25 Comments on “Final Thoughts On WandaVision”

1. A decent, if very Marvel ending (lots of flying and pew-pew).

   In terms of villainy, I place her between OG Thanos (whose head Thor lopped off) and nu-Thanos that OG Nebula summoned to our main Marvel timeline. OG Thanos did terrible things, but you can point to a greater cause than himself that he was serving selflessly. Wanda’s actions were entirely selfish and not in the service of ANY greater good. nu-Thanos just wanted to conquer another dimension, which is pretty selfish on his part. Of course, this is based on your standard of bad person or person making bad choices. :-)

   Looking forward to Disney adopting “House of M” in a decade or so and revisiting this discussion.

2. It was a Very Bad Choice – does that make her a Very Bad Person, or someone who made a Very Bad Choice? There’s a difference between the two, and it all depends on what Wanda learned from this.

   This interpretation of Agatha is A Very Bad Person, because all she learned from her own bad experiences is “GET MORE POWER!” This is not the only interpretation of Agatha, though – in others she’s Wanda’s and Pietro’s teacher and protector, more of an ambiguous figure than a strictly e-VIL! one.

   OTOH, Katheryn Hahn getting her Wicked Witch of the West on, after gloriously camping it up through the earlier episodes, was too much fun not to watch.

3. Chris K

   I really don’t believe OG Thanos’ rhetoric. Throughout Infinity War and the first act of Endgame, Thanos’ actions belie his claims.

   Thanos doesn’t want to save anyone. He wants to prove that he was RIGHT, that if the people of Titan had just listened to him, he would have saved Titan. And he’ll butcher half the universe to do it.

   The flaws with Thanos’ plan are obvious and much-discussed, with many asking why Thanos, presented with near-omnipotence by the Infinity Gauntlet, only ever considered “kill people, but FASTER.”

   Because to even consider any other plan would mean that he was wrong. That his plan would not have saved Titan. And that his world-by-world campaign of culling since then has been a pointless slaughter rather than the salvation of worlds.

   If Thanos’ original plan is not right, then he is a monster. So it has to be right. And once he is done, they’ll see. They’ll be (his words) GRATEFUL. When the Avengers come for Thanos after the Snap, he even expresses anger at their lack of gratitude.

   And that is what motivates NU-Thanos. Having seen that even if he carries out his plan, people will not accept that he was right, will not be grateful like they should be, he resolves to destroy and remake the universe into a proper one – “a grateful universe.”

   Thanos never wanted to save the universe. He wanted to be SEEN as its savior.

4. “Version of the Vision?” I’m thinking “Vessel with the Pestle.”

5. I enjoyed the whole series; it was like a lot of the Marvelverse — as a non-comics reader, I made do with surface impressions and enjoyed it. It was fun to hear the people who devoted time and could recall their younger selves rocking from the various surprises.

   Fly and shoot is getting a bit tired for all the superheroes finales — if nothing else, it’s a bit harder to sell me on exertion via CGI that if they’re physically straining. But I’m happy I watched, and the friends struggling not to spoil it were a motivation to watch now instead of adding it to the queue.

6. My wife and I loved the series. We’re looking forward to watching it again to pickup things we missed the first time.

   What is grief, if not love persevering?

   That will stay with me for the rest of my life.

   You know that moment in Toy Story 3, where all the toys are headed straight for a giant pit of fire, and instead of fighting it, they all hold hands and close their eyes as they approach their end?

   That was the pinnacle of the whole Toy Story series for me. An astounding moment. And then to turn around with “The Claw!” to give you the laughing-through-tears moment was brilliant.

7. It’s not really accurate to say that comics!Agatha is “Wanda’s villain”. She started out as a governess for the Fantastic Four (taking care of son Franklin) and she’s generally been a goodie. She did give comics!Wanda some magical training. Her being evil here is a change, as is her being middle-aged instead of old. (Comics!Agatha has gray hair and wrinkles, the whole bit.)

   Vision being white and emotionless is also taken from a comic book arc. His look in the comics was a bit more ivory than the blue-white here.

   The Darkhold as an evil magic book is also a comics thing. We’ll have to see where this goes in the next Doctor Strange movie.

