f13.net

So this dropped today with two episodes. I got caught up in the sitcominess of it pretty fast but there was still some creepy weird stuff going on.

Yeah. That was low key weird.

I really appreciate the weird in this.

I grew up watching reruns of these shows and the actors did a great job with the roles. I'm genuinely intrigued where they go.

This is going to have 9 episodes - I'm trying to decide if I should wait and binge it or watch it every week like I did the Mandolorian. Thoughts?

I considered it but like the Mandalorian I don't think I could avoid spoilers simply due to internet osmosis, and like the Mandalorian i don't want this spoiled.

Someone remind me, are these guys dead in the MCU? I thought they were.

Vision is, Wanda got snapped back in Endgame.

Ta.


I'd watch the first one. It is really just prologue - gives you an idea what you are waiting for. Second felt more like you'd want to be on a binge.

I liked it. I'm wondering what Kids These Days will make of it since you kind of have to have watched The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched to decode the set design and implied situation of the first two episodes.

I'm genuinely puzzled about the deeper shit going on. That voice on the radio sounded familiar but I'm not sure who it is.

I'm trying to relate some of the characters to known Marvel villains/etc. and so far I can't really. We have references to Stark and Strucker and Sokovia and there's the helicopter.

Of characters known to use a kind of computer/virtual world MO, there's Arnim Zola in the comics AND the movies. There's Quasimodo, created I think by the Mad Thinker but at some point he fought the Vision and worked with Ultron. There's Ultron, of course.

I kind of wonder if the recurring neighbor isn't Agatha Harkness, though if so I hope they reimagine her from the comics.

Feels maybe as if someone's captured Wanda and is trying to get her to use her remaining portion of the Infinity Stones' power for something?

Anyway, I'm interested. It's got a feel to it.

Word is it was probably Ant-Man's parole officer, Jimmy Yoo (Randall Park was credited in Episode 2, but never appeared).

--Dave

I don't know nearly enough comic shit to guess, but the guy who climbed out of the manhole would seem to be the thing to focus the rampant speculation on.

So, hm, the manhole beekeeper and the plane both have the logo for SWORD, which in the comics is SHIELD's extraterrestrial protection spinoff force.

Folks are trying to connect that to Jimmy Woo and Ant-Man, but the immediate connection it makes for me is to Captain Marvel, the Skrulls, the Kree, and the Spider-Man: Far From Home revelation that Nick Fury's off-world and has been letting a Skrull masquerade as him.

So suddenly I have a new idea of why Wanda might be in a virtual reality with ominous implications: she's a captive of the Kree's Supreme Intelligence, who lives in a virtual world. That would also explain Monica Rambeau's appearance in the show, maybe. Captain Marvel and the Scarlet Witch both were empowered by the Infinity Gems. With Thanos destroying the physical form of the gems, maybe their power is somehow recollecting in individuals who possess some of that power, etc. (Could also be a route for the Vision to come back to life for real.) Maybe SWORD is trying somehow to infiltrate the virtual reality that the Supreme Intelligence has built in order to warn Wanda of the danger she's in.

I could buy that, but...

--Dave

I think that's solid. SWORD being involved is obvious from the logos. One more thing I picked up - in the first part of ep1, Wanda is cleaning the kitchen with her powers and breaks a plate on Vison's head. He says "my wife and her flying saucers" and she says "my husband and his unbreakable head", or something similar. Knowing Thanos crushed Vision's head to get the stone, if we consider both these statements.... it wouldn't surprise me if alien tech of some sort is all over this series.

I'm just enjoying the ride and trying not to get caught up too much in the speculation.

Not much to add but I’m glad they made it , and surprised it’s so indirect. Felt like Legion but no exposition yet.

Maybe Real Rambeau has been thrown into the virtual world by SWORD to try and get in touch with Wanda.

Definitely I hope SOMEBODY meaningful is all behind it, e.g., this is not just Wanda having a nervous breakdown and no-more-mutants freakoutery. I mean, if nothing else, she's not old enough to know the referents so this can't just be from her personal imagination. (It's an odd thing--there is literally no one in the MCU precisely old enough to know the pop culture of the 60s and 70s (the origin point of Marvel Comics!) except for the odd side character like Dr. Erik Selvig and a few scattered others and most of them aren't from the US anyway.

(https://allears.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/samuel-l-jackson-nick-fury-iron-man-2.gif)

Ah, true dat. Interesting.

I kind of wonder if this will lead to an inverse of the comic plot where she banished all mutants. Like maybe she tries to bring Vision back and somehow creates mutants as well thus bringing the X-men into the MCU. We'll see I guess.

That would be brilliant, perfect setup for new origin movies and hopefully finally doing justice to the X-universe.

Too bad Marvel Studios didn't have the license with Stewart and McKellan, would've enjoyed seeing them chew into those characters with good direction and writing.

I also just want something featuring Magick and Emma Frost in hotpants  :why_so_serious: :oh_i_see: :pedobear: :awesome_for_real:

Maybe that's what she's "pregnant" with: Infinity Stone energy that she'll let loose on the world by saying "lots more mutants". (Which could include her actual kids, though I really hope not too close to their utterly confusing comic-book counterparts.)

I mean, they were basically on "honeymoon" before Infinity War started so she could just be regular pregnant, I guess there'd have to be some infinity stone magic to make that work also though.

It would be amazing if she was pregnant with mutant twins, the first mutants.

Charles and Erik :D

Seems likely whatever is happening Wanda is either creating or sustaining it. Consciously or otherwise.

I might have to rewatch the first coupke now because this one she definitely cane across as faking ignorance.

There's some signs of that in the first two as well. Makes sense if she's trying to hide something from a virtual-world simulator.

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that Wanda is doing it on purpose, and she's rewinding reality or otherwise intervening every time things go off script.
--Dave

"Wait, that's not the way that happened", e.g. the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

There's a lot of spoilers and comic speculation here so I have barely skimmed the thread.

If I have seen all of the MCU movies, but read 0 comics and not watched a lot of Dick Van Dyke or other similar TV shows, will I enjoy watching this?

I'd like to think so, esp if you enjoyed the MCU movies. It plays on all of that.

The sitcom flavor is a fun bit of nostalgia - the only thing you need to know about it is that comedy was a lot cornier back then. But the comedy is not the point here.

My take on where this is going:


Regardless, this show is super cool. I liked Ragnarok because of how much it was different than established MCU, just how I like this too.

I haven't watched it yet but maybe it's a Spock Wrath of Khan type-thing. Wanda's powers come from the Mind Stone so maybe part of Vision's consciousness was absorbed into her when she destroyed it.

Edit: powers, plural

I'm not sure Wanda is fully involved in this. I am getting major Truman Show vibes but far more sinister. And the way Episode 3 ended seems to only make that even more apparent. I'm also fascinated that Vision seems to be truly his own individual whatever that means in this context. He does stuff even if Wanda isn't around which makes me believe he's not part of her imagination or whatever. I think maybe he's some kind of software program or something but I'm not real sure.

Yes.

Thanks, guys.

As long as you know that they are riffing on SOMETHING (even if you aren't particularly familiar with it) then you are probably okay. Otherwise it would be pretty disorienting.

Right. I've seen a handful of episodes of Bewitched and I Love Lucy as a kid on Nick at Night, but not enough to get specific references.

I don't think the references are super specific for the most part, and to the extent there are little easter eggs that reference specific sitcommy things they aren't in any way important to the plot.

You'd be more confused if you weren't following the MCU. By a lot.

Specific knowledge of specific sitcoms definitely not required. A vague visual sense that they're marching through the set history of sitcoms is (maybe?) thematically helpful. Not sure myself where that's going, though. If Wanda IS in control of this in any way, why she's choosing to put herself in the role of sitcom wives (of sitcoms she is in MCU terms too young to have watched, unless Sokovia was one of those countries that could only afford to buy old US programming when it started its national TV service).

Though interestingly the first episode referenced Mary Tyler Moore in the Dick Van Dyke Show, a show known for having the sitcom wife be highly independent and sexually attractive in a modern sensibility (wearing Capri slacks etc.) compared to I Love Lucy, which had Lucille Ball mostly in a subordinated role where she was meant to be ridiculous.

Then Bewitched, a show where the wife very much was in charge and the husband basically came off like a closeted gay man (as one of the two actors playing him actually was).

Then the Brady Bunch/Partridge Family, where the wife was in the former at least a peer to the husband and in the latter was completely in charge of the family and the band as a widow.

So, if Wanda's in charge, she's pushing towards sitcoms where women were powerful and husbands were kind of hapless, passive or dead, which is at least interesting.

I think the 'Wanda is too young to know these shows' thing is a worst a reasonable use of artistic licence. And anyway they aren't explicitly in specific shows, these are just parallels we are drawing as an audience.

Nothing here would be unreasonably specific to just be Wanda (or something else) projecting an 50s, 60s, 70s style world. And even if it weren't, 'Wanda specifically likes old TV shows' fixes it in an instant.

There is plenty in her character that suggests she'd prefer a 'normal' existence with Vision to her actual life, and these kind of TV shows are very explicitly about idealised normal life.

She's from some eastern bloc country, who knows what kind of TV they got over there.

Have they gotten to the actual conspiracy yet or are they still relying on people having nostalgia for "I Love Lucy".

Or maybe she fixed her accent by watching a lot of TVLand/Nic at Nite. "These shows are older than Wanda" is literally the least reasonable objection to make to the show's premise with the most mundane possible answers.


--Dave

Smart ass answer: Watch the show.

Less smart ass answer: Your question is answered in Episode 2.

OK mystery over then.

Well enough produced but surprised by the choice to just lay it all out.

I mean, it was fairly obvious what was going on. Dragging it out would have just made people eye roll. And there may yet be a deeper mystery behind it all though I doubt it.

Dead Vision being controlled like a puppet was creepy as fuck.

It was definitely a Choice. I'm hoping there's a deeper payoff than just "Wanda's gone batshit with grief." It implies Multiverse of Madmess is an unhinged Scarlet Witch trying to actualize a living Vision, even if it comes with extra dimensional eldritch horrors, but that's almost too obvious.

--Dave

There's got to be more going on than "Wanda has gone nuts". There was a brief shot of someone else watching the TV show, after all, so somebody's involved that we haven't seen yet.

I really really hope it's not Mephisto in his standard Marvel Comics form though, because he fucking annoys the shit out of me. Not the least because he presents the same problem Satan and Satan-like characters always present, only more so in a superhero universe, which is where's his opposite number? If he's powerful enough to directly fight with the top-level superheroes and he can change all reality so that Peter Parker was never married and no one knows his identity and all that shit, why isn't he the king of everything? Why isn't the world Hell? If that's because there's a God or something like God to stop him, why does he exist at all? What are the rules here?

But it's also just that Mephisto in MU form is literally the most unimaginative Satan you could come up with: red man in demon costume, 100% unsubtle, shitty bargainer, etc.

Still, I'm guessing somebody made Wanda an offer to live in a world where the Vision is alive, and it's likely to be some kind of significant Marvel U. bad guy in an MCU form to kick off the next phase. I'm still thinking the Supreme Intelligence is possible, but if you want a really wacky idea, why not Doctor Doom in his first MCU appearance? Latveria is certainly near to Sokovia....

(Another possibility is Zemo once again, since he's supposed to be the baddie in the Falcon and Winter Soldier series...)

"Computing units" is still Chekhov's Gun, we don't know what Vision is doing at work. Neither does he.

--Dave

Not sure, I definitely like it as a twist, but has it been mentioned since episode 1?

It is also fairly common sitcom joke.

I think that was just Darcy.

It looked to me like a different TV set at a different location? And it's kind of an odd shot to just throw in there--hands with a notebook, close shot in front of a TV.

Literally the exact same shot appears in this latest episode, without the screen zoom-out. It's Darcy.

--Dave

Ah well. The tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Still thinking there's got to be another player in all this though.

No. The entire point of it was that he was trying to figure out what his job really was and everyone was operating by sitcom logic. Think of how many times in a 50s sitcom the husband goes to work/the office and no one ever mentions what he actually does. That was all the scene was about. Vision trying to figure out what his job was and no one knowing because it doesn't actually exist.

For me, the biggest twist in Episode 4 was that all the other characters are real people. I thought they were projections of Wanda's mind.

I think Zola is a strong contender, and "computing forms" could be Zola being emulated on Vision's substrate. I don't think it's a throwaway sitcom joke "job", Vision was too persistent in the first episode in trying to figure out what they were.


--Dave

Another thought: Shuri got a good portion of the way towards making it possible to remove the Mind Stone while leaving the Vision alive in the last act of Infinity War.

Maybe somebody got a hold of her work and has been using it to try and restore the Vision.

They certainly could choose to have vision alive at the end of this if they wanted.

Thing is in the MCU it is unavoidably obvious that vision's fate is just a decision on whether they want his character in future movies or not.

I don't think we've mentioned it much here but the question on the whiteboard about why all the hexagons seems to require an answer now they've spelt it out.

Well, hexagons would align with turning the SWORD guy into a beekeeper, only I struggle to figure out what that means in Marvel Universe terms.

AIM wears funny beekeeper helmets in Marvel Comics, but we've seen AIM in Iron Man 3 and that wasn't their thing.

There's a hilariously bad villain called Swarm who is an actual Nazi, so it might not be hard to transfer him over to Hydra but this kind of storyline is not his thing.

I suppose it could turn out to be the way they're going to talk about the structure of the Multiverse or something like that.

If they're thinking in the really long term about something like Battleworld and Secret Wars, they could make the zones there hexagonal.

Wanda's powers in the 616 Universe are described as "hexes" but I don't think anybody's described them like that in the MCU.

