WandaVision Episode 7: Breaking the Fourth Wall

We all thought it was Wanda running the WandaVision sitcom in WandaVision but it was really Agatha all along, as we learn in the new sitcom, Agatha All Along. She disrupted Westview, she hypnotized her neighbor, she lured Tommy and Billy into her basement lair, she summoned Pietro, and she killed Sparky!

 

Who is Agatha Harkness? In Marvel Comics, she’s a witch/sorceress. She’s not a superhero in the sense that the Avengers are, but she’s heroic and can be counted on to assist. She claims to be an original witch from the Salem trials. Her familiar is Ebony, who appears as a black cat. She lives in a creepy mansion in Whisper Hill, somewhere in New England.

 

Agatha has been around in Marvel since the early ‘70s as Franklin Richards’s governess in the Fantastic Four, watching him while his parents were away in battle. Technically, Franklin doesn’t need protection, since he’s one of the most powerful mutants on Earth (his powers are sometimes suppressed since he doesn’t have the maturity to handle them), but he’s still a little kid who would need his normal needs tended to. Agatha got involved with the Scarlet Witch in Avengers comics in the ‘70s. Wanda was experiencing disruptions in her powers and asked Agatha to help control them.

 

Agatha founded a community of witches in New Salem, Colorado. Her son, the evil sorcerer Nicholas Scratch, later took over this colony with the help of his children, the magical villains, Salem’s Seven. Nicholas was banished but years later in the Vision and the Scarlet Witch maxiseries, Salem’s Seven burned Agatha at the stake. Agatha reappeared with no explanation in Avengers West Coast in 1989, revealing that Billy and Tommy were magical constructs and not real children. It was Agatha who wiped Wanda’s memory of her children, a kindness that later backfired. Agatha popped up now and then to advise the Scarlet Witch before another apparent death, later appearing as a ghost.

 

In the comics, Agatha appears as a stereotypical creepy old witch lady, a subversion of her true heroic nature. On WandaVision, this is reversed, with her young, attractive appearance belying her villainy.

 

But is it really Agatha behind all this? She was heroic in the comics so this would be Marvel’s most significant switch from the comics. It seems like it would be too easy and clichéd to blame it on the witch. There’s a lot of talk about Mephisto, Marvel’s more obviously evil devil figure, being behind all this. It could also be Nightmare, a Doctor Strange villain since the ‘60s, which would tie into the upcoming Multiverse of Madness movie. I think these are plausible string-pullers but there’s probably a limit to how many reveals this show can do before they lose people.

 

Anyway, this week, Wanda says she’s having a “me day” to relax at home, speaking to the camera in the confessional style of sitcoms like Modern Family and The Office. (Since these are so recent, are these the last of the sitcoms on WandaVision? There’s really nothing after that would fit.) But Wanda is clearly very depressed. She doesn’t get dressed, doesn’t care where the Vision is, and tells her young kids essentially that life is meaningless. Her powers are going haywire, with objects losing their permanence and devolving to earlier versions of themselves. Agatha has done quite a number on her to break her down.

 

While Wanda plays Claire Dunphy’s neuroticism in the striped Modern Family easy chair, the Vision apes Jim Halpert’s Office snark in his address to the camera. The references aren’t too blatant but when a construction crew and a school bus block the path of Darcy’s truck, it’s an Office-esque farcical moment.

 

Monica appears to be the only person to get through to Wanda, trying to build a connection through their shared trauma. Monica is also clearly developing superpowers. Her eyes glow an unnatural shade of blue, she can see the energy patterns of the Hex, and her outfit is very close to the black-and-white costume she wore in the comics.

 

What does the commercial for Nexus antidepressants mean? One thing I remembered when I saw it is that in the comics, the Scarlet Witch is a nexus being. These nexus beings have the ability to affect probabilities and there is one per reality. Wanda therefore is the one being who has an analogue in every alternate reality. The children of nexus beings have the potential for incredible powers and in the late-‘90s Avengers Forever series, it was revealed that the time traveler Immortus manipulated the Scarlet Witch and Vision into splitting up so they would not have any all-powerful children. I don’t know if this is still operative or has been retconned.

