WanadVision has come and gone. For me it has accomplished a lot within its 9-episode run.
When it was first announced that the show will play huge homage to generations of sitcoms, everyone was wondering how a superhero show could do that. The first two episodes landed and some people felt that it crashed as they could not make sense of what’s happening. However, for me it is because of the quirky murky premise that drew me further into it.
Probably I could persist because I knew the comic inspirations the show drew from, so I knew that everything would be ok.
I had talked about the premise and my initial thoughts about the show here previously, so I won’t repeat them here. However, what I want to talk about is how the show successfully told a story about self-discovery, self-doubt and self-assurance within this weird superhero sitcom premise.
Wanda Maximoff is one of the tragic characters in both the MCU and the Comics. I think in the MCU her experience was just second to Thor, if not worse. She was there every time someone she loved was killed and in the last instance, she had to do it herself and then immediately watching it happened again. When she came back, the world had changed, and all she could hold on was the past. And held on to the past she did.
I think for most people, even superheroes, there are only that many times you can stand back up on your own feet by yourself. Thor nearly never recovered from his failure in the Infinity War and thus he descended into the version we saw in Endgame. It was only through his conversation with his mum in a different timeline that he finally picked himself back up again. Wanda is less fortunate. Vision is dead, not by the snap, hence he could not come back. So, the only beacon of light she had in the post Ultron and pre-Infinity War period is gone. Her other mentors were not available either. As she said, it felt like waves just keep knocking her down when she wanted to get back up.
The Westview incident is a reflection of just letting life and fate washing over her, unwilling to fight back and sometimes drowning in grief feels a lot easier than picking herself up again. That’s where Agatha Hackness came into the picture. Her curiosity had brought Wanda to face her past once again, dealing with the grief that were suppressed throughout the years once again, and in the process rediscover who she is – is she going to be identified by her misfortune caused by others or she is going to find her place in this world properly through self-understanding?
We have seen how Wanda Maximoff as a character grew in this 9-episode run. From hiding from the reality to facing it head on, from losing her own identity to finding her true self and be comfortable with it, from letting fate decide to deciding her own fate, from being afraid of other people’s view to accepting this world as it is. These are all things Wanda learnt in this short and impactful series, both for the character and the MCU moving forward.
Some people might think that the series did not wrap everything up properly and had left quite a number of loose ends in the end. However, one must remember this is a limited series aiming to bridge Phase 3 and Phase 4 of the MCU, so it was not supposed to be a completely self-contained story. What needed to be resolved within the confinement of the series’ story were resolved – and that’s the maturing of Wanda Maximoff as a character within the MCU. She might still have more work to do to completely understand herself, but she definitely had gone to a point of accepting who she is and stop existing in relation to other people’s existence. I think that’s what WandaVision had achieved.
The Season Finale had moments I felt a bit under-developed but then, nothing in the MCU is really under-developed as you know somewhere down the line it will be addressed and resolved. That’s how MCU productions are made nowadays, and I think in the last 10 years or so we have accepted this approach for movie production.
From the mid credit scene and the end credit scene, we knew bigger things are coming to the MCU but in the meantime I might just binge these 9 episodes again to appreciate the coming of age of the Scarlet Witch once again.
