****THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR WANDAVISION!!!****
Hello Internet!
I’m sorry that’s been a little while since I’ve done a Weekly Blog. I try not to miss Weekly Blogs because they are supposed to be weekly, but sometimes there’s just nothing I really feel compelled to talk about. When I don’t have a good idea or motivation, it’s hard to think of subject matter for a blog. Luckily, we have a great topic to talk about because a certain Disney Plus show just had their finale and I want to talk about it. But first we need to quickly talk about the pieces I’ve published in the past week. The most important thing is that we hit 600 published Pieces! So that’s really exciting. I published “Scarlet Door Part 2” which is a sequel to the AI-Assisted Piece Scarlet Door. The first one was partially written by Artificial Intelligence which helped shape the plot, but this one was entirely done by me. I’m just now kind of realizing that the color Scarlet, warping realities, and an AI all have to do with a certain MCU couple, but I swear there’s no relation! Just a major coincidence. Anyway, please go check out both of those pieces if you haven’t already and help me as I continue to celebrate that milestone. Other pieces I published the past couple of weeks include a Writing Prompt Piece titled “On Watch,” which is about a group of soldiers stationed at this military base after the world has been overtaken by zombies. I also published a Poem titled, “Return Trip,” which is about the feeling of going off to accomplish something and then failing to do that thing. We’d all like to return home with a tale of glory or accomplishment, but sometimes life just doesn’t go your way and you end up coming home bruised and defeated. Finally, this past Friday, I published a Writing Prompt Piece titled “Ice Witch” which follows a young hero looking for adventure as he travels to this town to pursue a powerful ice witch who can turn people to solid ice. However he quickly discovers that the tales of this witch don’t quite match the tales surrounding her. So yeah that’s all the pieces I published over the past couple of weeks. If you missed any of those pieces, I highly recommend you check them out.
Now that we have all of that out of the way, let’s quickly move on to the biggest thing to hit Disney Plus since The Mandalorian: WandaVision. I want to talk about this incredible show and the unique story it decided to tell. Let’s talk both about the positives and the negatives as well as the cloud of theories and predictions around it. I think it’s important to recognize a lot of outside factors surrounding WandaVision that put it in an unique place starting with when it was scheduled to release compared to when it was actually released. Originally, WandaVision was slated to release in Spring 2021 as the fifth Marvel Production in their Phase 4. However a little thing called a global pandemic shifted a ton of things around and delayed major MCU movies like Black Widow and Eternals. Instead we have the story of Wanda and Vision kicking off 2021 and Phase 4 which put a lot of pressure on them. 2020 was a year without any MCU following huge movies like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: End Game. Many people like myself were desperate for more MCU stuff and excited to see where things would go after the events of End Game. I was really excited for WandaVision and the idea of Wanda and Vision hoping through decades of sitcoms made me even more excited. I wanted a show that went crazy and got weird. I wanted it to go off the rails. Now did we get that? In some ways, yes, but in others, no. In the end we got a show about the power of grief that had some really strong character moments. WandaVision also sets a great example of how Disney Plus can allow interesting stories to be told that might not have fit the big screen.
Like I said, I believe WandaVision was ultimately a great show with a lot of strong moments. The week to week cliffhangers really made me wish this show was all released at once even though I do believe watching week to week was a great experience. I loved all the online discussions and fan theories flying around week to week as we got answers to some questions and more questions for others. I think ultimately the reason this show turned out so good was because the main leads of the show, Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda and Paul Bettany as Vision, were such fantastic actors. They really matched the sitcom styles in each episode and they didn’t pull punches just because this was a television series and not a big, MCU movie. When Wanda’s pain and grief were displayed on screen, you really felt it and that is due to a large part to Elizabeth Olsen’s performance. The other stand out role was the nosy neighbor turned villain, Agnes AKA Agatha played by Kathryn Hahn. I mostly knew Kathryn Hahn from her role on Parks and Recreation and she is a perfect casting here. Not only does she play a good comedic character throughout the show, but when it’s revealed that she is actually a powerful witch trying to break into Wanda’s world to steal her abilities, it works. I didn’t know if she could really pull off being a serious villain, but Kathryn Hahn knocked it out of the park. The other big thing that really makes this show great is the emotions behind it. WandaVision is ultimately the story of Wanda’s grief for Vision who she saw die twice in Infinity War. She misses Vision and wants him back so bad, she unleashes an eruption of chaos magic and ends up creating her own reality where Vision is alive again. However this cannot last and reality shows its ugly head. The last episode ends with Wanda and Agatha squaring off as Sword Agents invade with a rebuilt Vision. Wanda ends up embracing her mantle as The Scarlet Witch to defeat Agatha, but she knows that she must end this other reality. In the end, she has to say goodbye to Vision once again as well as her superpowered kids. All of it is very powerful stuff and it definitely pulls on the heartstrings.