 

Two more episodes and so many questions. Chief among them: If Agatha is really manipulating Wanda, what is her endgame?

 

 

Texts from Heidi Cruz

HEIDI C 9:14 AM

 

Hello, Lovelies!! Just got back from Cancun 

last night. Had a great time with the girls! The 

Ritz Carlton was beautiful...and a BARGAIN at 

just $309/night! Great security too.  So sad 

none of you could come with!

 

HEIDI C 9:16 AM

 

It was 85 and sunny the whole time! 

So it was sooo hard to get off of the 

plane here in TX.  I left my coat in the Range 

Rover before we left (figured, I wouldnt need 

it in Cancun! more room in suitcase for 

tankinis!) So it was FREEZING walking to 

the car with the police escort!

 

HEIDI C 9:19 AM

 

Anyway the girls and I went snorkeling 

and chowed down on Mexican Food- Delish!! 

We lazed around  the pool and worked on our 

Winter Tans!!  After they were in bed, it was 

time for Mom to have a margarita ;) 

 

HEIDI C 9:20 AM

 

So Ted had to fly back to Houston right 

away- there was this silly dustup back home.  He 

was a good Dad to come down and escort us, 

I feel bad that he had to fly down and go right 

back. But duty calls and that's the life of s Senator 

(and a senator's wife). 

 

HEIDI C 9:26 AM

 

Hope everyone has there heat back on! Ours' 

came back on shortly after we left according 

to the security guard. so it was nice and toasty- 

we actually had to turn it down a little.And of 

COURSE  Ted left every light on before we 

went so I had to turn all those off. JThe guard 

was so good to watch our poodle while we were 

gone. He was yappy when we got back (the 

poodle not the guard) and seemed a little 

agitated but we're glad he made it through the cold. 

 

HEIDI C 9:31 AM

 

I had so much fun in our trip but it was nice to 

get back home. I missed sleeping in my own bed. 

The first thing I did when I got home, was take a nice 

hot shower.

 

HEIDI C 9:32 AM

 

So it's back to work and school for us. Sigh!  It 

was nice while it lasted. 

 

HEIDI C 9:40 AM

 

So how is everyone else? Who's up for wine night? 

 

HEIDI C 10:03 AM

 

Hello?

 

Hey you know what

if you suddenly stop your car for no reason in the middle of the highway (45 mph speed limit) in the left lane despite the raised median preventing any possible left turn, very nearly causing a chain reaction crash due to at least the two drivers behind you slamming on their brakes, a move that gets you some honks and high-beaming from the car behind you, and then you continue on down in the left lane, going below the speed limit during rush hour, foot skittering on and off the brake like a crab, before finally turning left—slowing down several traffic lights before your turn in the apparent belief that turning a car is like landing a plane, which has to start slowing down many miles ahead of the landing—and all the while it never occurs to you to be more considerate of other drivers by getting in the right lane and letting faster rush hour traffic pass you and get back in the left lane shortly before your turn (even though it makes you just so nervous to switch lanes, as if it were an advanced driving technique, rather than something we teach 16-year-olds) so you just sit back and relax going 40 mph and slowing down in the left lane until you can turn, oblivious to the traffic stacking up behind you (while going just fast enough so nobody can pass you on the right), and you keep on collecting dirty looks and high beams like a celebrity collecting Instagram followers, then you might think the reactions from the other drivers are a bit jerkish, and maybe they are, but at the same time, you might deserve the dirty looks and high beams, because, man, you’re really bad at driving.

WandaVision Episode 6: All-New Halloween Spooktacular

Halloween gives the cast an excuse to dress in approximations of their comic costumes, as if real people were sewing them from scratch (the Vision and Quicksilver’s costumes look very homemade, but Wanda looks the closest to her classic Scarlet Witch costume—like, she could wear it into battle whereas the men would look goofy). I realize the costumes that look fine in print may look weird in live action, and I think it’s a shame that we’ve lost some of the more colorful costumes as superheroes move to movies and TV. I hate when live action adaptations seem almost embarrassed of their four-color origins. They should be celebrating them.

