WandaVision: Welcome to the MCU

WandaVision | Season 1 | Episodes 4-7
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For a quick read, go to Review. For a complete summary, go to Recap.

KBear Recap [Read time: 5-7 min]

Episode 4. We Interrupt This Program

Dust particles integrate to become a person, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). She wakes up in her mother’s hospital room. Outside there is complete chaos as other people are blipping back. She runs into Dr. Harley (Lana Young) who tells her Marie Rambeau died three years ago, two years after Monica disappeared. Three weeks later, Monica arrives at S.W.O.R.D. headquarters where Acting Director Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) greets her. He explains that they went away from manned space missions to making sentient weapons. Marie helped create S.W.O.R.D. and Monica practically grew up there. He sends her on a mission to New Jersey to deliver a drone to the FBI for a missing person case. Monica meets FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), he had a person in witness protection who flew the coop. When he contacted the man’s relatives and associates, they had never heard of him. They talk to a local sheriff who’s never heard of Westview even though he’s standing next to the Welcome to Westview sign. What started as a missing person case has turned to a missing town case. Monica flies a drone through an invisible barrier, and it disappears. Monica detects an energy field and puts her hand in it, it pulls her in. Twenty-four hours later Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) arrives at a S.W.O.R.D. advance base. She sets up her equipment and detects CMBR radiation. Darcy later detects a broadcast signal intertwined with the CMBR; she asks for an old TV model. Hayward sends Agent Franklin (Zac Henry) through the sewers to get into Westview. Hayward, Jimmy and other base personnel are looking over data when they hear laughter. Darcy is watching the first episode of WandaVision. The agents attach the townspeople real identities to their characters in the show. Agnes’s identity remains unknown. Darcy spots Monica playing Geraldine. She sets up a device so Jimmy can broadcast a radio message to Wanda. An agent brings them a photo of the drone that turned into a toy helicopter. Jimmy contacts Wanda but the program edits the scene. Agent Franklin crawls through the tunnel, his hazmat suit is turned into a beekeeper outfit. Jimmy and Darcy watch the 70s era pregnancy episode. The broadcast edits the Wanda-Monica confrontation. We see the unedited version; after Monica doesn’t tell Wanda how she knew about Ultron, Wanda brutally pushes Monica out of town. Wanda quickly fixes the damage before Vision walks in, when he does, she sees his corpse. He’s quickly back to normal and he tells her they don’t have to stay there. She tells him they do and says it’s their home. A medic attends to Monica, Jimmy asks if she’s okay. In a daze Monica says, “It’s Wanda, it’s all Wanda.”

No commercial.

Episode 5. On a Very Special Episode…

Wanda and Vision can’t get the twins to sleep, Agnes shows up to help against Vison’s wishes. She’s confused and asks Wanda if she wants to take it to the top. The crying stops, but when Wanda and Vision turn around the twins aren’t in their cribs, they are five years old. Tommy (Gavin Borders) and Billy (Baylen D. Bielitz) ask Wanda if they can keep a dog they found. Vision and Wanda tell the twins they can’t have a dog until they are ten, Tommy (Jett Klyne) and Billy (Julian Hilliard) automatically age to ten. Vision goes to work and breaks Norm out of his trance, he’s in a panic about his family, he tells Vision he has to make her stop. The boys play with Sparky, they ask Wanda if she has a brother, she says she does. Sparky goes missing, he turns up dead in Agnes’s yard. The boys ask her to fix the dead, Agnes asks can she do that. Wanda tells them there are rules in life, we can’t reverse death. Later that night, Vision tells Wanda he spoke to Norm. He warns her that she can’t control him like she controls the town. Wanda menacingly asks, “Can’t I?” The credits begin to roll but Vision won’t let the credits end the fight. Vision believes Wanda didn’t start controlling the town on purpose. She admits she doesn’t know how any of this started, he tells her it’s wrong. The doorbell rings, she tells Vision she didn’t do this, he doesn’t believe her. It’s her deceased brother Pietro (Evans Peters). Wanda’s confused along with Darcy who asks, “She recast Pietro?”

