I ended my 2021 review saying I had no idea what the Darkhold was or what it would do to somebody who’d just lost everything twice, but that it didn’t look like recovery to me. That’s the one call from this whole rewatch project I’d most like to take credit for and the one I least enjoyed being right about, because fourteen months later Multiverse of Madness turned that cabin scene into the opening move of a killing spree.
Watching the series again with that knowledge changes it completely, and not entirely for the better. In March 2021 the finale plays as tragedy with a hopeful edge: Wanda does the right thing at enormous personal cost, dismantles the Hex knowing it costs her Vision and her children, does it in front of a town of people who now hate her, and walks away to grieve properly. That’s a redemption beat and the whole series is built to earn it. Knowing what follows, the same scene becomes something much closer to a relapse waiting to happen. She doesn’t process anything. She goes somewhere isolated, picks up a book of dark magic, and immediately starts hearing the children she just gave up. That isn’t a woman recovering, it’s a woman looking for a loophole. Both readings are supported by exactly what’s on screen, which is the genuinely interesting part. The show didn’t change at all. The context did.
Did the film betray it or finish it?
I’ve gone back and forth on this more than anything else in the project and I’ve landed on: betrayed, though not as badly as I first thought. The case for betrayal is straightforward enough. Nine episodes build a woman whose defining act is choosing to let go despite unimaginable pain, and the film’s answer is that she immediately stopped choosing that and started murdering people. It skips the middle entirely, and whatever happened between the cabin and Wundagore is the most important part of her story, and it happens off-screen where nobody has to write it.
The case for completion is that the show explicitly warns you it’s coming. Agatha spends the back half insisting Wanda is something out of prophecy that doesn’t get to opt out, and the series never really refutes her. The Scarlet Witch is framed as an identity rather than a title, something she is rather than something she chose. So where I land is that the destination was earned and the journey wasn’t. A show this careful about grief deserved a film equally careful about relapse and it got a horror movie instead. Good horror movie. Wrong homework.
Nothing has dented the Ship of Theseus scene, meanwhile. Two Visions arguing about continuity of identity instead of fighting each other is still the single best scene in any of these Disney+ shows and possibly the best thing in the MCU’s television output full stop. It’s also aged into something quite melancholy, because Vision got the thoughtful, dignified conclusion the character deserved and then the franchise simply left him there. The white Vision walks off and, for practical purposes, nothing follows. For somebody introduced in 2015 as the culmination of two films’ worth of setup that’s a remarkably quiet exit, and I don’t think it’s this show’s failure. It gave him a real ending. Everything afterwards just declined to pick it up.
The threads that went somewhere, and the one that didn’t
My 2021 complaint was that Wanda trapping Agatha in a false identity was hypocritical and the show did nothing with the parallel, and that still stands as a criticism of this series. What I didn’t anticipate is that the hypocrisy would become the setup for an entire show of its own three years later. Going back to Westview and picking up the person Wanda left frozen there is a genuinely elegant piece of clean-up, and it retroactively makes the unresolved parallel look deliberate rather than sloppy. Kathryn Hahn was always too big a casting for a nosy-neighbour part, and it turns out she was correctly cast for what the role eventually became, which is a strange thing to be able to say four years after the fact.
I also said I didn’t love Monica Rambeau and that every minute outside the Hex was a minute I wanted back inside it. I’d stand by the second half of that and soften the first. Monica is the thread that reaches furthest of anything here: she gains her powers in this show, and she’s the character who ends up meeting Beast in The Marvels, which is the earliest real signal that the X-Men were actually coming rather than just being talked about. That’s a lot of weight for a character I found flat, and it’s a fair reminder that “least interesting thread on first watch” and “least consequential” are completely different measurements. She’s still the least interesting thread on a rewatch. She’s just very clearly not the least important one.
The sitcom structure was the thing I was most worried about revisiting, and it holds up better than I expected. Knowing what the format is hiding lets you watch the seams instead of the jokes, so the moments where Wanda rewinds something or a neighbour almost breaks character land as horror rather than mystery. The commercials are the part I’d defend hardest. Each one is a piece of her trauma repackaged as advertising, and on first watch they read as surreal texture. Watching again, they’re the most direct thing in the series. The show is shouting at you in thirty-second increments and it took me most of a season to hear it.
Nothing since has matched it
Worth saying plainly, because the rewatch made the comparison unavoidable. The Disney+ shows that followed have been variously competent, occasionally very good, and consistently less ambitious. None of them attempted anything close to the formal risk of nine episodes of escalating television pastiche, and most settled into being six-hour films with the pacing problems that implies. Part of that is circumstance — this arrived first, with the budget and attention that comes with being the flagship experiment. But part of it is nerve. This series was willing to be confusing for weeks, to withhold explanation, and to make its protagonist genuinely unpleasant for most of its runtime, and audiences went with it. Very little since has asked for the same trust.
Working back from where the franchise now is, this is the show that quietly does more setup than almost anything around it. Wanda’s turn here is what makes Multiverse of Madness possible, and that film introduces incursions, which is the mechanic the entire road to Doomsday runs on. No Westview, no Darkhold, no Wundagore, no incursions, no Doomsday in the shape it’s taking. A nine-episode sitcom pastiche about grief is holding up a multiversal crossover event, which is an absurd sentence and entirely true.
Whether Wanda herself figures in what’s coming is the open question I’d most like answered. The franchise has been conspicuously quiet about her, and given she’s arguably the most powerful character it has, that silence is either a very good surprise being saved or a very large loose end nobody wants to discuss. Still the best of the Disney+ shows. Watch it again for the Ship of Theseus scene, and watch that last cabin shot knowing exactly what it means.