Mikey Zee: You know, I thought it would be a good idea to do this week’s WandaVision recap “on location,” from the basement of this cool old house. I had this idea that being surrounded by stone, subflooring, and centuries-old root vegetables might give me some inspiration. I know they always say not to go in the creepy basement, because it could be haunted, or be a trap, but I just couldn’t resist. And in the end, it wasn’t even the creepy dungeon that did me in, it was the fucking storm doors shutting on me–
Wait, is that–hello? HELLO? IS SOMEBODY UP THERE???
Justin Partridge: WHY HEY THERE, MIKEY! It was Justin ALL ALONG! EEYYYYHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH!
[Cut to a restrained but tasteful talking head set up in the dungeon. Justin sits in the chair in full witch regalia.]
God, I’ve been so NERVOUS about this, I have to be honest, and I think I might have overdone it with the intro. I mean, to be totally frank, I’m still a fairly lower man in the overall scheme of the Nexus of All ComicsXF Realities and I’m fine with that!
You have to know your limits, my therapist and overbearing mother always said, and I’m well acquainted with mine! But these WandaVision columns? A BIG DEAL, right? It’s a big show! And Mikey runs a pretty wonderful thing here and I don’t want to ruin it with my my my my…ya know….ME-ness. It’s just…you know, it’s HARD. It’s really hard. It’s… yeah it’s really hard.
BUT LIKE WANDA, I’m totally fine and not spiraling about it ALL. s’gonna be FUN! So fun.
[we cut back to the dungeon, Mikey doesn’t look very scared.]
Do ya see the cobwebs? Pretty spooky, right?
MZ: Yeah… I mean, I’m terrified for the condition of my lungs right now. The cobwebs are so dusty. And that dripping noise… there’s definitely hidden mold in this foundation. I’ve watched enough HGTV to know…
Cool witch costume, though. I love the, uh, collared shirt. Subtle, but evocative. Very Agnes of you.
JP: OH THIS OL’ THING?! Nah, just a little number to mark the occasion! Also there is for sure mold here. I think I saw a lichen that looked like Man-Thing earlier.
BUT I AM EXCITED! I look forward to these write-ups every week and having you all here to my barely furnished and more-than-a-little-spore filled rumpus room is a grief dream come true! Especially dealing with such a packed and lore filled episode that makes a wonderful use of early Aughts “mockumentary” sitcom tricks and conventions!
It’s a Wundergorian delight! I don’t wanna waste one more second.
Hang on, Mikey, I’ve always wanted to try this. *Makes Wanda Hands* AZARATH! METRION! ZINTHOS! YEEEYYHAHAHHEHEHEHEHEH!
[They both DISAPPEAR in puff of purple, legally permissible smoke]
Playing Hooky
MZ: So, Wanda’s got a case of the Somedays. (That’s what I’m calling a case of the Mondays that happens in a world where the passage of time is questionable as it is being controlled by a superhuman with ambiguous powers.) Her grasp on the reality she’s built is getting shaky, as her perfect life falls apart around her ears. Vision left her, Pietro questioned her, and her twins video game console is turning into Uno cards. So she decides what she really needs is a day off, and Agnes is all too excited to give her one.
But it seems to me like there’s some genuine thing that Wanda is pushing down in favor of maintaining a sitcom exterior–even if it’s a dysfunctional, postmodern one. What do you think, Justin?
JP: Oh, I absolutely LOVED it.
Because on its surface, this is a CLASSIC Modern Family set up, right? So much so that I’m 92% sure Julie Bowen has done this precise plot, down to the talking head “interview” exposition and all. Probably even a FEW times. That show was on for a billion, barely funny years.
But like all of Wanda’s episodic Hex dreams, a darkness lingers juuuuuuust to the edges of it all, which is given further explicitness with the world around them literally shifting at random. More concerningly, completely out of Wanda’s ultimate control.
BUT ALSO AGAIN, the show continues to play the tropes and conventions of its chosen sitcom type like a Sokovian fiddle! Originally when Mikey (and WonderEditor Charlie) recruited me for this venture, I was coming on board for possible “Married…With Children”-like shenanigans (which we still might even get, if only for a beat or so). But these mockumentary shows are positively RIFE for parody and once again WandaVision nails them to the wall, all while still delivering some tremendous Marvel 616-inspired goofery in the B and C plots and genuinely affecting darkness around Wanda’s chosen therapy binging.