Monica is examined and questioned; Jimmy brings her clothes and introduces her to Darcy. They go to Hayward’s briefing; he calls Wanda a terrorist. Monica disagrees, Hayward shows a video of Wanda stealing Vision’s body. Monica needs a special vehicle to penetrate the barrier. Darcy calls it the Hex, she questions what in the Hex is real, it would require an absurd amount of power to do it. Monica points out Wanda nearly beat Thanos by herself, Jimmy points out Captain Marvel nearly did it too. Monica’s expression becomes troubled, and she quickly changes the subject. She shoots her Geraldine outfit, the outfit is untouched, it proves Wanda rewrote reality, changing the Kevlar Monica was wearing to a 70s era outfit. Since Wanda’s rewriting reality to fit the era she’s in, they send a 1980 era drone to Wanda’s home. She and her kids come outside, Monica tells Wanda she wants to talk to her, when she isn’t receptive, Hayward orders the drone to fire at her. They lose their reception and then the base alarm goes off. Wanda walks out of Westview carrying the drone which glows with her power. She warns them to stay out of her home. Monica tries to get through to her. Wanda has all the soldiers point their weapons at Hayward and leaves.

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Episode 6. All-New Halloween Spooktacular!

Billy and Tommy break the fourth wall talking to the audience. Pietro is sleeping on the couch but gets up to playfully chase them with his superspeed. Wanda comes downstairs in a Sokovian fortune teller outfit. Vision comes down in a Mexican wrestler outfit, he passive aggressively points out he had nothing else in his closet. He isn’t going out with them; he has neighborhood watch. Pietro volunteers to take his place. Herb tells her Vision isn’t on duty. Vision is at the outskirts of town seeing people glitching. Wanda thinks Pietro’s a bad influence on the boys. Tommy displays his superspeed. Vision flies above the city and sees a car at the edge of town. It’s Agnes, who is frozen in place. He touches her head, and she asks if she’s dead, he says no and asks why, she says because he is. She brings up he is an Avenger which he doesn’t remember. He tells her he’s going to go for help. Pietro asks how Wanda pulled this off, she doesn’t know how she did it. She just remembers feeling completely alone, empty, endless nothingness. She looks up and sees Pietro’s bullet riddled corpse.

At the base, Hayward and Monica have it out. He orders Monica, Jimmy, and Darcy off the base. Jimmy and Monica jump their escorts. Darcy hacks into Hayward’s devices. He’s tracking Vision. Monica gets a message that her ride has arrived. Darcy sees a medical file on Monica, she warns her she can’t go back in. Her bloodwork shows her cells have been rewritten. Monica doesn’t care, she knows how Wanda feels and plans to help her. Darcy will stay behind while Monica and Jimmy get the vehicle that can breech the barrier. Darcy finds the Operation Cataract file. Vision tries to get through the barrier, but he begins to break apart. He tells an unconcerned Hayward the people in town need help. Darcy screams for someone to help him; they handcuff her to a truck. Billy can hear his dad. He tells Wanda Vision is in trouble. Wanda tells him to focus, he does and tells her he’s dying. Pietro jokes she can’t save her already dead husband. She sends him flying into a haystack. Wanda extends the barrier. It changes the S.W.O.R.D. base into a circus, the agents into clowns. As the barrier extends, Hayward barely escapes it.

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Episode 7. Breaking the Fourth Wall

Wanda wakes up alone still dressed in her Halloween costume. She talks to an invisible interviewer and downplays what she did last night, they show the chaos expanding the barrier does. The twins’ videogames keep changing. Wanda won’t get out of bed to check on the boys. She decides to take a day to herself. Things start phasing in and out and changing. She’s losing control of her world. Wanda asks the boys if they’ve seen Vision. They ask her about what Pietro said about Vision, she tells them not to believe anything he says, he isn’t their uncle. Wanda bleakly tells them she’s beginning to believe everything is meaningless. Agnes shows up and takes the boys to give Wanda a break. She tells the interviewer she bit a kid. The house furnishings go back and forth in time. Wanda tries to convince herself and us she’s fine. The house is going through every version of the house for the past decades. Wanda doesn’t know what’s happening or how to fix it. A voice behind the camera asks her if she is getting what she deserves. Wanda is surprised and tells the person you’re not supposed to talk. The twins are at Agnes’s house, Billy can’t hear Agnes, she’s quiet on the inside.

