WandaVision on Disney +. Open spoilers

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1331

Time differences mean that this thread has moved on a lot overnight. I won’t try to rewind so picking up some of the ideas:

I think that - despite this being a comic book story - the idea of the “villain” doesn’t really fit and nor really does the idea of “hero”. As @Banquet_Bear says, this is a story about a woman with a history of trauma confronting heart-wrenching grief. Part - the biggest part - of that confrontation is about coming to terms with her loss and letting go. But I think part of it is also moving past the solipsism that grief brings. It’s impossible, at the beginning, for Wanda to think of anyone but herself and her pain. However, when she has been through the process and reached acceptance, that acceptance in part means she can start looking beyond her pain and start taking an ordinary empathic interest in other people. Particularly, one might think, people she has hurt in her grief. She doesn’t do really do that. She had the option to stick around either try to make amends or at least to face the people she hurt but she leaves smartly so she can spend more time on herself.

Reading over the transcript was really interesting. In particular, I thought it was quite telling that Wanda’s apology was directed at Monica; she didn’t address the villagers either as a group or individually. Even for Monica the villagers are just “they”. “They” are fellow human beings standing right there, who can hear every word and might be considred to have a voice in this conversation. But Monica dismisses them as a mere amorphous blob. Given that the MCU has at least been nodding to “what about the little people who get hurt” since Age of Ultron, this seems pretty glib.

Interesting too to see that some big scenes were cut. I said earlier that I thought they mis-managed their time and it’s good to see that there was at least an intention of doing more with Monica and Darcy et al than we saw. But I really do wonder about how those time limits were set. We had 9 episodes of varying length. Could we really not have had 10? Or made episodes 4-8 5 minutes longer and bought ourselves another 25 minutes of screen time? I don’t know what the relationship between Disney+ and Marvel is but you’d have thought that their interests sufficiently overlapped that there could have been enough time allowed to tell the story properly.

Anyhow: I really liked WandaVision. It told a moving story about a profound human experience really well, while doing some very interesting experimentation with the form of TV drama. It didn’t quite stick the landing and left what I felt were some big issues unexplored at the end due to lack of time (and, let’s not forget, Covid restrctions) but it remains an excellent show.

1332

I can only report how emotively it hit me.

We both heard the same words. I hear the first concern as “how they see me” and “You don’t … hate me”. The follow up of “I’m sorry. For all the pain I caused.” I heard almost like she was trying to convince herself of that. As a footnote.

Yes her bigger business is that she is “at God Tier mode now” … I don’t understand how on one hand you declare of Stark “he never tried to make it to people like Wanda, and to a degree that’s what really matters.” but for Wanda you endorse "Sometimes you can’t make amends, you can’t take it back. All you can do is withdraw & fix you. "

And sorry but it took massive effort at self-denial to not accept what the Hex was doing much earlier on. Vision told her. She only admitted it when there was no possibility of denying it any further.

I do not see her as a villain. But neither do I see her heroic. Her saving lives does not undo her willingness to have others tortured if it assuaged her own pain.

Long term narrative they have not had Wanda move the needle much with her grief. End of day her growth is that she is less feeling guilty about having caused harms than she was in her past traumas, feeling more separated from humanity (physically a representation of her head space), and now having the hope expressed, by WV Vision, that maybe you’ll see me again, along with children whose loss is driving her current actions.

That’s my big disappointment. Her character growth in the show ended up being her finding out about her power. The story should have moved her somewhere psychologically. Okay it moved her a bit. Now she still has grief unresolved, compounded, but she now sees herself as God Tier mode, separate than humanity, with dark and dangerous chaos power that she has to understand, not to do better for humanity, not to make up for damage she’s done, but to bring back her children.

I experienced her arc moving her to less heroic and more to the villian side. A bit.

My experience of much of the show was very similar to yours I think - it was more of an exploration of her past traumas, her unresolved and complicated grief, and her trying to deal with it in very dysfunctional ways, enabled by power that she does not understand or even fully realize. I just did not experience the last ep as you did. It was, to my experience of it, more standard MCU battle and less an exploration of the complexities of what is going on inside this character’s head. Compared to what came before it, emotionally, for me, it sputtered across a finish line, with a bit of handwaving, thrown cars, and shiny lights, but psychologically about the same broken she was, now with God power.

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After all of the overanalyzing I’ve done, I realize something important … I don’t like Wanda Maximoff anymore. It’s not about mindraping the townfolk with her grief at first. But as the story developed it was clear she knew what was going on … at least that she was in control and she did nothing to stop it. She developed from a grieving girlfriend/wife into someone selfish only caring that her needs were met. The time when Vision said she couldn’t control him like she did the town and she replied, “Can’t I?” … That’s when things changed.

