I didn’t feel that needed to be explicitly stated - I thought it was adequately implied by that point.
Monica’s response could have been better, admittedly.
Yeah, that conversation between Monica and Wanda really undercut things for me. The two of them understanding each others’ loss and grief is a good setup, but the way that scene went was not good. “These townsfolk won’t be grateful you eventually decided to stop torturing them” was not the way to go.
Overall, quite a good series, but around episode 5 I thought it had a chance to be an all-time great show. The X-Quicksilver thing was a mistake, and the ending had some problems, but otherwise I liked it quite a bit.
I’m glad that’s obvious to you. It’s not obvious to me. And it’s pretty poor storytelling to give a series on Disney+, but then force us to watch a different movie (or whatever) to actually get the ending of the story.
That’s true. But then why do you think that Wanda is the victim of the Scarlet Witch?
“The best she could” was keeping the kids in comas - except when she needed to puppet them to get a Halloween episode, at which point she made small children experience a living hell and made their parents watch it. “The best she could” was letting people mostly keep their existing relationships, and aspects of their personalities. She made them as comfortable as she could without interfering with her fantasy life. She “cared” exactly as much as she needed to in order to convince herself she was a good person without it actually costing her anything.
The Vision was dead. She created a fantasy of him, to assuage her grief. Look, grief is complicated, and awful, and I would have been perfectly ok with her just creating a fantasy version of Vision, and having to deal with the existential repercussions of that. That part doesn’t make her a villain. But she sacrificed 4000 innocent people, adults and children to create her fantasy. And what about the kids? They weren’t real. She manufactured them, as part of her fantasy. She sacrificed the children of 4000 other people to create that fantasy.
I’m not going to respond to that, other than to say, I get the point, I really, really, really do.
I’m not quite sure how to respond to that. I acknowledge that Wanda accidentally created Fake Westview. And she wasn’t fully aware of how awful what she had done really was for her victims. But, again, to me, it seems abundantly clear that she’s clearly aware that she’s puppetting real people, and over-writing their minds, to create her fantasy. When Agatha frees the Westview residents to confront her, she’s not shocked that they’re real people, she doesn’t deny that she’s the one that’s been controlling and scripting them, she’s just horrified when she realizes that they have been consciously aware of it the whole time.
If it is, I apologize. But “she saved the soldiers” doesn’t give her pass in my book for all of the horror she inflicted on everyone else.
Killing her is not objectively worse. I personally would rather have a quick, clean death, than be puppetted that way.
As to “no human prison can hold her” - how do we know? S.H.I.E.L.D. held Loki, a literal god, until he was broken out from the outside. The U.S. government held several Avengers, until they were broken out from the outside. But beyond that, Wanda didn’t reluctantly over-write Agatha because there were no other alternatives. She taunted her, and did it with a smirk.
So, instead of massacring innocent people (we’ve already established that she’s too powerful for conventional law enforcement to deal with), she escaped. She has no reason to stay and fight. The fact that she chose to escape rather than massacre FBI agents and then escape doesn’t seem particularly heroic to me.
I think.
Ok, I’ll accept that he was arrested at the end for illegally reactivating Vision. That does make some sense. But no one knew about that until part way through this episode.
This has been Marvel’s business model since at least the 1980s.
Were there some bombshells we were supposed to take away from the post-credits scenes?
…but we got an ending to the story. It was a self-contained story from beginning to end.
You don’t think Wanda is once again a fugitive who will be hunted down for what she did? You don’t think that there will be wall-to-wall coverage on TV, that the #isurvivedwestview won’t become a trending topic on twitter?
We didn’t explicitly need to see the consequences for the story to be complete. The ramifications of what happened here though will be explored in other media, exactly as they have done it in all other aspects of the MCU.
Because Wanda doesn’t even know what the Scarlet Witch is. She doesn’t have agency over whatever the Witch is yet. It may as well be a completely different person.
