WandaVision was exceptional television, and the thing I keep coming back to all these years later is that I never really knew what was happening, not in the first episode and not right up until the last one, and I loved every week of not knowing. I wrote a shorter review back in 2021 when the finale dropped, but with VisionQuest now on Disney+ and the whole Wanda and Vision story finally getting its third part, this is the long version, a full WandaVision recap that goes through all nine episodes one at a time, with spoilers for everything. And I mean everything, so if you somehow still haven’t seen it, go and watch it first. It’s only nine episodes, and it’s the kind of show that’s much better going in blind. I’ll also be talking about how it leads into Agatha All Along, which I liked a lot less, and where it leaves Wanda with Avengers: Doomsday only a couple of months away.
Episodes one and two: black and white, and something’s off
It opens as a 1950s sitcom, black and white, laugh track and all, with Wanda and Vision as newlyweds who’ve just moved to a town called Westview and are trying very hard to fit in. Vision goes off to an office job where nobody, including him, knows what the company actually does, and there’s a heart drawn on the calendar that neither of them can explain. It turns out to be dinner with Vision’s boss Mr. Hart and his wife, and the whole episode is the two of them scrambling to pull it off while hiding their powers, which is genuinely funny in the way those old shows were. Then Mr. Hart starts choking, and it stops being funny, because Mrs. Hart just keeps smiling and saying “stop it” over and over while he goes purple, and nobody in the scene reacts the way people should. Vision phases his hand into his throat and saves him, everyone laughs, and the episode ends with the camera pulling back to show someone watching all of this on a monitor.
Episode two moves into the 1960s, very much Bewitched in style with a cartoon opening, and it’s a talent show for the local school where Wanda has to cover for Vision after he swallows a piece of gum and starts behaving like he’s drunk. That’s where we meet Agnes properly, the nosy neighbour from across the street who’d go on to get her own show, and Dottie, who runs the planning committee and clearly doesn’t like Wanda. But the cracks are everywhere. There’s a red toy helicopter in the bushes, in colour, in a black and white world. A voice comes through the radio asking Wanda who’s doing this to her. And a beekeeper climbs out of a manhole in the street, and Wanda just says “no” and rewinds the scene like a tape, and that was the first moment I sat up and realised she wasn’t trapped in this thing at all.
Episode three: twins, and Geraldine knows too much
Colour arrives with the 1970s, Brady Bunch outfits, wood panelling and all, and Wanda is suddenly very pregnant, and getting more pregnant by the hour, which is played for laughs while also being really quite unsettling. The house keeps reacting to her, water pouring from the taps, power cuts across the town, a stork turning up in the living room, and Vision rushes off to find the town doctor while their new friend Geraldine comes over to help. Geraldine was a character I didn’t think much of at first, she’s just the friendly woman from the talent show, but she ends up delivering the twins in the living room, Tommy and Billy, and the episode spends a lovely couple of minutes being an actual sweet family comedy. Meanwhile Vision is outside talking to the neighbours, Herb and Agnes, and Herb starts to tell him something about Geraldine before Agnes cuts him off and changes the subject.
Then Geraldine slips up. Wanda mentions that she had a twin brother, and Geraldine says something about Pietro being killed by Ultron, which nobody in a 1970s sitcom should know anything about. Wanda’s whole face changes. And there’s this cold moment where she asks who Geraldine is, and the next thing we see is Geraldine flying backwards through a wall of light and landing in a field outside the town, surrounded by soldiers and vehicles with S.W.O.R.D. markings, and that’s the end of the episode. I remember not having any idea what I’d just seen, and wanting episode four immediately, and it’s funny to think that this was the first we ever saw of the Monica who’d end up flying alongside Carol and Kamala in The Marvels.