Another thing they could be doing, since they love pulling up obscure shit from MU history, is recreating the Nexus of All Realities, which in the MU is in the Everglades. It was kind of relegated to being an obscure story point in old Man-Thing, Howard the Duck and other Steve Gerber-written comics including The Defenders back in the day, but Chris Claremont liked playing around with it and the characters like Dakimh and D'Spayre who were connected to it so he brought it into X-Men and then I think Roger Stern brought it into Doctor Strange fairly prominently. Why not make the Nexus a hexagon? And so maybe Wanda is able to pull energies from it to remake the Vision, but it takes her decades of time to do it, hence traversing time and space via sitcoms? I dunno. Would make the whole thing that Mysterio was spinning in the Spider-Man movie rather funny/interesting....

I think we could probably do without seeing Giant-Size Man-Thing, mind you, but the basic idea of a multiversal access point is clearly fun. Maybe this is how they deal with Sony--"our" Spider-Man gets to come and go from a Spider-Verse so that he can be in the MCU and yet have other adventures in a Sony Spiderverse.

I would imagine that a large part of the appeal of doing this version of the character for Bettany was getting to do a lot of scenes out of makeup and not having to always endure the many hours I'm sure it takes applying it. I know Bettany doesn't have the sort of career where he could turn down any MCU work he's offered and it wouldn't be a financial hit to him, but I also have to wonder how enthusiastic he'd be about continuing to play Vision. As it is, I think he probably has less screen time than just about any other Avenger prior to WandaVision and I would guess that's at least partly because there's a lot more practical effects work in bringing the character to life compared to CGI characters like Hulk or Groot.

They also could leave the post-show status quo as "Vision is now a real boy", e.g., actually alive, where he could wear a costume that invokes his classic look but not the full body makeup.

Certainly they could use the opportunity to rework his look any any number of ways. It's after being taken apart and rebuilt in the comics that Vision goes from his red and green look to the all white look he had for a long time.

Not that anyone cares but since Mephisto was brought up I just want to go on the record that while I generally love Byrne I hate some of his retcons, this one especially. (I also think he ruined the Starbrand character because he had beef with Shooter.)

Byrne could definitely be malicious as all fuck when he came on to a new book--he'd go out of his way to rubbish clever retcons and past character development. Occasionally that was a good idea--the death of Iron Fist, for example, was handled incredibly poorly and he did a fair if convoluted job of undoing it.

I actually loved his Fantastic Four and even some of the controversial moves he made--the idea of getting Ben Grimm out of the weirdness of the Alicia relationship and having the Torch start up a relationship with Alicia while Ben was away (possibly forever) was provocative and interesting. Since they're a family, well, that kind of thing happens in families too.

But his need to shit on established work by other writers was probably never worse than in West Coast Avengers, most especially in what he did with the Scarlet Witch and Vision.

Treating episode 4 as episode 1 helps this show a lot.

I think this show will play better binged. The mystery boxes of the first three episodes getting opened after an hour and a half instead of 2 weeks would work better.

--Dave

Just watched episode 5. I'm resisting the urge to spoil it lol. It's really good. I think it's near perfect, except for one bit that I'd like to discuss when everyone's seen it.

I think that bit was perfect. Holy shit.

I wasn't a big fan of 5.

I respected it. It did a really good job of sustaining discomfort, but I needed some kind of payoff. Also not having Wanda's true PoV while spending so long with her is becoming irritating.

Probably an episode that will feel better in a binge.

I'm definitely assuming Wanda can't be fully in control, because that was too much moustache twirling.

Do think I'll like it more in retrospect.

I liked the little almost fourth wall breaking power level talk, even though they ignored that Captain Marvel fought Thanos when he had all the stones and Wanda when he had none.

The whole thing about any of them having a chance at Thanos was silly, and Captain Marvel putting up much of a fight was just the writers trying to justify her existence because they had nothing else for her to do.  She got partially charged by some power by one of the stones.  While Thanos was wielding all off the actual stones.  He should have vaporized her with a flick of the wrist.  But the strength of a characters power when fighting another in the MCU has always been extremely variable based on how convenient it is.

Anyways, just binged this.  I certainly give them credit for taking a pretty wild concept and running with it for a major production.  I've enjoyed it, and am interested in where they go from here.  When Wanda says near the end that 'I don't know how this started' and 'I didn't do that' when the doorbell rings and you know who appears, I think it's obvious somebody else is playing her.  I mean, could still just be that her mind has totally fractured and gone nuts, but I think there is a villain in here somewhere.

Also, I know some others said the same, but to reiterate about age and these sitcoms.  Wanda was born 6 years after me, and I grew up watching all this shit on Nick at Night, so I get the references.  She was born in Eastern Europe, and having lived there for several years and dated several women, I can 100% tell you she was watching these random reruns as a kid in the 90's.

Yeah, her denial seemed completely genuine, and the timing was entirely too convenient like Vision thought. Also, she wouldn't "recast" someone she cared about. Agnes can break character without any interference and keeps dropping little hints.

I expected it, and yet I still did not see that coming.

--Dave

I'm sure we are talking about different things.

My problem with this episode is everything surrounding the director of SWORD.


At least one person on the internet didn't realize that the title of the episode was a spoiler for its tone.

Regarding the director of SWORD, um, come on:


I think more generally, I'm fully convinced now that:



I'm also thinking:

Considering how they keep emphasizing the (potentially) dangerous cosmic waves being interwoven in this, yeah, pretty sure some burst of that will hit Monica.  I actually had no idea she was an existing character (though probably should have guessed that).

The inability to scan her suggests that is accurate and may have already happened.

The vibe I got from the testing scene with Monica was more that they weren't actually doing the tests to have an excuse to keep her out of the way, not that there was actually a problem taking them.

They showed one of the scans/x-rays and it was totally washed out to be just white.

I saw these on a Youtube video so can't claim any kind of credit for them sadly but there may be a very good reason for how he is acting:


I will say, I ended episode 4 pretty damn sure Wanda was behind it all. As of this episode, I now think she only thinks she caused it and the people who believed another villain is behind it are correct. I believed her when she said she couldn't control the whole town all the time doing their little playacting. And she seemed genuinely surprised by the moment at the end.

Edit: And wow did I miss a massive thing about that ending cameo and feel silly for it.

When she did her rewind thing on the agent in the beekeeper suit...where did he go?

--Dave

One theory about the "recast" is that he was changed to become period appropriate like the clothes or sword drone.

Monica Rambeau, just to be really headachey in that comic-book way, originally took the name Captain Marvel after becoming super-powered because the male Captain Marvel was dead and the Carol Danvers Captain Marvel ran through the names Ms. Marvel, Binary and then Warbird before claiming Captain Marvel for herself. By that time Rambeau had renamed herself Photon and then later after that Spectrum.

She's kind of a C-list character--she had a fairly long stint in the Avengers, briefly was the leader of the team under really bad circumstances, and then was pushed off to the side for a while. She had a fun if played-for-laughs run in the brief and brilliant Nextwave series and then showed up in a post-Secret Wars series that was for super-heavy-hitter characters doing cosmic-level things. I think presently she's depowered but that never lasts long in comics--given how closely the comics now follow the MCU, they'll surely power her up again and rejigger her history some probably too. (In the comics, she's the daughter of a New Orleans firefighter, no personal connection to Carol Danvers.)

Anyhoo, yeah, I think it's right to guess that she's already powered up, just doesn't know it yet.

Yeah. At this point, we know:


So:

He was incorporated as a character in the sitcoms. Like Monica.

Also

Thanos wasn't wielding the stones, they were fighting for the gauntlet. That's why she beat him to a standstill until he grabbed one of the stones out of the gauntlet they were fighting over and hit her with it. That's the point they're making. Her being "partially charged" was enough to take on Thanos sans gauntlet. Wanda was also charged by a stone and then was in the vicinity of a second when it released a bunch of energy. She could be off the charts at this point.

Yeah, exactly. We don't really have any explanation for Thanos' pre-Stones power, but it's plainly more than an Asgardian except maybe Odin and Hela--but in that battle, he's not powered by any of the Stones while Wanda and Captain Marvel ARE.

i just watched every episode in one sitting

really impressed that they're using a tv show on a streaming service to trial balloon a complete reset to the structure of the mcu

also it's basically perfect television in a variety I didn't know people could even make anymore? 

I don't know what you guys are remember but Thanos had the gauntlet and all the stones when Captain Marvel fought him.

Yeah, but he clearly didn't have possession of it,  (aka "wielding") if you know what I mean--it clearly takes some degree of concentration and focus to use it. Look at how he manages to get to the Snap in Infinity War after Thor embeds the axe in his chest, he doesn't just think it, he has to really focus on doing it. Further evidence on this? He doesn't even know that Stark has taken the Stones until he looks at the gauntlet after the Snap doesn't work.

His hand has to be closed in order to use the stones. Doctor Strange whispers this to his cloak I believe in IW. In Endgame CM forces his hand open; Thanos then takes one stone out (power?) switches it to his other gauntlet, then punches CM.

Just make sure he has both feet in bounds and makes an Infinity Stone move to establish possession.

 :oh_i_see:

I'm not the one writing this stuff.  :why_so_serious:

Fair enough, I guess you can interpret many ways.  And yeah, I guess in keeping with the power levels, Feige has already changed his mind and said Wanda is the most powerful hero (https://screenrant.com/scarlet-witch-strongest-mcu-hero-kevin-feige/), instead of Captain Marvel.  So your point about the energy could also be true.

It is, unfortunately in my view, consistent with the comics, where Wanda has been put into the "unstable female heroes powerful enough to change the universe and hence need to be sympathetically murdered by everyone else" category. There's an MCU justification for it (Infinity Stones!) but it doesn't end well. Compared to say, Reed Richards who in the comics has at times conspired with his entire multiversal legion of counterparts to change multiversal reality in a way nobody would really agree with (this merits understanding and empathy from his friends) or Doctor Strange who despite several bouts of severe mental instability and willingness to consign friends to damnation is still the go-to guy when folks need someone to figure out a mysterious universal problem.

Nobody ever says "we all gotta kill Strange" but they do say "we all gotta kill Jean Grey and Wanda".

For the record, Feige never said Captain Mary Sue was the most powerful. That was the Russos'.

--Dave

Edit: Obviously women can't be trusted with Absolute Power.

Feige did say that, though that may no longer be true.

https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/kevin-feige-captian-marvel-mcu-powerful-hero/

Yeah, that's what I meant by him making a u turn.

Regardless, I think discussing power levels in absolutes is dumb, especially coming from the studio exec.  I believe they were catching so much flak for not having a major stand alone female Hero that they sort of went all in on hyping up Captain Marvel to get headlines (she's the strongest hero!  She can do anything!  See, we literally made the strongest women ever!  We aren't sexist!).  And once they do that, now they're stuck having to answer that question every time something changes in the MCU.  So now Wanda is actually the strongest, Captain Marvel is just an also run has been.  And then they're going to have to answer that question again the next time some new hero appears.  It's just stupid and they should leave that kind of nerdwank slapfight to very online nerds.

I got the impression this was a silly answer to a silly question, not based upon rigorous data analytics.

I have to agree with one of the commenters to that article. Scarlet Witch is a glass cannon. Extremely powerful but if you manage to blindside her even someone with a pistol could drop her. But if you shoot Captain Marvel with a pistol or hell, a missile, all you'll do is piss her off.

That said, purely based on offensive potential, Scarlet Witch easily wins in my opinion. Which is interesting as they're both powered by Infinity Stones so you'd think they'd be roughly equal.

Which is basically what happened in Endgame, a nearby hit from the bombardment wiped out Wanda but Captain Marvel tanked the whole volley with her face.

I just binged this as well and I have to agree with schild. This shit is just perfect. Knowing how Feige has been with continuity for the last decade+ of movies, do not think that there is any choice that's been made in this thing that wasn't meticulously planned, even if some of it means very little. The surprise entrance at the end of the episode was likely a 100% confirmation that the X-Men are coming and perhaps even an explanation for how.

Did anyone notice that Wanda's Eastern European accent sort of came back in that showdown with the SWORD Director? Just for a second, but it's something that has been dropped since Winter Soldier - and now it returned, if only for a second. I think that might have something to do with what's going on. And I do think this could be a way to get the Fantastic Four in as well, in much the same kind of way as their origin in the Ultimate Universe. It's kind of amazing to see but I think they really are rewriting and resetting the status quo of the whole universe with this really odd but incredible homage to the history of television sitcoms.

If they do bring the FF in and it's the Ultimate FF, though, I'm fucking done, because I just loathe the Ultimate FF. But I trust these guys--they aren't gonna do that.

Nah, it'll be like the Ultimates in that it'll be a more grounded version, but I don't think we're going to get Reed as idiotic super villain. Man that series went full retard shortly after Marvel Zombies showed up.

Also, I thought it was already confirmed that Secret Invasion was the theme for the next phase, which means Skrulls.

Wanda's accent comes back when she is angry, it came back when she punted Geraldine and when she fought Thanos in Endgame. As someone bilingual I can tell you that this is absolutely DEAD ON what happens.

I sure the fuck hope not. The lamest trope that always immediately turns me off is the old shapeshifter/clone/mindcontrol gag. So cheap and milked for so much fake drama.

Even putting a goatee on the evil clone is an improvement, in my opinion.

Well, they're already messing around with Skrulls some but they're so different already from the regular universe version that however they do this it's gonna be different.

Skrulls in the MU have worked best when it's either been a quick one-shot "the authorities turn on Our Heroes because they are suddenly acting very evil, and Our Heroes must rush to clear their names by finding the shape-shifters", which I think is already a played-out storyline in multiple ways in the MCU, or "Our Heroes turn on each other because it's not clear who has been body snatched" which I think only works when the characters have known each other for a very long time and spend a lot of time in each other's company.

So yeah, I hope they mostly avoid Secret Invasion also. Or switch it up big time from the comic-book version.

Well, they announced Secret Invasion, so...hopefully the latter?

https://disneyplusoriginals.disney.com/show/secret-invasion

Right--I just mean that it doesn't look like that's the big spectacular ending of the current phase of films. It might give them a chance to further complicate the history of SHIELD/HYDRA/SWORD, maybe to build some new wrinkles or complications in the history of the MCU, etc. which is all fine, I just don't want it to be the huge crossover premise of something like Infinity War/Endgame.