Welcome to yet another lesson in grief. This lesson is called “enabling.”
Fake Quicksilver is an enabler. Wanda’s behaviour escalates because the enabler has given her an excuse. Again you are seeing the literal but missing the metaphor.
Who are you to say Vision was a fantasy? Did he not have agency? Did he not walk, and speak, and interact, and joke, and sleep, and dance, and do funny magic tricks, and go to work in the morning?
Was the original Vision just a fantasy just because he was essentially a robot? What made the original Vision real, but this version of Vision a fantasy?
And knowing that the WandaVision Vision had agency, could walk and breath and laugh and live, who are you to say that he should die?
But they were real. She didn’t sacrifice anyone. The children of those other 4000 people are still alive. It doesn’t help your case here to descend into hyperbole.
And this wasn’t fantasy. Part of the meta-commentary here from the writers is how common gas-lighting women is in our society, and how easily we fall for the gas-lighters narrative.
Take for example Hayward’s claim that Wanda was emotional and she stole Vision’s body. We just accepted that narrative: it just made sense. So when Wanda walked out of SWORD I did a double take. It suddenly didn’t make any sense. Why would Hayward lie?
I don’t think this was a fantasy. It was reality. The WandaVision Vision had agency. He was real, he existed, then he died.
What I’ve bolded is I think our major point of difference. I don’t see it as a fantasy world. I don’t see Vision or the twins as fantasy creations. One thing was made explicitly clear: if the Hex came down then Vision and the twins would die. The continuation of the world was needed in order for them to remain living. If it were somebody else’s lives at stake then I would imagine Wanda would have maintained the Hex as well in order to keep them alive. She didn’t know how it all worked. She knows she created it, but that was about the limit of her knowledge.
Think about it this way. You wake up in a world that doesn’t work the way its supposed too. You know that all the children have been put to sleep, that all the adults are acting like NPC’s in a computer programme, and you have the ability to make it all stop.
But if you did that then three strangers would die. No if’s or buts. If you set everybody else free the three people die.
Do you maintain the status quo and hope that someone can come and help you? (Like Monica almost did until Heyward literally blew that attempt up) Or do you just let those three people die? That was the position Wanda was in.
I’d rather not be dead thanks.
Ultimately WandaVision is a comic book series, and Agatha got a “comic book” end. I’m not personally happy with it, but its obviously a set up for “Agatha becomes mentor” or something similar. So I’ll wait to see where it ends up.
I wasn’t defining this moment as heroic. You just finished saying you were “even more in favor of a drone strike to the head than (you) was before.” I was putting that moment in context.
Yup. I thought this was far better than anything else MCU I’ve seen. And the red herrings were required.
But from its weird sitcom start to around then, maybe a bit past, this was on track to be one of the greats. Endgame tried to deal with grief and the limits of even the most powerful when faced with it, but the format was limiting in ways the longer format weekly drops were not. But then a return to formulaic battle sequences instead of delivering on the complex psychological character arc … ending up good when it could have been more.
Always better to show it than say it. I did not adequately see it shown though.
Banquet_Bear, it’s clear that you and I disagree about a lot of aspects of WandaVision, and especially about a lot of aspects of this last episode. I think we may even disagree about what it is that we disagree about. I think we’re starting to go in circles, but there might be something productive in continuing the conversation. But this:
This is the second post in a row where you’ve decided to give me a “lesson in grief.” I’m out.
Hell, even one of the Westview townspeople begged Wanda to kill her if she wasn’t going to let them go. That right there shows the horribleness of what she was doing to them and that death would be preferable.
I hardly think it’s heroic to save people from torture you yourself inflicted. That conversation between Wanda and Monica was pretty messed up. Of course the townspeople wouldn’t thank her. They were her victims she finally decided to let free.