Episode four: the view from outside the Hex
This is the episode where it stops being a sitcom, and it goes right back to the moment at the end of Avengers: Endgame when everyone who’d been snapped away came back. Monica Rambeau rematerialises in a hospital, where five years have passed in an instant, and she finds out that her mother, the woman who ran S.W.O.R.D., died while she was gone. She goes back to work there, and Director Hayward sends her to help an FBI agent with a missing persons case in a small town in New Jersey. That agent is Jimmy Woo, which was a really nice surprise if you remembered him from the Ant-Man films. Nobody can get into Westview, or out of it, and the people they ask about it can’t even seem to remember that the town exists.
They send a drone in, it vanishes, and Monica touches the edge of the field and gets pulled straight through. Then Darcy Lewis from the Thor films turns up as a scientist, and she’s the one who works out that the town is broadcasting, on an ancient frequency, an actual sitcom called WandaVision. So now we’re watching people watch the show we’ve been watching, and the episode rewinds over the first three, showing us that the beekeeper was a S.W.O.R.D. agent, the radio voice was Jimmy, and Geraldine was Monica the whole time. The best bit is near the end. Wanda looks at Vision for a second and sees him as he really is, grey and dead with a hole in his head where the Mind Stone was, and then she blinks and he’s back to normal, and it’s absolutely chilling.
Episode five: Pietro’s at the door
Episode five is the 1980s, Family Ties and Growing Pains, and the twins age up from babies to five-year-olds in about a minute, and then to ten when the boys find a dog and want to keep it, which Agnes conveniently has a collar for. They call him Sparky. Outside, S.W.O.R.D. has realised that Wanda is controlling everything, and Hayward is very keen to treat her as a threat rather than a victim, which is when we find out that Wanda broke into their headquarters before all of this and took Vision’s body. Inside, Vision is starting to notice things. He breaks through to one of his co-workers for a second, and the man begs for help, and Vision finally confronts Wanda about what’s going on in the town.
Wanda actually walks out of the Hex to face S.W.O.R.D. directly, still dressed for the sitcom, and tells them to leave her alone in a voice that is nothing like the cheerful housewife we’d been watching. Then the end credits start rolling in the middle of an argument between her and Vision, which is a great touch, like the show itself cutting away from something it didn’t want us to see. And then the doorbell rings. It’s her brother Pietro, back from the dead, except it isn’t the actor from Age of Ultron, it’s Evan Peters, the Quicksilver from the Fox X-Men films. Darcy’s reaction, wondering out loud why Wanda recast him, is exactly what everyone at home was saying, and the theories went completely wild that week.
Episode six: Halloween, and Vision walks to the edge
Episode six goes to the late 90s and early 2000s, a Malcolm in the Middle style opening with the kids talking to the camera, and it’s Halloween. Wanda is in her comic-accurate Scarlet Witch costume, which she passes off as a Sokovian fortune teller, and Vision is in his old comic book outfit, and Pietro is being a terrible influence on the boys. Tommy discovers he has super speed, like his uncle, and Billy starts sensing things other people are thinking. It’s a very funny episode on the surface, but Vision skips the trick-or-treating to go on a neighbourhood watch patrol, and he finds the edge of town, where people are just standing frozen, one of them crying, and Agnes stuck in the middle of the street.
He keeps walking anyway. Vision tries to push out through the boundary of the Hex, and the moment he’s outside he starts coming apart, literally, pieces of him peeling away in the wind while Darcy watches from the S.W.O.R.D. camp. Billy senses it and tells his mum. And Wanda’s response is to expand the whole Hex outward, swallowing the S.W.O.R.D. base and everyone in it and rewriting them into Westview residents, which is about as clear a statement as she could make that she isn’t letting go. Hayward gets away, Monica gets thrown clear, Jimmy too. I remember thinking at this point that I didn’t know who I was supposed to be rooting for anymore, which I don’t think a Marvel show had made me feel before.