Since Secret Invasion sucked so hard in the comics, and Wanda's mental breakdown in the comics that caused Avengers Disassembled and House of M was also so badly written, I'm more inclined to think they can handle those themes without them turning into stupid shit like Norman Osborn becoming an evil Iron Man analogue or Thor Clones killing Black Goliath.

Yeah, on the one hand, the comic versions of these events shit sucked.  On the other....the overall IDEA of them wasn't necessarily bad, just the execution.  I'm willing to give MCU benefit of the doubt they can adapt the basic ideas into something fun (and WandaVision seems to be doing that well so far in terms of House of M stupidity).  Still makes me nervous.

It's based on comics. At any moment, it could descend into navel-gazing dipshittery of the highest order, and I say that as a huge comic nerd.  :awesome_for_real:

I kind of liked the Dark Avengers period--it was a reasonably smart coda to the worst parts of Civil War and Secret Invasion. (E.g., heroes fight with each other, let government take control of superpowered people, leads to the really bad guys taking over the establishment and going to some bad and dark places with that power, which leads to the return of the good guys as the public begins to realize what they let come in the door).

Concept wasn't bad - execution was shit, just like Civil War and most of the big Marvel crossover stories on that period.

"What is 'something written by Bendis/Millar?'" :why_so_serious:

couldn't sleep so watched episode 6.

Really great episode, I think it's particularly unnerving considering the last 5 min or so of the previous episode. Did the writers just forget some of what was said then or is this a hint of something more sinister going on?

I really like the family dynamics, and the fan service in this is jacked up to 11 (or maybe I just recognized more of the "Easter eggs" this time around).

Not sure if this counts as a spoiler but just in case:
Also my favorite bit:

Ya, good episode. They are firing on all cylinders on this thing.


Also the

Am I the only one who feels that show is trying a little hard to make us believe that Wanda is not the villain here. Despite the mounting evidence that even if this was unintentional at one point... this is pretty unacceptable even by leave it to beaver to standard.

I thought they were trying too hard to make us think she is :P

100% certain now that the "it's all Wanda" is a misdirect. I mean, "Quicksilver" practically says "beats having red shit coming out of your hands" or something to that effect which is pretty much "oh yeah, something's fueling your power in very new ways".

I have to say that the Mephisto theorists got a big boost this episode--Quicksilver was acting very Mephisto-ish and was even sporting the horns, and it's easy to see that Wanda could be some kind of gate/key to the expansion of an extradimensional realm ("Hell") into Earth in the last quarter of the episode. But maybe that's too simple too. Maybe if this is some kind of interdimensional portal that's got nothing to do with Wanda per se, what we're seeing is a bunch of different kinds of fuckers swarming towards it--Mephisto, whomever Hayward is (no way is he just some bureaucrat), Agnes, etc. because it's a huge opportunity or source of power. Could end up something like the MCU's equivalent of Cynosure or Sigil--a permanently contested multiversal/multidimensional zone.

I hope it is all Wanda. But it would mean turning her into a straight up villain. Which I doubt they are doing. And anyway there is no way our plucky heroes on the outside are going to be dead wrong about a thing.

If there's a theme here, it's "misdirects behind misdirects, everything is both deep and exactly what it says on the tin." They're not going to resolve this in a simple binary "Wanda is the big bad? Yes/No." There's going to be very deliberate loose ends, and very deliberate lies, everybody is an unreliable narrator.

--Dave

This show drives me crazy in the best ways. Every episode I zig-zag about my thoughts on what is going on. In this episode I actually did it twice in the same episode. There was clear evidence Wanda is behind it all. And clear evidence she wasn't. So hell if I know what's going on now. Except Director Hayward needs to go down.

Also...a question

This show is goddamn amazing. I'm going to spoiler what I think is going on - it may be a long shot, but we'll see.


I could be wrong, but don't really care if I am. I'm just loving how well they are taking so many pieces from these characters source material, stripping them of the worst of comics bullshit and turning in a fantastic piece of movie making.

Someone or something else has to be behind it all. Even if Wanda just got powered up through grief, it doesn't explain how the tv signal is embedded in the CMB.

I saw a theory on twitter  that postulated everything we've seen in the show is created by Wanda, not just what's in the hex. That would explain the above and a line from today's episode (Wanda said something about remembering being alone and in endless darkness; I originally took that to mean her mental state but maybe that was a literal description of her environment).

I thought the writers had forgotten Vision said there were no kids but on re watch I see Pietro bring that up.

I kind of hope that the villain isn't someone we've seen before, but also is Unrelenting in their awfulness.  :why_so_serious:

I'm still not convinced there's some other villain behind all this simply because I don't know that there's anything thematically satisfying with a 3rd act villain reveal in a story that up until now has been largely about dealing with grief and loss.

My other thought right now is that Wanda's powers in both the comics and in the MCU have largely been hard to define. Comics went from altering probability (which itself is a can of worms), to chaos magic, to altering reality. The MCU has done a weird thing where contact with an Infinity Stone can cause people to develop powers... somehow. And not even powers that are defined by what Infinity Stone was was. Wanda has some mental powers which would kinda make sense because she was powered using the mind stone, but then Pietro got super speed (which would make more sense with the space stone or time stone). I think the lack of definition in the MCU is because Age of Ultron was over-stuffed as it was, but I could see one of the goals of WandaVision to possibly be establishing what her powers actually are, what are their limits, and what is the cost of using them.

The other odd thing about Wanda's powers is that especially now in WandaVision she's displayed almost all the powers of the Infinity Gems. She has mind powers, can alter reality, has energy blasts (power), has created two kids (soul), is possibly tapping into other dimensions (space), and has rewound time (although that could just be her control of the reality she has made). There's also six Infinity Stones and her reality is contained in a six-sided shape. Probably just crazy speculation, but just something I was thinking of in regard to how many powers she has displayed.

It can still be about grief and loss if Wanda has been convinced to do something awful by someone much worse.

I'm ready for them to get on and give us Wanda's PoV though.

And if they decide Wanda is the antagonist for the whole next phase I'm here for that. They've struggled for villains in the MCU and Olsen deserves more screen time.

But I'm super doubtful.

The commercial this week definitely seemed to hint at a deal with someone like Mephisto that Wanda will not get what she hoped from.

I like Haemish's idea.

They've tried to hard to make sure Wanda's hands are clean (not actually hurting anybody directly) for me to think they are going to turn her into the big bad.  She's being used by whatever.

Also, any thoughts on who the person that will get Monica back into the Hex will be?

I think that's just one of many comics Easter eggs. The costumes, embedded numbers that reference key comic volumes, they really packed them in.


--Dave

Wanda knows she's holding people there and controlling them against their will so it's hard to say her hands are clean. It might have not been done intentionally at first but now she's been making the choice to perpetuate it. If the writers try to say that this is all due to manipulation or mind control then at some point we haven't actually been watching a show about Wanda, we've been watching a show about someone who suffered trauma being used as a puppet with no agency because of it, which is a much less interesting story to tell for this many episodes.

Theory about the commercials: Each one represents an episode in Wanda's life:

Stark Toaster, "Forget the past, this is your future": The bomb that she and Pietro stared at in their destroyed apartment.

Strucker Watch, "Strucker, he'll make time for you": Strucker and Hydra taking her and her brother in.

Hydra Soak, "Find the goddess within": The success of the Hydra experiments with the Mind Stone.

Lagos Paper Towels, "Lagos. For when you make a mess you didn’t mean to": Umm, yeah, kind of on the nose there.

Yo-Magic Yogurt, “Yo-Magic. The snack for survivors": If this represents anything we've seen on screen before WandaVision, I can't imagine what it is. There's no name associated with it, the whole thing is an allegory for a Faustian bargain, the shark is nameless, the little boy dies in claymation grotesqueness. In an episode littered with deeper meaning and references behind everything, this is completely disconnected. Pretty sure it has to represent what happened with Wanda after Endgame.

Wanda made a deal with someone or something, and it's both exactly what she bargained for and a hellish nightmare.

--Dave

Sort of.  If she's having her feelings being manipulated, she can always come out as "oh shit, I really didn't know how terrible this was for all of you, I convinced myself everybody was as happy as I was", ect ect, when everything clears.  Or something like that.  It's possible to write ways to be sympathetic.  If she outright vaporizes an FBI agent, well then now she's evil.

Having said all that:
I got the feeling that's exactly what this will more or less end up as.  The public is fine with somebody going through trauma being manipulated.  They don't like watching the show about the mother who gets Postnatal depression and drowns her three kids, which is basically what your suggesting.  Especially when it's one of Marvels only female super heroes.

One of those at least is a story with a character arc. The other is a plot device masquerading as a character arc especially if the goal is to have Wanda's hands totally clean by the end. Mephisto/Nightmare/whoever is an evil manipulator who evilly manipulated Wanda isn't a terrible story to tell, but if that's the route they're going it could have been done in about 3 episodes instead of 9. We're 2/3 of the way through and if Darcy, Monica, and Woo are the only characters in the show we've been watching who have any real agency then it doesn't make for a particularly good story in retrospect. In the absence of following any actual non-mind controlled characters aside from the three previously mentioned (two of which are absent for the first few episodes), it makes almost everything we've watched so far just a collection of mystery boxes and references to the history of TV sitcoms.

The middle ground is that you say that the villain gave her a nudge but she's the one who acted on it and continued keep it going even as she realized the consequences, but then you can't handwave away her guilt and you're functionally back to your postnatal depression analogy except that when she's drowning her kids there's someone whispering in her ear telling her what a good idea it is.

Perhaps!  I'm not really confident on any guess because this entire show in and of itself is such a departure from what I expected them to make.  I'm applying my standard Hollywood Studio Logic to this, but it could got in any direction for all I know because it's already pretty far out there.

As for the mother who drowns their three kids, that real life story was the basis for my 3rd Cthulhu novella, Drowned. If you've read it, I'll let you be the judge as to whether or not it makes for a sympathetic or interesting story to have a mother suffering post-partum drown her children in a bathtub by providing something that manipulates her into doing it. There's a lot to be said for this being an interesting study on mental health and how we are allowed to suffer from grief without help. Considering the entire MCU Earth spent 5 years grieving and Hayward's reactions are a direct result of that, there's plenty of interesting ways this can go.

I don't think they are trying to get Wanda out of this with clean hands at all. She's pretty clearly made some choices consciously to protect her weird little ideal world, and though she hasn't killed anyone, the mindfuck that the townsfolk have had to go through is no small thing at all. They could fuck this all up if they don't stick the landing in the last 3 episodes, but the first 6 have given me confidence they will come up with something that's at least good.

I think that one does fit really well for the current events. Something offered Wanda a magic solution to help fill the void in her heart/life/soul due to Vision's death and she took that but it turns out all she's gotten is a constant, tantalisingly close taste of nourishment and satisfaction but the whole time she's not actually getting what she wants and she's slowly dying. Which if we accept she's consciously hurting the people she's trapped there, her attempt to recapture happiness and connection through this magic is causing her to slowly drive everyone away and traumatise herself to the point where it's not fixable.

Recast Pietro is definitely overly aware of what's going on, there is clearly some outside agency going on although my first guess was that he could well be some aspect of Wanda's own psyche trying to get her to confront what's going.  would work well, although the hair I think is just a fun homage to Quicksilver's comic look. I am curious if the hexagonal aspect comes up as more than just a reason to refer to Wanda's powers as Hexs again.

I definitely think Quicksilver's hair is just an homage to his terrible comics look, especially considering he, Wanda and Vision were all wearing the most literal interpretations of their classic uniforms. I love that Tommy and Billie were both wearing the costumes of their Young Avengers appearances. There were so many good comic nerd nods in this episode. That's one of the things that makes it difficult to gauge what's a red herring or what's an actual hint about the ultimate reveal - all the nods to TV tropes, sitcoms, and comic references are so much overload that it's very easy to miss one in the flood, and it's hard to point to one as dominant because there are so many.

Could just be about survivors guilt, the next traumatic event in Wanda's life is Pietro's death. Maybe she feels she could have saved him with her magic but she wasn't strong enough.

Another thought: What Vision sees when he's away from Wanda (simplified behaviors, looping, static poses) is a lot like what we do in games with NPC's when the players aren't nearby, no point in burning cycles on stuff that won't be seen.

Is this connected to "computational forms"? Is Vision also involved in operating the pocket universe?

--Dave

I think if it comes down to it,

I read that more as simply Wanda is directing people and those who are outside areas she's focused on are just kind of left in neutral to provide background e.g. the neighour cutting through the wall when he was hedge trimming because Wanda was distracted. I don't really think the computational work thing was necessarily a clue so much as it tied into Vision's nature and the sitcom joke about no one ever having a 'real' job. Hell they pretty much state Wanda sends him to 'work' when he needs to be distracted. I think she's being manipulated but I think it's more along the lines of setting her up to break her as a person somehow rather than using her current power to achieve something.

Also having gotten through all the episodes so far this week, the first three definitely work really well as a binge. I think it would have been kind of frustrating watching them each a week apart.

I thought Billy was dressed as that male Scarlet Witch guy whose name I can't remember. Not Dr strange.

Did they? It was played for comedy mostly in the Spider-man sequel, and informs some of Monica's character here, sure. Thanks to Covid we've barely had any MCU product since Endgame and unless something odd is going on Black Widow should be pre-Snap, but for the most part I still haven't seen anything that suggests that they're really doing anything to show the ramifications of 50% of the world being erased and coming back 5 years later. The world in the MCU seems like it's largely back to being close to the present day real world (with superheroes and all that comes along with but you know what I mean).

I mean... 50% of the population. 1 out of every 2 people should be going through what Monica is, but it doesn't come across like that here.

Director Douchebag went pretty long on the issue in this last episode.

If you mean Dr. Druid or something, nah Haem is right. It's clearly meant to look like his outfit as Wiccan in Young Avengers.