 

Costumes serve an important function in comics: they allow readers to identify characters easily. No two artists will draw the Scarlet Witch the same but once she wears that iconic red headpiece, she’s immediately identifiable. The red bathing suit with a cape and evening gloves has endured for over 50 years for a reason. The very few times she has had costume redesigns without the headpiece, she just hasn’t looked right. A lot of characters have had design elements that they must include. Plus, I’ve heard superheroes explain that their colorful costumes allow kids to trust them if they’re in a situation where they need rescuing.

 

Wanda knows something isn’t right with Pietro. He looks different and he’s dropped his Sokovian accent (then again, he points out, so has she). When he goes trick-or-treating, doesn’t his blown-out hairstyle look reminiscent of Mephisto’s? Pietro also seems to approve of his sister’s amped-up powers, in a nod to House of M, when he was the one manipulating Wanda to warp reality (everybody assumed it was Magneto pulling the strings—force of habit).

 

In the latest episode of WandaVision, Billy and Tommy have grown to the edge of adolescence, old enough to start manifesting their powers and cracking wise to the camera in a nod to Malcolm in the Middle. I’m not as well-versed on these two as I am older Marvel so here’s what I know about the characters in the comics.

 

Both are members of the Young Avengers, sort of the junior team where each member has an analogue on the adult team. After Mephisto reabsorbed their souls into themselves, the children ceased to exist but were later reborn to separate families. This makes the Scarlet Witch and Vision their birth parents in a weird Marvel way (I can tell you from experience that this was not a typical adoption process).

 

Tommy Shepherd is known as Speed and inherited his uncle Quicksilver’s superspeed. He also has prematurely gray hair, which is apparently a trait of many of the men in the Maximoff/Eisenhardt/Lehnsherr family. Billy Kaplan-Altman is known as Wiccan and has vaguely defined magical powers. I don’t believe he actually has anything to do with Wicca but they changed his codename from Asgardian to avoid any puns on his sexuality (he also doesn’t have any relation to the Asgardians). Billy recently married Teddy Altman, known as Hulkling. Teddy is the son of the Kree Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell) and a Skrull princess (the Kree and Skrulls are longtime mortal enemies) and he recently inherited the Skrull throne.

 

Yeah, Monica is totally on the verge of getting her Captain Marvel/Photon/Spectrum energy powers. Her cells are all messed up from interacting with Wanda’s energies.

 

At the edges of Westview, things are fraying. Those at the town limit are stuck in stasis. This includes Agnes, dressed as a witch in a reference to Agatha Harkness (she was a witch but didn’t wear a black hat or anything). The Vision decides to see what is on the other side of the barrier. Free from Wanda’s influence, he starts to fray and fall apart. This would be alarming but I’ve read enough comics to know the Vision is the last superhero to worry about. They’ll just repair him.

 

Wanda retrenches and expands her sphere of influence. A little more of the world is hers to command.

 

Moaning Through a Megaphone

I rise today, fellow members of Congress, to protest those pernicious parties and quisling forces that have silenced me. Since my time in office, I have been deplatformed, quite viciously, simply for speaking my mind. I have been the victim of Deep State cancel culture, which has ripped away my First Amendment rights. I have been muzzled, chained, suppressed and oppressed. But I will not quit.

 

And so, during this live broadcast on C-SPAN, Fox News and CNN; before 534 of my colleagues in the House and Senate; and in this hallowed setting in which the Constitution gives me total legal immunity for whatever I say—I rise to object and give no quarter to those who have silenced me. I will not be quiet. Don’t try to quash me.

 

What is this country coming to if we can’t advocate executing the speaker of the House, a former president or one’s colleagues in Congress? Are we really free if we can’t raise an incendiary fist to an angry mob that wants to overturn the results of a free democratic election? Do we really have free speech if we can’t blame forest fires on Rothschild-controlled space lasers, or question whether public servants in the Pentagon were really incinerated by a crashing plane? Is this still America if you can’t carry a gun and harass a school shooting survivor like quarry on the streets?