(Ed. Note – Marvel 616 is the comics universe!)
Way back before I was touched by the wonder of Not Being A Comics Critic, I dabbled a bit in being obsessed with sitcoms. I mainlined all the classics (your Cheerses, your NewsRadios, your 3rd Rocks From The Suns etc etc), but the stuff that was starting to catch on TV at the time was precisely THIS! The Office, Modern Family (obvi), Parks and Rec, and the criminally underseen Trial & Error (which contains a Kristen Chenowith performance for the AGES, I tell ya) just to name a few.
While the format quickly lost its luster aside from a few standouts, you can absolutely see how and why this would be something WandaVision would want to toy with within the confines of what it’s doing. It’s allowing ample opportunity for our leads to do some choice directly-to-camera mugging, plenty of easy exposition (delivered wonderfully by the aforementioned cast), AND plenty of narrative space for the episode’s script to bounce in and out of the Hex and headlong into more sharply honed creepiness.
But I digress a bit, I think the opening moments being expressly focused on Wanda, sans Vision and the Twins, is a smart choice and one that lets us, the audience, breathe a little bit after the expansive cliffhanger that did some S. W. O. R. D. swallowing last week.
WE are just as disoriented as Wanda as and we get plenty of chances to see Olsen playing it, both in and out of the “interview” spaces that dot the episode. Hahn’s Agnes naturally also shines through in this format, pinging well from the vamping in the “present” to deadpan talk about biting children to the unseen camera crew. We also get some fun visual touchstones back to the “original” houses of the previous episodes.
I saw people talking about how “slight” of an episode this was but I’m not really sure they watched the same episode we did, Mikey.
MZ: I agree, because there’s just so much to take on in this episode. I also loved seeing the bits from previous episodes that show just how far Wanda’s world is spiralling out of control… even the stork from the second episode has a cameo!
We also see how calm and accepting the twins are of all this. We know that the show’s world exists past the episodes we see. I can only assume in the narrative, this is a dynamic that has developed over time since Pietro got kicked to the curb. The twins clearly want to help Wanda, want to sort out what’s wrong, but she isn’t telling them anything.
I think Olsen is doing a great job of emoting here—last week she went from confident to confused. Then in this episode, she’s almost given up, which kind of reflects how Modern Family and modern sitcoms more broadly tend to have families that are disjointed, on the verge of falling apart. Like you said, not only does this let them do the “confessional” camera, it reinforces how Wanda is isolating herself by refusing to accept help to solve any problems. And she’s almost refusing to solve any of her problems at all.
JP: one. Hundred. Percent. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think this show has a lot more in common with Crazy Ex Girlfriend than it does any of the sitcom styles it’s parodying. It’s all grounded, real deal emotions filtered through the lens of kooky comic book crazy AND the Golden Age of TV.
But that’s only the tip of this Synthezoid iceberg, my pretties! Let’s shake our Bells, Books, and Candles to the rest! YYEEEEHAHEHEHEHEHEHEH!
Red Light, Green Light
JP: So while Wanda, the Twins, and Agnes deal with Wanda’s case of the Somedays in Westview proper, our favorite Android Who Can Cry and new doctorate holder Darcy Lewis find themselves tangled in this week’s sitcom tomfoolery on the new edges of the expanded Hex.
I will say that these scenes in particular are a bit expository as Darcy is having to catch up the amnesiac Vision up on his origins and what’s been happening since his death in Avengers: Infinity War. But even with the exposition explosion, both Paul Bettany and Kat Dennings find a new tremendous dynamic and also play up the “Jimming” the camera and talking head segments with aplomb.
These scenes also gave me one of my favorite gags of the episodes, where Vision and Darcy (now rewritten as an escape artist in the new S. W. O. R. D. Traveling Circus) reconnect and Darcy is done up in chains, only to then cast them all off with a huff and little to no effort at all. It’s stupid but it’s MY kinda stupid.
What about you, Mikey? Did you dig this new Marvel 2-in-One team up between Darcy and Vis?