S.W.O.R.D. sets up a temporary base. Hayward tells an underling he plans to launch today. Vision wakes up at the circus. Darcy is chained to a truck, she’s the escape artist. Vision asks does she remember him; she thinks he’s hitting on her. Vision snaps her out of her trance. They steal a funnel cake truck. Darcy fills him in on his and Wanda’s history. She explains how Wanda had to kill him, and Thanos rewound time to kill him again. Someone is creating impediments to slow them down. Vision asks what he is now. Darcy doesn’t know, but she does know the love he and Wanda share is real. While talking to the interviewer, Vision remembers he can fly and leaves.

Marcy sent Monica and Jimmy the report on Operation Cataract. Hayward is trying to bring Vision online. Major Goodner (Rachael Thompson) delivers the space vehicle to Monica and assures her many people in S.W.O.R.D. still support her. The vehicle can’t penetrate the barrier and is slung away. Monica decides to force her way through. Different versions of herself appear, and she hears her mother, Nick Fury, and Carol Danvers, the different version unite, and she pushes through. She can see the different spectrums of energy. Monica makes it to Wanda’s house. She doesn’t want to talk to Monica and tosses her in the air and tries to slam Monica into the ground, but Monica uses her new powers and makes a hero landing. Wanda threatens to kill her, Monica tells her to do it. She tells Wanda that Hayward plans to burn Westview down to get Vision and he’ll make her out to be the villain. Wanda says maybe she is. Monica begins to get through to her telling Wanda about the grief she feels losing her mother. Agnes sees this from across the street and hurries over to interrupt Monica and get Wanda. She asks Agnes where the boys are, she tells Wanda they are probably playing down in the basement. Wanda descends, it looks like a witch’s dungeon with vines and runes on the walls. She sees a demonic book. Agnes enters and tells her she’s Agatha Harkness. We hear her theme song, and they show how she’s been screwing with Wanda the entire series. She even killed Sparky! In the mid-credit scene, Monica arrives at Agatha’s house and opens the door to the basement, Pietro sneaks behind her, “Snoopers gonna snoop.”

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KBear Review [Read time: 1-3 minutes]

In Spider-Man: Far from Home we caught a comedic view of people returning from the blip. Monica Rambeau’s return wasn’t funny, it was chaotic and terrifying. People just popping up out of nowhere, running into each other in confusion. Monica finds out she’s been gone for five years, and her mother has been dead for three years. She goes back to S.W.O.R.D. in a few weeks, not taking the time to grieve, and finds out her mother grounded all the blipped agents to give them time to gain their footing when they got back. Tyler Hayward has her mother’s old job, and he appears supportive, we’ll find out later this isn’t the case. On her first mission back, a routine assignment of delivering a drone to a FBI agent, Jimmy Woo, she gets sucked into the barrier and becomes an actor in Wanda’s sitcom. Darcy Lewis has a doctorate now and is brought in to help figure out what’s happening in Westview. She is the first one to stumble upon Wanda’s show. She and Jimmy become a team. During this episode we see the events from the first three episodes through the eyes of the S.W.O.R.D. team.

After Wanda expels Monica from Westview, she joins Jimmy and Darcy’s team, and they figure out that Wanda is rewriting reality. Hayward has Wanda pegged as a terrorist and wants to take her out. Monica has a more nuanced view of Wanda and understands that she is an extremely powerful woman who is grieving. It would be best to talk to her instead of trying to fight her. Hayward doesn’t agree and tries to kill her with the 80s era drone they sent to communicate with her. Wanda proves Monica correct when she brings back the drone and has the soldiers point their weapons at Hayward. She is too powerful for them. Things are beginning to fall apart for Wanda, she doesn’t have any control over the twins, they go from babes to 5-year-olds, to 10-year-olds on their own. Agnes seems to know what’s going on, and Vision grows more suspicious. This causes conflict between he and Wanda. The tricks she had been pulling on Vision don’t work now so she admits she isn’t sure how it all started, but she is aware of what she’s doing now. Pietro shows up to disrupt the fight, but it’s the actor who played Pietro from the FOX X-Men. Are we in the multiverse?

