WandaVision (1.6): All Things Are Made New Again

To this point, the world of WandaVision functioned from a largely insular perspective. Every part of this world revolved around Wanda. We hardly left her sight except for Vision’s brief days at work. This episode is far different. The arrival of Pietro at the end of the last episode felt like it blew everything up and that much literally happens (I mean, sort of) by the end of this week’s episode.

We spend this week’s episode following around three separate character groups, pairings, and individuals. The first is Wanda and Pietro (and her two twins to a lesser extent). It starts out innocently enough with Pietro causing chaos with his nephews as the fun uncle. Eventually the goofy sitcom quality (crafted in a lovely homage to Malcolm in the Middle this week) cedes to something far more serious. By the end of last week’s episode, Vision started to see through Wanda’s façade. This week Pietro fills that role. He fills it so well, in fact, that Wanda ends up attacking him for making a reference to Vision’s death.

Vision is the second party we follow over the course of the episode. While Wanda and Pietro’s journey throughout the episode is marked by a transition from goofy to ominous. Vision’s journey has no such transition. From the beginning, it’s spooky. As he travels closer and closer to the edge of town, the grimmer the situation in Westview appears. Not only are these people under a spell, but they can’t even move. Vision sees one woman in her front lawn making a repetitious movement with tears streaming down her face. Finally, as Agnes (I really do wish we had more scenes with Kathryn Hahn in this show) clues Vision into his own death when he breaks her spell. He is insistent on getting help for the citizens of Westview. As he tears through the outer wall of the city, it tears him apart. In an effort to save him, Wanda starts to expand the boundaries of Westview. Those boundaries engulf Darcy and all of Hayward’s team, save the him and the few people in his truck that got away. While we can assume Jimmy and Monica make it away, it’s not totally clear exactly what happens to them as the last group we follow throughout this episode.

As Director Hayward draws a line in the sand and has Monica, Darcy, and Jimmy kicked off the base for challenging his methodology and outright hostility, it fractures the S.W.O.R.D. group we have spent time with up until this point. The group that is interested in actually helping Wanda and the residents of Westview though (Monica, Jimmy, and Darcy) won’t give up quite so easily though. Darcy starts to hack Hayward’s files in an attempt to uncover what he is hiding and likely what his mission is in all of this. At the moment, all we know for sure is that he is tracking specifically Vision’s location (presumably to obtain the vibranium, but we do not know for certain) inside the anomaly. Jimmy and Monica plan to go into the anomaly in an attempt to help Wanda. Where they are at the end of the episode is a mystery but as we near present-day sitcoms and fractured realities, it is clear that their time is running out.

This week’s episode also spurred thoughts about how emotion is handled in the MCU. While it’s not all heavy-handed and overly sentimental in these movies (though to be clear, it almost always is), the exploration of grief and how it manifests in superpowered individuals feels fresh in WandaVision. While Wanda’s feelings of stark loneliness and emptiness are not uncommon in grief, the manifestation of a world within the larger world that preserves what you hold dearest (and even explores possibilities that you dreamed of, like having kids) is potent. It is not fantasy, it is pain. Vision’s “death” in this week’s episode felt far more intense than in Avengers: Infinity War not because it was not sad then but because now we know the full extent of its meaning. His importance to this world made his death serious then, but what was most important in his world is what made it all feel so much more devastating this time around.