“WandaVision. Wa-Wanda Vision. WandaVision!” If you sang that to yourself while reading that line, this article is for you. Let’s discuss Marvel’s first project since the beginning of the pandemic and all of the ways we might see reality-bending, universe-changing things in the nine episode series we have quickly grown to know and love: “WandaVision.”
I am writing this a few days after the release of the fifth episode of “WandaVision” on Disney Plus. It was a long 17 months for Marvel fans between the theatrical release of “SpiderMan: Far From Home” on June 26, 2019, and the release of the first two episodes of “WandaVision” on January 15.
Those 17 months marked the longest time Marvel Cinematic Universe has gone between releases since its creation in 2008. With COVID-19 greatly affecting the movie-going experience as well as the movie industry, fans and casual viewers didn’t new Marvel content twice a year like normal. This led fans to rewatch content — like all 23 previous MCU films, projects like “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D,” X-Men properties that were brought to Disney Plus through their recent Fox acquisition and more (I am guilty of all of these).
Then, the fateful day came. January 15 gave us not one but two episodes of the long-awaited first MCU cannon show: “WandaVision.”
The first three episodes are set up like sitcoms, where Wanda Maximoff and the Vision — who both gained their status as Avengers in the second MCU team up movie “Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015” — are married and live together in the town of West View. Everything is seemingly normal except for the fact that it starts in the 50s, even though neither of the characters existed then as Vision died in “Avengers: Infinity War,” Wanda has lost her Eastern European accent and neither of them seem to know anything about what is going on.
Viewers start to see that things are off about the town of West View and soon Vision does too. By the end of the third episode, we are deep into the 70s, and Wanda is about to have the children she became pregnant with less than a day before. Geraldine, who we later find out is actually Monica Rambeau, starts to remember Wanda and her status as an Avenger in the outside world, proving that West View is not actually in the 70s but instead someone is making it seem that way.
Episode four introduces S.W.O.R.D. (sentient weapon observation and response department) acting director Hayward, who both the fan community and the other characters later establish to be the worst — and possibly even a villain — in the show. The episode also reintroduces two fan favorite characters from the MCU, Jimmy Woo, the FBI agent assigned to be Ant Man’s parole-style officer while he was on house arrest, and Darcy Lewis, a political science student turned astrophysicist from the first two “Thor” movies. Fans fell for the humor and timing of Woo and Lewis so much that projects could be in the works already for their own shows.
This episode also gives us a sense of how much time has passed between the events of Endgame (the return from the blip) and the start of “WandaVision,” which is only three weeks. The final shot of the episode shows Monica being thrown out of Wanda’s “hex,” saying that Wanda is the one controlling everyone inside.
Episode five is the first time we get some sitcom-style scenes set in the 80s, mixed in with scenes from outside of West View. These are mostly about Monica, Darcy and Jimmy. This episode is arguably the best one yet because of the defining scene at the end when actor Evan Peters is introduced as Pietro, Wanda’s twin brother who died in “Age of Ultron.” In the 2015 movie, Pietro/Quicksilver was played by actor Aaron Taylor Johnson instead of Evan Peters. Evan Peters, however, plays Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver in the non-MCU X-Men Universe. Now that Disney owns Fox, this could be their way of combining the X-Men into the MCU.
I can’t wait for more episodes of “WandaVision” to answer more of our fan questions — but it’s likely to give us more questions than we already have. With that, I will just leave you with one question: who is Ralph?