WandaVision spends much of its first episode devoted to playing out a classic sitcom plot. Vision’s boss Mr. Hart and his wife are coming to dinner, only there has been a matter of miscommunication and Elisabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff is under the impression that it is her and the synthezoid’s anniversary. Obviously, hijinks ensue. Taking cues from I Love Lucy, the screwball energy of the plotting revels in the couple rushing around as they attempt to deliver a great meal and a great night, all the while trying to hide their superpowered abilities and present as simply two people new to the neighborhood.
In the second, Vision swallows some chewing gum. A metaphorical spanner in his inner workings, it threatens the performance he and his wife are set to deliver as part of the town’s talent show. He arrives all out of sorts and starts using his power in a cavalier fashion with a sense of jubilant inebriation. Wanda has to work overtime to counteract this, using her powers to make his strength and other abilities seem like ordinary magicians’ trickery. She pulls it off. The town loves the act, and more importantly, doesn’t find out who they actually are.
These two instalments are tremendously funny. They are also tremendously sad.
WandaVision is the first piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – you might have heard of it – released in a year and a half. By now, its domination of the cultural conversation is evident. As such, many of the viewers eagerly clicking onto Disney+ every Friday over the past two months will already be aware that Paul Bettany’s Vision died (twice) in Avengers: Infinity War back in 2018. The show doesn’t offer an upfront explanation for how he’s back. Instead, it is the first of many questions that the first three episodes of the show pose as to what’s really going on. Questions like: What is Westview? How did Wanda seemingly command Vision to save Mrs. Hart from choking? Why the sitcom format? What’s going on with that person watching on a TV like WandaVision is an actual show in-universe? Why are the decades flying by so quickly? Who’s on the other end of that radio signal calling out to Wanda? Who is the person dressed like a beekeeper? How does Wanda rewind time? Who is Kathryn Hahn’s Agnes? Who is Teyonah Parris’ Geraldine? And where did she go while Vision was outside?
The opening third of the season works as well as it does because of how committed all the performers are; in particular its two principles who, despite their importance to Avengers: Age of Ultron and its thematic concerns, ended up being minor parts of Phase 3’s narrative. Wanda and Vision’s relationship blossomed off-screen between Captain America: Civil War and Infinity War, with the latter film asking Olsen and Bettany to sell a goodbye on the precipice of death as if it had previously invested any time in them. To Olsen’s credit, her quivering lip almost does so. Almost.
WandaVision is the duo’s time to take center stage. Both are game for the antics it initially asks of them and the range it requires. The latter in particular relishes in the opportunity to break loose and go broader with their physicality. Working in tandem with the energy that their performances radiate, elements of the production value like the detailed nature of the domestic sets, the studio-audience laughter and era-appropriate aspect ratios mean that this slice of suburbia is a world away from the flat, green screen surroundings which the studio usually uses to disguise the empty warehouses and parking lots of Atlanta.
The hyperreality of the situation enhances the actual artifice of everything, though this texture is one of the many things lost as the show enters its fourth episode. Opening with a close-up VFX shot, it initially asks audiences to again wonder what they’re looking at, but much of the cinematography that follows hews closer to the standard look of the movies set on Earth. The episode runs the clock back by way of Geraldine’s perspective – or rather, Monica Rambeau’s – to explain how she ended up in Westview as well as connecting the show to the wider MCU. In fact, as it works its way back up to the point of her banishment from Westview, it systematically explains nearly every aforementioned question in a dry, expositional fashion.
In shifting its focus outside of Westview, the perspective of the show becomes broader. These reveals come by way of the characters who set them in motion, as opposed to Wanda learning that it was in fact Randall Park’s Jimmy Woo who was trying to reach out to her on the radio. This renders them as objective reveals, rather than being grounded in a single character’s growing understanding, and purely for the benefit of the audience as a result. Only by that same maxim, they don’t change anything for the majority of the viewership because they are already aware that on some level, the events of Westview weren’t real. Which begs the question; what do they accomplish beyond taking away the air of uneasy mystery that had permeated around the show up until that point?
