The WandaVision Finale: What Worked And What Didn't
The Unexpectedly Potent Impact Of The Show Meant Its Final Episode Had More Riding On It Than Even Some Of The MCU Films Do
Spoiler Warning For The WandaVision Series Finale
Tristan Young @talltristan
WandaVision entered the cultural ether is a mild curiosity, something to kill time while we enter year two of our hermetic pandemic life, but not exactly worthy of animating lively and earnest discourse. Oh wow did that ever change. In its brief run WandaVision has captured the orbit of pop culture enthusiasts from far beyond the Marvel spectrum and become a lightning rod for surprisingly robust exhumations on what grief and love mean, the role of fantasy media in our lives, and newly emergent interpretations of how a story can be told. The series has masterfully segued from quirky and sincere humour to disruptive and interrogative examinations on how we process and explain our most complex and inscrutable emotions. The mixture of anodyne analytics and disorienting waves of debilitating mourning or liberating catharsis has weaved a complicated and messy overlay of what transitioning from trauma to acceptance looks like. The series finale, after accumulating a wealth of divergent moving parts, had a lot of heavy lifting to do to tie all of these threads into a satisfying conclusion. Now that Wanda’s Hex is lifted it’s worth looking at what concepts were brought to fruition and what was left underdeveloped, like ghosts frustratingly still trapped in the machine.
What Worked
Wanda Is Not Let Off The Hook
As the series became more explicit about the reality of Wanda’s actions within the Hex- that she was literally holding hostage and perpetually traumatizing a group of Jersey residents, one couldn’t help but wonder how the show would get her out of this one, morally speaking. How and in what manner would she be absolved from her onerous and unethical actions, bred of sincere but solely inward looking pain? Would another far greater threat arise to give Wanda a comparative thematic pass and allow her a chance to redeem herself in the eyes of those she had cruelly assailed? I’m glad to say the show didn’t take the path in giving her the easy way out. With the Hex dissolved and the townsfolk free from her psychic bondage, their understanding and mental scaring of what happened remained. They look at her as she exits the town with an acute mixture of disdain and fear. No longer one of the saviours of earth who helped fell Thanos just a month prior, she is a literal emotional terrorist, forcing her subconscious nightmares onto them to mentally buffer her own frail emotional stability. There is no squaring the circle or undoing what she did to those people, and she has to live with that on her conscience. Hopefully it will be a lesson that weighs heavily as she delves deeper and deeper into her apparently god like powers, and her past mistakes will prove to be a moral rejoinder should there be a next time she considers succumbing to her instinctual and terrifying passions. And yet the show depicts her as more curious than afraid of this darker edge. Despite the prophesised end of times that her existence implies and the book of the damned she absconds with being ominously named the Darkhold, Wanda is more curious than afraid of the potential her burgeoning powers will afford her. This moral ambiguity will serve her future stories well and hopefully make for some compelling contrasts as she either teams up with or challenges Dr Strange in his upcoming sequel.
Agatha Chewing The Scenery
As no doubt many casual MCU fans had to look up to learn upon the reveal of nosey neighbour Agnes really being the magic interloper Agatha Harkness, WandaVision had a tight rope to navigate in establishing her character and place in the larger continuity. Comics have depicted her certainly as antagonistic but also as a frenemy type mentor to Wanda. The finale did a good job of portraying her as certainly a menacing thorn in Wanda’s side, but mitigated any world ending, precipitous machinations by showing her as more interested in and inspired by Wanda’s power. Certainly she has selfish ends, but more in purist of the knowledge itself rather than to enact some cataclysmic master plan. Indeed, Agatha did an excellent job of intimating her disapproval but also feverish awe for what Wanda was capable of. Interspersed between her delightfully snarky and causal derision, Agatha was aghast at the enormity of what being in the Scarlet Witch’s presence meant. This allowed Agatha to be a larger than life presence herself and made for meaningful intersections between slightly comedic and slightly villainous. Like Wanda’s concluding complexities, this nicely sets Agatha up for a variety of applications, either opposite or reluctantly on Wanda’s side whenever and wherever she pops up next.
White Vision Surprisingly Worked
One of the most boring tropes in the MCU dating all the way back to the first Iron Man- and one with increasingly diminishing returns- has been our heroes fighting a morality based mirror of themselves. A physically or technologically superior one usually, but the context and resultant scene is always boringly similar. This seemed like the deflating direction the inclusion of White Vision late into the game suggested and that certainly seemed the case for the first part of the episode as he and his Hex analogue duked it out. To my pleasant surprise the episode took a turn for the much more cerebral and contemplative in concluding the duelling Visions scene. Centering the debate between the two of them around the hypothetical Ship Of Theseus thought experiment was a refreshingly novel way to articulate the legitimacy of both of their claims to the one true Vision, or the invalidation of said claims. Both of them are the Vision, neither of them are. The effectiveness of this paradoxical inquiry compelled White Vision to effectively eject his mandate to kill his targets and ruminate on the implications of his and Hex Vision’s existence. This was a unique and intuitive way for a show that has revelled in not being defined by violence to find a non-violent, and effectively ambiguous way to resolve the encounter. It recalls the climax of Dr Strange in which the Dormomu threat was circumvented by some intuitive and magical word play.