It’s Halloween and Wanda’s wearing an outfit that is close to her comic book costume. The costume looks like something you’d buy at a thrift shop. Vision is also wearing an outfit like his comic book costume, and he isn’t happy about it. Wanda apparently removed the rest of his clothing, so he’d have to wear this. He’s no longer her puppet, he’s aware what she’s doing and doesn’t go trick and treating with the family so he can investigate what’s going on in town. When he gets to the outskirts of town, people are glitzing, it seems the further away you are from Wanda, and the needs of the show, you basically shut down. Pietro is playing the wild, fun-loving, irresponsible uncle. Tommy adores him but Billy is wary of him. It turns out Tommy and his uncle are both speedsters, while Billy has magical powers like mom. His powers come into effect when Vision goes outside the barrier to get help. He begins to break apart, and Billy senses it. To save him Wanda extends the barrier, turning the S.W.O.R.D. base to a circus and the agents into clowns. Hayward tries to throw Monica, Jimmy, and Darcy off the base, since they won’t back his actions. Jimmy and Monica leave to get a vehicle that can penetrate the barrier. Darcy stays behind to finish her hacking. She found a medical file on Monica, and tells her not to go back inside the barrier, but she won’t listen and plans to go back in.

Wanda is depressed after her activities last night. She looks like she partied too hard on Halloween, but instead she extended the barrier. She’s so depressed that she ignores her kids, allowing Agnes to take them. Her powers are going berserk, the house is phasing in and out showing the different styles of the house over the decades. Since her show is in the present time, Wanda has a mysterious interviewer to deal with. The interviewer talks back to Wanda and asks her does she believe she deserves this, furthering her spiral. We find out the interviewer is Agnes. Agnes isn’t just a noisy neighbor, she is Agatha Harkness, a powerful witch who has been screwing with Wanda’s perfect world behind the scenes. She reveals who she is to Wanda and has a catchy theme song to boot. Monica is trying to get through the barrier. Her ride is delivered, but it can’t penetrate the barrier, so she decides to do it herself. What Darcy had warned her about is true, the previous trips through the barrier have rewritten her cells, when she goes through this time, she is changed forever. Monica has superpowers, which aren’t spelled out. We know she can see the spectrum of energy, and when Wanda tries to slam her into the ground, she’s able to land on her feet instead. She shows her heroic nature by willing to sacrifice her own wellbeing to help another person, a person she doesn’t owe anything to.

The first three episodes were sitcoms with peaks at the MCU, but starting with episode four, the MCU becomes a major part of the story. Monica comes from Captain Marvel, Jimmy from Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Darcy from Thor and Thor: The Dark World. Monica was a kid in Captain Marvel, and we didn’t know we would ever see Jimmy or Darcy in the MCU again. They are important character for the series, especially Monica. She is one the protagonist of this series. Her story parallels Wanda’s story, both women are dealing with grief, but in different ways. Wanda has created a fantasy world to deal with the loss of Vision, Pietro, and her parents. Monica is dealing with the grief of losing her mother, by trying to help Wanda and ignoring her own pain. She understands what’s going on with Wanda and is willing to help her, regardless of her own wellbeing. I wouldn’t say the way either woman is handling it is the healthiest way, but at least Monica’s is more positive. I think that everyone knew that Agnes was Agatha Harkness, Marvel wouldn’t hire an actress of Kathryn Hahn repute to just play a noisy neighbor. The show kept showing that Agnes was attuned to what was going on. By the last episode, she gave up any pretense she had maintained, she made sure to get the boys, made sure that Monica couldn’t get through to Wanda, and finally just told her who she was. It was fun watching Kathryn Hahn play Agnes, but it’s going to be a blast seeing her go full Agatha. Episode 5 is set in the 80s and uses elements of Family Ties, Growing Pains, and Full House. You can especially see it in the show intro. Episode 6 is late 90s, early 2000s and closely mimics the style of Malcolm in the Middle. Episode 7 is present day and captures the mockumentary style of Modern Family and The Office. The intro apes the Happy Endings intro.