With the sitcoms no longer running, this was the first episode of WandaVision that looked and felt totally like a Marvel movie. Agatha Harkness takes Wanda on a trip through her own mind to see what makes her tick. Some of the way Agatha talked to Wanda reminded me of a therapist talking to a patient. Maybe she is trying to help Wanda or stop her from abusing her powers. Agatha could simply be evil, but given her heroism in the comics, maybe there’s more going on here.
Wanda relives her childhood in Sokovia when her parents used DVDs of sitcoms to try to soothe her and Pietro during the war. (It bothers me that they had to invent the fictional nation of Sokovia and call her father Oleg. If they’re making up names anyway, why not go with the comics’ nation of Transia and call her father Django? It would be a pleasant little Easter egg for fans.) We witness the bombing that kills the Maximoff parents (oddly, this was very similar to Storm’s origin, except set in Eastern Europe instead of North Africa) and the bomb that doesn’t explode. We see Wanda’s exposure to the Mind Stone with a silhouette of a woman wearing the classic Scarlet Witch headpiece in the background (or is it the elder god Chthon?). We see Wanda mourning Pietro’s death with the Vision, as her consoles her with the lovely, deeply moving line “What is grief if not love persevering?” (Shades of “Sometimes It Snows in April” here.) Then after the Vision dies, Wanda goes to SWORD to get his body back, but it’s already been disassembled. In her grief, she creates a new Vision and a new town of Westview.
Agatha confirms two significant things about the Scarlet Witch’s power: She created a probability hex that disarmed the Stark bomb, and now her power is chaos magic. These reflect the greater understanding of her powers in the comics. (It bothers me that she has telepathy because she didn’t in the comics. It also bothers me that she can fly because the comics were adamant that she could not. But I guess I’m a curmudgeon about these things.) Wanda finally gets her Scarlet Witch moniker.
This episode had references to the comics that were blatant and subtle. The most obvious was the scene with the disassembled, desaturated Vision, a direct reference to the Avengers West Coast story in 1989. A few years before, while recuperating from an attack, the Vision had tapped into the powerful computer ISAAC. He then developed a delusion of grandeur that he could bring peace and prosperity to the world, so he gained control of the computers of world governments. The Avengers brought him to his senses and the Vision and Scarlet Witch left the team to start a family. The world governments were content to let him be but once he rejoined the team, his knowledge of government secrets was a threat, so they kidnapped him with the unwitting help of the Avenger Mockingbird, physically disassembled him and erased his Wonder Man–derived personality. The Avengers rescued him.
More subtle was the home in the background of the scene when Wanda hexes Westview, which looked a lot like the Maximoff home in Leonia, NJ in the comics. The whole way each person or object in Westview became an analogue of itself reminded me of Uncanny X-Men #190–191 in 1984. The sorcerer Kulan Gath transformed New York City into an ancient city of barbarians, and the X-Men, Avengers, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange had to stop him. The Scarlet Witch did something similar in the 1997 Avengers reboot, when Morgan le Fay used her power to transform a small pocket of the world into medieval times. This gave the Avengers medieval costumes and names, which was pretty cool. During this story, the Scarlet Witch’s dramatically boosted powers allowed her to recreate the deceased Wonder Man, which reminded me of her recreation of the Vision. Finally, the way the Vision spoke so poetically of love and grief was reminiscent of the comics, in which he constantly longed to have a real human body but was often one of the most soulful members of the Avengers.
Why haven’t the Avengers intervened following the Vision’s death? In the comics, every time the Vision was offline, they got all the team’s scientists, like Tony Stark, T’Challa and Hank Pym, to put him back together. There is no way the Avengers would let SWORD or SHIELD or anybody else hold his body. They would have marched in there and just taken his body, with any objections met by a terrifying glare by Captain America or Thor bringing down lightning and yelling, “I SAY THEE NAY!” The Avengers of the comics fought and bickered among themselves but in the end, they were a family, and they would have seen the Vision’s deactivation as family business. This brings home the fact that the Avengers of the movies are not as tight as those in the comics, at least not yet.
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