8. I can’t read these articles due to the spoilers, but I’ve saved the links. Once the copyrights expire (see https://whatever.scalzi.com/2021/03/07/two-tweet-threads-about-copyright/), then I will watch them on Hulu or something and read the articles. I’m really looking forward to it!

9. White Vision is also an artifact of the comics.
   https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/wandavision-easter-eggs-white-vision-comics-origin

   Agatha Harkness was originally the Fantastic Four’s babysitter, since who else are you going to trust your son with when you’re also the target of supevillains on a weekly basis? She’s thousands of years old and has her own agenda, but generally comes down on the side of the heroes. Until she does not.

   Original Flavor Comics Wanda also went through her spell with reality-warping, when she created Billy and Tommy. There was Drama, because the kids would sometimes just vanish, until we find that it happens because occasionally Wanda would not be thinking about them, so they’d blink out of existence.

   The funny part was when they decide to consult with, you know, an actual doctor and it’s Doctor Strange — the West Coast Avengers just blithely go on about ‘Wanda’s Chaos Magic’ and he promptly tells them there’s no such thing as ‘Chaos Magic’.

   (This was all part of upping Wanda’s power level – back when she was ‘just’ the daughter of Magneto and a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, she had ‘hex bolts’ that would sometimes make things fall apart. Then that was upped to probability manipulation, so she was a ‘bad luck magnet’, and finally replaced with actual magic paired with some low-grade reality-warping I think. )

   MCU Agatha was, I think, more curious than anything. And cautious. She didn’t so much ‘go along’ with things as insinuate herself into the narrative, but she might have also been swept along with it from time to time due to Wanda’s sheer power. It was a gamble for her, and it almost paid off.

10. Oh Wanda is definitely the villain, far more than Agatha or Hayward. She’d have been better off trying to get Pepper to let her use Tony’s old fantasy machine from, I think it was, Civil War if she wanted to play pretend family.

    I don’t think anyone came out of the show covered in glory. Well, Jimmy Woo did. He is perfect. Hayward misappropriated government resources, so did Monica [“they’ll never know what you sacrificed”, gimme a break, please] though. And Hayward’s reasons were less self serving too, since they live in a world full of Ultrons and Thanoses, and having a weapon to combat them would be a good idea and something that someone should be working on. Even Darcy attempted vehicular homicide in the finale too.

    The real villains though, the writers. Or at least whoever thought that yanking our chains with fake Peter/Pietro from the X-Men movies was a good idea. Ultimately the show was great in its build up, but fell apart in the last two episodes. It just didn’t stick the landing.

11. I thought WANDAVISION was an amazing piece of television, and indicative of what an incredible time for geek TV and movies we live in, with multiple MCU, STAR WARS, and STAR TREK shows to look forward to.

    I still remember when the original STAR TREK ran first-run. That, TWILIGHT ZONE, and BATMAN were about it for quite a while as far as good genre material when I was growing up. No, I don’t really count LOST IN SPACE.

12. Or at least whoever thought that yanking our chains with fake Peter/Pietro from the X-Men movies was a good idea.

    As a comics fan of six decade, I most certainly thought it was a GREAT idea. And shows some people are easily distracted, even though the show was telling you exactly what it was about.

    And Hayward was an asshole, pure and simple. He could have, you know, asked?

13. I found your assessment of Breaking the Fourth Wall amusing. Given the evolution of sitcom structure the show was following I knew after the 90s style show would be the mockumentary style a la The Office, Modern Family etc. When you watch those shows do you not realize it’s supposed to be like a documentary/reality TV crew is filming them?

14. I’m just hoping the post credits scene indicates we’re going to end up getting Wiccan and Speed (Billy and Tommy) in the MCU. And if we do get an older Billy, maybe we will get Hulkling too? We do, after all, already have the Kree and the Skrull in the MCU so it’s possible.

15. “Is she a bad person, or just a person who made bad choices? Where’s the line between the two? If someone makes bad choices over and over again, when do they earn the title of “bad person?” ”

    Evil is when you know something is ‘bad’, and choose it anyway. Not as the ‘necessary evil’, or ‘lesser of evils’ but just because you want it and have blown off moral considerations.

