Well, this is a bit embarrassing. I’ve portrayed myself as a comics geek with knowledge of the source material several times in this thread, including in that very response, and somehow that didn’t occur to me. Yes, I think you’re clearly right.
I thought she was one of the highlights of the show, and pretty nearly the only good thing in the first Thor movie. Obviously, tastes differ.
Certainly. And she was far from the worst thing in this adventure. As casting goes, there isn’t much to complain about. I did want to point out how well Hahn matched her character. Dennings doesn’t match my tastes but she’s really not that bad either.
This is how I feel about it. There was some A+ writing involved, and it showed up in patches all up through the last episode. But it got blown up by (IMO) by a few bad choices with plot and casting that undermined the rest of it.
So, a C, but only because it’s a seriously injured A series.
I think the most extraordinary thing about this show is that I believe it’s the first time the MCU has taken one of the good guys from the comics (Agatha Harkness) and turned them into a unequivocal villain. Alas, when they get around to rebooting the Fantastic Four, Alicia Masters will be the only babysitter available when the Richards’ abandon their children to go fight Skrulls (who are now apparently good guys - 13 year old me is very upset.)
I wouldn’t regard original Harkness as an unequivocal good guy. She’s not a villain, but she’s willing to follow her own interests and sometimes acts as a wild card. That said, yeah, this isn’t the comics Agatha at all.
On the other hand, the Cap Marvel movie took an unequivocal set of villains, the Skrulls, and flipped the script on them super hard.
But then again, we’ve got a Secret Invasion series coming up, so the script is flipping again.
Bottom line, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Agatha.
My understanding is that in the upcoming Secret Invasion series,
a militant faction of Skrulls goes rogue, and tries to take over the Earth to make a new Skrull homeworld. Talos, his daughter, and many other Skrulls remain good guys, and help Nick Fury to fight the rogue Skrulls. But, we’ll see.
I agree with a lot of folks here. The highlight of the show was Wanda’s story arc about grief, and how in her grief she caused horrible injury to those around her, and how now she’s compounded her grief with guilt. This stuff was phenomenally good.
But Agatha, and SWORD, were fair-to-middling bog-standard comic book stuff, and the requisite laser-show battle in the finale served no purpose except to check boxes. Agatha especially felt like a waste: her motives were dull. SWORD was okay as a way to move the plot forward, but they distracted from the show’s central themes of grief, loss, and moral accountability.
And the ending, with Wanda just saying buh-bye people she tortured, left a lot to be desired. Monica could have said something like, “There’s no way we can hold you accountable for your crime, Wanda, and there’s no way you can make this right, but you’ve got a lifetime to try.” She could have brought home, to Wanda and to the viewer, the enormity of the misdeed. Instead, she was all, “It’s okay, babe.”
So much good in the show. I wish it hadn’t been tempered by the missteps.
alot of lively discussion -
For me - I thought this series ended on a high note - last episode answered alot of questions, set up several new story lines and was a good story for Wanda/Scarlet Witch.
I’ll let you all continue to argue over it - but while I don’t see re-watching it anytime soon, I did enjoy watching it and the finale was quite the spectacle.
I enjoyed the finale, and the series in general. I will say that when they revisited the point in the “previously on” that a witch cannot work magic within another witch’s runes, I knew exactly how Wanda was going to defeat Agatha.
Plenty of nits to pick, some set up that didn’t pay off and the first Marvel villain – to my knowledge – to be undone by a freshman philosophy discussion, but I enjoyed spending time with these characters and exploring this premise.
The more I think about it, the more I’m coming to regard using X-Pietro as an excellent piece of misdirection on the part of Marvel. In-universe, Agatha cast some rando to play the part of Pietro. Now if Marvel had really cast some rando to play Fietro then we the audience would pretty much instantly have seen right through it. Putting in X-Pietro garnered shock, confusion and then acceptance from the audience that he really was Pietro, much like Wanda was initially confused then accepted that he was Pietro. And so Marvel trolled all the socials while still making Fietro fit into the storyline.
Probably too obvious to mention, but White Vision now has all of Westview Vision’s memories and perhaps also his emotions and personality.
If I’m understanding correctly, “Westview Vision” unlocked the memories that were stored in the “White Vision’s” body but Haywood had blocked access to. So he’ll have the memories Vision had prior to his death, but no memories from Westview.
I was just responding the same. I don’t see WV having WVV’s recent memories.
Naw, that’s how Westview Vision went so gently into that good night. He lives on in White Vision.
I can’t imagine how anyone can justify Wanda’s actions, much less think of her as a hero.
If he did he would have stayed. He had his old memories unlocked, which is not quite the same.
When WV Vision touches White Vision’s mindstone it briefly turns yellow. This could be interpreted
as WV Vision as leaving a copy of himself in White Vision. Maybe?
Yeah, that was confusing. Even if Vision only had memories up to Westview or his death in Infinity War, he and Wanda were an item before that point. I actually assumed it was White Vision with Restored Memories that flew off to be with Wanda at the end. I thought the big surprise would be that Vision would still remain once the hex went down and then the two would go off and figure out something to restore their kids or whatever. Especially after the whole “Ship of Theseus”. I mean White Vision with Restored Memories IS the Real Vision, isn’t he?
I thought the whole point of that was that they were both the real Vision and that neither of them were.