Turns out I do mean wiccan.

Who is also Vision and Wanda's son Billy.

Ah yeah, I forgot he had the Wiccan headband, just remembered the Dr. Strange-ish cape, which he also has as Wiccan.

I actually took a look the other day to see if they ever explained how Billy and Tommy came back in the comics and it turns out, no so much.

Kinda sorta but it's a fucking mess of the worst kind.

He was dressed as the character Wiccan from Young Avengers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiccan_(character)) - which was a character that was later confirmed to be the reincarnation of Wanda's children that she imagined into existence, whose name is Billy.

Well, since dimensional incursion is heavily hinted at, both in show and in talks of Doc Strange 2, we should expect the masters of the mystic arts to show up sometime. Maybe Strange himself, maybe Woo, but it's probably going to be some variation on a dimensional horror having used Wanda as a stalking horse to make a beach head in our reality.

--Dave

Didn't like the reveal at the end of the episode. Hopefully they at least do something interesting with it.

And predictably we get the multiheaded scapegoats to salvage Wanda's hero persona. I mean it was either that or face the consequences of endangering/ruining the lives of millions of people because your sad  :oh_i_see:. I would be genuinely surprised if there was any actual blowback for this other than a vehicle to explain why some characters have powers.

The reveal seemed like a good idea, but suffered from not really having any sneaky things to reveal.

Thinking about it though it had to be her. They did a decent job of making us think it might be anyone else.

I wonder if this is a double fake out. I looked up Agatha Harkness after I watched it and she's never been a villain from what I can tell. So could we have yet another manipulator behind her? Or is this just a case of the MCU changing a character.

I doubt it.

We still don't know what Agatha wants or how it fits into what sword guy wants though.

And wouldn't rule out a final episode post credits scene reveal of how it fits into someone's larger plan.

Could be another fake-out, but to what end, especially with 2 episodes left? Either way if you’re only just introducing your villain 3.5 hours into a 4.5 hour story that’s a bit of a problem.

I think you guys missed the mid-credits scene. There's definitely more to it than "Agatha All Along."

--Dave

No, I saw it.

The one with 'Pietro'? Or just the bit between the Agatha credits and the Wandavision credits?

--Dave

There is definitely more to explain I just don't see it being another villian.

The thing with Monica and Pietro. It’s too brief to really offer up any substantial hint. The larger hint of bigger goings-on was the Nexus commercial.

Yes, seems likely Wanda and Agatha are both nexus people and Agatha is going to explain this next week.

I didn't know about the nexus stuff but looked it up. Looks like in the comics Wanda is a "nexus being" and can access all realities or something? I'm guessing that WandaVision is indeed going to be used to bring the X-men into the MCU. I'm thinking the mid-credits scene is a partial misdirect. We're supposed to assume Pietro is working for Agnes but he's really just as curious as Monica is about what's going on. Perhaps Wanda's blasting of him last episode freed him from Agatha's control or something.

It's also possible that the X-men version of Earth is being destroyed by the hex and he's there to save it but that seems like a lot to throw into only 2 episodes unless this isn't a one-off as I assumed and there will be a season 2 of WandaVision.

I already went into the Nexus thing about four episodes back. It's not Wanda. It's a place in the Marvel Universe, normally in the Everglades. They moved it to New Jersey, apparently.

That's what's in Agatha's basement--the doorways you saw. The Nexus is a gateway to other realities/universes. In the Marvel Universe, among other things, it has had a portal back to Howard the Duck's universe.

Wanda doesn't normally have any special multiversal powers--but she's frequently been possessed or targeted for possession by powerful interdimensional beings, and she's had at times powers to change all of her own universe's reality.

I'm one hundred percent certain that Agatha came here to get access to the Nexus or she already was its guardian--and that something beyond one of the doors or portals in the Nexus drew Wanda to the Nexus when she was gripped by despair and anger over SWORD messing around with the Vision's corpse. I still think is a good candidate for that something, but would be another. I guess if they're going with the Nexus, the third possibility would be  whose M.O. is pretty well given away by his name--.

Since we've now confirmed that the Nexus is involved, it gave me another thought. I'm pretty sure this will NOT be happening but it'd be an interesting twist.


I love a show that gets me invested enough to come up with nerd theories.

 definitely fits the TV motif, so why not--he could just as easily fit the role of "powerful extradimensional being who came in through the Nexus", with a slightly different motivation than

I seriously doubt that they are going to throw in another "bad guy nobody has ever heard of" into the mix at this point. Everyone is acting like the whole Agatha Harkness reveal was obvious but 99% of the people watching have never heard of her. Stop thinking like comic book readers.

Also worth saying the MCU has never really gone in for super clever endings.

There is likely to be a focus on running and explosions from this point on with limited screentime for exposition.

Counterpoint: The MCU has also never done anything like Wandavision before. I think that means all bets are off for this show. Though you're probably right.

Here's the things that have appeared in this show so far that no one but comic nerds had ever heard of:

SWORD
Billy and Tommy aka Wiccan and Speed
Quicksilver from another reality
Photon/Spectrum (Monica Rambeau's superpowered alter ego)
Agatha Harkness
(Probably) the Nexus of All Realities (another reason to think it's the Nexus: the swampy tendrils on the walls on the way in)

etc.
hardly seems like "Oh my god, they would never do anything throw a bad guy in that no one has ever heard of".

That said, I think this is why the Dormammu guess is still a pretty good one and makes this an effective lead into the Doctor Strange movie. (I will also not be at all surprised if Strange shows up in the last episode.)

Yeah, revealing the villain at the last hour isn't great if you're setting the villain up for the show. However if you're teasing the villain for some movie stuff it makes sense, I'm kind of expecting whoever it turns out to be  to be a focus for Dr. Strange or similar and to be kept off screen in Wandavision.

I'm not sure what's wrong with doing that in a comic-book setting.

It is literally what ten thousand comic books have done in ongoing storylines--have the REAL BAD GUY reveal himself in the final panel before the battle royale. Sure, comics fans always know who the REAL BAD GUY is when he/she appears, hence the gasps where people go "oh my god". If you have been reading along in such a story without ever having read a comic book, probably "oh my GOD IT's DOCTOR DOOM" or "OH MY GOD IT'S MORDRU" probably lands with a thud for good reason but why has that person been reading at all then? It's not just comic books--any long-running serial does this. Soap operas do it, Doctor Who does it, Star Trek did it once at least (Wrath of Khan). It's a delicious thing for those in the know. If you sell it well enough with some exposition it works for those who are new. (If you never watched "Space Seed", you still got the 411 on Khan in "Wrath of Khan", for example.) 

When I think on, for example, it was in X-Men and Doctor Strange and in both cases you got his M.O. and backstory by the end and the point really was that he just served as a way to make the lead character (Strange and Cyclops) relive their lives in an emotionally fraught way. I'm sure if you were a hard-core reader of Steve Gerber's comics for Marvel in the 1970s or Chris Claremont's early career you were like WHOA but otherwise, it was just "ok, fine, I get it".

Did anybody need a longer 411 on the bad guys in the Eccleston Doctor Who that had Simon Pegg in it? The alien running horrible television shows? No? You didn't find out anything about them until pretty late in the game.

Everything MCU is just a set up for the next MCU thing. They have no issue revealing a big bad in WandaVision just to hype up the next thing.

All of this is setting up for the next Dr. Strange movie. They could introduce both the Big Bad and Strange (or even just Wong) in the last 5 minutes.

--Dave

Edit: Insert micro-agression about Asian names here.

Stuff is set up for the next MCU thing in the post-credits stuff usually. The main stories in the movies have been more self-contained, with a fairly sizable number of villains actually getting killed off in the movie they're introduced in.

Woo is the name of the guy who is already appearing in the show this thread is for. I'm guessing you mean Wong, and I'd have just let it slide but this is the second time.

I don't remember who it was but I someone on the interwebs suggested Immortus as the villain. I'm not sure how I'd feel about that, but it would tie into Loki and Ant-man and The Wasp.

Even the most basic story needs conflict and resolution. For most of the show, Wanda has been the source of conflict. She's confused, she seems to have taken over a small town controlling everybody inside, and actively prevents people from questioning her or figuring out too much. You can argue SWORD guy is a villain, but really all he's done so far is try to rebuild Vision and get aggressive against Wanda (who again, has seemingly taken over a US town).

Possible resolutions taking the story all the way down this path is to have Wanda either confront the trauma and work past it as best she can, freeing the town, or more tragically to double down on things, eventually having to be stopped by Vision, Monica, or whoever. There's a number of ways you can resolve it really, but those are some of the basic ones.

Or you can take the path they're currently going down with a reveal that someone else is behind it. The problem with doing this too late in the game means that they've spent 7 episodes building up one conflict only to at least partially negate it, changing the conflict from Wanda vs. everyone else to Wanda vs. Agatha (with Vision, Monica, and Quicksilver in the mix somehow) with only two episodes to develop that. Who is Agatha Harkness? What does she want? How did her whole plan work? We've now got two episodes to explore this. Worse, Agatha's plot wasn't uncovered by Wanda, she largely just seemed to reveal herself as the villain. Nothing in the story actually built to the reveal, it just kinda happened and it feels like it happened now because the writers knew they had to start wrapping things up.

Doing another surprise reveal pretty much right on the heels of the one they just did would be even worse. You can only do so much misdirection before people stop caring. Going from "Wanda is responsible" to "no wait it's Agatha" to "just kidding it's Mephisto or whoever" is just... at some point you have to take a step back and look at what the story is they're telling. Person experiences trauma, tries to reimagine life with deceased lover is a coherent plotline. You can see how the sitcom theme kinda works itself in. Witch manipulates trauma victim into taking over a town transforming it into a sitcom as part of her plot to do whatever, just becomes increasingly convoluted. Mephisto as the reveal instead of Agatha would have been easier to pull off because he's basically Satan so there's at least an easy shorthand there for viewers.

Now clearly I'm not saying that the MCU can't do reveals that lead into other things, because yes, they do it all the time. There's a difference between the Avengers movie we got though where Loki is the main threat but Thanos is hinted at pulling the strings in the background, and a movie where Loki doesn't show up until the last 20 minutes and then Thanos shows up in the last minute.

I understand from your defense of The Last Jedi that you're ok with undermining previous character and plot developments, and with having a complete disregard for pacing but I can only speak for myself. I'm not saying that WandaVision has fumbled the ball quite yet. It's absolutely possible they pull this off. That reveal was very much a red flag for me though.

Sure, I can see an epilogue that says 'hahaha this is all part of my nefarious plans' and teases the next story.

I just doubt they are bringing any more major players into this story.

And just watching the yo magic commercial again, which I'd taken more as a faustian bargain thing, rewatching at this point it looks like a much simpler message that you cannot undo grief with magic.

Strong disagree.  My money is on a blue laser that shoots into space while lots of giant bugs fly around it.

Come on. How much more do you need to have the show say WANDA MIGHT NOT BE RESPONSIBLE THERE MIGHT BE SOMETHING ELSE GOING ON? It's been doing that from the beginning. Every sympathetic character--Jimmy Woo, Monica Rambeau, Professor Two Broke Girls, is "This can't just be Wanda". You have a secret agent/police guy practically twirling his mustache and rubbing his crotch at the thought of the sweet vibranium corpse of the Vision and a video that shows Wanda roaring in to her dead lover's vivisection.

You have a mysterious place doing mysterious things with mysterious characters around, one of whom the non-mysterious characters have noted seems very mysterious.

Having a Big Bad who isn't really revealed until the end of an ongoing serial or even hinted at in some ways is completely comic-book normal. Watch the first Avengers movie--when is Thanos mentioned ever in any of it? Oh right, he's not until the post-credits. No hints, no winks, no Loki saying "Well, wait until you meet my new master", none of it.

Dormammu is mentioned constantly in the first Doctor Strange but you don't really see him at all until near the end--Kaecilius and his goons are the only threat that matters. (Nor do you have any hint that Mordo is going to be an enemy.)

You have a situation in WandaVision that's been explicitly

a) a mystery/puzzle box show: what's going on from the VERY BEGINNING cannot be what is literally going on (e.g., that characters we know have been amusingly recast as sitcom characters in classic TV shows)
b) a mystery/puzzle box to which the most powerful character is very obviously not the right answer--a scarlet herring--since there is NO conceivable reason for her to recast herself and her dead husband in sitcoms; she's been previously shown to be something of a fish out of water in her new Avengering life (she was experimented on by a Nazi, she was manipulated by a genocidal robot into fighting the Avengers, her brother sacrificed himself heroically, she tried to join up and do the right thing and accidentally got people killed, she fought for Captain America and was imprisoned, she fell in love with a saintly android, she failed to save him from a mad god, she almost killed the mad god later when given the chance, and then? Nowhere in there does "she will choose to relive the history of sitcoms with her powers" seem like something consistent with the character we've seen so far, so this is not a Chekov gun of long-standing
c) a mystery/puzzle box that suggests that maybe the seemingly powerful character at the heart of it is driven by grief and despair that she barely understands--but to create something in a place she doesn't know and has never been to? in a medium that hardly matters to her? with shapes that have no association with her?

If this was a 1-hour X-Files, you'd expect the Cigarette-Smoking Man to show up at the end--and don't forget that once upon a time, he wasn't a familiar figure and he wasn't foreshadowed throughout an episode.

There is nothing weird about the last 1/8th or so of a show like this introducing a real antagonist underneath two layers of fake antagonists, especially not when it's essentially an elaborate prologue for future content.

You might want to rewatch Avengers. About a half an hour in Loki talks with Thanos' henchman who spells out that Loki has a new master who supplied him with the scepter and is providing him with an army. We don't see Thanos until the post-credits but it's never ambiguous that Loki is working for someone else. We know that Loki of course also has his own motivations for what he's doing, but when Loki opens a portal to alien invaders and a giant space ship it's not some "what the fuck is going on here" reveal, it's directly set up early in the movie.