16. To answer your questions about the runes, they weren’t there originally when Agatha used hers against Wanda. Wanda added them later after she’d learned about them from Agatha.

17. I enjoyed the series. It perfectly captured that humans are complicated and grieving is a messy process. It brilliantly fleshed out both their characters in a way the Avengers movies couldn’t. And I found the TV-homage format intriguing.

18. Wanda is certainly not a villain. She’s simply someone overtaken by her grief. As someone who lost the love of their life, I can say I’d do absolutely anything to have her back. So would, I think, most people who loose someone who means that much to them. Grief makes you do and think and consider things you never would otherwise and for awhile, they all seem completely reasonable. Unfortunately for the town of Westview, Wanda has the power to bring her understandable desires into reality (of a sort). Wanda’s not bad, she’s human.

    On Agnes/Agatha, I’ve got to think that ultimately, she actually thought she was doing the right thing and was turning circumstances to her advantage. She wants power for power’s sake certainly and she’s also intensely jealous of Wanda, but she also seems to think that Wanda is a danger to the entire planet. She believes what the Darkhold is telling her. In her mind, she’s saving us all from Wanda (while enriching herself). She is, like all of us, the hero of her own story. I’m sure we’ll be seeing her again (probably in Dr. Strange 2) and it’ll be interesting to see her ultimate arc in the MCU.

19. If your bad choices hurt yourself, then you’re just a person who makes bad choices. If your bad choices hurt other people, then you’re a bad person.

20. Jay, we’ve all lost people. I know for a certainty that if they thought bringing them back was at the cost of other people’s lives, they’d hate me forever though; because it would be wrong. Just because you lose someone doesn’t mean you get a get-out-of-bad-acts-free card. Wanda did something evil, and not to bring anyone back, but to indulge her daydreams of having them back. She enslaved people to play pretend.

    It is why Monica is kinda a villain too, with her over identifying with Wanda and letting her grief take control of her instead of dealing with it sensibly.

21. crypticmirror, I certainly understand what you’re saying, however, right after I lost my wife, I would have torn the planet apart to get her back. It isn’t a rational response and it’s probably not even a sane response, but it’s certainly where you go in your head – or at least I did and others that I’ve spoken to have done the same. What I did do was smash a few things up, burn the suit I bought for the funeral, and, for months, just snapped at everyone for, in many cases, no reason at all. Wanda basically did the equivalent to all that, but, because she has powers, it expressed itself through them. Not all of us are capable, in those moments of “dealing with it sensibly.”

    As for Monica being a villain, well, I guess I am too then since I identify with what Wanda was going through. But keep in mind here that for Monica, she just lost someone too – her mother. Yeah, her mother died years before, but because Monica was Blinked, for her, it just happened and because she pretty much immediately returned to work, she hasn’t even taken the time to grieve fully herself. So she, more than anyone else in WandaVision is in a position to fully understand where Wanda is/was in her head. Feeling sympathy and expressing sympathy to others who are feeling as you do isn’t being a villain, it’s just being a person.

22. One of the most problematic of all human failings is the ease with which we justify our evils. I mean, we’re all the heroes of our own movies, right? And the hero is by definition the Good Guy. So we’re not REALLY Bad People when we make “bad choices”.

    But we are.

    Which doesn’t mean we are always and forever Bad. But it does mean that we shouldn’t get off the “bad” hook without the whole repentance-atonement thing. And for truly Great Wrongs? That kind of means you end up doing the atonement for the rest of your life.

    Wanda did a Great Wrong. It’s possible to understand, and even have a smidgen if sympathy for the “why”. But it doesn’t lessen the wrong, or let her – in a just world – escape the consequences.

23. Wanda is absolutely not a villain. What she is, generally, is someone who badly needed grief counseling and support after some majorly traumatizing events, but all of the people in her support net are gone. Her brother, dead. Her lover, dead just a few weeks ago. Her mentor and friend, never came back from the time-stream or came back as someone else. Tony Stark, Natasha? Dead. Hawkeye: concerned with his own trauma. Nick Fury? Presumed dead, in space.

