said this development meant that he was an entirely different person than the original, and had his marriage to Wanda annulled. Well, before being kidnapped and replaced by an evil doppelganger from a parallel universe, that is. (Longer story.)
So could that be white Vision’s future? We’ll know the next time he shows up. I figure he went to Wakanda, where he died, to see if he can pick up the threads of his life. Or to Ultron’s old lair, to explore his origins. Or maybe he’s in search of the Ship of Theseus.
Fake Pietro was really Ralph Bohner, another mind-controlled Westview resident. (Courtesy Marvel.com)
Q: What about Pietro? He wasn’t who we thought he was, was he?
A: Correct. We all thought — or wanted to think — that the arrival of Evan Peters as an ersatz Quicksilver meant a connection to the Fox X-Men movies, where Peters played a different version of Wanda’s brother. (Wanda’s version was played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Avengers: Age of Ultron.) It turns out fake Pietro — or “Fietro” — was just another mind-controlled Westview resident, the “Ralph” to which Kathryn Hahn’s Agnes kept referring. One we all figured didn’t exist, because we were all wrong.
So now know. Who’s been messing up everything? It was Agatha (Katheryn Hahn) all along. (Courtesy Marvel.com)
Q: That’s just one of things I wanted that the finale didn’t give me. I didn’t get Mephisto, either. Or Chthon. Or even Dr. Strange.
A: Yep, the WandaVision finale didn’t give us a surprise guest star or Super Big Bad, as had been feverishly expected in certain quarters of the Internet. It just gave us an unforgettable emotional wallop and established the Scarlet Witch as Marvel’s most tragic figure. It also gave us Vision talking Vision out of a fight with Vision by using a thought experiment in a library, which is exactly how Vision would handle fighting Vision.
As for the villain of the piece, we now know it was “Agatha All Along.”
Q: Is this the last we’ll see of Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings)?
A: Of course not!
Dennings is already on record as doing more work for Marvel. She wouldn’t say what it was, but did rule out Thor: Love and Thunder.
And Park’s performance has made him a keeper in the MCU. There would be riots if he didn’t appear again.
In the comics he leads a group called Agents of Atlas, so that would be a natural progression, and be pretty cool to see. All Marvel has to do is establish M-11 (a killer robot), The Uranian (an alien), Gorilla-Man (a talking primate), Namora (Sub-Mariner’s cousin) and Venus (a Greek naiad), and that project will be good to go.
Monica's change to different colors to reflect the energy she's manipulating or seeing. (Courtesy Marvel.com)
Q: So, is Monica Rambeau a superhero now? Will she have her own movie?
A: Well, as Doris Day once said, the future’s not ours to see. Maybe she’ll have a movie someday, and maybe not.
But it’s clear she has super-powers, similar to the ones she has in the comics. And she’s due to appear in the Captain Marvel sequel (expected Nov. 11, 2022) already. Plus there was the mid-credits stinger, which had a Skrull tell her that “he” is waiting for her in space. “He” is probably Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), last seen in space, which could mean she’ll appear in the Secret Invasion series.
Q: And Wanda herself? The end credits stinger showed two of her. Where is she and what’s that all about?
A: Well, the double vision (had to work that one in) is easily explained; Dr. Strange did the same trick in his movie, where his physical body did one thing while his astral self did another (studying magic, just like Wanda). As for where she is, the comics would suggest Wundagore Mountain in Transia (her birthplace), which is the stomping grounds of the High Evolutionary (a supervillain) and Chthon (an Elder God). The movies would suggest Sokovia (her other birthplace), which has its own perils (Hydra, a whole country that hates the Avengers).
Hmmm. Those both sound like terrible places to take a working vacation. Maybe she just rented a cabin at the Kia Kima Boy Scout Reservation in Arkansas, where the only threat is adolescent hormones.
But don’t worry, we’ll see her again. She’s co-starring in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (expected March 25, 2022), and I wouldn’t be surprised to see her in Spider-Man: No Way Home (Dec. 17, 2021) which is also tied to the Strange sequel.
Whither Tommy (Jett Klyne, right) and Billy (Julian Hilliard) now? Their story isn’t over. (Courtesy Marvel.com)
Q: So it’s over. Will there be a second season?
A: It doesn’t seem likely. But possible.
Even Marvel Supreme Leader Kevin Feige doesn’t know. “I’ve been at Marvel too long to say a definite ‘No’ to anything as far as a second season of WandaVision,” he said to the Television Critics Association on Feb. 24. And if he doesn’t know, nobody knows.
So anything’s possible. She will probably try to re-create her children — we heard them calling to her in finale after-credits stinger — so there’s more story to go. And there’s still plenty of TV left to parody!
Find Captain Comics by email (capncomics@aol.com), on his website (captaincomics.ning.com), on Facebook (Andrew Alan Smith) or on Twitter (@CaptainComics).
Replies
WandaVision Had Early Plans for a CSI-Inspired Episode
As a long-time comic who loved the Avengers most when Wanda & the Vision were part of the team back in the 1970s, and had stopped reading Avengers a bit before Byrne had the Vision dismantled, I thoroughly enjoyed WandaVision. Really clever, unusual, comedic and heartbreaking. Admittedly, I was a bit wary going in, not sure how well they could pull it off, especially with two characters that weren't all that well-known outside of superhero comics geeks, but overall I believe the creators and the performers involved all did an excellent job. Certainly not standard live-action superhero fare.
I've learned to expect the best from the Marvel movies and TV shows. Nobody in the general public ever heard of Iron Man before the first movie, or the X-Men before the first Fox movie.
Fred W. Hill said:
Sorry, but I couldn't relate to WANDAVISION because it took place in the world of my TV Youth. Nope, I really didn't want to go back to any hint of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet"!
I was there for Vision's "First appearance" and the day when the AVENGERS were CAP, Hawkeye, Wanda and Pietro.
I did give the series more than an hour and that was more than enough.
Well, that was different. I didn't expect to like WandaVision as much as I did.
One day last week, there was nothing on TV we wanted to watch. I recalled that the headline of this article indicated there were only nine episodes and asked Tracy if WandaVision was on a channel we got. When she told me it was on Disney+ I knew we didn't get that, because the only reason we watched Picard is because they offered a month for free. [Subscription television is un-American.] I asked her if there was anything else on Disney+ we might be interested in watching. She laughed (silently) to herself until tears welled up in her eyes. Five minutes later, we were watching the first episode.
Understand, I had zero interest in this show. The only thing that appealed to me about it was that it was only nine episodes and wouldn't represent a huge loss of my time if I didn't like it. (Ironically, if this were a show I had cared about, that it had nine episodes would have been my biggest complaint.) Besides, I had heard some good things about it. We just finished watching S1 E9.
WandaVision truly is greater than the sum of its parts... and there are a lot of parts! It pulls in decades worth of stories from the comics alone, but there's also the spot-on parodies of great (and some not-so-great) TV shows of the past. The writers and producers demonstrate a deep knowledge of both sources, comics and TV. They even made me like some aspects of the show based on comics I do not like. And, unlike the "originality" demonstrated by the movies (changing the word "gems" to "stones," for example), this series had some real meat to it.
I had to resurrect this discussion. I finally signed up for three months of Disney+, and this was the first series I thought of trying. Despite having no history with the characters! It just sounded so trippy, and it was. I really enjoyed it, and plan to check out the other Marvel TV series on there (I think I have already seen all of the movies). I did find the post-credits stuff on the final episode to be overdone, though. It's a Marvel production, so I was expecting a scene. But not three!