 

I ask you, what kind of country is this if we impose social consequences on doing any of these things?

 

Members of Congress and viewers at home, I hope you can all hear me through my “Free Speech” mask—or as I like to call it, a muzzle, because I am being muzzled. My voice is stripped away from me in a queasy display of communism. My very thoughts are subject to the approval of angry leftists. There were a few scary weeks when I lost my book deal due to the machinations of an Orwellian publisher, before a smaller publisher gave me another book deal. This is a quintessential form of oppression. Is this 1930s communist Russia or 2020s America? Quite often I wonder.

 

As I said on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and my nationally televised 45-minute press conference, I will no longer be quiet. I will not be questioned. My concerns will not be quelled. I will fight the nefarious forces of darkness that have taken away my God-given right to campaign with an ad that implies I will shoot my coworkers. Any serious constitutional scholar must acknowledge that the First Amendment guarantees that nobody is allowed to call me out on my bullshit or impose any penalty whatsoever.

 

Therefore, I will be appearing this week in the following venues to discuss my censorship: at a nationally televised prime time press conference; on Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, Sean Hannity, Judge Jeanine and Laura Ingraham on Fox; doing interviews in both Q and GQ magazines; podcasts with Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Alex Jones; in editorials in the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal; and on a block of shows with Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell on OAN and Newsmax.

 

I leave you with the following 17 words: We must keep our children safe from the lizard people, adrenochrome harvesters, socialists and Jewish space lasers.

WandaVision Episode 5: On a Very Special Episode

Intellectual properties and universes are starting to collide in Westview. Quicksilver from the X-Men cinematic universe shows up on Wanda’s doorstep. He’s very different from the Avengers’ Quicksilver. He goes by Peter, not Pietro, and he doesn’t appear to have a sister. He’s much less serious than the Quicksilver in both the Marvel movies and comics. His father is implied to be Magneto rather than Baron von Strucker (which is significant since in the comics, Strucker was a literal Nazi while Magneto survived the Holocaust).

 

It appears that due to the corporate merger, after 20 years, the X-Men and Avengers will finally meet on TV and probably soon in film. In comics, the two have a long history, as the X-Men and Avengers titles both debuted in the same month in 1963. The two teams have often been allies and occasionally rivals, due to their very different natures. The mutant X-Men are feared and hated by a lot of the public, despite them having saved the world countless times (the Marvel general public is famously stupid, short-sighted and ungrateful, much like real-life America). The Avengers are much more popular and mainstream, with universally respected heroes like Captain America and socialites like the Wasp, although they have had conflicts with the public since their Upper East Side mansion attracts its share of danger and destruction. (The Fantastic Four are the celebrities of the Marvel Universe, with in-universe comics and licensing deals. Reed Richards actively cultivated celebrity out of guilt for being the one who pushed for the trip into space that gave his friends their powers and changed their lives.) It will be interesting to see if and how the TV and movies reconcile the different tones of the comics.

 

The Avengers and X-Men have had several links between them. One is the Beast, an original X-Man who was an Avenger for years in the ‘70s and ‘80s, making him probably the mutant most accepted by the public. Rogue debuted as an Avengers foe before attacking Ms. Marvel, losing control of her power and turning to Professor X for help. Magneto has been a foe of both teams and later, an ally of the X-Men. His parentage of the Maximoff twins was subtly revealed in issues of Uncanny X-Men and Avengers that came out the same month in the late ‘70s: Magneto, who resembles Pietro, sees a photo of his late wife and she looks exactly like Wanda. So eagle-eyed comic readers knew he was their father before any of the characters did, which was cool.