Episode seven: it was Agatha all along
This is the one everybody remembers. It’s done as a modern mockumentary, The Office and Modern Family, with Wanda talking to the camera in confessionals, and she’s falling apart, nothing is working right and the house keeps flipping between decades whether she likes it or not. Monica forces her way back into the Hex and it changes her, she comes out the other side seeing energy and able to do things she couldn’t before. Vision finds Darcy, who’d been turned into a circus performer, and she tells him everything, including how he died. And Agnes offers to babysit the twins so Wanda can have a day to herself, which in hindsight was the single most suspicious thing anyone did in the whole show.
When Wanda goes to find the boys, she ends up in Agnes’s basement, which is full of roots and purple light and a book that’s clearly very old and very evil, and Agnes walks down the stairs and tells her it’s been her the whole time, and then the show breaks into its own theme song. Agatha Harkness. She killed Sparky too. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t guess the whole Agatha thing, I had no idea she was a centuries-old witch, but I did work out that something was happening with her, because Kathryn Hahn is far too big a name to be cast as the nosy neighbour with three lines an episode. Once that thought was in my head I couldn’t stop watching her. The song itself became a hit and won an Emmy, and it still gets stuck in my head every time somebody says her name.
Episode eight: what is grief, if not love persevering
Episode eight opens in Salem in 1693, with a young Agatha being dragged before her own coven, led by her mother, for practising dark magic. They try to kill her, and instead she drains every one of them dry, which tells you exactly what she is. Back in the present she has Wanda in her basement and wants to know how she built all of this, so she makes her walk back through her own memories. We see the apartment in Sokovia, the shell with Stark’s name on it that didn’t go off, a little girl watching American sitcoms on DVD with her family before the world fell in on them. Then Hydra, and the Mind Stone, and a glimpse of something in the stone that looks a lot like the Scarlet Witch herself.
The scene that hit hardest for me is at the Avengers compound after Pietro died, with Wanda curled up watching TV and Vision trying to work out how to help her. He tells her that he’s never experienced loss, because he’s never had anything to lose, and then says the line everyone quotes: “What is grief, if not love persevering?” Then it jumps to after Infinity War, where she goes to S.W.O.R.D. to ask for his body so she can bury him and finds they’re taking him apart. She drives to Westview, to a plot of land Vision had bought for them to grow old on, and the grief just pours out of her and builds the town, the house and Vision himself. Agatha is stunned. She says it’s chaos magic, which makes Wanda the Scarlet Witch, and that’s the first time anyone uses the name in the MCU.
Episode nine: two Visions and a Ship of Theseus
The finale is the big Marvel fight I’d half expected the whole thing to avoid, and honestly it works because it’s been earned. Hayward has rebuilt the original Vision, all white and with no memories, and sends him in to destroy the one Wanda made. Agatha and Wanda fight across the town, Monica takes on Hayward, Darcy drives a truck straight into him, and Tommy and Billy are holding off soldiers in the middle of the street. The fight between the two Visions is my favourite part. Instead of punching each other to a standstill, they end up arguing about the Ship of Theseus, if you replace every plank of a ship is it still the same ship, and the Vision we’ve been following gives the white one back his memories, and he just flies off.
Agatha’s trick is to wake the townspeople up, and they come to Wanda begging her to let them go, telling her what it’s been like to be awake and trapped inside someone else’s grief, and that’s when Wanda finally starts to give in. She beats Agatha with the runes Agatha taught her about, takes on the full Scarlet Witch power and the costume that goes with it, and leaves her trapped in Westview as Agnes, the nosy neighbour, forever. Then Wanda tucks the boys in and walks Vision home as the Hex closes in around them, and he asks her what he is, and she tells him he’s the piece of the Mind Stone that lives in her, her sorrow and her hope, but mostly her love. He says they’ve said goodbye before, and she finishes it for him, they’ll say hello again. Then the after-credits: a cabin in the mountains, Wanda reading the Darkhold, and the boys calling for help, which is exactly where Multiverse of Madness picks her up.