Now that’s the really great stuff about the show and I could go on and on about the things I liked, but I want to talk about the few criticisms I have with the show. Again, I want to state that I really liked this show and the goods far outway the bad stuff, but it’s not a perfect show. So let’s talk about the stuff I didn’t like. For one I think that there was a lot of wasted potential with the side characters of the show. Alongside the strong performances of Wanda, Vision, and Agatha, we have side characters like Kat Dennings as Darcy, Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambough, Randall Park as FBI Agent Jimmy Woo, Josh Stamberg as Sword Director Hayward, and Evan Peters as Pietro (?). All of these side characters have some good moments, but overall I feel like their potential is kind of wasted. Starting with Darcy, Monica, and Agent Woo. These characters all have really cool moments together mid-season when they are working together to figure out what is going on with Wanda from the outside. Having all three of these characters on screen together for the first time was kind of like an Avengers moment for minor MCU characters. That was cool. However these moments are basically nonexistent at the end of the show. Darcy just shows up in a truck to hit Hayward’s jeep and Agent Woo escapes handcuffs and calls his FBI buddies. Now Monica has a bit more character development due to the fact that this warped reality , nicknamed The Hex, gives her superpowers, but the ending just sets her up to be a bigger factor down the road (maybe in Captain Marvel 2 or Secret Invasion). I would have liked to see more done with these characters and I imagine that they could have had a great B-plot if all three of them got into the Hex together and had to work together to figure out what was going on with Wanda and Agatha. Hayward was really an unnecessary villain who didn’t really have a main impact on the end of the story. He just turned out to be a boring, military guy. Not too much more to say there. Finally, I want to talk about Evan Peters. For those who don’t know, Evan Peters played Quicksilver in the X-Men movies and when he showed up in this show as Pietro/Wanda’s brother, it was a huge deal. It looked like Marvel was using this show to introduce a shared multiverse that connected the Fox X-Men movies to the MCU proper. However the last episode really undoes all of this by having Monica find out that he’s not really quicksilver at all. He’s just a dude named Ralph Bohner who Agatha controls with a magical necklace. This to me seems like the biggest waste. Disney/Marvel basically just trolled us into thinking this character was really important when he wasn’t. They took a character which could have been a crux between multiverses and just turned him into a dick joke. Now Marvel could always retcon things down the road, but for now it just seems like a joke on the Marvel audience which confuses me more than anything.
So let’s talk about WandaVision as a whole and how it stacks up as a whole. Like I said, WandaVision came out at a time where it is not kicking off Phase 4 of the MCU and people had some wild theories about where it was going and who was behind it all. I wanted it to really go off the rails and get crazy ending with some sort of event similar to the craziness we saw in Dr. Strange. I don’t think the show ever reached those levels and that let down a lot of people. Collider has a great article about this which I highly recommend you read where they basically talk about how people wanted WandaVision to set up all these crazy things like the multiverse. They wanted Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards to show up. They wanted Dr. Strange. They wanted X-Men and for Wanda to utter her famous lines from the Marvel Comic “House of M.” They wanted so much that was never promised to them. Instead we got a pretty self-contained story about Wanda and her grief. Yeah there are some obvious nods to other Marvel properties, but it doesn’t break out into an Avengers-level thing. WandaVision is its own story focused on two people: Wanda and Vision. In that way, WandaVision obviously succeeds and that’s why I think overall it was a good show. I’m glad a show like this can exist without having to be bogged down by the burdens of launching a thousand other Marvel Properties (I’m looking at you Mandalorean, season 2). Am I a little disappointed in the ending? Sure, maybe a little bit. But I don’t think that takes away from the powerful moments of the show. At the end of the day, I’m happy we got WandaVision the way we did and I’m excited for the future of the MCU. Marvel has made so many movies and now that Marvel Studios is taking on movies and television series, I’m excited to see what stories get told. 2021 is going to be filled to the brim with Marvel and I couldn’t be more thrilled!
Thank you for reading that Weekly Blog all about WandaVision. If you liked this Weekly Blog, feel free to give it a Like. You can also leave me a comment down below with your feelings on WandaVision. Did you like it, love it, hate it? I’d love it if you let me know in the comments, especially if you were like me and keeping up with all the fan theories as the show was coming out. If you really liked what you read, you can Follow me here on WordPress. I’m slowly building up a positive and creative space on the internet and we are approaching 700 Followers. I’d be ecstatic if you decided to join this community and help it grow. I really do appreciate all my Followers, new and old, as well as the lurkers who read my stuff and support me from the shadows. I have over 600 published pieces here on the website so you have plenty of stuff to read if you haven’t already. I’d probably start with the stuff I mentioned at the beginning of the Bog or you can just spend some time checking out the website. Either one works for me!
Thank you again for all your support and I hope you have a wonderful week!
-Allen_The_Writer
Header Photo Credit to Marvel
https://www.marvel.com/articles/tv-shows/wandavision-final-trailer-poster
Allen The Writer 