I never criticize people for how they express grief but by the same token grief does not give you carte blanche to hurt people. And if I had any sympathy for her, it was gone when she intentionally (metaphoric) lobotomized Agatha into Agnes. Yes Agatha was a Big Bad but Wanda intentionally chose the worst punishment and did so knowingly and with the intention of keeping her prisoner for if and when she needed Agatha’s knowledge. And there is no redemption at the end. She acknowleges what she has done but Rambeau’s echos her thought that , “Hey I was depressed so it was OK. I’m justified because I was grieving.” She does nothing to make amends to he neighbors; just returns things to how they were before and leaves to avoid any consequences. If Marvel’s goal was to arc the Scarlet Witch from someone you sympathize with to someone you don’t like, they did a great job.

1334

That was great! 100% accurate in everything he says!

1335

So, I want to go back to this. So far, every instance we’ve seen of someone entering the Astral Plane has required the host’s body to go unconscious. So someone walking around doing whatever while their Astral Form is also doing something is actually a big leap in power.

1336

One. What Wanda did was bad, but it was not Kilgrave-esque mindraping. It was a side effect that did not bother her too much, that she was trying hard to ignore and to pretend did not exist, to rationalize, but the control, the power, was not the end itself like it was for him. (Mind you still little difference to the victims.)

I think the goal was not quite to make her someone you don’t like, but to leave her a still damaged extremely imperfect person who is at great risk of being corrupted by the dark power she is now pursuing control over. Vision, at least as idealized in her memory, was her moral compass and pulled her back from the abyss when she was stuck in grief over Pietro. Without him the vast power of Chaos magic may pull her further to thinking of herself as a God above and separate from mere mortals, whose pain matters much more.

The best spin I can put on the last ep is that that tension, her teetering on the edge of an abyss, will be a theme moving forward and that this was just a way to come to a reasonable self-contained stopping point.

1337

I think some people are confused because Wanda is the protagonist of this series, but protagonists don’t have to be heros, or good guys.

Someone coming to Wandavision without knowledge of her backstory probably will be somewhat confused, although I think the use of flashbacks helped.

Wanda grew up in a poor, war-torn nation. She and her brother survived days in the ruins of their apartment building next to the body of their parents and a bomb they were waiting to explode. At that point she’s already set up for PSTD. In fact, she’s so angry/traumatized she volunteers to be a guinea pig in a weird government experiment that gives her weird powers no one really understands. Then her country gets invaded again both by a AI killbot and these foreigners fighting said killbot. Massive damage ensues. Her brother - her only remaining family - is killed leaving her entirely alone in the world. Then she winds up trying to work with these foreign interlopers and on one trip, in attempting to avoid one type of death and destruction, winds up killing a bunch of people. Which leads to the Sokovia Accords.

Meanwhile, the ONLY entity that seems to value Wanda for being Wanda, who isn’t creeped out by her weird powers no one understands, isn’t even a human being. But they fall in love and start thinking of a life together.

THEN we get Thanos and that whole business, with Wanda having to kill the one thing left that she loves and that loves her to save half the universe. Holy crap, that’s a shit-sandwich no one should ever have to eat. THEN it’s all for nought because Thanos brings him back and kills him again, in front of her. At that point, her being dusted in the Snap is perhaps a mercy.

When Westview happened it wasn’t five years later for her, as it was for those who had survived the Snap, it a at most a week or two later. At most. At least initially I think we’re dealing with someone at the end of a Trauma Conga Line whose cheese just slid off the cracker. She’s suffering from PTSD and grief at the very least.

By the end… well, yes, she did sacrifice her loved one(s) twice to save others, a lot of others. She’s not full-out evil. But she’s not good, either, in a way that would make her heroic. Her recognition that nothing is going to make the townspeople feel better about her probably comes from a lifetime of being subjected to horrible things down by other, more powerful people to whom she was, at best, just part of the backdrop. She gets that. There is nothing Wanda can do to make things better with them, and the best she can offer is to do no more harm and leave. That’s actually realistic.

Meanwhile - consider that this is not a person life has ever been fair to. No one has ever rescued her… except for vision, and he’s died three times in front of her, and twice she was the one to end him. What, exactly, motivates her to be nice to other people? At best she is regarded as a dangerous freak. The other “enhanced” people don’t like or trust her, either, because she fought them when they invaded her home, because no one understands her power, because her actions resulted in the Sokovia Accords that none of them liked and which prompted a “Civil War” amongst them. Why should she subject herself to the laws of society when society left her little corner of the world to be bombed and invaded?

No, it doesn’t excuse what she did, or make it OK… but sometimes an explanation helps both understand how we got here, and maybe how to get out of the mess. What Wanda really needs is some help for PTSD, depression, and grief. Sure, some consequences and compensation if possible are also in line, but if you don’t do something about her coping with her abuse and mistreatment Wanda will not get better. It’s actually in everyone’s interest for Wanda to get better, because Wanda is not god-tier in power. Aside from it just being the decent and humane thing to do.

As to where she goes from here… who knows? She could go either way, to hero or villain.

1338

Please don’t take this personally, but I’m no longer participating in this thread. Please don’t respond to me or @ me from this thread, and please be aware that I will not respond to such.

Thank you.