This question also opens itself up to a comparison point by way of the other MCU property that Monica Rambeau featured in, albeit as a small child. Captain Marvel, directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, much like WandaVision starts its story somewhere in the middle. Originally announced to be playing Carol Danvers in 2016, Brie Larson is introduced to audiences on-screen as Vers, a member of the Kree Starforce operating under Jude Law’s Yon-Rogg.
Across previous films like Half Nelson, Sugar and Mississippi Grind, the duo have become known for their ability to delve into a character’s headspace and place audiences within that subjective area in order to further understand what makes them tick. They do so in the opening moments of their MCU picture, by dropping us into a scene already underway, one that is intentionally disorientating in its flurry of chaos. They then cut to their next scene, which takes place a world away, on the Kree homeworld of Hala and finds Vers bolting awake after what is now understood as a bad dream.
Just as the audience is unable to understand what they were initially presented with; they learn that the lead character cannot either. Thus, both are placed on the same footing and this process starts an arc for both Vers and the audience of prior information being continually recontextualised and changing their understanding of what’s going on. Of course, there are things she does know and the first fifteen minutes of the film move quickly as a result, asking audiences to keep up with information that Vers is aware of, namely that the Kree are at war with the Skrulls. Other questions are gradually raised by way of this process – If the Supreme Intelligence adopts a form relevant to each person due to something in their subconscious, who is the character played by Annette Benning to Vers?
From here, the Starforce team embark on what should be a simple rescue mission, but it goes sideways when their VIP ends up being Ben Mendelsohn’s Skrull General Talos in disguise and he captures Vers. Again, what was thought to be understood has been turned on its head. Cut to black. A beat passes. Suddenly, we’re in a hangar, but not one on Hala. One that looks like it’s somewhere on Earth. Disconnected Skrull voices talk over it, as they too are questioning what they’re seeing. Unlike Agent Woo’s “So you’re saying the universe created a sitcom starring two Avengers?” in the fourth episode of WandaVision, their discussion is focused on probing further in order to understand rather than purely lampshading what was already clear.
Over the course of what I’ll term “the mindfrak sequence”, it becomes clear that they are mining Vers’ head. Only, it is not as simple as saying that once again the images on-screen are recontextualised by that knowledge. These are no longer just dreams that Vers’ subconscious is conjuring up, but fragments of memory. Through this, a sense of progression is established and one that the film will continue to build on moving forward. The sequence has a playfulness to it, with the Skrulls scrubbing through, rewinding and jumping around in nonchronological fashion in order to uncover the information they’re searching for. In doing so, they create further mysteries not just for us, but for Vers too, who can’t understand why they’re in her head. As a result, when she crashes to Earth, the stage is set for a journey directly driven by her desire to find answers as well as playing up its slippery sense of not being sure what’s going on by entwining this with a wider plot about a race of shape-shifters. Even as the film clarifies mysteries, it allows these to be additive, a way to take the story forward – even if this is through further questions – rather than purely focused on filling in prior events.
Similarly to WandaVision, Captain Marvel does share wider connections to the larger MCU. Namely: Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg and Lee Pace who all return to play younger versions of their established characters, but their presences exist in tandem with Larson’s rather than pulling focus away from Larson for extended periods of time. Jackson’s Fury in particular becomes the co-lead who eventually catches up to her and joins her en route to whatever the destination may be and even before that, him learning that life exists beyond humanity comes by way of her arrival. Meanwhile, the nature of WandaVision’s reveals mean that as it proceeds into the second half of its season, the show has less time to spend on its sitcom elements. Only this split focus of arcs is a choice necessitated by breaking from its initial structural conceit rather than a result of any character’s motivations.
The hexed-Westview is unsustainable in nature, but the format of the show requires it and everyone inside to travel through the decades until it arrives in the contemporary era before anything can actually happen. This puts those characters inside on pause until the concept runs its course, which works in terms of driving home the horror of the situation for the people who already lived in Westview but puts a limit on what Wanda and Vision can do within that milieu. What this means is that Monica is the character with the most dynamic arc because she becomes determined to go somewhere, even if that is back into the hex, while Wanda desires to remain as she is.
