…well episode four was simply brilliant.
Yup!
It does leave one question hanging though -
Does she ever get her coffee? 
So, a lot of speculations confirmed.
A few thoughts, in no particular order.
I didn’t like the first two episodes. I think they were probably necessary for this episode to hit the way it did, which I really liked. The thing is, the first two episodes, in and of themselves, just weren’t engaging. I’m not sure how that conundrum could have been resolved.
It might have been a hallucination - Wanda’s perspective is at this point pretty much the definition of an unreliable narrator - but it sure looks like Wanda is re-animating Vision’s actual corpse.
Geraldine/Monica sure seemed to be speaking with Narrative Authority when she said “It’s Wanda. It’s all Wanda.” HYDRA and Strucker may still figure in somehow, like maybe a HYDRA remnant is manipulating Wanda, but it sure seems like this is something Wanda is doing, not something that’s being done to Wanda.
I think this is yet another example of how Winter Soldier blowing up S.H.I.E.L.D. was the single biggest meta-plot mistake in the MCU (yes, even worse than the Snap). S.W.O.R.D. in this episode is S.H.I.E.L.D. in all but name (side note - why on Earth did they change Sentient Worlds as it is in the comics to Sentient Weapons?). It’s clear that having S.H.I.E.L.D. works for a lot of stories in the MCU, both dramatically and realistically. And just how many acronymic super-threat agencies does the U.S. government have, anyway? And why did S.W.O.R.D. never show up before? Blowing up S.H.I.E.L.D. and then trying to fill that hole I think has created even more plotting problems in the MCU than even the Snap.
I’ve liked all the episodes so far but this are just way too short. At least each Mandalorian episode was a self contained story, this feels like a movie we are getting in small chunks.
Well that was amazing. I had chills for the entire episode. Though it is about 11 degrees here in Boston.
BTW, in case anyone didn’t get the reference, Monica Rambeau was last seen as the 12 year old daughter of Carol Danver’s (aka Captain Marvel) best friend. Which explains why she was the first director of SWORD. But she was once on a first name basis with the most powerful remaining MCU hero, which may come into play in the future.
I was frustrated by this episode. For all the people who were waiting for a proper MCU story and were hampered by the sitcom tropes getting in the way, this was probably just what they wanted. But for me, who has been delighted by the previous episodes, it was just a confirmation of much of the speculation we’ve had so far, but no real progress. It gave us a list of answers, but no story.
Now having said that, I enjoyed the shenanigans and that there was a sense of where it was headed, but it felt too short, and only left me hanging. Not tantalised, just frustrated.
FBI Agent Jimmy Woo was previously seen guarding Scott Lang aka Ant-Man during his house arrest; he has since learned to do card tricks. And Darcy Lewis was Jane Foster’s graduate assistant when the latter became involved with Thor; she has since obtained her doctorate in astrophysics.
And had a scene with Danvers that had made me predict that adult Monica would play a role in End Game, possibly on a plane or rocket meeting her return. A prediction that I was sad to see was wrong. But glad that the reason she was not there was that she had been snapped.
It pushed quite a few of the speculations to the back of the board. Agnes was shown on their board as an identified person with NJ address. That doesn’t make it impossible for her to actually be Harkness and a driver of the action to get Wanda to this point, but it makes that guess less likely. Of course that could be what they want us to think! And they did take pains to have Woo wonder what was the deal with the hexagons out loud.
Funny that none of them seem to attach much significance to the commercials.
I really like the Darcy Lewis character! But really get the woman her damn coffee!
I’ve been enjoying the sitcom stuff, but it was great to have some “normal” MCU stuff again. The opening scene was great. I think it landed better because they took the time to set up a pattern in the first three episodes before breaking it with this one.
So I guess my main question now is what exactly is going on with Vision. Just about everyone else in town was identified as a real person, right? Vision is dead as far as we know, but he’s appearing in the sitcom world, and seems to be having some amount of independent thought. So who is he?
Vision at the end had a very strained, uncomfortable look on his face. A very grin and bear it expression. So is he one of the real people dolled up to be Vision in appearance?
Wanda appears to be controlling everything. That probably includes Vision. My guess is that she is controlling his dead body like a puppet. She’s also getting him with confused with her dead brother, which is why Vision has super-speed like Pietro when he never manifested that ability in the movies.
I took that as intuitively obvious since it was the same actors.
Though amusingly, Monica has the same hairdo from when she was 12.
Some may have never watched the previous movies or may have simply forgotten, especially Darcy since it’s been a while since we last saw her.
This time, though, we saw some of “glitches” from the other side - including the one of what looked like a dead Vision.
It’s interesting how entering into the Westview bubble (“Home is what you make it!”) changes people/things into the sitcom/tv appropriate version of their trappings, but sending them back out doesn’t. Along those lines, the logo on Monica’s shirt turned into a starburst-y broach in ep 2, but didn’t become the sword logo until ep 3 (once Wanda started noticing things about her? maybe?)
Well we saw his dead body but I think it is still more than “like a puppet”.
I also don’t think of it as her getting them confused so much as that the degree of unresolved grief is large for both of them and is being processed (or avoided) for both.
This is what’s confusing me. Everyone else appears to be real people who are either being mind-controlled or are acting because they’re scared of Wanda. That would explain why Agnes and Herb had that “real” conversation with Vision at the end of episode 3 - a bit of their real personality is coming through. But if Vision is simply a dead robot being animated by Wanda, how can he be having similar independent thoughts, like the “grin and bear it” look he had at the end of this episode? Or the suspicions that Wanda rewound out of existence?
Visions corpse was significantly creepier than i remembered it, and the possibility that she’s animating it like a puppet just ads a terrifying aspect to this whole thing.
While they had a file on the board for Agnes, they did not have her identified as a real person (everyone else had their real drivers license attached to their file). And they didn’t have anything for Dottie. My money’s still on both of them being interlopers.
As you said, Vision is a robot. Maybe Wanda is powering his robot mind which is still capable of independent thought, even if it cannot manipulate its robot body. As I recall, his mind was based on J.A.R.V.I.S., which was Tony Stark’s original AI. The body, on the other hand, was designed by Ultron. Possibly Wanda’s power affects mind and body differently.
Thanks, I had meant to go back and check whether any of the townspeople were unidentified. Agnes for sure seems like an important character, and maybe Dottie too. And we never actually found out who Woo’s missing person was, right?
Something like this might work. My original idea was that Wanda was trying to bring back Vision, so this type of thing could make sense.