 

The Avengers and X-Men also had seesawing popularity. The Avengers comics sold well in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, while the X-Men title was canceled at one point in the early ‘70s. After Chris Claremont revived the X-Men title in 1975, their popularity grew to insane peaks it would stay that way through at least the early ‘90s. Meanwhile, during Marvel’s bankruptcy in 1996, the Avengers and other properties considered less valuable were spun off temporarily to another publisher. Things changed in the mid-2000s, when the Avengers were disassembled and reassembled with flashier members and became more popular than the X-Men, especially when the movies started.

 

But I digress. The bureaucrats at SWORD are painting Wanda as a villain for stealing the Vision’s body but I think it’s more complicated than that. His living will stated he didn’t want to be resurrected but I don’t think he would have wanted to be experimented on in a SWORD lab. As in the comics when the Vision was disassembled, Wanda loved him and wanted to at least give him a proverbial decent burial. She’s basically his next of kin.

 

Wanda leaves the bubble to confront SWORD, warning them that she has all she needs and they need to leave each other alone. But I don’t think she’s entirely in control here. She edits her own sitcom, disturbingly telling the Vision she can control him as the credits begin to roll. But the Vision then rebels and begins to question the reality around him. Wanda also appears to have nothing to do with Quicksilver appearing at her door.

 

I’m betting she’s under the influence of Agatha Harkness or Mephisto. As happened so many times in the comics, the Scarlet Witch may be getting a power upgrade from an outside source. It could also be the twins who conjured Pietro, trying to make their mother happy. We still don’t know the true nature of Tommy and Billy. The fact that they’re aging so quickly means they’re not real, at one point disappearing from their cribs in a subtle nod to the Avengers West Coast story that unravels them. (I wonder if aging them is a deliberate sly wink to Family Ties, which introduced a baby near the end of its run and suddenly aged him to 5 or 6 with no explanation.)

 

Wanda is powerful and may seem to be in control, but her reality is starting to crumble around her.

She wore a coat

Did you see it? She wore a coat! She was on TV when she wore the coat so everyone saw the coat. The coat looked like a regular-type overcoat but it had some sparkly details on it so everybody flipped out and nobody could stop talking about the coat. You might say her coat “broke the internet.” The coat was the most popular online thing since the last viral thing had happened, which was earlier that afternoon.

 

The coat retails for $5,000.

 

The coat was instantly iconic. America took a vote and that was the verdict. It was a cultural moment that will forever be burned on people’s retinas, like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Add that coat to the other instantly iconic moments we’ve lived through, like seven things that happened at the 2020 Billboard Music Awards, 13 things Demi Lovato did during her VMA performance, some clothing Rihanna wore once to Seoul, a photo a woman once took in a strawberry field, a tortilla omelet, and several other legendary things that also happened during the inauguration, better known as the Wearing of the Miu Miu Coat.

 

We will take memories of all those things to our graves—every single one of us. The world is so full of instantly iconic moments that it’s almost like everything is equally memorable regardless of quality.

 

I can say without exaggeration that it is absolutely impossible to overstate how iconic that coat was. Society is very prudent about what it labels as an instant icon. We would not say YAAAASS QUEEEEN SLAAAAY unless we were referring to the most indelible of cultural moments, up there with the moon landing. 

 

So we gave her a modeling contract. Because of the coat! The coat she wore on TV. She wore the hell out of that iconic, expensive designer coat, and that’s enough to offer someone some money! Money comes to money, and that’s America.

 

Someday, when The Coat goes into the Smithsonian, I hope people will look at it and see how a woman from an extremely prominent political family, who could afford to drop a few thou on a designer coat (or has the connections to get it for free), caught a break and got a modeling deal.

WandaVision Episode 4: We Interrupt This Program

In the real world, the town of Westview doesn’t exist. It’s wholly a fictional creation in New Jersey (in the comics, they bought a house in Leonia, right outside New York City) and anybody who gets sucked into it apparently becomes an extra in the WandaVision sitcom. I enjoyed the sitcom episodes but it was refreshing to get outside that bubble.