A second act should be where characters and material are further fleshed out, instead the Westview material opts to hit the same notes rather than finding meaningful variations on these. There are moments, like the end of the fifth episode where the couple’s argument plays out while the sitcom credits roll as if the simulacrum of suburbia is starting to break down, only the impact of this is less potent than it could be as the story has already reached a point of not being confined to that format. Stuck in this holding pattern, the performances of Olsen and Bettany gradually become hemmed in. The sitcom homages become lazier, even if some aesthetic signifiers remain like the opening titles and the mid-episode commercials, leading to less dynamic material for them to play.
This particularly applies to the sixth episode which is ostensibly an homage to Malcolm in the Middle, but only its opening scene and credits sequence really live up to what the emulation of the shooting style promises. It is a far cry from the initial episodes and the extent of their pastiches, not to mention made worse by further adding on another couple of plotlines to run parallel.
Wanda, the boys and Evan Peters’ Pietro – their “recast” uncle – go out trick or treating for Halloween. As the boys come to terms with the extent of their powers, it allows the two Maximoffs a chance to talk and the show a means of bringing up another trauma she’s suffered in her life. Only because this is not the MCU’s version of the character – played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Age of Ultron – it starts to spark questions about the multiverse and if Peters is really playing the Fox version of the character. After exhausting most of its previous mysteries, this becomes one of WandaVision’s primary ones by proxy. Only by doing this in the time that it should really be digging into Wanda in order to understand what’s led her to hide away from the real world, it makes the scale of the show even bigger, and her importance in it smaller.
Happening concurrently to this (and everything else going on), the show introduces another spinning plate in Vision’s plot in which he takes a walk further afield. As he gets closer and closer to the edge of the Hex, he comes across people stuck in their simulated nature, yet this is not even a new discovery for him considering he previously saw Herb drilling into the wall in episode three. For the audience, it is even more redundant.
Captain Marvel, on the other hand, with its tighter focus has the opportunity to dig deeper. After a chase sequence gets Vers access to some Skrull data, she sets off to track down the location of a bar that was glimpsed in the “mindfrak”. When she arrives, Boden & Fleck pan around the interior of the location and flashes of prior events play out. They show Carol hanging out with someone that we don’t know yet, that she doesn’t remember, but that we have seen previously in her memories. Again, there is progression; what was once intangible is gradually becoming tangible, this time with memories being situated within a place.
It’s also here where Fury catches up with her. The two play off each other well as they travel together to the next piece of the puzzle – the Project Pegasus facility, which they know to go to because of a picture on the wall of the bar – but neither has complete trust in the other just yet. Despite being a period piece by being set in the 90s, it largely avoids treating references as jokes, instead letting the humour arise from its characters – what they do know about their understood way of life and what they don’t about that of the other characters.
In fact, Captain Marvel’s biggest signifier of the time period is its soundtrack, yet even these are complementary to its central arc. As Vers travels to the bar via motorcycle, Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” plays over the footage as non-diegetic music. When she arrives, it becomes diegetic thanks to the bar’s sound system. When the duo leave for Project Pegasus, TLC’s “Waterfalls” plays over a wide shot over their car cruising along before becoming a soft undercurrent playing on the radio while the two converse.
Their time at Pegasus is spent discovering a test flight crash that was covered up, not just because of the loss of money it represented, but also because of the deaths of the pilot and Miranda Lawson, the doctor played by Benning. A testimony and photo which reveal the other female pilot in the flashbacks is Maria Rambeau, not to mention that the latter file features Vers in the background. Their next step is to travel to Louisiana and upon their arrival, the young Monica Rambeau immediately recognises Larson as Carol Danvers. She and her mother have a box of photos and the other fragment of Carol’s dog tag. This mosaic of memory formed is the most substantiative and tangible amount of information about the life that Carol previously led and its biggest strength is that it suggests one that exists beyond what the images show. Only the mystery doesn’t conclude just yet.