Likewise, there's no reveal with Kaecilius or Dormammu. Yeah, we don't see Dormammu until near the end, but we know what he is, and what his general motivation/goal is. Now imagine in Dormammu was never mentioned at all in the movie until that point when he shows up in the movie.

Here's the thing about mystery/puzzle boxes: Things still have to develop properly (unless you're David Lynch). You can't just pull answers out of nowhere and expect it to be satisfying. Agnes is present throughout the show but revealing her as the villain behind what going on isn't building off any hints shown previously. It's like solving a murder mystery by revealing the killer is some random side-character who hasn't really been involved in the story. Sure you can do it, but it's not really satisfying. I mean, I know who Agatha Harkness is from the comics and this was still a pretty limp reveal. "It was Agatha all along?". Great, it was all the plot of this person who wasn't a character through the first 7 episodes. Awesome. Really slapping myself for not putting the pieces together on that one earlier...

I feel like you're giving them a lot of leeway because comic books and the MCU have set up threats for future stories down the road, but the first rule of doing that is that you have to make sure the story you're currently telling still works on its own also. It can't all just be set up for "We'll see you in a year with Doctor Strange 2!". Again, maybe they can pull it off. Maybe the next episode will do a great job of making Agatha an interesting character. Making interesting villains has generally been the MCU's biggest struggling point, but maybe they've just discovered a new workaround. Just don't have a villain for 80% of the story and then it's not an issue.

What they needed is a bunch more things like the dead dog. Ideally we also needed some idea of her motivation in the reveal.

But we're being fussy. Show is getting held to a higher standard than the movies are in this regard.

Certainly possible they've bitten off more than they can chew by implying there was a clever mystery behind the show. But if people are willing to pretend captain america 2 was a conspiracy thriller then this is also fine.

Show has been impressive for just giving film characters time to hang out on screen and introduce the new MCU ideas in something this weird. If the ending isn't shit that will be a bonus - but I'd still be happy enough if it is just explosions, that is all we ever get in the final hour of the films.

The thing about Avengers is that we get nothing on what Loki's ally is or what he wants, really. We don't really know what his plan is, other than one of those "get captured and pretend that was your plan all along" until we get to NYC. We don't really get much on the aliens or what their specific 411 is--they're just flying monkey minions told to destroy for no specific reason. (In fact, in retrospect, it makes even less sense than it did then in that it's not all clear what Thanos thought he was getting out of any of that or even what Loki expected from it--the people who spend time trying to figure this all out have had to come up with elaborate theories that Thanos was scared of Odin or was trying to avoid getting Captain Marvel's attention and that this was a way to use one Stone to get another Stone.) It doesn't really matter: the action works fine if you just tell yourself Loki wants to conquer the world and settle some scores with Thor or even that he's just Jokering it up and seeing the world burn. By the standard of "we need to have a full 411 on all the bad guys by halfway into the movie or it's no good", Avengers is a failure. (Contrarily, Age of Ultron is a roaring success because the baddie is introduced early and his basic motivation is clear throughout even though there's a MacGuffin he's chasing that he gives up on after it's taken away from him.)

Actually, though, now that I'm thinking of Age of Ultron,


Anyway, this series has established throughout that there's something really weird going on, that Wanda can't remember how she got in this situation or what she's trying to do, that maybe there's something else behind it, and that there's at least one antagonist--Hayward--who is up to no good. Anybody with even a passing familiarity with comic-books, thrillers, soap operas, etc., would naturally be on the alert by now for an unexpected or sudden reversal or reveal. At least one of the things that's happened was a huge clue that there's something way beyond Wanda's known scope of power going on--a Quicksilver from another reality showing up.

Thanos wants the Tesseract. Loki is tasked to get it and in return gets access to some of Thanos' army to take over Earth. Thor flat out asks Loki if he's doing because he lost the throne of Asgard and is going to try to rule Thor's adopted home as revenge. How Loki goes about his plan is a little convoluted, but it's pretty clear from the start what his goal is, and what the conflict of the movie is. It is all directly spelled out in the dialogue.

"we need to have a full 411 on all the bad guys by halfway into the movie or it's no good"

Fuck man, this is the same tack you took with your TLJ defense. That anytime someone is asking for a bit more definition/explanation of major characters or plot points that they're asking for a wikipedia entry to be info-dumped into the narrative (and everything basically is in Avengers except for Thanos' name).

To say "we need to have some idea of what the conflict is and who is involved prior to the last 10% of the story" is not to say we need every bit of detail filled in about them.

Also like I said, a mystery still needs to unfold in some logical way. You can't just handwave away basic storytelling by saying "well they hinted something was wrong so that means anything goes". If they hold with the Agatha Harkness thing they're literally doing the "a wizard did it" plot explanation. Nothing built up to the reveal other than the whole show being a bunch of odd shit going on. If they wanted to tell a story of Agatha trapping Wanda in a fake reality they could have done that in like 3 episodes. As it is, if Wanda was just being controlled/manipulated by Agatha, then we spent the first 3 episodes of this season watching zero characters who are acting under their own agency.

I'm a simpleton when it comes to comics, I haven't really dove into any of the book material and I'm mostly familiar with the movies only.

That being said, I think the story is "whats going on" and "i'm confused" and "Wanda is acting strange".

We got the answer to "whats going on" in episode 3 and 4? (I think) when it was revealed who was speaking with Wanda from the outside.

We got a half answer to "I'm confused" with Agnes being revealed. We just don't know her motivations.

"Wanda is acting strange". So if we get a definitive answer to Wanda getting better/escaping/becoming a villain whatever, that will also satisfy a plotline.

Next week we can find out that Agnes stole/has/made a thing that allowed her to capture/manipulate Wanda in her distress to hardness energy or whatever to do a thing. So next week we learn about Agnes hopefully and confront her and her motivations. This "fight" to save Wanda and defeat Agnes is the "end" of the show. But in defeating Agnes we learn that her true master is X or she stole a thing from X who is now very angry.

This Dormumumumu dude from Strange (who I barely remember) can be like "Agnes broke the promise so therefore I'm coming back!" which sets up Strange 2.

Anyway, I think they're doing a great job with the show.

When I looked up this episode online, I found something curious in at least two places that isn't spelled out on the show:


I can't wait until next week to see if this is true or just internet fuckery.

I don't think there will be a reveal, as much as a very blatant hook that Agatha was acting in something else's behalf, and possibly not even willingly. It could come at the end, or they could save it for Multiverse of Madness.

--Dave

As long as they don't do what happened in the actual comics to Wanda's kids (first version before various retcons and reboots).

I'm really not sure what they can do with them since they clearly don't seem to be human children i.e. they seem like some manifestation of the Hex. I'm also not persuaded that Agnes is the villain just yet. What she's been doing has been preventing Wanda from settling into her own little sitcom paradise but typically it's revolved around forcing her to confront the reality of what's happened to her and what she's doing. I guess it feels like such a weak villain reveal to show her as the bad guy that I'm kind of hoping she's a bit less villain / lackey for the main villain and instead something like a magic user who has been caught up in whatever is going on and interfering. The setup so far has been nuanced enough in presenting Wanda and other characters that I'll be disappointed if the finale is a shoot out with Agnes that frees Wanda and the SWORD guy gets arrested for trying to do stuff with Vision's body while screaming 'I'll get you next time Gadget Vision!'

I'd be surprised if the children don't continue to exist in the MCU.

Killing kids with names and material screen time is a tough pitch in a script. And in this case there is a real option to use them as heroes in future so I'm not sure I see a good reason to let them die. The way they've jumped in age makes an even more convincing argument to keep them.

As for the finale, well if this were an MCU film it absolutely would be a shootout with Agatha and Sword wanting control of the hex,  Wanda, vision, spectrum and the kids trying to hold out against them.

Next week's episode is presumably going to lay out Agatha and Sword guy's motivation. Maybe with a flashback as I'm not sure there are any sit coms to cover after Modern Family. Then the final episode is explosions.

Since both the kids were part of the Young Avengers in the comics, and we also have Ant-Man's daughter in the MCU (who was also a character in Young Avengers) and we know there will be a Kate Bishop Hawkeye show (who was ALSO a Young Avenger), don't be surprised if the kids hang around and we eventually have a Defenders-style mini-series on Disney+ of the Young Avengers. If I was Marvel, that's what I'd be angling for.

I think they're pretty clearly going for some version of the Young Avengers (probably with Ms. Marvel added) in the future, so yeah, I'm sure the kids will be back. In fact, I wouldn't be that surprised if that's one of Strange's missions in the Multiverse of Madness is to find the kids and bring them back.

That new Ms Marvel is so dopey. Look, a shitty Elongated Man rip with giant FISTS.

Ye gods.

It's okay, we all look alike too :awesome_for_real:

You mean Fantastic Man, and Ms. Marvel is awesome.

You mean Mr. Fantastic? He didn't go to Man School for 6 years to be called Man, man.

Wait...

How about Plastic Man?

Anyway, Reed Richards was dopey af, too. Flaming human, solid rock tank, invisible force field woman, and goddamned Stretch Armstrong over here.

I know nothing about the actual character other than seeing her powers and it was enough to hard pass on the Avengers game (even before I heard it was wildly mediocre).

LOL yeah I somehow mixed Plastic Man and Mr. Fantastic in my head and ended up with Fantastic Man.

Stretching is the lamest super power, at least Reed Richards is 50% mad genius.

Ms. Marvel was one of the highlights of the Avengers game and one of the characters that felt the best to play.

The Ms. Marvel comics were great and as a character, she's awesome. Her powers aren't exactly stretchy powers so much as "embiggen!" It's kind of a loosely-defined series of powers. I recommend reading her comics if you are into it - they are well-written, well-drawn and quite sweet without being saccharine.

Stretching powers are one of those comic-book things that I don't think anyone has figured out how to do right outside of comic books, and it's not a matter of the CGI expensiveness. It's that they're really fucking gross outside of comic books. Ms. Marvel did a good job of trying to think about how to represent them differently in visual terms so that she was mostly "I can grow, I can shrink, I can make big fists, I'm kind of invulnerable" as opposed to "I'm the Silly Putty Man". It's really hard to figure out how not to look like body horror with a character who can stretch an eyeball around corners to see what's going on three hundred feet away (Elongated Man in the comics, frequently) or make a parachute, enveloping dome, etc. out of his body (Mr. Fantastic, frequently) while having all that still be flesh in some basic sense. Plastic Man obviously can hide the fleshiness of his shapes since he once changed himself into a dress for Big Barda without her noticing she was wearing a form-fitting flesh envelope until she realized the color scheme was Plastic Man's usual. But there's been descriptions in the comics of Reed Richards' body being warm/fleshlike on contact even when it's at maximum extension, so...gross? I will be interested to see how they solve this visually.

Well thanks for the nightmares, anyway.

I think the Incredibles did a pretty good job of it with Elastigirl.

Yes. I'd forgotten that--she doesn't seem gross while doing all the basic things that Mr. Fantastic or Elongated Man have done. But I think this is one thing that might not cross over into a live-action/CGI visualization unless they are really thoughtful about how to do it.

In a similar vein...I actually prefer the look of the 'halloween' costumes for Wanda and Vision over their MCU versions thus far  :drillf:

It is the old school '70's Avengers costumes and I absolutely loved them, despite their ridiculousness.

I did always like that Grant Morrison's run on Justice League  portrayed Plastic Man as one of the most powerful supers on the planet. Kind of like how super-speed of the kind depicted in Flash would make him so much more powerful than almost any villain he could face. If your body is so malleable that it can make almost any shape regardless of size or mass, I think that'd be a pretty powerful set of abilities if you had enough imagination to use it.

And gross. Definitely gross.

I used to read Plastic Man comics back in the day and am overjoyed to learn I'm not the only person that's heard of him. On the whole "depicting stretching powers hasn't worked thing" I think it'll requite really well done CGI to make it work. The Incredibles made it work because they did it without it seeming out of place in their world. Seeing it in live-action always looks kind of weird and fake so far in my opinion.

I had a phase where the Vision was my 'who would be who' champ, until I met an ultimate pedant and stopped wasting my time with such nonsense  :drillf:

Who would beat who kind of had its ultimate day in the JLA/Avengers comic they produced a while back, both because they had some clever match-ups and because every fight had to be approved by both companies...

Not really a fan of this week's episode but it did explain a lot. It did feel like they left an important 5 min or so on the cutting room floor though.
I should say that there was a lot of good in the episode and it may be spoilerish if I said why I didn't like it that much so just in case
Agnes' behavior from 1-6 didn't really match episode 7 IMO; there's a resolution to that here.

I think opinions may vary on this episode but I think most people will be pleased with the direction of the story now.

I'm not sure why I am surprised but it looks like they are also looking at a 21st century Scarlet Witch series as inspiration as well. Pretty neat trick to tie disparate storylines from several different decades into one MCU show.

There's another mid credit scene that pays homage to the comics.

The mid credit scene is a bit more than a homage, it is very plot central - though wasn't sure what was meant by 'energy from the original source'.

I liked the episode.

It does show they hit the wrong note with the Agatha reveal though.

I'd like them to have squeezed in more on Agatha, but I probably only think that because of the apparent conflict between the last episode and this one.

I can't think of anything in the MCU that transitioned to the final showdown that well.

So

While they showed that Wanda had some small innate talent with magic, she got all her power from the Mind Stone.  The Mind Stone later is what powered Vision.  They recovered the drone infused with her Mind Stone (and Chaos?) Magic, and syphoned it off to use.

I'm glad that they actually stuck to Wanda being the one who made the whole thing happen and not Agatha.

My contribution to the argument about the big bad reveal

But I get these things wrong.  A lot.

I will note that Haemish is the one who put the D theory in play here first.

Ah, thanks for bringing that up.  Yeah, I felt exactly the same way.

Edit:
Whoops, missed that along the way somewhere!

I think they did a fantastic job of making it Wanda while not making her unavoidably a villain now.

I also really like the angle of Agatha being broadly neutral rather than a flat out antagonist.