MZ: Yes! Darcy and Vision feel like a true odd couple, and the music, uh, underscores that. I feel like we need to talk about how great the music is in these segments too. The team behind the show handled the musical cues from shows like Modern Family perfectly, leaning into the ridiculous off-kilter stingers in lieu of laugh tracks.
It intensifies when they steal the food truck and make a break for it. We see Darcy and Vision bond over science, but while Darcy clearly has a hobby in watching sitcoms and soap operas to inject her life with drama, Vision has no such ideas about what it means to be human. Darcy feels compelled to abide by the rules Wanda’s world is putting forward. But Vision finally gets fed up with them after Wanda ends up playing an extended game of Red Light, Green Light. He throws off his microphone in the middle of an interview session, coming back to the truck and just ghosting through the top of it.
I sure hope Darcy is okay…
On the other hand, we finally learn who Monica’s secret helper is… and it’s not at all who I suspected. It’s just some normal kind of S.W.O.R.D. agent, who has gotten hold of an extremely armored moon rover. Which I guess is a good thing to have when you’re fighting all kinds of aliens with death lasers and Nintendo Power Gloves.
JP: AND SEE, I think that may be a feint.
Like I am very glad her and Woo’s backup is another woman of color but I don’t think it would just be another random side-character (whose name actually escapes me at the moment?)
MY money is still on Adam “Blue Marvel” Brashear BUT that could be a whole other column tbh. We have to talk Agnes and Monica!
BIPPITITY! BOPPITY! BOO! EYEYYAHHAHEHEHEH
MZ: There he goes again… guess I better make like Vision and jet on out of here…
Hide and Seek
JP: Even as the characters receive some more texture and awareness of their own backstories (and eldritch TV prison), the script throws at us some MAJOR reveals as it barrels toward its now viral conclusion.
The most obvious of these reveals is the explicit naming of Kathryn Hahn’s Agnes as none other than THEE Agatha Harkness, one time not-at-all-terrifying nanny to the Fantastic Four, ex-Avengers baddie, and one of the longest-running antagonists of Dr. Strange and the old-school Defenders. This is a reveal that a lot of us have been expecting for a bit, but that didn’t make the scene any less fun. Nor did it sap any energy from the tremendously catchy theme tune Agatha is graced with in the final scene (which has already gone viral in several incarnations by now).
MZ: Like everyone else, it is stuck in my head. Plus, I guess we now know there was some significance to the lavender spray that Agnes used on the twins… it wasn’t just aromatherapy!
JP: BUT EVEN MORE INTERESTING is that not only do we get Agatha, but we get, for my money, one of the weirdest things to ever grace the frames of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A shout out to the Nexus of All Realities, contained within another canny “ad” in this episode. The Nexus is…truly fuckin’ odd and something that I NEVER in a million years would think we would get in these shows (as most of the films thusfar have kind of shied away from some of the more fantastical elements of the comics they are adapting).
For those that are less familiar with the Nexus, allow us to explain. So while the Marvel Universe is technically a multiverse, the other “Earths” of Marvel are a bit harder to get to than the Orrery of Worlds over in Detective Comics Comics. While one can pop over to Earth-000 or Earth-X with little more than a Boom Tube and Cosmic Treadmill in DC, at Marvel it’s a little trickier and always contains at least one trip to one of the many Nexus points scattered throughout the Marvel universe.
Overseen usually by either Uatu the Watcher, Man-Thing, or a powerful magic user/current Sorcerer Supreme, the Nexus of All Realities is precisely that! An anchor-point within “our” world and within every other world and possible reality, allowing heroes and mages alike free travel between the worlds after their fraught pilgrimage to the Nexus. At times the Nexus was housed beneath Wundagore Mountain, inside the Sanctum Sanctorum, and even Man-Thing’s Swamp (which Steve Gerber used to call “one of the most important swamps” in all of comics). Sometimes even were all three at the same time and more, as the Nexus is just one of those narratively powerful things and could sustain itself across multiple books and creative teams.
AGATHA EVEN HAS THE FREAKING DARKHOLD! The Marvel version of the Necromicon that used to give Phil Coulson and his Agents of SHIELD so much trouble on tv just a few years back!
It is all VERY exciting, but did this hard right turn into Mighty Marvel Magicks catch your fancy, Mikey?!