Is it the best Marvel TV show?
I think it is, apart from some of the Netflix shows. Daredevil, especially that first season, is in a different league for grown-up superhero TV, and I’d hate to choose between them. But of everything Marvel has put out as one complete series, WandaVision is the standout for me. Some individual episodes of Agents of Shield came close, Raina’s big moment and the second season finale especially, and Agent Carter had a couple of episodes that were close too, but neither of them held it together over a whole run the way this did. Nine episodes, not a wasted one, and a story that knew exactly where it was going from the first frame.
What made it for me was that it wasn’t afraid to confuse me. Most Marvel things tell you the plan in the first ten minutes, and this one let me spend three weeks not even sure who the villain was, or whether Wanda herself was the villain, which in a way she was. She took a whole town hostage. She made them live inside a sitcom, awake and unable to say anything, and the show never pretends that’s fine just because she’s grieving. And then it sits her down at the end and makes her give it all up anyway, kids, husband, all of it, and that ending is so sad I don’t know how a Marvel show got away with it. The weekly releases helped a lot too. I spent every Friday guessing, and I was nearly always wrong.
VisionQuest picks up the other Vision
Watching it now, WandaVision is clearly the first part of a trilogy, and Marvel’s even said as much. Agatha All Along picked up Agatha where Wanda left her, still stuck being Agnes, and gave Billy a new body and a new life, and now VisionQuest is on Disney+, with the first two of its eight episodes out this week. It follows the white Vision, the one who flew off in episode nine with his memories back but none of the feelings that went with them, and it brings in Tommy, who’s grown up somewhere else entirely, and Ultron, back from Age of Ultron in a way I never expected anyone to bother with. That’s an awful lot of loose ends from Westview finally being pulled on at once, and I’m really glad the Ship of Theseus argument wasn’t just a clever way of ending a fight.
Because that’s what that scene was always asking, if you put all the old pieces back together, is it still him? The Vision Wanda made was never going to survive her letting go, he said as much himself, and the one who’s left is the original body with the original memories and nobody at home, or at least that’s how it looked when he flew away. I don’t know yet what that means for him or whether the answer ends up being yes. Paul Bettany has been the quiet heart of this whole story since Age of Ultron, playing a robot who’s somehow the most human person in every room he’s in, and I think he’s more than earned a show of his own. It’s also nice to see one of these threads actually get picked up for once instead of being left hanging for years.
Where does that leave Wanda for Doomsday?
Wanda is the bigger question, and it runs straight into Avengers: Doomsday. Her story carried on in Multiverse of Madness, where the Darkhold took her somewhere much darker than that cabin, and that film brought in the incursions, universes crashing into each other, that the whole road to Doomsday has been running on since, which I dug into properly when I did my rewatch of the series earlier this year. So without WandaVision there’s no Darkhold, no Scarlet Witch, and probably no Doomsday in the shape it’s taking. That’s a lot to hang on a sitcom about a grieving woman in New Jersey, but it’s true, and it’s part of why this show has aged so well while some of the others around it haven’t.
But Elizabeth Olsen has said she isn’t in Doomsday, and with the film out on 18 December I’d love nothing more than to be surprised, because leaving the most powerful character Marvel has buried under a mountain would be a strange way to treat her. Whatever happens there, nothing takes away from what these nine episodes did. I’d happily sit down and watch all of them again tomorrow, laugh track and all, and I’d probably still be humming the theme for the Harts’ dinner party by the end of it. I loved this show thoroughly, every single week of it, and it’s still the one Marvel series I’d hand to somebody who swears they’re sick of superheroes.
So what about you? Did you work out that Agnes was really Agatha before the song gave it away, and was it the casting that tipped you off too, or something else? And which of the sitcom decades was your favourite, the black and white fifties, the Brady Bunch seventies or the mockumentary episode? Tell me in the comments.
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