WandaVision

[Rendakor]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

[eldaec]

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Threash]

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

[MediumHigh]

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

[MahrinSkel]

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

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

[Riggswolfe]

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

Smart ass answer: Watch the show.

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

[eldaec]

OK mystery over then.

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

[Riggswolfe]

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.

[Threash]

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

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Khaldun]

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...)

[Surlyboi]

[MahrinSkel]

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

--Dave

[eldaec]

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

It is also fairly common sitcom joke.

[Raguel]

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 think that was just Darcy.

[Khaldun]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[Riggswolfe]

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

--Dave

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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.

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[Raguel]

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.)

[Khaldun]

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.

[MediumHigh]

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

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Raguel]

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.

[Threash]

I think that bit was perfect. Holy shit.