Streaming Saturday #12.5: WandaVision Wednesday

Happy St. Patrick's Day, Ticketholders!

If you read my last issue of Anime-BAWklog, you know about how I ruined all of my own plans by being a scholastically responsible, emotionally fragile, and mostly unnecessary crybaby about the non-existent feelings of modern computers and the non-existent attention spans of modern humans, so let's not revisit that or pay any attention to the fact that I just revisited that.

Okay?

Okay.

Instead, I'd appreciate it if you all liked and commented on this post, the previous post I linked to above, and these two previous entries in my coverage of WandaVision:

Stay Tuned #11: Juan Division (Disney+ First Impressions and In Defense of WandaVision)

Streaming Saturday #12: WandaVision Episode 4 (Re-branding, 3-Episode Recap, and Episode 4)

Before I cover the final five episodes of WandaVision, a SPOILER Warning! is in effect for those of you who haven't seen them yet or been bombarded by speculators and media coverage.

"On A Very Special Episode" of WandaVision (the fifth episode) based fittingly--or ironically, depending on your artsiness--on the 1980's sitcom, Growing Pains, Wanda and Vision are struggling to raise their new twin babies. The character breaks become even more frequent in this episode, as Wanda is too distraught and distracted by motherhood to maintain much control over her reality (remember the old cliffhanger of "it's all Wanda"?), showing through Agnes that the citizens of Westview see her, at the very least, as some kind of tyrannical film director. Vision starts to notice the cracks in "reality" as well, driving him to a rebellious quest for self-discovery. But in the meantime, Wanda (or maybe Billy and Tommy, because they somehow know the true nature of the world they have been "born" into?) ages her twins into five- and then ten-year-olds. Also, they adopt a dog named Sparky for some reason (probably so he can die later).

On the outside, S.W.O.R.D. director Tyler Hayward discovers that if they send something into "the Hex" that matches the decade inside, it won't be changed by the barrier, so he sends in a missile-armed drone to kill Wanda (because conventional weapons work so well on super-powered beings). After Wanda scares the crap out of Hayward in a "does this belong to you?" moment, she returns home and almost comes to blows with Vision. That is, until the series' first ever post-credits sequence, when Evan Peters shows up as Pietro!

This will later turn out to not be as cool as it sounds, so let's talk about the paper towel commercial instead! The brand is Lagos (a reference to the opening scene of Age Of Ultron, which involves Wanda accidentally blowing up hundreds of people in Lagos), and it's your typical side-by-side comparison ad involving a test liquid that is definitely not blood.

Episode six is the "All-New Halloween Spooktacular!" Inspired by Malcom In the Middle, this episode of WandaVision follows the Maximoff (or is it Vision? What is Vision's last name, anyway? Is it like a Mario Bros. thing, where his name is Vision Vision? Is Vision just his last name because his first name is "The"? Or is it a female-empowerment kind of thing where he just takes Wanda's last name? It is all Wanda, after all, right?) family as they go trick-or-treating as their original comic book designs. We soon learn that Billy has inherited psychic powers from Vision (how does reanimated necrotic robot DNA work again?) and miracle powers from Wanda, and Tommy has inherited...his...uncle's...speed? Again, how does genetics work again?

While Pietro has a brother-sister chat with Wanda that made me speculate that he might be Mephisto ("I like what you've done with the place"), Vision resumes his quest for answers from the previous episode by walking to the outskirts of Westview, where he notes a gradual decline in Wanda's influence, as the citizenry are trapped in repetitive tasks with tortured looks on their faces, and later simply frozen in place. This includes Agnes, who (after some wibbly-wobbly-mindy-windy stuff on Vision's part) tells Vision that he is supposed to be dead. Vision then manages to break through the Hex wall, but promptly begins degrading to the point that Billy can no longer sense him. This makes Wanda experience a surge in power, expanding the wall to re-absorb Vision while also taking in Darcy and a literal carnival of S.W.O.R.D. agents. Hayward, however, remains beyond the new scope of influence, apparently tracking Vision's vibranium body for some as-yet-unknown reason.

This episode's commercial is a decidedly 90s claymation ad for a GoGurt-inspired product called "Yo-Magic." It involves a talking shark, a kid on a deserted island, a cup of Yo-Magic that is impossible to open, and a super-dark payoff.