They'd get all the gold stars if the 'I've been trying to snap you out of it for 6 episodes' thing was better supported. But this was still smarter than anything else we've seen in the MCU.

I don't think sword guy is working with anyone though. I think he just wanted his robot to work. He lied about what was happening in the footage because he doesn't want two visions and is happier without Wanda around to potentially turn off his vision.

For the most part. I still think the Agatha reveal was a bit of a misfire, and I think it also betrays a slight lack of confidence in the writers that they felt they couldn't write an MCU story that didn't have a super-villain in it.

Still don't see Hayward as necessarily a villain either. I know by comic book logic we'd generally consider him as such, but it's also kind of a "yeah, no shit this is how a government agency would act" when it comes to dealing with something like Vision's corpse.

So, my takeaways from the episode:

Hayward:

Agatha:

My biggest letdown with this episode was no Monica and Pietro. Next episode is the final episode correct? Or are there 2 more?

I wasn't fussed about the lack of monica and pietro - they are already final showdown ready. Especially as I expect they are all on the same side as Agatha and Wanda next week.

I was a bit surprised they didn't explain the multiverse but I guess they need to do that in a film anyway so no point being explicit here.

I noticed this one crept up to 46 minutes and wonder if it might be even longer next week.

I'm glad that Agatha got the exact sort of role I was hoping they were going to go for, she never really seemed to be evil in what were revealed to be her interactions and was more prodding Wanda. I'm guessing we're going to see a Vision v. Vision showdown next episode. I am curious to see if Hayward is going to be just a power mad creep or is going to tie into some other big bad. His only goal does seem to have been getting himself a real working Vision but it seems real odd that he knew Wanda had the power to bring him back. Some potential Hydra connection to know about the Mind Stone and Wanda?

In the comics, the Vision "dies" because he'd previously attempted to take over the entire world via integrated computing systems due to his fury at how badly mistreated he and Wanda were when they tried to have a normal suburban life in...New Jersey, but also because he encounters a sentient computer system that runs the very small world of Titan (where Thanos is from) and concludes that running the world is a snap.

This fails badly for a bunch of reasons, but basically the people who really run the world are so alarmed that the Vision was able to take over their computing systems that they kidnap him, dissemble him, and make sure he can't do it again. They don't care if he gets reassembled after that as long as they feel they understand how he did it in the first place and can reliably prevent it from happening again.

Well, coincidentally, I just re-watched Dr Strange last week, and the Ancient One did actually explicitly state that an entire multiverse of alternate realities exists and one of the duties of the Sorcerers is to protect earth from the interference / influence of those other realities in one of her early lectures to Strange.   It's just that when that movie came out, most people didn't directly connect that bit of exposition to the possibility of "specific" multiverse style interaction (a-la Spiderverse etc) and rather just took it as a passing reference to "the multiverse" in abstract, or in reference to things like the Mirror Dimension.

I think the entire zoo of predatory realities in Marvel continuity is something the normies need to be walked into slowly.

--Dave

Heh, all day I thought this latest episode was the finale and all I could think was "that was a weird way to end it".

Thing you have to remember about Agatha Harkness is that she's not a super villain and I think they have pretty accurately captured that with her role here. She's not the super villain and the big bad, though she may end up being an antagonist for this one. Her role in the comics in relation to Wanda was to train her to use her mutant powers in combination with actual magic, and it was called Chaos Magic. Later, when Wanda went insane and killed some Avengers (Hawkeye and the Vision as well as others) in Avengers Disassembled, Dr. Strange came in and said that there was no such thing as Chaos Magic (which probably got retconned away anyway - Wanda is almost as bad as Hawkman for repeated contradictory retcons).


I do like that Wanda isn't let off the hook for controlling Westview, though I think it's clear she didn't exactly know what she was doing or even that she could do that. The explanation for the sitcom thing was really well done. I have to give this show a ton of credit for not only not making this a black/white binary good versus evil story. There's a lot more nuance here than most MCU stories.

 Speaking of countless Wanda retcons: what I was alluding to earlier was, during a 2015 SW series, it turns out Wanda's REAL mother (this is like her 4th real mother  :why_so_serious:) was a witch, specifically going by the name Scarlet Witch. Agatha knew all along but never told her (also at this time Agatha is a ghost, because comics). I never read the entire story so I don't know how it was resolved. I got the feeling however that Wanda was just the latest SW in a long line of SWs. It sounds to me that that's what Agatha is saying in this episode.

Agatha isn't a villain in the comics, sure. It remains to be seen what they'll do with her here, but I don't know that there are any die-hard Agatha Harkness fans out there who are going to be terribly upset if they change the character around.

Other side-note about the time Dr. Strange said there was no such thing as chaos magic, it was especially dumb even at the time because there was a period in the 90s where Strange himself got his powers from chaos magic (the comic kept going through creative team changes, each one coming up with some new take on the character).

As far as the ongoing Dormammu speculation here goes, would anybody actually be excited to see him return, especially as a lead-in to the next Dr. Strange movie? He was the main villain of the last one, and wasn't especially interesting there. Sure I can see how he would work as a plot device, weakening dimensional barriers and such, but as far as memorable MCU villains go he kinda ranks down there with Malekith.

I don't get how anyone is getting a "not a villian" vibe from Agatha in this show, that Salem flashback was a villain origin story if i ever saw one and kidnapping then choking children is not "grey character" behavior. PLUS SHE KILLED THE FUCKING DOG.

There have been at least four really dumb turns in the life of the Scarlet Witch character in the comics, and Brian Michael Bendis is responsible for at least two of them. House of M and Avengers Disassembled powered her ridiculously up and did some dumb crazy-woman tropes along with it. The other two were John Byrne deciding that she actually had the hots for Wonder Man because the Vision's mind was based on Wonder Man's (always an incredibly ridiculous premise, considering that the two characters really have very little in common in their expressed personalities and besides Wonder Man has been a horribly written and wildly inconsistent character for his entire existence); and then finally more recently deciding that Wanda and Pietro weren't actually mutants and Magneto wasn't actually their father, which apparently was just to simply the legal exposure at the time (e.g., to keep Fox from claiming that they were X-Men characters and couldn't be used in the MCU).

Agatha Harkness isn't a villain exactly in the comics but she's also been manipulative and creepy in at least some of her appearances.

I am really beginning to wonder if

Current rumor is that he meant himself :P

That certainly makes the most sense. Seems almost certain white vision talking to wanda's vision will be a thing.

I really don't see why sword guy has to be working with anyone. And seems especially unlikely it would be anyone magic themed.

I can still imagine an epilogue scene linking Agatha to anyone convenient for a future series or movie.

Didn't she kill her cat or something at one point to not die?

She's not a villian in the sense that she can't be bothered to conquer the world or anything equally silly.

But not a hero in the sense that she mostly wants to stay alive and gives limited shits about the wider world.

In the next episode, when faced with SWORD trying to kill everyone, I expect her to be on Wanda's side - if only for the giggles.

This is what I mean by Agatha not being a villain. She wasn't moustache-twirling levels of badness in this one, and she genuinely seemed interested in what Wanda is more than how she can use Wanda. The origin scene for Agatha clearly showed that she was more interested in knowledge than power for power's sake. She was technically defending herself.

As for Dormammu being the villain and working with Hayward, I don't think Hayward knows he's working with Dormammu so much as Dormammu is influencing him subconsciously, much like I imagine he's been tempting Baron Mordru in the Dr. Strange movie.

In the comics, Agatha deliberately fed other witches/sorcerers to the witch trials in Salem and to later persecution not because she was trying to protect herself but because she thought it got rid of the weak witches and kept the strong ones. That is pretty deep into villain territory. Her interest in people like Franklin Richards was also never altruistic.

Just had a thought.

One thing I was struck by. During Wanda's memory walk there was definitely a moment where Agatha, I believe, shows genuine empathy.

You are correct, Riggswolfe.

I don't think she's evil, I think she's curious. They're witches.

I also don't think this entire thing is due to grief, as the last episode implied. That said, we'll probably never get answers now since it's the white vision show from here on out.

Yeah that definitely happened.

I don't think Agatha is a villain, which is not the same as saying I think she's a good guy. She has been messing with Wanda the whole series but none of the acts seem like they're aimed at manipulating Wanda or getting her to enact some goal, they were much more trying to break the 'happy' life she was crafting. I think Agatha wants to know what Wanda is and how she did what she's done and she has no qualms about upsetting or traumatising Wanda to do that but the trauma isn't the goal. Also when I saw them powering up the White Vision I was thinking 'please don't be Ultron' but I kind of think we are going to see some kind of Ultron. Possibly even just because that was the original plan for the body and without the Mind Stone, Wanda's magic joojoo might well be bringing the body back 'as it was intended'. Hayward clearly sees it as a weapon and it would make sense that intentionality will have a big play when magic is involved.

I'd be happy with this series introducing Wanda as a part of the MCU magic universe and also establishing her power level, I'm not really sure we will see a Dormamu cameo. That said it's definitely MCU style to have a villain behind the villain reveal in a credit sequence.

I get the feeling that Agatha is kind of neutral that can swing up and down the villain/hero spectrum.

That's certainly comics Agatha.

You're all crazy. That was the most standard run of the mill bad guy story we've gotten so far. Gets involved with forbidden knowledge, kills her entire coven including her mother, kidnaps Wanda's children in order to blackmail her into showing her how to get more power. There is not even a slight shade of grey here.

Kinda with Threash on this one. If Agatha wasn't based on a morally ambiguous character from the comics, I think there'd be a lot more people here calling Agatha out in this show as just being a villain.

I think there is grey since the "hero" reformed Vision from her fucking mind bullets (and yet kept him a skin of dead, as she last saw him - theoretically, though maybe Vision is Vision and Dead Vision was Trickster Agatha shit) and kept an entire town in thrall like some bullshit vampire.

Edit: Basically, for agatha to be a villain, we would need to have a hero, and there don't seem to be any here - and vision is a lost little puppy

Monica would be the hero in that case.

It appeared to me her coven was trying to kill her for her dabbling in forbidden magic and it backfired on them. I'm not saying she's a hero, but I don't think she's pure villain either. She's most definitely in the grey category.

I'm sure whatever she got into that caused her own fucking mother to want to kill her was not pure fucking evil at all.

It's not particularly clear Agnes purposefully killed them. Normally an actor will make a move to show they are causing whatever effect (magic, telepathy, etc.) is happening. The only time she made a move was to break her bond around her hands, and later to break the magic tendril thingies from the redshirt witches. They were already dead or dying at that point.

To Threash's point: whatever she learned (whether Agatha consciously summoned the purple magic bit or not) is what killed the witches. But it wasn't "forbidden knowledge" in the sense that no one could learn it. She was on trial for stealing the knowledge before she earned the right to learn it (or perhaps more importantly, before she was deemed mentally stable enough to handle it).

Agatha is obviously a manipulative liar but I think she was sincere when she said she could control it if they only taught her, and that she wanted to be good. As her mother said though she can't be good. I think Agatha will want to help Wanda learn to control her power (and maybe she thinks she's helping now) but she can't express that in behavior like a normal person would anymore, because she's been corrupted.

I think it's pretty clear that she purposefully killed the other witches and that her attempts at saying she needed help controlling her power was her being manipulative. How rapidly her attitude changes as she tries different attempts to get out of the situation, and the fact that she shows zero remorse after killing her own mother (and then snatches the brooch from her corpse and takes off) don't even really show of hint of this just being some accident.

And you know, holding two kids captive and tugging them by the necks with magic is fairly unambiguously evil imagery.

TBF, we aren't even sure the children are actual children rather than creations of chaos magic or even Agatha's magic.

Sure but if the writers/director were actually trying to show Agatha's moral ambiguity in that episode, that's generally not an effective way to go about it.

Edit: And I understand that there could still be a reveal next episode that she doesn't have evil motives here. This is more of a response to people who are suggesting that there was some ambiguity being displayed in this last episode, because I'm just not seeing it.

Agatha will likely be a tragic villain or something (maybe turns to help take down the big bad and dies like Darth Vader), but she is not good.  I believe she thinks she isn’t bad, and the fact she tried to play nice with Wanda means she has some empathy, but the show has made it clear.  The magic that came out of her was purple.  That’s the Dark Dimension magic color (also the color of the Power Stone which just destroys everything.  Marvel has established purple is evil).  To me it seems obvious her sin was reaching out to the dark dimension and likely making a deal with Dormammu, or at least letting it’s corrupting power possess her.  She is literally Kaecilius from the Dr. Strange movie, but got caught.  And I think the line where she pleaded to her mother “I can be good.”  And her mother said “No  you cannot” and then tries to kill her, means that no matter what Agatha thinks she’s doing, the power she tapped will corrupt her (or already has).  Maybe it works like the symbiont from Spiderman.  Anyway's, this is why her own mother knew she had to die, and why Agatha will be evil.

As for Hayward, I thought the last episode also made it clear he is more than he seems.  The way he looked at Wanda and the way he spoke at certain points, showed he was specifically trying to manipulate her.  Maybe reading to much into it, but I think he knew what would happen, knows exactly what’s going on, and engineered this entire thing for his own goals.

My guess:  We’ll find out he either is an imposter who is pretending to be Hayward (alt dimension Loki? Heh), or Hayward who has been possessed by something magical/cosmic (Hydra theory also works, but I’d like to think MCU has moved beyond Hydra at this new phase.  Also, the purpose of this show is to world build up Magic).  Hayward likely caused Monica’s mother’s cancer to come back and kill her, so he could seize control of SWORD. 

I think she has selfish motives. And not fussed if you want to call them evil or her a villian, but they seem to be a different sort of motive to the archetypal villains we've seen, mostly because they aren't purely antagonistic.

She's here to see what she can get out of the situation. And for funsies.

Eh, "I want more power and I'm willing to do fucked up shit to get it" is about as archetypal villain as it gets.