I’m not sure about “bombshells”, but in the mid-credit scene (spoilered because of references to plot points in recent movies),
the FBI agent is a Skrull, who refers to an old friend of Monica’s mother, who wants to see her, pointing up. We know from Captain Marvel that there’s a cloaked Skrull ship orbiting Earth, and we know from a post-credit scene in Spider-Man: Far From Home that Nick Fury now has some sort of post-SHIELD operation based on that ship. The implication seemed to be that Monica is being invited to become part of that operation, which is pretty close to the set-up of The Ultimates comic book, which features “cosmic” heroes like Captain Marvel and Spectrum (Monica’s comic book alter-ego).
The post-post-credits scene establishes that Wanda is alone in a remote cabin with her thoughts (not unlike Thanos…), except that the Scarlet Witch is also there, studying the Darkhold, when she hears the cries of Wanda’s children from…somewhere. I think that is supposed to be confusing. Are Wanda and the Scarlet Witch actually two different entities? Does she now have a split personality, which her reality-altering powers allow her to physically manifest in two separate bodies? Is the pensive Wanda we see outside an illusion in case she’s being remotely monitored, while the Scarlet Witch is the real one, being further corrupted by the Darkhold? Is the voice she hears real, because her children somehow actually still exist, somewhere, and need her help? Or is it a delusion, and is she just going to start the whole mess all over again?
Well, that was pretty whelming.
Yup. The series started verrrry slow, picked up and then was excellent for a while, and then kinda fizzled out.
It’s her astral form studying the Darkhold as her physical body goes about the day. Dr. Strange does the same thing. Not split personality or anything else. Think of it as singing along to the radio as you drive.
As to the voices of her children…shrug. We’ll find out later.
Yeah, I didn’t understand that. Why does Wanda need to “project herself astrally while her body goes about the day” doing jack shit in the middle of nowhere?
Why would Stephen Strange’s astral form be studying while he sleeps in the middle of nowhere?
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'Cuz there’s only so many hours in the day, and they want to learn as quickly as possible.
ETA: not sure what’s up with the link; anyway, it’s just an image of Strange’s astral form etc.
I think Haywards biggest crime was ‘kidnapping Woo’…and even then theres all sorts of circumstances. Trying to shoot kids who arnt real isnt a crime, but at the end of the day he has to be removed for optics sake and jesus fucking SHIELD just collapsed a few years ago and we’re dealing with corruption at the top again?
But i don’t see Hayward serving any time. Certainly not any Sokovia Accords stuff. Dude doesn’t have a secret ID, and IS the government,
Spoiler alert: It was all a dream. Or magic, which is pretty much the same.
Best casting: Kathryn Hahn as Agatha
Worst casting: Kat Dennings as Darcy
She’s been playing the character since 2011, you know.
You’d think they woulda figured it out by now.
…the entire story of WandaVision is centered on an exploration of grief. Its there in the subtext: its there in the text. The episodic structure walks us through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Removing that context changes our perceptions of Wanda. I don’t think that’s fair and that certainly wasn’t either what the writers intended or what many (including me) took out of the show. You accused her of sacrificing children, of mind-ra%ing people, but that really didn’t happen. As soon as the extent of what she was doing was made clear to Wanda she broke the barrier to try and let everyone go. She didn’t know they were sharing her grief. She didn’t know how much pain they were going through. All of this was shown on screen.
Wanda wasn’t right to escalate after her conversation with Fake Quicksilver. But Fake Quicksilver was an enabler, and enablers enable. That was the point of the scene.
Wanda lost everything saving the world. She probably lost more than any other Avenger. She was gaslit by Hayward who also tried to murder her. And if he hadn’t tried to murder her this probably all would have been over and done with then. The meta-subtext in all of this is the different ways society treats men and women. How easily discarded they are. How they can try to do everything right but that still isn’t good enough. Wanda is a flawed hero: but she is still a hero. Once she found out the extent of what she was doing she did the right thing. She said goodbye to her children, she said goodbye to Vision for a third time, then she let him go. Final stage of grief.
My apologies for how “lessons in grief” may have come across.