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Wanda Maximoff (and brother Pietro) made their official MCU debuts back in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron (although I believe she also popped up at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, making her a character that has never really had much of an origin story. We know the basics of how her parents were killed and she and Pietro joined Hydra, but there have always been a lot of missing pieces for anyone who doesn’t follow the comics. This week’s episode of WandaVision finally corrected that oversight, thanks to Agatha’s prying into just how Wanda has been able to create this idyllic, sitcom facade (so … it hasn’t all been Agatha?).
But first we get some Agatha backstory as well as we flashback to 1600s Salem, Massachusetts. Agatha is on trial for being a witch, but this isn’t the actual Witch Trials … she’s being tried by her own coven for stealing knowledge to practice the darkest of magic. Agatha says she just bent the rules a bit but it’s an infraction that cannot be forgiven as the coven begins to blast Agatha, magically bound to a stake, with their own magic to destroy her. But Agatha is already too powerful, and she drains the entire coven of their powers, leaving their whithered husks lying on the ground. So how did Agatha get from Salem to Westview? That’s an answer we don’t yet have.
But Agatha has bound Wanda in her cavernous basement with runes, meaning only the witch who created the runes can use her magic in that space. So Agatha presses Wanda to learn just how she’s been able to create this elaborate illusion, as she puts it ‘magic on autopilot’. Agatha does admit that she’s been working some of her own magic, including Pietro, or ‘Fietro’ as she calls him, because the real Pietro is ‘full of holes’ and on another continent and not even she has the power to resurrect someone that dead. So this Pietro is just what she calls a ‘crystalline possession’ … but who is the possessed and how did Agatha just happen to conjure up the X-Men version of Pietro, and what exactly has he done with Monica? That’s neither here nor there as Agatha wants all the dirt on Wanda.
Creating doors in the basement for Wanda to pass through, we first revisit her Sokovian childhood where she and her family watch classic American sitcoms on DVD to learn English. Wanda’s favorite is The Dick Van Dyke Show Season 2 Episode 21, ‘It May Look Like a Walnut’, in which Rob dreams that aliens are using walnuts to take over the world. Wanda enjoys the episode because in the end, it’s all a dream. Unfortunately, the last time she and the family watch the episode, her parents are killed by a Stark Industries bomb that does not explode. For two days she and Pietro hid under a table waiting for it to go off. All Agatha gets from this is a baby witch ‘obsessed with sitcoms and years of therapy ahead of her.’ But that still doesn’t explain Wanda’s extreme power.
The next stop down Memory Lane is the Hydra facility where Wanda and Pietro ‘joined an anti-freedom terrorist organization’ (Agatha’s description) that Wanda thought would make a difference in the world. Instead she was just a lab rat for Baron Wolfgang von Strücker, brought face-to-face with Loki’s scepter. The lab tech remarks that no one thus far has survived an encounter with the scepter but when Wanda touches it, there is a blast of light and energy revealing the Mind Stone and something else … a silhouetted figure with a very familiar headdress, like the one Wanda wore on Halloween. It appears that this encounter with the Mind Stone is what amplified Wanda’s powers, or as Agatha quipped, ‘An Infinity Stone amplified what otherwise would have died on the vine.’
Next Wanda and Agatha turn up at the Avengers compound after Pietro’s death. Wanda is trying to console herself with an episode of Malcolm in the Middle when an eavesdropping Vision pops in to try and cheer her up. She tells him she can’t find any happiness when she’s consumed by grief, but he asks her ‘what is grief if not love persevering?’ Vision laughs at some of the antics on screen, after he got the grasp of what a sitcom was, and that helped forge the bond between the two of them. But with both Pietro and Vision dead, who can pull Wanda out of her sorrow? Agatha presses her more about how she created Westview.
In the episode’s most pivotal moment, we are taken to the S.W.O.R.D. headquarters where we previously saw, on video, Wanda blasting her way in and stealing Vision’s body. Now we see Wanda entering the building demanding to be taken to Vision. After not taking no for an answer, she’s finally invited to meet with … Director Hayward. He tries to make Wanda understand that Vision is just a piece of machinery, there’s no actual body for her to bury and he’s certainly not going to just let her put $3 billion worth of vibranium in the ground. To make it crystal clear to her, he allows her to see his team dismantling Vision (and the episode helpfully provides a flashback scene to Avengers: Endgame when Thanos removed the Mind Stone, leaving the grey shell of what Vision once was, and which was also saw in an earlier episode). Hayward pushes Wanda just a bit too far when he tells her Vision ‘isn’t yours’ to take and she shatters the observation window and floats down to the floor to observe the now disassembled body for herself. Touching Vision’s head she says she can’t feel him anymore and leaves the facility. None of this is anything like the scenario Hayward seems to have created. But why would he fake the security video?
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Despondent, and in the series’ most heart-wrenching scene, Wanda gets in her car and drives … to Westview. It’s not the town we’ve seen all season. It’s dirty, run down. We see Sharon Davis sitting outside a coffee shop. We see Harold Proctor and some others who have been drawn into Wanda’s sitcom world. Then Wanda stops at a vacant lot. She’s been carrying an envelope and once inside what is the foundation of a house she pulls a sheet of paper from the envelope. It’s a deed to the land that Vision bought for their home, ‘to grow old in’. Wanda’s grief overtakes her completely and as she shrieks, she releases a massive red energy wave that builds their house and completely transforms Westview into the ideal sitcom town. Inside the house, Wanda also creates her version of Vision, and the scene fades to black and white with Wanda the only thing still in color. This Rob Petrie version of Vision says, ‘Wanda! Welcome home’, and she becomes the Wanda from the first episode, now in their happy black and white world, settling in for a night of television.
Wanda’s reverie is interrupted by the sound of two hands clapping, snapping her back to reality as she sees the TV studio, the lights, the seats for the audience. Agatha is clapping and disappears in a puff of purple smoke. Then Wanda hears the boys crying out for her. Outside Agatha is in full witchy regalia, holding the boys by their throats with magical cords. Agatha tells Wanda that she has no idea how dangerous she is, that before now someone like Wanda was just a myth, capable of spontaneous creation, and what she’s been doing with this construct of Westview is ‘chaos magic’. Agatha tell Wanda this make her … ‘the Scarlet Witch’. Yes! This is the first time that the name has been used in the MCU! And that’s where the episode ends.
Until the second mid-credits scene of the series where we see exactly what Hayward has been up to. Using a sample of Wanda’s energy absorbed by the drone, S.W.O.R.D. is now ready to power up the reassembled, now all white Vision. But the question is what does Hayward want with this rebooted Vision? Hayward has been blunt in the past that Vision is a weapon, despite Wanda believing otherwise, and perhaps her Vision wasn’t even though there was certainly the capacity for him to be that if he were in the wrong hands. It looks now like he just might be in those wrong hands.
With one episode remaining, we’re left to ponder just how this will end, if any other major characters will show up (and both Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany have teased someone big coming to the show), and how exactly this will all tie into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We know Monica will be in Captain America 2 and Wanda figures prominently into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but what does the future hold for Agatha, Hayward, Jimmy and Darcy?
New episodes of WandaVision premiere Fridays on Disney+.
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