I wanted to wait a couple weeks before publishing my thoughts on WandaVision out there in the meaningless abyss of the internet. The wait provides time to think, and also more time to be lazy with my writing.
Ultimately, I was impressed. The season had highs and lows, but generally it worked well and I’m excited for what this sets up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For a show based around two Avengers I had almost no interest in, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany’s stellar performances carried the series (season?) and I finally look forward to seeing what these characters do next.
In ranking the MCU’s romances, Carrie Wittmer of Vulture put it into perspective: “Wanda and Vision — tertiary Avengers who appear on the run and in love without any context in Infinity War — are now the glue that holds together a major television show, and it appears that their relationship will determine the universe’s future.” That’s a lot of pressure for two characters who have had very little to do.
Aside from laughing at his middle school English teacher clothes in Civil War or feeling bad that he got whooped constantly in Infinity War, Vision has bored me. I liked Paul Bettany in Wimbledon as much as the next guy, but Vision was a total square and uninteresting to the max. He served no purpose other than to be OP as shit and be another person on the team. Finally showing some personality and have a character arc was a welcome development.
More importantly, this was a vehicle for Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff. All we really knew about her previously was that she was a sad young woman who continually suffers horrendous tragedies. Much has been said about her performance across the internet, so I don’t have anything bold or new to add; she was great. Bettany played the straight man through all of the different eras of TV, but Olsen had to do much more in order to adapt to each, capturing the spirit of the time period while playing a devastated widow and a sitcom wife and mom. All of that’s a pretty heavy lift. Understanding the depths of her grief and trauma, seeing her dip her toes into villany, and ultimately ending up in a position for her to do unfathomable damage to our reality has me hooked.
It seems like saying anything negative about Kathryn Hahn is internet sacrilege, but I just do not get the Agatha Harkness love. The “Agatha All Along” song was fun, but she didn’t, like, do anything. Kathryn Hahn was entertaining as always, but ultimately Agatha is just another blah Marvel villain and served as a vehicle for exposition. I normally don’t care about the repetitive nature of comic book movies or shows, but I was underwhelmed that WandaVision was so different at first then ended with the same old stuff. Agatha just wants Wanda’s power, her true witch form looks like she works at a budget haunted house, and she fights Wanda in a big CGI battle. It was way more compelling for a minute when it seemed like she wasn’t quite a villain; the situation was briefly framed as Wanda being supremely dangerous and Agatha was out to fix the problem. But alas, the finale was standard Marvel fare instead of something bold.
Before I get to the finale, a brief rundown of the episodes:
- My wife and I both hated the first episode. Was it supposed to be funny? Was it supposed to be so unfunny that it became funny? We didn’t laugh.
- Episode 2 was really funny, though. The magic show was top notch, and Vision outing his neighbor as a communist was delightful.
- The third episode – see my thoughts on the first.
- Episodes 4-7 were awesome.
- Episode 8 was interesting but felt weird. Like something was missing and like too many important developments were weirdly abandoned. Sadly the finale didn’t really pick those threads up.
The finale left a weird taste in my mouth. The season was an exploration of Wanda’s grief, and ultimately I’m satisfied with how things came to an end for her. Wanda has to sacrifice her family, only to study the Darkhold to learn dark sorcery and hear her twins screaming. That has all sorts of implications for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But I feel like the finale just sort of wrapped other things up without real resolution. What becomes of Hayward? He was an antagonist to Monica for most of the series then just lost easily. Monica was awesome and got superpowers and…? Did she even acknowledge the fact she has superpowers?
Darcy crashes into Hayward’s van and that’s all we got for them? I hope we get more of Kat Dennings at some point soon since she was way better in this than in the Thor movies, and fortunately we probably don’t have to wait too long to see more of Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau.
Also – what’s the deal with White Vision? Judging by his appearance, the producers of The Bachelor would want to get him involved with the franchise ASAP. Did he realize that and fly away? A new Vision with all of his memories seemed like a fairly major development and he just peaced out.
Wanda ruined the townspeople’s lives for a bit there – I feel like their pain is just sort of the cost of setting up a second Doctor Strange movie and won’t be explored ever.
The Evan Peters stunt casting – not a fan. Clearly the Mandarin troll in Iron Man 3 didn’t work since they are retrying the Mandarin in the Shang-Chi movie, so I don’t understand why they trolled again.
In Spider-Man: Far From Home we got teased with the multiverse. That same summer, Marvel announced Wanda will be in the next Doctor Strange, which is explicitly about the multiverse. With all the multiverse talk in mind, bringing Evan Peters in to tease a version of the character he played in another universe, only to make it a boner joke, felt like a bizarre diss either to the Fox X-Men series or the people who liked it.
Writing for IGN, Matt Purslow said, “In a universe that has built its reputation and reason to be on its interconnectedness, it feels as if fan investment in the multiple worlds of Marvel has been leveraged to create excitement for no payoff at all, and worse still a dick joke to cap it all off.”
I totally understand not muddying the waters by bringing in another studio’s characters or shoehorning an explanation of mutants into what should be Wanda’s story. So why even bother with the tease? Marvel picked that actor to maximize hype for the show, only to have him be a joke character of little consequence. It feels like when WWE would tease WCW/ECW guys doing something cool then have Triple H beat them and embarrass them just to remind you WWE bought their competition (Booker T, Goldberg, Sting, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, Rob Van Dam). This was Disney reminding us they bought Fox.
This also took the focus completely off of Wanda’s growth and instead turned the show into a “predict the next guest star” game. I’m surprised there was no Doctor Strange cameo, but that would have been too much like The Mandalorian and detracted from Wanda’s journey. Paul Bettany trolling about a guest star is kind of funny, but taken with the Evan Peters casting it all just adds a layer of weird cynicism to the show for me.
Obviously, living through a pandemic it goes without saying that all this silliness doesn’t matter. But at the same time, living through a pandemic, I don’t have the energy to enjoy being trolled by a comic book show. Just tell me a story, don’t bust my balls.
And while you’re at it, Marvel, we need more of Randall Park’s Jimmy Woo. I’m hoping we can get an Agents of Atlas miniseries or something. We’re introducing Shang-Chi this summer, Amadeus Cho’s mom was in Age of Ultron so don’t tell me he isn’t out there somewhere, Cindy Moon was in Homecoming, let’s get the rest of the team together.
But hey, in the end this was a show that mostly worked and introduced a lot of cool stuff to set up the future of the MCU. I’m glad we’re going to get more of Vision (it would have been a shame to lose him forever now after he finally became worthwhile), and I very much look forward to seeing how much damage the Scarlet Witch is about to do.
Unsolicited Opinion 