 

SWORD agent Monica Rambeau is able to pass through the forcefield and enter Westview, perhaps in a nod to her energy powers in the comics. Monica reappears on Earth five years after disappearing in Thanos’s snap, along with half the universe, finding her mother died three years before. This was an interesting look at what the movies haven’t had much chance to explore: the chaos of half the universe returning to where they disappeared from, not realizing they were ever gone. This wasn’t a problem in the Infinity Gauntlet miniseries because once Nebula got the gems back from Thanos, she just made it so that the whole mass disappearance never happened, so nobody had to deal with any trauma.

 

Who is Monica Rambeau in the comics? She was the second person, and first woman, to hold the title of Captain Marvel. The title has a complex legacy in both Marvel and DC Comics. (This is from memory so my facts may be a little off, but here’s the gist of it.) Captain Marvel (real name Billy Batson) has been a DC Comics character (originally Charlton Comics before DC bought them) since about the 1940s. He’s the guy in the red suit with the yellow lightning bolt, and you might erroneously know him as Shazam. Marvel introduced its own Captain Marvel in the ‘60s. He was Mar-Vell, a Kree warrior. He fought cosmic threats like Thanos and the Skrulls alongside the Avengers but never officially joined the team.

 

The existence of two Captain Marvels brought Marvel and DC into conflict, so they came to a deal. If I remember correctly, the deal was that DC could have its Captain Marvel character but can’t have a comic series titled Captain Marvel. So they always name any series including Billy Batson as some variation on Shazam. This means everyone understandably thinks Captain Marvel’s name is Shazam, which is actually the name of the wizard who gave him his powers. In the Shazam movie, they didn’t even call Captain Marvel or any of the Marvel Family by name. Maybe this was part of the movie deal.

 

On the Marvel side, the deal was the company had the rights to a Captain Marvel character and series title but that they had to continually have an active character by that name. If the character ever died and left the title vacant, DC would get the rights and could name a series Captain Marvel. That’s why when Mar-Vell died of cancer in 1982, Monica Rambeau assumed the code name the same month, so the chain would be unbroken. Monica had no connection to Mar-Vell. She was in the Coast Guard (or harbor patrol?) in New Orleans and got powers that let her transform into any kind of energy. She adopted the code name Captain Marvel and joined the Avengers. A few of the Avengers thought it was presumptuous of Monica to immediately adopt the code name, as many of them had very recently been at Mar-Vell’s deathbed, but it was just copyright renewal. Monica soon proved herself a powerful and loyal Avenger, serving for several years and becoming chairwoman before taking reserve status.

 

Monica sort of drifted into obscurity for a few years, spending more time with family and less time superheroing. She later took the code name Photon and then Spectrum and was active here and there. There was an amusing Avengers story in the late ‘90s when villains had instructions to kidnap Captain Marvel and they got the wrong one. I believe by that point, the name Captain Marvel had passed to Mar-Vell’s son (I’m hazy on these years in comics because I had drifted away by that point). Enter Carol Danvers. She was known as Ms. Marvel for a long time and was an Avenger in the late ‘70s, before Monica. She later lost her original powers and memories after being assaulted by Rogue, got vastly increased powers, took the name Binary and left to explore space with the Starjammers. She lost some power and rejoined the Avengers as Warbird but soon left the team to deal with her alcoholism. In recent years, she assumed the Captain Marvel title, and the Ms. Marvel name passed on to a young girl, Kamala Khan.

 

The fourth episode shows us both the edited version of the sitcom and also what happened when the “cameras” weren’t rolling. Wanda clearly expels Monica from Westview, throwing her through several walls, and rebuilds her house like nothing ever happened. Meanwhile, they scientists identify most of the sitcom extras as people from the real world, except for Agnes and the woman at the country club. They wonder what the hexagon symbols mean, and I think they’re a references to the Scarlet Witch’s hex power.

 

I’m not concerned by the Vision being alive again. He was damaged so often in the comics and they always rebuilt him. The Avengers would just call Hank Pym, Iron Man and Black Panther—their big scientific minds—and sooner or later, they’d find a way to get the Vision back on his feet. People come back from seeming death all the time in Marvel. If you read enough comics, you’ll find death is no impediment to the story.