That's Hayward. Agatha is more "wow, how did she do this? I have to know!" but she hasn't really crossed any lines yet other than killing the dog. But I'm not even convinced that was real. The show has a very "unreliable narrator" feel to it and I think maybe "Agatha All Along" is Wanda's version of how she felt about the reveal as it let her blame someone else for what's happening, if only briefly.

The biggest villain thing she has done is holding the kids by the neck. But so far, she hasn't threatened Wanda. She just told her what she is. It could be as simple as her holding them by the necks to keep Wanda from blasting her the second she sees her. We'll know next episode but I'll be very surprised if she doesn't team up with Wanda and HexVision next episode to face off against Sword and WhiteVision. After the fight I suspect she'll just disappear and say something like "We'll meet again Wanda, we have so much to teach each other!" It's always possible she will be a side antagonist in Doctor Strange 2. The Darth Vader to whatever the big bad is basically but I just don't see it.

Edit: The opening scene, I think, really is open to interpretation so I'm not willing to consider it a "villain origin story" at this point.

The more I think on it, the more I'm thinking that

I really hope not, she's been amazing.

I think it's clear you can't take anything that has happened in Westview at face value, not even the dog. AFAIK, the dog could be just as made up/created/illusory as the kids, or Dead Pietro or anything else. Agatha literally turned a bug into a different bug then had her rabbit eat it, talking about illusions the whole time.

Sparky tried to kill itself the moment it 'appeared' so yeah, who knows.

Hahn is amazing in this, they'd be stupid to waste her as a setup character. So far my favorites have been her and the Kat Dennings/dude from Ant-Man combo.

I've been liking the series overall, really cool stuff. I don't try to figure it out, I just enjoy the ride  :grin:

Have to admit, the wife wanted to watch this and the first episode put me off. I know nothing about the MCU or the comics or any of that and I really did not like 50's or 60's sitcoms... so I left the wife to go it alone. However, she decided to binge it Saturday while working on her Etsy shop and I was playing around with an old laptop - have to admit, the show picked up and brought me back into it around the 3rd/4th episode. Not my favorite show, but I will admit I will continue to watch it.

I enjoy reading everyone's thoughts as it gives me some insider opinions about what is going on which fleshes things out a bit more.

That should be a TV show right there.

Just have them wander around the fall out from the movies one at a time trying to manage collateral damage.

I want to see them in an X-files or Fringe style show personally. They wander around tracking down weird stuff that happens. Besides, isn't what you mentioned basically Damage Inc. ?5

I will say that the payoff in this last episode of the entire sitcom premise was fantastic. Remember when we were talking about whether two kids from Sokovia would have seen all those sitcoms? Well, they were about three steps ahead on that one, and it was really poignant, actually.

They also managed in one scene to make the Vision-Scarlet Witch relationship make more actual emotional sense than it did in twenty years of comic-book storytelling.

Re: Agatha

Tbh I thought

(a) this was way too on the nose.

(b) having all the shows on DVD instead of VHS was a weird anachronism.


But the avengers compound scene was great.

Re: DVD rather than VHS it's one of the classic problems comic-books always have, which is backstory or origins that trap a character in a particular time frame. As soon as it's VHS, Wanda is of a certain age.  (Also, at least in my experience, DVDs were more likely even pretty early on in the technology to be hustled on the street in underdeveloped countries: they were lighter, less destructible, and could be played on computer drives. Try to imagine Papa Maximoff having all those old sitcoms on VHS--that's a lot of shit to be hauling around.)

She was born in 1989 per Jimmy Woo. Her parents died when she was ten.

DVD players were just coming to market but certainly wouldn't be in reach of a poor family in eastern europe.

The specific box set wasn't released for several years.

Given the effort made on the rest of the set it just seemed weird. Obviously not a huge deal, says more that this is the biggest moan I have.

If you want you can argue that the elevated level of tech in the MCU allowed DVD players to get to market there several years earlier.

And the same elevated tech simultaneously threw the TVs they get used with backwards 15 years?

What I suspect happened is that they originally planned the scene on VCR, then realised there was a product placement opportunity, or possibly CBS insisted on it. That Dick Van Dyke compilation is available to buy from all good Amazon websites right now. There is even a VCR player in the scene, which looks weathered in keeping with the rest of the set. Then there is a rather slim and clean not-1999 era DVD player sat on top of the VCR.

If you really want an in universe explanation I'd go with Wanda's unreliable memory.

But I'm OK with a weird anachronism.

Um, as late as 2003, I had seen dvd players with special adapters on TVs that were old as shit when I was traveling to various places in Central and South America. Shit, the memory is fuzzy but I had seen a DVD player on one of those old barely color box TVs, in the style I remember my family owning in the mid 80s, this was like 2001 and it was somewhere in Texas.

You all just don't have enough experience in third world or developing countries.

My first DVD player was a PS2 connected to a 36 inch CRT (150 freaking pounds of it, ask me how many times I carried it up or down a flight of stairs). Flat screens were basically unavailable before about 2004, unless you had stupid amounts of money, DVD players were merely very expensive in the late 90's.

Yeah, the timing doesn't totally work, reasonably it would have been 5-10 years later for street hawkers with DVD's in Eastern Europe. But it's fine, it works, VHS would look weird to a less pedantic audience.

--Dave

Trying to tie comics down to specific dates is a bad idea (even though they did it with the birthdate). It's really a minor detail not worth worrying about. Also, the dude was selling shit on the black market in a war-torn Eastern European country. He might just as easily have traded a third child (they were triplets!) for a nice DVD player.

I find myself again at odds with just about everyone on the internet. Didn't really like the finale.

I'm fine with all the stuff with Agatha (more than fine with it tbh), but I think my suspicions about Hayward was vindicated by this episode. Everything I hate about this series can be tied to this character and Marvel's need to make someone other than Wanda the bad guy. The scene with Jimmy and the phone was just pants on head stupid IMO. The show would have been much stronger if a character like Hayward didn't even exist in the show.



So basically I like the end credits stuff and some of the beginning, but the stuff in between I had problems with.

I had the opposite reaction. I found the finale deeply moving even more so than Endgame

I can see being unhappy about how Wanda was allowed to just walk away, but come on: At this point, who is going to stop her?


--Dave

Despite how good this has been, I didn't expect a final episode that strong.

That was a better ending than any MCU film or series. MCU has always had a problem with final acts degenerating into meaningless punching and this didn't.

I don't think the exchange with Monica at the end acknowledged the what she'd done well enough, but better that than a kop out making it all someone else's fault.

And for anyone daft enough to be reading this before watching, there are two credits scenes to wait for.

What they did with the kids in particular really surprised me.

Also I can't help thinking that second scene makes a second season into a racing certainty. Neither rescuing the the kids nor whatever happens with white vision seem appropriate to resolve in someone else's movie.

Yeah, overall this was incredibly good, probably the best thing Marvel has done. If it has a flaw it's that it doesn't really acknowledge how fucked up what Wanda did was, specially after having Agatha actually show her what she was doing to those people.

One simple thing they could have done is put the log cabin scene in before the credits.

I think they were going for 'I fucked up, I can't live in a normal town like I want, so I'm exiling myself to figure this shit out'. But I think putting that scene after the credits makes it feel like 'this story is over, here is the teaser for the next story' instead of 'here are the consequences of my fuck up'.

those of you asking for a kat dennings tv show (someone mentioned x-files)

ok but did you know she's truly terrible and can't carry a show

Overall I thought the show was decent but not great writing elevated by Olsen and Bettany's performances which were fantastic. Bettany can make dialogue that would sound heavy-handed coming out of anyone else's mouth sound like some universal truth. If the guy ever ended up starting a religion I would probably buy into it entirely.

The sitcom stuff was fun and well done, and Wanda had a good arc as a character, I'm just not crazy about some of the additions to her backstory and her powers. Even in the comics I'm not a huge fan of all the magic stuff that's part of Wanda's character. Comics can sometimes have a habit of layering origins on characters, particularly when they're having trouble finding a take on a character that works, and it usually has the effect of just making things more complicated. In the comics we go from a fairly easily explainable origin of Wanda and Pietro being mutants, to them being Magneto's children, and then to the elder god Chthon infusing her with some of his essence when she was born and her and Pietro aren't Magneto's kid, and there's some stuff in there with the High Evolutionary, and her father was the Scarlet Warlock and none of it makes for a good or interesting story.

We're going down that road a bit here, and I know it's comics and we already have stuff like the Sorcerer Supreme, but I'm just never going to take "the Scarlet Witch" seriously as a thing someone is born as rather than just a code name Wanda goes by.

Agreed. She is good in support, but not in a main roll unless it is some slapstick type stuff like her other show.

I agree that they're going to have to really really watch out for the major danger of serial storytelling in a franchise, which is that over time characters accumulate way too many layers of "but wait! actually the REAL deal with this character is that they're an ancient ninja from Mongolia whose soul has ended up in a transgendered midget math genius". Chris Claremont was kind of the original sinner on this over at X-Men, but it's also a consequence of comic books needing to constantly prevent characters from getting old while also constantly making them seem like they're changing. So maybe the MCU is going to avoid this because a) they have fewer installments--there aren't 30 titles coming out 12 times a year and b) they're letting the characters get older, change and die. So with Claremont's model, you get a character like Danielle Moonstar who begins by being a Native American who has to fight a bear spirit, becomes an actual Valkyrie who is supposed to ferry the spirits of the dead to Valhalla on her flying horse, is begged by a Native American deity to come back to them instead, becomes a SHIELD agent, gets more psychic powers, becomes a teacher for mutants who also teaches Native American history, loses her powers, regains her powers, becomes an awesomely skilled marksman with guns, becomes a Valkyrie again, and after that point the complexity of the character's evolution just loses me completely.

Wanda is another like that. They really have got to avoid this. It's ok to have one or two twists in a character's evolution, especially if they haven't had a movie of their own, but they have to put a cap on it.

She can stop herself, which is the point.

I don't think it matters how many twists you have, but what does matter is that the story doesn't become about all that lore cruft.

The MCU has done a good job of avoiding it.

I'm just proud that my perfect record of inaccurate lore-nerd predictions about possible twists remains intact. Very nearly batting .000!

I just noticed what the closing shot reminds me of:


--Dave

It was exactly that, it even had his theme song.

I really liked this. It's a great prolonged to the next MCU phase. Happy it didn't get into big bads and big reveals. The scale was just right.

I forgot to mention one of my favorite bits: there's a scene in the Vis v. Vis fight that's eerily similar to Supes vs. Zod in MoS. I thought it was kind of hilarious, given how both fights ended very differently.

I think his theme song was there to hit us over the head with "This will be continued in Doctor Strange 2".

Also, I read up on the Darkhold and it says it corrupts those who use it. I guess it's basically Marvel's answer to the Necronomicon which considering it's from a god named Cthon is a bit of a "duh" thing. Anyway, that'd explain why MCU Agatha is so different from comics Agatha. It also leads me to think Wanda may be the antagonist of Doctor Strange 2.

The Darkhold was actually used in Agents of SHIELD which I realize will probably have no bearing on this whatsoever but there you go.

I thought this was goddamn brilliant. Yes, I know it's comics and I'm a nerd so I'm scoring it on a curve but still. So I was wrong about Dormammu and I still don't think Agatha gets to be a complete villain from here as she clearly is going to be in Westview for when Wanda needs to ask questions about magic. I dug just about everything in this episode, though I do agree that Jimmy Woo getting the phone was kind of silly. It's comics, so I'll allow it. I also think this show needs some credit for not really shying away from things. Wanda's a villain in the eyes of the people of Westview and nothing she ever says can undo that. She didn't get to have a happy ending with Vision and her kids, and had to make the hard choice to let them go.

With this level of quality, I'm really looking forward to Falcon/Winter Soldier.

The Darkhold was also in The Runaways.

Trolling twitter and apparently people didn't know about the ship of Theseus. I would have thought that the paradox was better known but I guess I've been living in an echo chamber.

I'll admit that despite my higher education and endless internet debate bs for the last 20 years, I'd never actually heard of The Ship of Theseus till this.  Kind of awkward, because googling, feels like I really should have.

Hey, comic books were a great way to learn about shit like this when I was a kid. Next they need to do Zeno's Paradox in the Hawkeye show.

In the comics, the Darkhold is definitely and invariably bad news. Among other things, it's what was used to create vampires tens of thousands of years ago.

Is Runaways or SHIELD MCU-continuity now? Has Feige said anything about that? I've been kind of assuming that they're just going to quietly forget everything that happened in both shows. They used the visual design of the book from the other shows, so...

Feige really hasn't much acknowledged the Runaways or Agents of SHIELD past Winter Soldier. The last season of SHIELD though could open up all sorts of possibilities for putting it in an alternate timeline than the MCU one.

Also, the Darkhold has been known to have an effect on the person using it, similar to a demonic possession, or at the very least a demonic seduction.

The short-lived Darkhold comic in the 90s had a fairly good premise although the execution lacked at times (partly because it was launched as part of the Ghost Rider/Midnight Suns family of books).

I've heard of it as the Paradox of Grandpa's Axe: My grandfather only ever owned one axe, he replaced the handle 5 times and the head twice. But he was very specific it was always the same axe.

--Dave

I don't think it's that unusual not to have heard of this philosophical discussion. I have a college degree and even took a philosophy and logic class but if I ever learned of it, I forgot it until years later. I only knew about it before the show because of a nerdy Star Trek debate I once had. Basically the old Dr. McCoy "do you commit murder the first time you use a transporter on someone?" thing became a topic of debate at my gaming table one night when we were waiting on food or something.4

Script was properly written. The bit about the ship relied on you either not having heard of it or at least recognising it was obscure, to reinforce that Vision is smart, susceptible to logic, and that the white one is definitely Vision.

I... don't know that it relied on you never having heard of it? Maybe you meant it assumed most of  the audience wouldn't know it? I did a philosophy BA and MA so it's pretty bread and butter but yeah, it would have been a pretty awful move to use the Ship of Theseus as a shorthand without explaining the problem directly in the dialogue. It was definitely an appropriate way of ending it that did some good character reinforcement. I was actually afraid it was going to result in a logic trap where WandaVision caused Vision to self-destruct since he was the 'real' Vision that he had been tasked to destroy. I think that would have sucked, doubly so in the context of what actually happened.