That comes when Talos arrives on the scene shortly after, having recovered the black box of the crash. As Carol listens, the film jolts back to the day it happened. I saw the film once at the Cineworld in Leicester Square, their wall-filling Superscreen made the entire room rumble in this transition. This flashback reveals Dr. Lawson is actually a Kree called Mar-Vell, looking to end the war after realising the errors of their race’s crusade against the Skrulls. Yon-Rogg killed her and took Carol back to Hala, as the young pilot had become imbued with the craft’s energy after following through on her mentor’s instructions and destroying its power core.
As the film returns to the Louisiana setting, it marries its character study to the wider contours of its plotting, tying them together in a seamless manner of recontextualization. Talos and the Skrulls are not the aggressors, but the persecuted race in the conflict. These moments, shot on handheld that allows even greater proximity to the characters, reveals the film as a tragedy. Carol had her autonomy taken away, all in service of fighting for the wrong side. The realisation of this is all the more emotional because we reach that moment at the same time as her.
This knowledge both reshapes every previous interaction as well as laying out where the film will go in its final act: to find the Skrull refugees and stop the Kree from getting their hands on the power source that Mar-Vell was utilising. At the same time, this level of care and regard for Carol’s interior life across her journey to now ensures that there has been some sense of reclamation, achieved through self-definition.
This is unlike WandaVision, which in its seventh episode reaches the end of its parodic structure. Taking cues from Modern Family, the scenes are shot in mockumentary style and interspersed with talking head interviews. Wanda takes a day for herself, only finds herself unable to control the now-larger hex like she previously could. Pieces of furniture cycle through the years. Had the show fully committed to staying within the hex until this point, it would mark the perfect opportunity to finally break the façade and have Wanda come to terms with what she has done. The title being “Breaking the Fourth Wall” would work even better.
Instead, the structure has not yet reached its terminus, best exemplified by Vision’s efforts to return home being constantly inconvenienced by obstructions. He also gets some interviews, which he plays with a nimble nonchalant nature. Curiously though, and perhaps the best example of the show not making the most of its conceptual roots, Dennings is not given any comedic material to work with. Despite being an actor who was a lead on a contemporary sitcom, her purpose is solely to fill in the synthezoid in on how he died. Her description is so detailed, almost as if she saw the same film as we did and yet another example of the show’s broader view of events. As such, it feels like padding as the episode waits until its final moments to reveal that Agnes is really Agatha Harkness, a witch who has been pretending to be playing the role of a Westview citizen the whole time.
In a quick musical number, the show rewinds back to its previous episodes in order to show her actions, capping it off by letting Hahn make a meal out of “And I killed Sparky too!”. The playfulness is welcome, although it comes underscored by the same worry that the fourth episode did – as well as the S.W.O.R.D material – in which the show is so driven by the need to be absolutely sure that the audience gets what it’s attempting, in turn leaving little to no room to mine that for its thematic and dramatic potential.
That description is true of the eight episode too, which is another flashback episode. Despite the opening scene, which unfolds in 1693 and reveals that Agatha stole the life force of her coven after they tried to punish her for practicing dark magic, the show isn’t as concerned with its surprise villain. Instead, the episode’s conceit is instead about her trying to understand how Wanda created the hex, while she largely lampshades the proceedings with lines like “so much trauma”. All the energy of her previous performances, which she managed to communicate even when barely featuring within those episodes, is sapped away in order to facilitate this.
Had WandaVision committed to staying inside the hex, it could have had the time to feature her more, not to mention the means to get to the heart of why Wanda did what she’s done while entwining this with the reveal that Agatha had manipulated her on some level. Imagine a version of the seventh episode that builds to a talking-head confessional, where Wanda breaks down or spills the beans, before revealing that Agatha is behind the camera rather than treating it as just one part of the musical montage.
