This entire line of discussion feels spot on to me. I don’t know much about any of these suggested big bads since I’m not a comic reader (but I am a big Marvel Wiki reader) but this zig to avoid the Judeo-Christian baggage feels like exactly the kind of thing Disney would do. And I suppose I agree with it as someone who prefers we leave religion out of everything and also someone whose stomach turns at the thought of all the stupid Twitter discussions should the wade into those waters.
Upthread there was a suggestion that the “astrophysicist” could be a Skrull, likely Talos’ daughter. The fact that they introduced someone who was so apparently inconsequential for the role after so much build-up all but confirmed it for me. The speed with which they resolved it also tickled my BS meter.
My take is the exact opposite. You don’t reveal the big-bad at the end of episode 7 in such an over the top, cheesy way without any of our protagonists actually being involved in figuring it out if it’s real. It’s got to be a misdirect or else they basically punted on what should be the main climax of Act II all for a stupid The Munsters spoof. Big bads don’t simply out themselves in what is basically a soliloquy. Wanda, or whoever is driving the TV sitcom motif, is dropping this as a smokescreen.
I’m really underwhelmed by this entire origin story. This is frankly a far too innocuous event to trigger the powering up of a character like Spectrum. She’s basically every bit as powerful as the MCU Captain Marvel in the comics, which makes her one of the strongest characters in the entire ecosystem. Carol got her powers from a massively concentrated and catastrophic blast of infinity stone powered stuff. This is a one-time, freak thing. Dozens, maybe hundreds, have at this point passed through the hex. If each and every one of them is just a couple more trips through from becoming a top-tier Avenger-level super, then superheroes are basically a dime-a-dozen. It also means that Wanda can basically create supers at will (which maybe is where they are going based on the comics, but I don’t like it). Maybe they’ll write in that Monica is somehow uniquely predisposed to it, but that would be out of left-field and there’s been no suggestion of it so far. All in all, this is the weakest part of this entire show, especially if she turns out to be a) Wanda’s equal and b) the main hero who fights the big bad and gets us to a semi-happy ending.
The last couple episodes are going to really have to be something to turn me around on this show not being a major disappointment.
I suspect at this point that Agatha is a victim. Recall that the entire reason Jimmy took an interest in Westview is because a protected witness was missing. Perhaps Agatha was that witness and got caught up in the hex with the rest of the town, and it’s her inherent magical abilities that enabled her to resist her role as Agnes.
Perhaps the entire reason Mephisto (or whoever else the Big Bad might be) chose Westview is because it was hunting her.
Yeah, I’m still leaning towards the idea that Anges is working as an agent of a greater power, either willingly or unwillingly. Making her outright evil would be a 180 from the comics and frankly it would be dramatically upping her powers from what they are in the comics too, if I understand correctly.
I don’t think she’s a simple victim though. It’s certainly no coincidence that she’s in Westview. She might be the witness in question, but we still have no idea why Wanda and Vision are in Westview. We are pretty sure that Sword was tinkering with Vision’s corpse but that seems to not have been here in Westview, we’ve seen nothing that looks like a transformed Sword lab in bizarro Westview.
I like the “Nexus of the universe” theory upthread. This might explain the confluence of powers appearing al in this one place.
Maybe Ralph is Jimmy Woo’s missing witness, and “off screen spouse” was how the hex interpreted “Witness Protection” into something sitcom appropriate.
I haven’t gone back and looked at all of the times Agnes seemed to be expressing genuine fear, armed now with the weight of later-acquired knowledge about what might or might not be going on, but my memory is that the actress was doing a good job of expressing fear which she clearly felt strongly while obviously trying to hide it (from Wanda?). That to me is a strong indicator that someone other than Agnes is holding the real power here, whether it be Wanda or someone else.
But I do agree that if there is another Big Bad to be revealed here, then it in my opinion must be introduced/revealed in the next episode. Leaving it entirely for the last episode would make the denouement far too rushed.
Agatha didn’t create the Hex, that is definitely Wanda’s creation. But I do think she is controlling the residents, and manipulating everything for her own ends, something involving the twins. I think any fear she is showing is either that she isn’t in as much control as she needs to be for things to go her way, or possibly fear of the consequences coming from whoever has sent her to do this.
So Agatha was the hidden witness but someone is manipulating Agatha into using her powers to manipulate Wanda into using her powers to manipulate everyone? Convoluted but not impossible.
My WAG is that Agatha isn’t fully aware of the Big Bad and thinks Wanda is the one solely responsible for Westview, and that’s why she’s been trying to break the simulation by leaving Vision the trail of breadcrumbs that have caused him to realize some of what’s going on.
My guess is that this show isn’t about the introduction of a new “big bad”. It’s about the accidental discovery of the multiverse and how Wanda/Billy Mumy’s powers are made possible by the existence of the multiverse.
Or Agatha is the hidden witness, and the “Mob Boss” that she is hiding from is the Big Bad. So Agatha is using her powers to stay hidden, and manipulating Wanda into manipulating others is part of that.
Might depend on how many times they went through it. As far as we know, Monica is the only (human) character, besides Wanda, to breach the barrier more than once. And, since it appears to be Wanda’s powers creating it, she’s probably not even going through it, so much as opening a hole in it.
Scientists have been trying for decades to figure out who gets superpowers when exposed to massive amounts of weird radiation, versus who just gets cancer and dies a horrible death. It’s one of the great scientific mysteries of our time.
Her last trip through was a lot different from all the other times people have passed through, as well. When we saw the SWORD guys get transformed, the hex worked like a scanline that rewrote them instantly as it passed over them. When Monica entered the hex the second time, she didn’t just step through it, she stepped into it, and appeared to exist entirely “inside” the hex for several seconds before she fought her way through. We can see lots of different versions of Monica as she passes through - which perhaps suggests that on this pass, the hex was trying to rewrite her multiple times, as opposed to a single rewrite each time she passed through it previously.
Also, going back to the subject of the asshole SWORD director guy’s overall level of competence - he has an agent go through an unknown phenomena, disappear for a few days, then suddenly reappear, except now nothing shows on her medical scans? LOCK HER THE FUCK UP! You KNOW shapeshifters are a thing, going all the way back to when Loki started messing with shit on Midguard. Plus, Skrulls are a thing now, and as a SWORD guy, he should absolutely know about them. And after the whole “SHIELD is riddled with Hydra agents” thing, they should be psychotically paranoid about infiltrators. Instead, he lets her run around for a few days, then throws her off the case not because of security concerns, but because he’s a spiteful dick.