    Wanda has no one to turn to, from what we can tell and is processing a traumatic double-death of her loved one (one of which was at her hands). The world is pre-occupied with it’s own trauma from Thanos’ Snap (remember, it’s only been a matter of weeks since half the universe returned after a five year absence) and Wanda effectively breaks.

    Wanda didn’t intentionally do what she did to Westview (by her own admission, she didn’t even know how she could), but was the result of her powers and her emotional PTSD colliding. Once in the WandaVision bubble, she suppressed her own acknowledgement of reality, avoiding painful memories like touching a bruise or sensitive tooth. As it became obvious she DID know that it was artifice, she didn’t want to give it up.

    Does that make her blameless or not guilty? No, but I think there’s a vast gulf between Wanda’s actions and Thanos’. How she proceeds from here, we’ll see.

    Also: using Ultron as an excuse for trying to make a weapon out of the Vision is a pretty ironic take.

24. WizarDru has put it perfectly. Wanda was not sane or in control of her actions when she created Westview. She gradually began to regain her awareness, but it wasn’t an instant switch. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I would imagine that’s probably realistic, that someone in the midst of a long term delusion probably doesn’t just come out of it in an instant?

    She’s not blameless for her actions, but she’s not a villain, and she is deserving of sympathy.

25. Dear Athena,

    As someone who is OldEnoughToBeYourGrandfather (Trademark, Patent Pending, Copyright, Domain Name Registered), I pretty much agree with everything you said!

    I think someone else pointed out that the breaking of the fourth wall was standard 90s, ala Malcolm in the Middle (which was one of the shows they riffed off of), but that doesn’t refute your point, because the writers were using these tropes for important reasons internal to this show. I think you were spot on.

    As someone who last read Marvel Comics BeforeYouWereBorn (also TM, PP,blahblahblah), I also really appreciated the recap episode. I enjoyed the series because I had some vague knowledge of all the characters (at least their earlier incarnations) but there was so much inside baseball! I don’t think that was a mistake on the part of the writers, because the Marvelgeek audience is huge, but it meant I wasn’t the target.

    Agatha All Along is a fabulous earworm and I just love Kathryn Hahn. I wish she’d had a bigger part in TOMORROWLAND (one of my all-time favorite SF movies). But for me it resulted in a huge inconsistency. It could be that I missed something. I went into the whole expository lump in the next episode assuming that it was just villainous expository lump, that all those questions that Agatha was asking were entirely rhetorical because she knew exactly what was going on because, well, it had been “Agatha all along!”

    Except it hadn’t! She really didn’t know, she really wasn’t in control, she was looking for answers that would let her acquire power. That ain’t consistent with “Agatha all along,” in my mind.

    If something went entirely past me (very possible!), I’d love it if someone would explain that.

    I thought the boss fight in the final episode went on far too long. Yeah, I know that comic book stories have to have a boss fight because it’s part of the form’s structure, like the grand aria in opera. But that was a movie-length boss fight that consumed most of the episode! I would’ve preferred it to have been half as long and gotten twice as much honest-to-God real story. Just way too much for a less-than-hour show, for me.

    Is Wanda a villain? Different schools of philosophy would give you different answers on that, as would slightly different circumstances. In this particular story, Wanda didn’t do any real permanent harm in her PTSD break. Sure, she took a town’s people’s autonomy away from them and force them to live out a sitcom. A world where nothing ever goes permanently wrong, no one is ever permanently hurt or even much hurt at all. As hells go, it’s a safe place to be. Sure it’s traumatic being a puppet, but it’s not like becoming an unwilling participant in The Wire or CSI:SVU!

    So it’s easy to forgive her. Maybe.

    But suppose, instead, she killed a bunch of people in her trauma. Suppose she killed the whole township and replaced them with magically-constructed clones? Would we be forgiving her PTSD? Even more extremely, suppose the trauma of watching her parents and her apartment wiped out by Stark weaponry caused her to exterminate the entire population of the United States? Okay, a PTSD reaction and not under her control or even her conscious desire, but does that mean she doesn’t wind up on the “Villain” side of the Moral-O- Meter?

    pax /Ctein
    [ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]