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.
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