The seventh episode is all about "Breaking the Fourth Wall," and follows Wanda (literally, because it's inspired by Modern Family) as she takes a personal day after the previous episode's barrier expansion proved rather draining. Even the kids are too much for her, so she asks (forces?) Agnes to babysit them. We also see the first signs that the house itself might not be real, as the walls and decor begin flickering through their previous designs. Elsewhere, Vision wakes up and frees Darcy (literally and psychically) from her assigned Escape Artist character, and the pair run into a series of metaphysical Wile E. Coyote detour gags as they attempt to make their way back to Wanda. On the outside, Monica Rambeau takes steps to re-enter Westview, ultimately deciding to pass through in an old space suit that transforms into her Spectrum costume from the comics. And she has (Mutant?) powers! Monica confronts Wanda, but Agnes intervenes and takes Wanda into her house. Where are Billy and Tommy? Where has Pietro been all this time? What's with the strange, purple room in Agnes' basement? Well, as it turns out, Agnes is a literal soul-sucking witch named--as every speculating nerd on the internet, myself included, predicted prior to the series' release--Agatha Harkness. So it's not all Wanda..."It Was Agatha All Along!" Running the camera for the Malcom In the Middle and Modern Family episodes? "It Was Agatha All Along!" Alternate Universe Pietro? "It Was Ahh..." You get it by now. Oh, and she killed Sparky, too. Zero sarcasm, Kathryn Hahn should get an Emmy nomination for this show.

This episode's commercial is for Nexus-brand antidepressants, "so you can get back to reality...or the reality of your choosing."

In a post-credits scene, Pietro attacks Monica.

Time for some AIMLESS, ALGORITHM-CHASING, MARVEL SPECULATION!!!! That I didn't come up with. As related by Bob Chipman, there are several theories surrounding Agnes/Agatha which could come into play in future MCU properties. The first regards Agnes' much-shaded husband, Ralph. Through some old-English etymology, the name "Ralph" translates to something involving wolves. Couple that with Agnes saying in one episode that Ralph "works better in the dark," and supposedly Ralph might be the Golden Age Marvel character, Jack Russell, a.k.a. the Werewolf By Night. The second involves color-coded magic and flowers. Yes, flowers. Wanda's magic is red. So are the roses in front of her house. Agatha's magic is purple. So are the flowers in front of Agnes' house. But we see in this episode that the flowers in front of the event planner's house (the only "character" besides Agnes to not get a facial recognition profile in Episode Four; her name is Dottie Jones, by the way) are yellow. So according to Chipman, could Dottie Jones be Arcanna, all-around Zatanna knockoff and member of the Squadron Supreme? Only time will tell.

Next on WandaVision is an episode titled, "Previously On...." There is no sitcom inspiration. There is no retro-sinister commercial for repressed Freudian trauma. This is where it all began, before we get to how it all will end. The episode opens in 1693 with a clever subversion of the Salem Witch Trials (which took place in Massachusetts, not Oregon; the location card tells us so), where Agatha--presumably--begins her dark path by sucking the magic out of her entire coven, including her own mother. The bulk of the episode thereafter follows a This Is Your Life-meets-A Christmas Carol format, with Agnes sending Wanda on a journey through her repressed memories as a way of making Wanda unlock conscious control of her powers. We learn why hexagons (the barrier is hexagonal because of how the pictures in Hayward's office were arranged on his wall, and because S.W.O.R.D. cut Vision's dead body into six pieces), why sitcoms (because Wanda spent the worst parts of her childhood escaping reality with old sitcoms--though not as literally as she is now), why the house looked like it wasn't real in the last episode (because it isn't, aside from the foundation), and how Vision came back to life (because Wanda can transmute air into a flying, laser-shooting, psychic, super-strong, occasionally intangible, shape-shifting, vibranium humanoid with a soul, apparently...maybe). After the trip down memory lane, Agatha comes to the conclusion that Wanda isn't merely a Mind Stone "miracle," she has always had some degree of access to "chaos magic," and (because Disney owns Fox and they can use the name now) calls her the Scarlet Witch.

In a mid-credits scene, back at S.W.O.R.D., Hayward unveils the White Vision (answering my earlier question about the last names of fictional robots), which they created using Vision's reassembled original body.

