An excellent show, and I think the first Marvel series that wasn’t a Netflix production to properly justify itself. It set a high bar, and I’m not sure anything is going to clear it soon.
The opening stretch is deliberately confusing, and that’s the point. We all knew Vision died in Avengers Infinity War & he didn’t come back in Endgame. What I hadn’t considered, and what took me embarrassingly long to land on, was that Wanda had turned to the dark side and brought him back herself. That’s a genuinely good twist, and it works because the show trusts you to sit in the discomfort for weeks before explaining anything.
The sitcom structure is doing real work
Each episode advances a decade of television history, from a black-and-white 1950s setup through to a 2000s mockumentary, and the period detail is accurate enough that the jokes actually land as jokes rather than as pastiche.
Underneath it, cracks keep showing. A beekeeper climbs out of a sewer. A voice comes through the radio asking who is doing this to her. Wanda rewinds moments she doesn’t like, which is the tell, she isn’t trapped in this, she’s running it.
Outside the town, S.W.O.R.D. has Westview surrounded, and Monica Rambeau, Darcy Lewis and Jimmy Woo work out that Wanda has enclosed roughly three thousand people in a reality-warping field and is holding them inside a sitcom. Awake. Aware. Unable to speak.
That’s the show’s real nerve: its protagonist is doing something monstrous, and the series doesn’t soften it.
Agatha was too big a casting for the part she was playing
I called this one early, and I suspect a lot of people did. Kathryn Hahn was playing “nosy neighbour Agnes” with far more energy than the role needed, and it felt all along like too big an actress for that small a part.
The reveal is still excellent despite being guessable, and the song is the reason. Putting the villain reveal into a purpose-written earworm is exactly the kind of swing this show keeps taking, and it’s the moment the series stops being an experiment and becomes confident about what it is.
Agatha turning out to be a centuries-old witch steering events to work out what Wanda actually is gives the back half its engine. Her verdict, that Wanda is the Scarlet Witch, something out of prophecy with more power than the Sorcerer Supreme, recontextualises everything from Age of Ultron onward. Wanda has always been the most powerful person in most rooms she’s in. Nobody had bothered to say so.
Vision finally gets a proper send-off
This is what I appreciated most. Vision died in Infinity War and it was brutal and rushed, two deaths in a row, no time to sit with either. The character deserved better than being a plot device for the Mind Stone.
The finale gives him that. The best scene in the whole series is two Visions arguing philosophy, the Ship of Theseus, what continuity of self actually means, whether either of them is the real one, instead of just hitting each other. In a franchise where problems get resolved by the biggest available fist, a climax settled by an argument about identity is a genuine risk, and it pays off completely.
It’s also the correct ending for Vision specifically. He was always the character defined by thinking rather than fighting, and letting him win by out-reasoning himself is the most respectful thing the show could have done.
Where I’d push back
Wanda overwhelming Agatha and trapping her in a false identity is a bit hypocritical, given that Wanda is the one who started this whole sequence by imprisoning an entire town in exactly that way. The show notices the parallel and then does very little with it.
I can understand her wanting to punish Agatha. I’d just have liked the series to sit with the fact that the punishment is precisely the crime she spent nine episodes being condemned for.
I also didn’t love Monica Rambeau. Teyonah Parris is fine in the role and I can see the character being built for something bigger later, but she’s the least interesting thread in a show full of good ones, and every minute outside the Hex with S.W.O.R.D. is a minute I wanted back inside it. Jimmy Woo, on the other hand, is always welcome. Randall Park has been quietly excellent in everything and the card trick is a lovely bit of business.
The show is honest about what Wanda is doing
The thing I keep coming back to is how little the series lets her off the hook.
There is an easy version of this story where the townspeople are asleep, or unaware, or somehow not really suffering, and Wanda’s grief is tragic rather than monstrous. The show refuses all of it. The people inside Westview are conscious. They know what is happening. They can feel her controlling them and they cannot speak about it, and when the Hex finally comes down they look at her with undisguised hatred.
That is a difficult thing to do to a protagonist you want the audience to keep caring about, and the series pulls it off by never asking you to excuse her. It asks you to understand her, which is a different and much harder request.
Elizabeth Olsen is the reason it works. She has been the most underused actor in these films for years, handed grief after grief with no room to play any of it, and given nine episodes she delivers the best performance anybody has managed in this franchise. The scene where she explains what grief is has been quoted to death already and it earns every bit of that.
Darcy and Jimmy are doing more than comic relief
A quick word for the outside-the-Hex cast, since I was hard on that material.
Darcy Lewis coming back after nearly a decade is a genuinely nice piece of continuity, and Kat Dennings plays her as the only person on the S.W.O.R.D. side treating this as fascinating rather than threatening. She is the audience surrogate, and specifically the audience surrogate who is enjoying herself, which the show needs given how bleak the inside material gets.
Jimmy Woo is the same trick from a different angle. Randall Park has been quietly excellent in everything he turns up in, and the card trick is a lovely piece of business that pays off a running joke nobody expected to be paid off.
Where the outside-the-Hex material fails is not the characters, it is Director Hayward, who is a thin antagonist doing thin antagonist things so the finale has somebody to punch. The show did not need him. It had a much better villain in the house next door and a genuinely uncomfortable one in its own protagonist.
The weekly release was part of it
Worth recording while it is still fresh: watching this week by week mattered.
The theorising between episodes became half the experience, and a lot of it was wrong in ways the show clearly anticipated. People were convinced about cameos that never arrived and villains who never appeared. The series was quietly building something smaller and more personal than the internet wanted, and the gap between those two things generated a great deal of noise.
I suspect it plays differently binged, and probably worse. The rhythm of a week between episodes is what let the sitcom conceit breathe. Four hours straight through and the format might grate.
Against the rest of Marvel TV
The comparison that matters is Netflix. Jessica Jones proved Marvel television could be genuinely adult and genuinely good, and it did that on a fraction of this budget with none of the film-tier cast.
WandaVision is doing something different. It’s the first one that feels like it belongs in the same continuity as the films rather than running alongside them, and the first with the confidence to be formally strange. Nine episodes of escalating television pastiche is not a safe pitch.
The ending leaves Wanda in a cabin, studying the Darkhold, hearing her children calling. I have no idea what that book is or what it does to someone who has just lost everything twice over, but it isn’t a happy image, and I doubt it’s meant to be. Whatever’s next for her, I don’t think it’s recovery.
Best thing Marvel has put on television that wasn’t on Netflix, and the first sign that the Disney+ shows might be more than filler between films.
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