Now, it should be said that this episode does literally delve into the headspace of Wanda via a series of rooms representing the most traumatic moments of her life. The first takes us back to Sokovia and reveals that the Maximoffs learned and practiced their English thanks to bootleg DVDs of the classic sitcoms previously homage. It also shows the moment where the Stark missile collided with their home, killing Wanda and Pietro’s parents. Even though this scene offers an obvious answer as to why Wanda has created a sitcom world – because it’s a place of safety – which is perhaps as obvious as many of the ones provided in the fourth episode, the major difference is that it is rooted in character.
Only the show fears that it hasn’t made this clear enough and much of the remaining episode remixes this same beat by also showing scenes of Wanda’s time being experimented on by HYDRA and a brief moment of connection she shared with Vision concerning grief in the wake of losing her brother. Both underline the point by having her watching sitcoms. In spending so much time on these periods, the skip from that post-Age of Ultron scene to Wanda’s arrival at S.W.O.R.D HQ unintentionally illustrates that the series hasn’t put time into fleshing out the pair’s relationship any more than the movies accomplished.
The sense of subjectivity that can be found in these moments also gets lost in how you can feel the show bending over backwards in order to realign what was previously established in order to justify itself. Which means that, as much for how the episode talks of trauma and grief, it never manages to actually talk about it. Olsen is a remarkably talented actress, her saucer-wide eyes in particular can expel so much emotion outwards, but she can only do so much with what you give her.
(In fact, she already made a show dedicated to exploring the journey of grief that let her express a full range of emotions plus it managed to properly utilise its supporting cast to boot. It’s called Sorry For Your Loss, it’s pretty much perfect. I would highly recommend you check it out if Olsen’s impressed you on WandaVision – and certainly if your interest has led you to read close to 4000 words about the show and when there’s still a ways to go before we wrap up.)
Meanwhile, the biggest reveals of Captain Marvel open it up even further, as now our heroes (and the viewers) are the ones with the benefit of knowledge. A confrontation between Carol, her new allies and the now-antagonistic Starforce sees the latter party attempt to repress and control her once again. The Supreme Intelligence hopes to undermine its former soldier by showing her memories of weakness. This is a return to what can be seen as intangible, but it is Carol’s understanding in herself and the reconciling that these actually happened to her renders them tangible and means she has the ability to overcome.
Having come to term with the nature of her powers, Larson’s performance gains new contours from the fun she’s clearly having being in control. She deploys her pluckiness with abandon. Taking on her former crewmates – in quick succession – she jokes, deals with them and moves onto the next. The film itself also manages to match this in instances like her brief tussle with Gemma Chan’s Minn-Erva. Carol disarms her and her opponent grabs another weapon off the ground. In the beat of stalemate, a brief verbal exchange occurs – “You knew all along. Is that why we never hung out?” “No. I just never liked you.” – before capping off the moment by showing that Minn-Erva actually reached for a NERF gun. Even the film’s prior back-and-forth about whether Goose is a simple cat or the Flerken that Talos was instantly apprehensive of comes into play as he gobbles up the Tesseract and handily takes care of some Kree aggressors.
The finale of Captain Marvel comes together… well, marvellously, culminating in the final showdown of Carol and Yon-Rogg. When the former mentor tries to control the rules of the engagement, Carol simply hits him with an energy blast. She knows who she is, she doesn’t need to prove herself to him anymore. Even with the increased level of CGI spectacle of the third act, the level of character the film has previously demonstrated is its key driving motivation and carries it to a conclusion that feels thematically consistent to what’s come before.
The finale of WandaVision has a similar moment wherein it elides action as Vision partakes in a theological debate with White Vision in order to deescalate the conflict, only its wider place within the episode is another instance of the show’s sloppy construction which has so recurrently hurt it and its strengths. The scene culminates in the pale counterpart, the former shell of his actual self, having his memories restored before flying off while there’s still a good chunk of the episode to go, much of which attempts to culminate in the emotional factor of Wanda saying goodbye to her falsified husband as the hex recedes.
