Image: Courtesy of Marvel Studios
It’s official as of Wandavision episode 4 on Disney+: Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has created a pocket reality to live out her stolen life with Vision (Paul Bettany).
This episode didn’t do more than confirm what we’ve suspected since Scarlet Witch showed up in a ’50s sitcom with her dead robot boyfriend, but it scratch the surface of a massive iceberg: the psychological repercussions of Infinity War and Endgame.
“We Interrupt This Program” is the first episode to take us back into our world, providing the first classic MCU footage in a year and a half and focused entirely on Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who we last saw as a child in Captain Marvel. Instead of picking up after episode 3 showed her yeeted out of Westview, we pick up before that, with Monica being un-blipped along with half the world’s population at the end of Endgame.
The hospital scene depicts the kind of chaos that Endgame didn’t dare explore (and already pushing its three-hour runtime, should not have); doctors and patients run all over while people materialize out of thin air to exactly where they were standing five years before. This is happening all over the world. Dead spouses are returning to their remarried partners and school children will reunite with friends who have aged five years (hello, Spider-Man: Far From Home). A frenzied doctor tells Monica one painfully resonant sentence: “We don’t have the capacity.”
Would a DEPRESSED person make this?? (yes!)
Image: Courtesy of Marvel Studios
Infinity War and Endgame were about defeating Thanos, and what follows is about reckoning with the effects of his violence. We might get a slew of new superhero movies that follow the old formulas, but Wandavision proved with this episode that there are endless stories to be mined from what The Snap and the Un-Snap did to Earth and its inhabitants.
Monica is not the first Dusted we’ve spent time with, but Far From Home played their return to more comedic effect and focused on the loss of Tony Stark rather than the impossible trauma of billions of people disappearing and then coming back. Unfortunately, we skip the majority of Monica’s early recovery, but we’re there when she learns the painful fact of her mother’s death (we’re still on January but it’s an early contender for Cold Open Of The Year). Within a few weeks Monica is back at work — at an office that clearly does not have the IT and HR support to welcome its returned employees — and investigating the mystery of Westview.
Again, the Westview stuff in this episode mostly solidifies existing theories, but witnessing it from this side does reunite us with Jimmy (Randall Park) and Darcy (Kat Dennings), now a delightful detective comedy duo. As Marvel’s television presence grows, there’s rich opportunity to explore its delightful supporting players in starring roles and combinations like this.
What still remains to be seen is how much control Wanda has over the Westview universe. She looks surprised when she uses her powers to yeet poor Monica through multiple walls, but consciously uses her powers in plenty of other scenes. Based on the harrowing flash of dead Vision, she hasn’t processed his death, let alone the Dusting and un-Dusting that have no doubt thrown the outside world into chaos (what about the food supply? The economy? The taxes??). Westview residents are trapped in the anomaly against their will on top of all that. The devil might be involved. These aren’t issues that can be resolved in a half-hour sitcom or even a 10-episode season — in fact, they could require a full Cinematic Phase to richly explore.
We’ll stay tuned.
Wandavision is streaming on Disney+ with new episodes every Friday.