1339

Sure, but we’ve established that Wanda is very powerful - just not very knowledgeable. Presumably at some point between leaving Westview and arriving in the cabin in the mountains she picked up the knowledge necessary to do this, maybe from the Darkhold. Isn’t that a comforting thought? :smiley:
Or she figured out how to do it on her own. About as likely, I’d say.

On another matter, it’s occurred to me that the events of Sokovia have had a very long tail in the MCU, and its characters and story. There’s Wanda’s origins, of course, part of what led to WandaVision - but there’s also Zemo, leading both to Civil War and to (apparently) Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

1340

Maybe it’s just a version of the mind control hex she was using in Westview, applied to her own, empty body - she’s programmed in an autopilot to do mundane chores while she studies in astral form?

1341

Gosh, I wish I could program my body to do mundane chores while my conscious mine was doing something more interesting… that would be a benign use of that power if that’s what it is.

1342

H’m. Maybe. I have the feeling that applying a hex to oneself can be a Bad Idea, but that’s just from general genre conventions, and may not apply. Feedback loops and such.
It could be just that she’s, as it were, fixing her coffee while thinking of something else, amped up a bit. A lot of what we do is more or less on autopilot, really.

1343

It certainly looks to me like corporeal Wanda is very much conscious while astral Wanda is doing her studying. I mean, if you are going to make your own body a meat-puppet, wouldn’t you have it do something useful?

1344

Could be, but remember, we’re drawing conclusions from a very brief snippet of action. At the point we saw, Wanda was studying, while her body was going through her morning routine. Maybe she can do more, maybe not - we just don’t know.

Which leads to another thought - WandaVision was a total of what, less than five hours? They packed a lot of story into that, a lot of concepts - and they also left some out. Some will be, I’ve no doubt, addressed in the future. Consequences, for one - the MCU hasn’t been shy about picking up on consequences of actions in later projects. The whole of Civil War, for example…

Heck, for all we know, the upcoming She-Hulk story will be Jennifer Walters defending Wanda in a civil/criminal trial* for her actions in WandaVision (and other places). It’s all but certain that the next Dr. Strange movie will involve Wanda, and it’s a safe bet that her power, her actions, and the consequences thereof will be addressed.

*Just a side note, but I really hope that the She-Hulk series will largely be a courtroom drama, emphasizing Jennifer Walters’/She-Hulk’s lawyerly skills. The cases will be of the fantastical sort, of course, but I think that would be really cool.

1345

Yeah, if I’m right (and my track record here is awful) then she’s kind of asking for that autopilot to accidentally turn into a full fledged person.

(Oh, man - imagine if in the finale, Agatha only wakes up half the towns people. The other half, still in their sitcom personas, realize what’s going on, and they start begging not to be erased - because it turns out they’re not just masks that the puppets were wearing, they’ve become actual people, too!)

1346

More than once, when I worked the 6 am shift at a bakery, I was terribly late, for just that reason: I decided to send one copy of myself to work while the other me turned over and slept a little longer. Strangely, when my boss called wondering where the hell I was, my brilliant plan hadn’t worked, and I just got in trouble.

Curse you, copy of me that never showed up at work!

1347

Sidebar: for an SF tale about having duplicates handle mundane tasks for you, consider Kiln People by David Brin. It’s a detective story at heart, with respect on how the tech changed the world (most people have dupes working multiple menial jobs - I’m sure the tax situation must be fun.

Aside from that, only slightly disappointed we didn’t see even a slight Ultron reboot but the Armor-Piercing Question re: Ship of Theseus was a suitable replacement Moment of Awesome.

I do agree Wanda should have made some statement to the townsfolk, a simple “I’m sorry for what I put you through.” would have helped. Staying to improve the town somehow would have been better but at that point, she couldn’t have trusted herself any more than the local population could have to not end up making things worse somehow.
(which learning from the Darkhold is going to do anyway, but that’s a story for another time)

1348

That’s me, when I’m doing housework while listening to an audiobook. I even sometimes think “This is great. Half of me is in my laundry room, half of me is in 221b Baker Street…”

…

And I wanted to agree with those (Saint Cad?) who are saying “I don’t like Wanda anymore.” And I’d agree, but that’s okay… I like my characters good and evil, sympathetic and not, all at once. I look forward to her future character work.

Elizabeth Olson did a great job. I’ll be very frustrated if we don’t get to watch her playing off Paul Bettany (and Benzadrine Cumberbund!) some more.

1349

Regarding the ending, I just had the thought she maybe could’ve just… not brought down the hex? They have the ability to end the mind control (Vision does at least, and probably Wanda too), so all the people could be free without Wanda having to lose Vision and the kids. That doesn’t work with what the show was going for narratively, but it seems like a possibility otherwise.

1350

They’d still be trapped in Westview, unable to communicate with the outside. (Which makes one wonder about food deliveries, gasoline, mail… some frustrated peeps in the shipping business outside with loads returned to sender … and did Wanda conjure up more food and gas?)

Agatha offered to fix the Hex’s problems before saying she couldn’t; all the spells were a package deal so Wanda would have to cast a new utopian Hex without mind control and she doesn’t know how to do that…YET.

House of M…ouse, anyone?