It’s not as shoddy as pointlessly wrapping up the question of Pietro so early in the episode – after spending so long holding out on it – only for it have no impact on the remainder of its conclusion, but it is one more objective reveal. One based around a need to let the audience know that’s something being set up that will pay off at a point down the line. Even if we take Vision’s goodbye as an oblique hint to Wanda that she might, in some fashion, see him again, this can’t help but undercut the show’s previous suggestions that Wanda’s inability to move on was damaging. So just as Olsen and Bettany were in a situation of saying a goodbye that hadn’t properly been supported in Infinity War, the same is asked of them here.
This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if WandaVision at least committed to letting wider aspects of itself make a difference. When Wanda finds herself confronted by her Westview neighbours during her and Agatha’s battle, the residents express the pain they find themselves stuck in. The nightmares they have to experience because of her. For a moment, the show outright acknowledges that Wanda’s actions were wrong in their extent of their collateral damage, only to consign Agatha to playing the character she pretended to be as if this could be considered a just punishment in the wake of that realisation.
Just as confusing a note comes in the wake of Wanda dropping the hex. She leaves the foundations of where her ideal home once stood and walks through the centre of town. The destruction previously caused as been undone and she’s met by Monica who tells her the townspeople who were being held hostage could never understand what she gave up for them. Even something as minor as the destruction of the bandstand is erased, but more insulting is the disregard of ordinary life.
Wanda previously assisted with the evacuation of Sokovia in Age of Ultron and despite the many faults of Civil War, it starts out pretending to be interested in the effects of the Lagos explosion and Wanda’s reaction to her powers having played a part. Ironically, this is perhaps an angle that wouldn’t have come to mind so easily had the eighth episode not spent so long on reminding viewers of her history, a factor which is arguably erased in this callous and flippant conclusion. (Rest assured, the irony of writing an article this long about a show that renders itself meaningless has occurred to me, but we’re almost done.)
No doubt, Captain Marvel and WandaVision’s varying levels of effectiveness has a base in the roles they had to play within the broader MCU structure.
Despite being teased in Infinity War’s mid-credits scene, Carol was a relatively minor part of Endgame and her solo film was afforded the distance of taking place in an unexplored part of the timeline. While it has an element to set up in terms of why Fury can get in contact with her, their bond is one of the major factors in its story. Even the potential pitfall of showing how Fury lost his eye is further informed by how he opts to pretend that he lost it amidst the battle rather than admitting it was because he got too close to a furry friend. It isn’t just an instance of a prequel showing how the character became the one we’ve already known; it is the penultimate moment of recontextualization. Of course, the final is that Carol’s Air Force callsign prompts the naming of the Avengers Initiative, again based in their bond. It is a grace note that shows just how much the film commits to its intentions all the way through.
These moments are additive rather than being the primary intention of the project’s existence and its ability to stand as a singular unit makes Captain Marvel an anomaly within the extent of Marvel Studios’ output. Considering many of the other films, I have no trouble attributing this to the way that Boden and Fleck work by entrenching themselves deep within their core of their body of work, their characters. It is not only their best film, but in my eyes also the best Marvel film and one I don’t expect them to match again. Despite the muted reception it has received in the two years since its release, I hope that at least one of you who have made it to the end of this piece have reconsidered the strengths that I so deeply adore.
WandaVision, even without the comparative conceit of this essay, exists as the next major step for the MCU to progress into Phase 4 and beyond. It might not have been intended as such in a pre-pandemic world, but it is representative of the studio’s approach going forward as they expand into another medium in television, with the rights of characters they previously had to do without. Despite the uniqueness of the concept in initial instalments, it is unfortunately required to have wider concerns on its mind by setting up the Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel sequels.
At the very least. Its broader, objective view of the MCU at-large means that even when characters are moved forward, this registers as more of a necessity to move them into position for whatever is coming next rather than what’s currently unfolding. Not only does this come at the expense of what’s come before, but it culminates in dull spectacle that’s not so different from so many of the franchise’s prior instalments. Only that overarching view of the universe as a whole is now what so many fans are privy to due to the emphasis on connective tissue and the roadmap of where the franchise is headed. The MCU has never been bigger yet its sense of character has never felt as small and those playing the ordinary people matter even less. They don’t want you to adjust your television sets, nothing is wrong, this is exactly what they wanted to happen.