I'll admit to being a little disappointed with the Agatha plotline simply because her motivation really wasn't clear. I don't think her actions really went full on villain, considering that the only beings she threatened (that we saw in the modern day) weren't actually real. She wasn't going out of her way to endanger people and what she did would seem to line up with either getting power for power's sake or taking Wanda's power to try and prevent some greater evil happening due to ignorance. So she could be outright comic book Evil but she could equally be an arrogant and selfish person who at least has an admirable goal.

+1 that this seems like it's setting Wanda up as, if not an antagonist for Strange 2 then at least a plot driver with Strange competing against someone else for 'control' of Wanda. Although I'm curious to see how they handle all this plot and character development for her in the movie without assuming people have seen WandaVision. Basically I think they'll have to add something in so do they just have a 1 liner explaining the situation or will we get a set piece of some kind with Strange investigating legends of a special magic user that might be endagering the world? They'll have a fine line to tread between not confusing people who haven't seen the series and not boring people who have.

Yes, I also was afraid for a second that this was going to be a Captain-Kirk-destroys-computer-with-illogic thing. SO GLAD they did not do that: any sapient being that can be convinced to annihilate itself just by changing its linguistic-cognitive understanding of its instructions is not sapient (it's not even a good program!)

I'm ok with Agatha. It's Hayward whose motivations are either unbelievably boringly comic-book pop-culture standard or are underexplained/odd. If there's any organization in the MCU that should be hyper-alert to being infilitrated/subverted by people who have their own agenda, it's SHIELD/SWORD. Just the whole "I'm not letting 3bn in vibranium go to waste, I want a synthetic being whose former comrades and lover think is dead reanimated in a recognizable form but under my command!" is like wait what? at this point in the MCU. What did Hayward think was the plan from that point onward? What was he going to use "his" Vision to accomplish? Just why has he shifted SWORD away from aliens to robots and AI generally considering that the threat from aliens must be a 100 urgent global priority in the MCU after the Snap? Why is he being given that kind of latitude?

Maybe the post-credit #1 is an indication that Hayward will be explained further in Secret Invasion (e.g., he's an evil Skrull). But otherwise the character is either a lame cliche or a dangling plot thread.

I could also buy he has some awareness of Skrull plots and sees Vision as a weapon humanity might be able to wield outside of the Avengers framework to combat interstellar threats. But yeah, as things stand he was a fizzle of a threat that they seemed to be teasing by having him goad and set up Wanda. I mean, him doing that didn't seem to make any sense with the context we were given beforehand so it almost felt like the writers had been planning for something like him working with Agatha to set Wanda off but decided to drop that without really fixing the set up with Vision's body.

I'm not expecting any fleshing out of the character though, I think Hayward has played his role unless they're going to retread the Hydra plotline with Skrulls in SWORD or something.

Like I said, it relied you either not having heard about or recognising it was obscure.

Because if it were neither of those things it would tell you nothing about white vision.

As for hayward, he just seemed like a typical antagonistic senior officer to me.

This doesn't make sense. Your average viewer probably just went "oh, they're talking philosophy. Oh, they're both Vision! I get it!"

It wasn't intended to prove how smart either Vision was or anything like that. It was just a non-CGI fight resolution that fit with Vision's prior characterization.


The dude shot at children. That puts him a bit above "typical" antagonist. He didn't even have a compelling reason to do it at that moment. It wasn't intended to threaten Wanda or Vision. The kids were just standing there. He just flat out went pure sociopathic villain.

The MCU has had a few characters like that, but they've almost entirely turned out to be Hydra agents.

"Generic secret agent/cop asshole" is a pretty common genre thing but given how much attention they've now given to the prickly relationship between the governments and the superheroes and so on--and even in this show how much world-building they did around SWORD--it seems really weird to just have Hayward be obsessed with rebuilding the Vision and killing Wanda/her kids/her fictional Vision without any further explanation besides "He's a Type A asshole guy". If this isn't a Chekhov's Gun, then it's kind of a mistake.

He’s a plot device, not really a character. People aren’t even going to remember his name a month for now let alone be clamoring for him to come back. Guy wanted to reactivate Vision under either his or government control (unclear). Wanda was a tool he needed to reactivate Vision, an obstacle that had no intention of letting the government keep Vision dead or reactivated, and she was also a legitimate threat after taking over Westview. He generally seemed like an opportunist rather than some sort of villain mastermind.

And given that White Vision escapes containment and goes off mission almost immediately, not a very effective one.

--Dave

I think that's correct - things like him antagonising Wanda, etc. happened to drive the plot and help build a credible motivation for Wanda but the way it was played and the level of insight needed for it really suggested he was more than just an opportunist. I think there might have been some subplot that got cut and he was just kept as a generic government goon but it could equally have been some lazy writing. His whole role didn't really make any sense.

And I don't understand what eldaec means by the Ship of Theseus resolution for the Vision fight not doing anything if you're familiar with it. It's philosophy 101 stuff but the point wasn't to show that Vision is a genius with wikipedia in his head, the point as I saw was to show that Vision isn't a basic robot with simple programming and he's also not, first and foremost, a fighter. He's thoughtful, adaptable and open to communication in a way that a lot of the human heroes probably wouldn't be. I guess I could be a little superior here and say that most people who are familiar with the thought experiment would also be aware enough to realise that writers aren't going to have him engaging in discussions of Spinozan Monads or spilling out some formal logical proof of physical properties be identical with Identity or whatever because that would be bad TV and require the audience to have at least read a few dozen wikipedia chapters to have some clue about what was happening.

The problem with Hayward is he wasn't at all interesting. Also he didn't shoot at children. He shot at Wanda's Super Simulation Children. And he knew that since he'd been watching Wandavision.

And yeah, what Vel Said, he was purely a plot device.

So was Robert Redford's character in Winter Soldier, but in his case, the whole "control the world by eliminating independently-minded people" plan made some degree of villainous sense.

I don't really get what Hayward's plan here was. If it was "I have 3bn of vibranium here, gotta get something out of that", I would guess selling the scrap--or offering the body to the Wakandans in return for something--would get you something out of it.

If it was, "I could have a very powerful android slave for my agency to command", well, for what? What's the mission you've got in mind? They paid enough attention to the Post-Snap status quo to suggest they take that seriously as a story engine for the current phase of films and shows, so surely the world's governments have something in mind about what they want a security organization focused on extraterrestrial threats to be doing. When the World Security Council calls up their boy to ask for a briefing and he says, "Well, I've finally done it, I have a powerful android slave built from the corpse of an Avenger", what's that going to about?

I've said this before, but I think Hayward's plan was the same plan the government/military would have in real life if they ended up with a piece of "tech" like Vision. It's not unlike when the government wanted the Iron Man tech turned over or when they were trying to use the Tesseract to power weapons like Hydra did. Yes, just as pure scrap Vision would be valuable. He also had a highly advanced AI made up partly from an Infinity Stone. As a whole, if they could find a way to reactive Vision you can absolutely see why a government agency would want him under their control, especially in a world filled with super human beings where even people like Captain America just decide they aren't bound by U.S. law.

Honestly, even with his actions in the finale I'm kinda wondering on what grounds is he in any sort of trouble at end? Even with firing on the twins, he saw from watching the show that they were creations of Wanda's rather than mind controlled townspeople, they had powers, and they used those powers to stop disarm his people. Looking at the power levels Wanda displayed and how she was using her powers to enslave people, I think it's absolutely understandable that the government would be trying to use lethal force there. Hayward is a villain in about the same way Gen. Thunderbolt Ross is. He's an antagonist to an incredibly powerful and largely out of control "hero". One could argue that he was the final straw that pushed Wanda over the edge, but that's about it.



I think he has to be an opportunist because there's no way he could have predicted that Wanda's reaction to seeing Vision disassembled would be to take over a small town, turn it into a sitcom, and recreate the Vision. The closest he comes to having a plan at any point is to send in the drone to get blasted by Wanda so he can syphon the energy out later, but that's the opportunist part. It wasn't some grand plan he had from the start because there's literally no way it could have been. At best you can say that maybe when he showed Wanda Vision's body originally he was hoping her powers would flare up then so he could capture some of the energy.

Here's a question: how did the US government end up with Vision's body in the first place? His body was last seen in Wakanda. Did the Avengers hand him over to the government? That seems unlikely, given Cap's opinions. Did Wakanda? That seems less likely, given Vision was made out of stolen vibranium. How does the government even have a claim on Vision in the first place?

Hayward's sole reasons for existing are to make Wanda look good and to piss me off.

Sokovia Accords possibly.

Like, we've seen these guys are detail-oriented and they pay attention to (and vicariously play with) fan theories. So that's actually a great question. Why on Earth would Wakanda as we've seen it hand over the Vision's body to a US-resident international agency in the era after the Snap? Ok, so we know that a lot of Wakanda's elite got dusted and I get why they absolutely cannot play around with Wakanda right now without being in a position to decide what the status quo for Black Panther 2 looks like, but it still kind of has to be that SWORD is an international agency that has Wakanda as well as other countries on board. So why would they put Hayward in charge? A typical dickish American man? Why would they let him do what he wants?

In the comics, there was a general international agreement to dismantle the Vision as he had been but that's because he'd actually committed aggression against the countries of the Cold War world (all of them) by trying to control the world's computer systems including nuclear weapons systems. In the MCU pre-Infinity War, the Vision is almost the least threatening being associated with the Avengers in some ways--the Sokovia powers have to be way more concerned about Captain America's squad but also frankly Tony Stark, who is a loose cannon even after the events of Civil War. I can see some governments viewing him with concern still because of his origin, but if they had an active threat table, I can't see why he'd be high on it. Post-Snap, securing his remains would seem like a low item on the overflowing to-do list, especially because the remaining Avengers are so important to global order--the last thing you'd want to do is seriously piss them off with some kind of secret project involving the Vision, whom they all liked and respected.

If for some reason the writers were forced to retroactively explain this, I imagine they'd go with "the Vision had become a US citizen".

Well, technically, he was born in New York City.

--Dave

Trying to remember which comic-book writer tried to get rid of the idea of Superman as an immigrant by saying that since he was "born" in the USA in Kansas, he was actually an American citizen like any other.

If SWORD was basically the international agency tasked with securing "sentient weapons" then it makes sense that Wakanda might hand over the Vision's body as part of the agreement to join the international community.

Really the most unbelievable element of the whole thing is the idea that the US would permit any international agency to deploy within its borders with just a single FBI agent attached. And I didn't really notice because SWORD is basically portrayed as a US agency here, I actually forgot they're meant to have some international status.

This isn't really a criticism of the show, I'm just curious if it was down to an oversight (because why would there be foreigners in an international organisation?) or if there was some kind of conscious decision to not pull in any international elements, whether that be because it would just distract viewers, ease of hiring people or something else.

It is a fundamentally questionable idea that sword and shield could exist in any form. Or that they should.

Unaccountable paramilitary organisations aren't automatically the good guys outside of comics and star trek.

I mean I don't think I'd be particularly happy with an international paramilitary organisation accountable to a shadowy set of pseudo-independent directors with a mandate to operate where ever they see fit with a seemingly unlimited budget. I just think it was interesting to point out that 1) such an organisation would never get away with operating without direct oversight within the US and 2) would certainly not be staffed top to bottom with US military/intelligence bods. Basically SWORD as presented here only really makes sense as a US alphabet agency, which is only really relevant in the context of explaining them having Vision's body from the Wakandans because they're supposedly a UN body.

I guess I'm just wondering if their presentation here was a deliberate choice for some reason (avoiding needing to explain how an international task force is operating unsupervised within the US, etc.) or was an oversight (the writers/producers wanted an official, largely unaccountable body representing authority so that is obviously a US alphabet agency) where they forgot SWORD is meant to be under the UN. It's got nothing to do with whether a real-life equivalent would be a good thing.

They've been leaning into "the MCU is not the same as our world" from the beginning, though. Their World War 2 was really different than ours--and that laid the groundwork for a different kind of international system.

I think it's a legacy of the comics vision of SHIELD and SWORD but taking more than 10 seconds to think about a UN organisation that is staffed top to bottom by US military and intelligence personnel with an international mandate - I can't see even an MCU Russia, China or collection of African countries that would be perfectly happy to effectively approve of giving the US jurisdiction over everything in their countries.

In total fairness I'm sure this is something that's been discussed heavily after Cap 2 but it seems a bit of a lost opportunity not to make these organisations look a bit closer to actual UN agencies with a more international set of top brass. That said it's not ruining it for me, I guess from the view of the movies I'm surprised they haven't had a senior Chinese official in SHIELD or similar to get some CCP distribution kudos.

Maybe Shang Chi will do something to push in that direction. Obviously Black Widow will tell us more about MCU Russia...

I'm hoping for a good old cold war vibe with some crimson dynamo kinda shit going down. They've got so much cool side IP to farm.

Binge watched this over the past few days. Good stuff all around; it struck a good mix of being a stand alone show about Wanda + Vision vs being an MCU property.

Caught up on the thread here too. Y'all had some wild theories, most of which involve characters I've never heard of so I couldn't make heads or tails of them.

Echoing Rendakor here, a bit.

I loved this series. It was marvelous. I'm also not going to go back and read all your bullshit film school dissection of it.

As a guy with a film history minor I literally called it one of the best shows ever made, so like, there's nothing special about your assessment.

Wasn't film school dissection, it was comics-nerdery bullshit. Come on, identify your garbage analysis correctly, we garbage analysts are easily insulted.

Looks like there is going to be an Agatha Harkness spin-off.

https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/wandavision-spinoff-kathryn-hahn-1235082445/

(from twitter) Disney is making a Hahn Solo series  :why_so_serious:

Looks like it is only at the paying rich dudes to have lunch stage.