Wanda And Vision’s Farewell
One of the central pleasures of WandaVision has been watching the show carefully migrate from quirky comedic homage to genuinely sincere drama, and our two leads have been excellent at delicately charting that fragile course. As far as tearful goodbyes go, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany had to do so in some fairly unique and frankly bizarre narrative contexts. The efficacy of their candour and processing in real time the totality of Wanda’s decision to collapse the Hex and ostensibly consign her family to oblivion was tricky stuff but they did a terrific job. Bettany relegated his wholly understandable curiosity of what exactly the hell he was- especially in regards to Wanda’s actions- as secondary to declaring his affection for his partner; even what answers he did get were more poetic than concrete, but he knew what to focus on. Speaking of poetic, the writing and delivery of Wanda’s final parting words to Vision were a challenging mixture of grief and love, perfectly encapsulating what WandaVision at least wanted to be about, even if it didn’t always hit the mark. It recalls what the Vision said in his introductory film Age Of Ultron, proclaiming the admiration we can find in simply attempting something beyond one’s ability to pull it off. When it was most important, WandaVision did just that.
What Didn’t Work
The Lack Of Permanence In That Same Farewell
While Olsen portrayed a complex and convoluted matrix of emotions admirably, her final moments with Vision were perhaps a touch too optimistic. This stems from the MCU adopting more and more the inexorable dictum of marvel comics that no one ever stays truly dead. The inclusion of White Vision and the future importance of her currently obliterated children strongly indicate their stories are not over. While this could be seen as exciting foreshadowing of the shape of things to come, it severely undercuts the central theme of WandaVision, which is confronting grief. It’s painful, unruly, and there is no right way to do it, other than you simply must. As the Hex is slowly undone, exorcizing Wanda of the hermetic life in which she hid from such grief, the show was setting things up for her to finally accept the painful truth. Instead a narrative back door is opened for her to reconnect with the Vision and once again circumvent the need to truly come to terms with his murder at the hands of Thanos. For such a thematically adventurous show, it kind of chokes the potency of the ending.
The Whole Quicksilver Deal
What was once the most exciting revelation in WandaVision, one indicative of a much larger MCU brimming with untapped potential, ended up being little more than a reductive troll. And a somewhat incoherent one at that! Wanda’s ‘brother’ Pietro, played not by Aaron Taylor-Johnson from Age Of Ultron where the character died, but by Evan Peters who played the character in the previously unrelated (speaking in terms of ownership) X-men universe implied the first steps in merging the two multiverses that were now under the Disney umbrella. The implication was that Wanda, in a subconscious exertion of her power on previously unheard of scale, summoned a living facsimile of her brother form a different universe. Instead he was just a spy sent by Agatha, and a pretty useless one at that. The final moments of his anaemic reveal don’t illuminate the situation much beyond he was under her mind control and she gave him powers to approximate that of Wanda’s brother. Fine, sure. What the show is far less clear on is, why did Wanda fall for it? Agatha was doing many things behind the scenes but directly invading and manipulating Wanda’s mind on a strictly perceptive level was never said to be one of them. Why didn’t Wanda immediately recognize he wasn’t her brother? In the episode subsequent to his reveal she was clearly uncomfortable with him, which was perfectly congruous with her not understanding exactly what her powers had conjured, but not if he’s just some dude named Ralph Bohner who she’s never met. The MCU has taught us to pay attention to interstitial threads and seemingly innocuous characters as they often evolve into major developments and arcs for the films. For such a big deal reveal to end up being as less than nothing seems kind of lame.
Covid Shenanigans
This one is a bummer but not one that the team behind the show could fully control. As WandaVision wasn’t fully finished filming before the pandemic hit, you could sense how a few threads were left a little undercooked by the end due to its disruptions. As the show established the Tyler Hayward character from SWORD as more and more of a duplicitous villain with his own self-serving agenda, some kind of confrontation seemed in the works for him. Instead he spends his screen time trying to execute a couple kids (rude!) and then gets hit by a car. Next thing we know he’s under arrest and that’s it. The whole story line with him seemed really deflated by the end, like they weren’t able to get all they wanted out of it. It was Darcy who rammed his car by the way, which along with one throw away line is all she got to do for the whole episode. I get the impression that Covid related scheduling issues prevented her from being on set for the last stretch. Likewise for how things played out for the Monica Rambeau character. Her whole story by the end just seemed so perfunctory; a small but impressive show of power, a wink and a nod at the end, and a post credit scene signalling a brighter future. There wasn’t a whole lot of content there, which seems emblematic of so many stories and shows that got streamlined if not outright delayed during the pandemic. Luckily this surely isn’t the last we’ll see of Monica or Darcy. Hopefully it is for Hayward though- that guy sucked.