In America, you binge TV.
In Sokovia, TV binges you!
Warning: Spoilers ahead for all ofWandaVision.
Paul Bettany as Vision and Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff in ‘WandaVision’.Marvel Studios
The scourge of comfort TV will ruin us all.
Their life becomes eternal cosplay untouched by cruel reality.
When anyone suggests this is not very healthy behavior, violent outbursts erupt.
Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as Vision in ‘WandaVision’.Marvel Studios
Meet your new neighbor: An invader, body-snatching.
Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) wanted to help.
She got back-up from Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) and Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings).
There was also another Vision, remember?
The finale forgot all about him midway through.
Guess Wanda hexed the writers.
Goofball antics kept iceberg-tipping into all-encompassing unpleasantness.
In the premiere’s stunning climactic dinner, Fred Melamed’s crusty boss almost chokes to death.
while she laughs and laughs and laughs.
“I worry that the central mystery is a bit standard,” Iwrote at the time.
If only the smash-up had merely beenfamiliar.
Friday’s finale is a five-ring circus of pointless showdowns.
Two Visions duel in the sky and then one Vision uses his powers of Brain Fingertouching to settle everything.
Jimmy calls the FBI.
Much conversation will arise from the post-credits scenes.
I’ll leave that tothe trusted experts.
Instead, let’s rewind a bit.
Wanda Maximoff suffered trauma in three and a half acts.
Shiny sitcom America provided an escape for the little girl in war-torn Sokovia.
It became another escape for the woman fleeing unimaginable loss.
Magic on autopilot!"
like the proverbial celebrity voice hired to class up a videogame tutorial.
The flashbacks did, however, offer one brilliantly unsettling sequence.
The sitcoms are a kind of education tool, helping the kids learn English.
A half-century-old laugh track fills the room and then the room explodes.
Wanda doesn’t see her parents die, because she’s watching television.
The siblings, half-crushed in the ruins, watch a missile slam into the ground.
On the side of the explosive is a brand name for a major U.S. weapons manufacturer.
WandaVisioncouldn’t follow through on its sharpest instincts.
At least the parody was a style.
Episode 4 went outside the bubble, andWandaVisionnever recovered.
except more boring and just as corrupt.
WandaVisionused anEndgameflashback to emotionally link two characters.
Wanda grieves Vision, while Monica returns from Infinity Stoned oblivion to discover her mom died years ago.
Theoretically, the Rambeau material should have serviced this fan.
material killed Westview’s fun.
All the exterior revelations turned Bettany into The Guy Slowly Realizing What The Audience Already Knows.
He discovered very strange things happening on the edge of Westview, and kept getting roadblocked.
In the finale, this version of Vision finally understood what was happening to him.
And Bettany gave the character’s last lines real emotion.
I like these characters together;WandaVisionwas good when they were together!
Except, except, except: The Vision isn’t actually dead.
We live in a world of sadness, so this struck a chord.
But White Vision took everything the show was trying to say about grief and set it on fire.
We can officially state that nothing aboutAvengers: Infinity Warmattered.
Loki gets a spin-off, Vision lives, the snap blipped.
Now White Vision awaits a late-Phase reunion with his lady love.
Someone lost their nerve withWandaVision.
Maybe creator Jac Schaeffer thought she had to give people answers, fast.
Maybe upper-level corporate powers stuffed in more familiar characters.
You have to remember, the MCU’s third phase shook all this stuff off.
Now we’re regressing.
In the flashback episode, we found out the Wanda-Vision relationship sprouted from watching TV together.
A post-modern love story: Netflix and chill, emphasis on Netflix.
This is the raw material for some kind of romance.
Are we sure these franchises should last forever?
Should we worry so many of them depend on beating a dead corpse?
And then there was Agatha Harkness, an immortal witch pretending to be the wacky next-door neighbor.
Hahn locked into the smile-till-you-scream sitcom masquerade better than anyone.
I know, I know, her personal theme song was funny.
Is this why we pay for streaming services?
The goddamnmemes???
By the end, Hahn got reduced to floating malevolence.
She absorbed Wanda’s energy until Wanda fired energy at her.
Olsen had a lot of fun early on, burying secrets behind a serene facade.
The finale turned her arc into a cul-de-sac.
If we trust the post-credits scene, Wanda didn’t really move anywhere with her grief.
She’s apparently using her powers to resurrect her dream children.
Class, what was her emotional journey?
From not knowing how to use her powers to knowing how to use them?
That’s a montage, not a miniseries.
There has been an outpouring of thinkpiecery on whatWandaVisionmeans.
The show lingered on the notion that television was an escape for young Wanda.
