So I am finally caught up on the thread. Jeeze you guys generate a lot of content over the weekend! There were a dozen things I wanted to comment on and I had a lot of theories, but the majority of them have been discussed enough already. So hopefully you’ll tolerate a little stream of consciousness here…
I REALLY enjoyed the Agatha Harkness origin scene. That was really cool to watch and I thought it was super interesting. I won’t belabor the point, but compared to the Spectrum thing this is a million times more satisfying.
I gather Agatha’s backstory is substantially different from the comics, so I’m curious what to make of her mother and her coven. I read some wikis that Agatha was responsible for some of the Salem/New Salem witch hunts herself, essentially as a purification of witch-kind, but in this reality it’s her mom doing it. And she’s presumably not doing it as a culling but instead as a punishment for getting out of line. I was particularly interested in the fact that she was shown with what looked essentially like a magical crown or tiara (diadem?) when she rose up.
Agatha as essentially a really greedy for power villain I think is elegant. She’s perhaps not Machiavellian enough to orchestrate a gaslighting of Wanda, which means I still think there’s a big bad we haven’t seen yet, but her being here makes sense narratively. She was a ‘young’ which in Salem who got into trouble for sneaking around in her moms restricted section, trying to learn forbidden magic, and was to be punished for it. I don’t think she planned to drain the power of her mother and coven, my interpretation of the acting was that she was caught of guard by it, but whatever allowed it was welcomed. Because she’s basically just hungry for knowledge, be it good or evil, it’s plausible that she largely flew under SHIELD/the Avengers radar. She’s basically chaotic neutral. I buy that she’s in Westview simply to learn/steal Wanda’s magic.
Spoiler/speculation about the book in her basement: internet nerds are basically treating it as confirmed that this is the Darkhold. If so, this would go a long ways towards explaining why Agents of SHIELD was decanonized.
Speaking of her basement, where the heck did that come from? So one of two possibilities exist for how Agatha ended up here. Either she “sensed” Wanda’s hex and her greed drove her to seek it out to steal/learn it. The issues with this are discussed upthread, basically Agatha really needed to be Johnny on the spot to show up and get into the hex. The other possibility is that Agatha was in Westview all along. Which means that she’s the “witness” that Woo is sent to locate or Ralph is. The problem with this is that Wanda showing up and starting the hex in Westview is more than a little serendipitous.
I don’t know what to think. That Agatha was in Westview already, her having this sanctum in place already, that she was the person that brought the hex to the notice of the government by going off the radar, and that she lured Wanda here by placing that deed in her possession solves a lot of open questions. But Agatha could not have known she’d cast the hex. She couldn’t really have known that she’d do anything magical at all. So this couldn’t have been part of a scheme. Maybe Agatha lured Wanda here simply planning to trap her and extract power/knowledge from her and the hex was a bit of bad luck, her getting way more than she bargained for. Still, this feels flimsy.
Agatha sensing this and-a-coming fits better if the hex was an out of the blue thing, but then how the hell did Agatha get into the hex and how does she have a ready made sanctum with all the right protections in place? Sure, magic, but you’d have to guess Wanda would have noticed something being built up right next door.
The other big lingering question for me is what the hell is going on with the kids. Are they even real? Did Wanda conjure them into existence and age them up? Manufacturing life out of whole cloth and advancing age, complete with emotional and psychological development, seems like a power that an Avenger probably shouldn’t have. An Eternal like Ego, sure, but not Wanda. Did Agatha somehow cause the kids to come into existence? There seems to be a suggestion that Agatha manipulated Wanda into conjuring them, but that’s a hell of a big leap. It presumes that Agatha knows Wanda can do it and that she will given the hint, which requires some form of precognition. Considering Agatha really seems a bit nonplussed by the Hex, this doesn’t seem believable.
Further, why the hell is Agatha antagonizing Wanda with the kids? What’s her endgame with this crazy kidnapping and magic leashes? She has to think that Wanda is more powerful than she is, she shouldn’t want to square off head to head with her. My best guess is that she’s baiting Wanda into hitting her with a energy blast and she thinks she’ll be able to absorb and drain her energy if she does, like she did with her mom, but that’s a hell of a gamble. And let’s face it, there’s easier ways. All in all, the entire kids subplot seems like a massive open question right now. I’m sort of expecting to walk away shaking my head at it.
In other news, CATARACT = White Vision. I don’t think there’s much mystery here. Upthread people wondered how SWORD got a hold of the corpse and what their plan is, I think this is all written right on the tin. Vision died 5 years ago in Wakanda. The remaining Avengers scooped up his body and brought it home with them. No one in Wakanda was stressed about the Vibranium. Black Panther was dusted, along with most of their leadership, they are in tatters from the battle and the snap. I’m sure Hulk, Cap and Natasha would treat him like a fallen soldier, not like a hunk of scrap. They’d want to respect his body, and frankly, they’d use his body as a proxy for all the other dusted Avengers.
Hayward is a typical bureaucratic asshat, He’s not working some long con and he’s not an agent of some big bad. He’s just a guy trying to resurrect Vision as a weapon, basically Ultron-lite, and I really don’t think he was overtly trying to goad Wanda into anything. They spent 5 years trying to get him fired up and failed. The hex happened and they suddenly get a Vision-like signature on their sensors so they make a call and start putting him back together. Maybe it started twitching or something when Wanda conjured Vision inside the hex so they figured they finally had the key. I’m not sure if we’re going to get a Vision vs Vision2 battle in ep 9, my bet is that this will be a loose end that hangs out there for a future show/movie. I suppose Wanda might merge her hex Vision with White Vision, but I doubt it. They dedicated too much screen time to this to have it be resolved like that, it would have been narratively cleaner for Wanda to actually have stolen the body and reincarnated it directly. Maybe Ultron, or some version of him, gets reimaged into White Vision, but again that’ll be a story for another time. I agree somewhat that going back to the well and reusing a bid bad is a bit lazy for Disney at this point, but Ultron’s voice actor was in the credits so I don’t rule it out.
I’m like 90% convinced that the soldier woman that met up with Monica was her “aeronautical engineer” friend and this this will be revealed as being the Skrull child, Talos’ daughter. But I suspect it’s nothing more than a Easter egg, not a central plot point. Still, odd that they alluded to it like 3 different times, that seems like overkill.
So that’s a lot…and I’m sure there’s a bunch of other thoughts bouncing around in my head that I’ll come back to later. But I’m late to the party so I’ll shut up now.
NINJA EDIT: Forgot about the Spectrum/Fietro scene at the end of last weeks episode. “Snoopers gonna snoop.” Is this Fietro more than just a puppet for Agatha? Is he somehow holding Spectrum hostage? Was he out of Agatha’s control at this point and was he planning to help Spectrum somehow? So many questions there.