It was at this point that I (wrongly? We'll see, because there's a long road ahead between WandaVision and the end of the Phase) speculated on the involvement of Monica's mysterious aerospace engineer friend (whom the fandom have in turn speculated might be Mr. Fantastic) in the creation of White Vision, and whether or not it might later become the basis for the android Human Torch. I then invented a possible MCU series or film called Torches, in which Paul Bettany (as Android Torch), Chris Evans (who played Captain America until Endgame, reprising his role as 2000's Human Torch) and Michael B. Jordan (who played Killmonger in Black Panther, reprising his role as Fant4Stick Torch) would do a multiversal crossover. And speaking of Mr. Fantastic, recent casting news revealed that black actor Jonathan Majors was cast to play time-traveling villain Kang the Conqueror--who is a distant future descendant of Reed Richards--in the upcoming Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania, suggesting that the MCU version of the Richards-Storm family might get a more diverse interpretation than in their source material. Quantumania is currently scheduled for release in 2022, to be followed by Guardians Of the Galaxy 3 and...Fantastic Four.

And now, for the series finale, titled..., "The Series Finale." Again, no sitcom inspiration, no commercial break, just good, old Marvel stuff. Wanda fights Agnes (with some cool callbacks to what happened "Previously On" WandaVision), Vision has a well-choreographed fight with White Vision (excluding the beam struggle and the philosophical interlude, but they had their purposes too, I guess), and Monica has a "fight" with Pietro (who turns out to just be some actor named Ralph Bohner that Agatha mind-controlled and gave Quicksilver powers to with a magical douchebag necklace...wait, is this the Ralph? Agnes' punching-bag husband Ralph? Eww. And I don't just mean that Marvel threw away the entire multiverse concept to make a twenty-year-old erection joke. But, eww to that, too). In the midst of all of this, Wanda is forced to face--through interactions with the witches from Agatha's past as well as the captive townspeople--the ramifications of her actions and the stigma of her Scarlet Witch title. Also, at one point, a man driving a big, bright, yellow van interrupts the proceedings to say "don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger," leading this viewer to go, "hey, they acknowledged the thing! They must be about to do the thing!" But "the thing" (revealing Dottie as Arcanna and having her break up the fight between Wanda and Agnes) never happens. At least, not yet. There are some shots of Dottie with interesting--possibly knowing--looks on her face, and it turns out that Monica's Spectrum energy is also yellow, but that's it. Wanda defeats Agatha with her own medicine and traps her in her Agnes persona, but after Wanda frees everyone from Westview, she, Vision, and the twins return home and she recedes the Hex barrier, de-manifesting Vision and their boys. So, is Agatha free again? Did Wanda leave a Hex skin around Agatha so she'd be stuck in Agnes mode in perpetuity? How does an unexplained, unpredictable, fictional interpretation of something that isn't real work again? Why did most of the dozens of cool things that everyone predicted and speculated would happen not happen again? Is it not supposed to matter because WandaVision was a competent, entertaining depiction of grief, psychological trauma, and faulty coping mechanisms, but with jokes and superheroes, and therefore a well-executed Marvel thing that generated terabytes of discourse and set the tone for the franchise going forward? Or is the 90s continuing to illustrate to us that speculation ruins comic book things? I mean, that's what created the cycle of constant deaths, resurrections, reboots, retcons, and re-started numbering schemes in the printed medium that characterizes the modern state of the comic book industry, and drove Marvel to sell off their IP catalog to Fox, Paramount, and Sony to avoid bankruptcy because they didn't take high school economics before pandering to the speculator crowd back then.

Okay, so how about those credits sequences, huh?

Monica gets summoned to space by a Skrull officer (possible lead-in to Captain Marvel 2 and the Secret Invasion miniseries? Damnit; have I learned nothing from my own words?), and Wanda joins the Ed Norton Hulk, Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, and Thanos in the "Meditating Alone in a Log Cabin Club". Her meditation involves manifesting an updated version of her comic book design, reading the Dark Hold (the magic book from Doctor Strange, Agent Carter, and Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.), and hearing Billy's and Tommy's voices.

The first episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier will be up this Friday on Disney+, and I will have my thoughts on it ready for you in time for the next Streaming Saturday. Remember to leave a like and comment below, and I'll catch you later.

Ticketmaster,

Out.