MZ: Yes! So much so that I even went back and rewatched Thor: The Dark World to investigate a lead!
Apparently there was a reference to the Nexus in Dr. Erik Selvig’s combined multiverse theory, but I didn’t hear it even after rewatching multiple times. What I did get is that there’s a lot of Marvel weirdness that’s been introduced into the canon MCU. The Crossroads and The Fault are both weird Marvel Comics liminal spaces on Erik’s chalkboard… and both of them I had to look up because they’re so out there that even I didn’t know them.
JP: BUT EVEN ON TOP OF THAT, the embarrassment of Marvel riches that this is, MONICA GOES FULL PHOTON (maybe)!!!
They have been building up to this since her introduction episode, building it up further with Darcy’s revelation that Monica has had her DNA rewritten TWICE now having been pulled into (then Hex Bolted OUT of) The Hex, but after her fancy-schmancy magic moon buggy fails, she crosses the boundary a third time!
Leading to the episode’s most affecting and trippy sequence to date! GOD it was so good, back me up here, Mikey.
MZ: Oh my god. Oh my god! So first, she takes this journey where she almost splits out into all parallel Monicas, but she’s able to keep herself together both because of her faith in herself, and her mom’s faith in her. It’s an incredible, emotional moment…
And then she’s back in Westview. We see the world through her new eyes, which show her all the electromagnetic, or EM, radiation coming off the power lines, sources of heat, the stars, and even the moon (which doesn’t generate EM radiation, but reflects light, heat, and radio waves)!
(Another score for the costume department in meshing her S.W.O.R.D. uniform here with her comics superhero uniform too.)
JP: OH GOD I WAS ACTUALLY GONNA MENTION HER PREFAB COSTUME.
I know people like to harp on the MCU’s weird insistence that we don’t wanna see heroes in their comic accurate costumes but I feel like WandaVision overall has kind of done a lot to cast off those aspersions. Monica showing up basically in her original Captain Marvel costume (AFTER JUST BEING PSYCHICALLY CHEERED ON by Carol “Princess Sparklefingers” Danvers) is a big step in the right direction.
Speaking of steps in the right direction, last BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST, we are allowed our first post-credits sequence! Revealing thaaaaatttt…PIETRO II isn’t actually gone! Merely… hanging… out, I guess? Since his Hex Bolting during the Halloween Spooktacular. The Discourse has been reading this as a sign (along with Monica’s Photonic upgrades) that Wanda is being set up for an inverse M-Day; making her the magical Rosetta Stone that finally allows us proper Mutants in the MCU.
But I’m not so sure, Mikey. I honestly just think this might just be the show not wanting to waste Evan Peters, what do you think?
MZ: Yeah, honestly I think the Internet Writ Large has theorycrafted itself into a paper bag, so it’s our turn to get them out of there. I think all of this is some very clever nods to fns, but I don’t think we’re quite getting a reverse M-Day. Just like I don’t think the Hex looking like a giant M’Kraan Crystal is actually going to bring the Inhumans back from Awful TV Purgatory (even if the M’Kraan Crystal being ANOTHER kind of Nexus is a link that could be made.)
Now, Wanda explicitly being a Nexus Being, on the other hand… maybe the show will go there, but I don’t think it will mean that alternate reality Fantastic Four will show up. What I do think this will all lead in to is the Time Variance Authority, who we know from the trailers is responsible for keeping Loki on the straight and narrow in his new show.
Since Wanda, and Agnes-atha, are causing problems with the flow of time, someone might stop in to keep time flowing smoothly. So it will definitely be interesting to see what this next chapter will hold.
Well, Justin, it has been an absolutely wicked pleasure.
JP: OMG, THE PLEASURE IS ALL MINE! These WandaVision write-ups are the highlight of my OWN WandaVision Watching Experience so being here has been a total GAS all on its own. Thank you so much Mikey and WonderEditor Charlie for allowing it to happen!
PLEASE, c’mon back to my dusty, not at all disgusting witch-basement any ol’ time! UNTIL NEXT TIME, keep those witch hats pointy and the cauldrons hot! It’s never a bad time for WITCH STUFF YEEEYYEY*coughCOUGH* okay I’m done now.
