WandaVision is snapping out of its usual milieu to give us some info from the outside. So let’s see what the world is up to beyond the barriers of Westview.
Summary
Monica Rambeau awakens in the moment of “undusting”—the moment when Professor Hulk undid Thanos’s first Snap in Avengers: Endgame—expecting to be at her mother’s bedside in the hospital. In the ensuing chaos, she learns that she has been gone for five years and that her mother died three years previous. She heads back to work three weeks later at SWORD, an organization created by her mother, and finds it now being run by Tyler Hayward (Josh Collins Stamberg)—he was the only one left available when the first dusting went down. Hayward informs her that she’s grounded on Earth for the foreseeable future missions, per her mother’s own orders on the possibility of return. She’s sent to check out a disturbance phoned in by FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), who was looking for a witness protection member who was not only missing, but unremembered by everyone who knew him. He discovered in his preliminary investigation that the entire town of Westview, New Jersey had been similarly unremembered, along with all its citizens.
Monica sends a SWORD drone into the town, but it vanishes. She walks up and realizes there’s an energy barrier there, and when she touches it, she’s sucked in. SWORD sets up a base outside the town and calls in a number of scientific experts, among them Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings). She immediately notes that the town is sending out tons of CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) and also a longer wave signal. She asks SWORD to find her an old TV, and winds up picking up on the broadcast of WandaVision, showing it to SWORD and Jimmy. The group sets to work identifying the members of the town in the real world, and trying to figure out how to reach people on the inside. A SWORD operative is sent through the sewage system in a hazmat suit, but once he’s through the barrier to the town on the subterranean level, his outfit turns into a beekeeper suit. Darcy then comes up with a plan to contact Wanda through the radios she sees on the program, giving Jimmy the ability to call in (“Wanda, who’s doing this to you?”), but the program blips and the experiment is a failure.
Darcy and Jimmy see Monica in the broadcast of WandaVision, but they can’t tell what she remembers or how the inner world of Westview might be affecting her. At the end of the most recent episode, Monica says Ultron’s name, which they both note is a first for the broadcast, making a reference to the outside world. Then the transmission blips and the episode ends, leading Darcy to realize that the program is being censored, but they don’t know who is responsible.
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We see the end of the previous episode again, but the entirety of it this time—Wanda knows that Monica doesn’t belong in her town and violently throws her out. When Vision returns, Wanda briefly sees him as he was in death. Vision tells Wanda they can go anywhere, but she insists that they cannot. This is their home.
Commentary
Typical to these stories, we have to wait a couple years in a completely different narrative to get the full effect of what we see in the major blockbusters. We’ve all wondered about what happened when Hulk unSnapped the initial Snap, but this is the first time that we’ve ever seen it, the first time we’ve been allowed to experience “undusting” in realtime.
And as presumed, it was terrifying.
The confusion, the panic, the onslaught of bodies and voices that hadn’t existed moments before as the universe suddenly doubles in population again. I know the show has a lot more plot to get through, but it really could have just stuck with those first few minutes for an entire episode. Monica’s slow recognition of what she has missed is by far the most affecting moment of this series. And plot needs aside, we deserve to sit longer with the fact that Maria Rambeau died without her daughter, and Monica missed her mother’s death.
In all honesty, I don’t know how to care about anything else. We learn all sorts of important things: that SWORD is Maria’s organization; that Monica has been doing this work her whole life and is now sidelined due to her absence; and that they clearly built this place up in honor and knowledge of Carol Danvers’ work as Captain Marvel. But Monica’s mother died while she was effectively unmade, and focusing on anything other than that feels like a cheat. Monica’s grief isn’t a footnote in this, and it shouldn’t be relegated as such. But it has been, and it’s probably being saved for a moment when it will be most useful in Wanda’s story, so I have to move on from it and discuss the rest of the episode. I’m not happy about it.
Anyway.
I can appreciate the fact that the show is highlighting (albeit quite lightly) the fact that this whole organization should now be under Monica’s leadership, and due to the Snap, she has been sidelined by a white man who has now assumed complete control over her career. Even if the edict grounding Monica came from Maria, it’s Hayward’s choice to uphold it, and they have multiple exchanges where they make it clear that he’s only in charge because he was literally the last person around. Moreover, there’s been no discussion about giving Monica the job once she gets her feet underneath her, so we can’t assume the authority she’s owed is incoming. It’s all done vaguely, but most POC, women, and AFAB folk know this rundown backwards and forwards. The whole set up is commonplace in its familiarity, even if Hayward turns out to be less of a problem than your average white-man-in-charge.
The only reason this episode works at all is because the characters being used to communicate the events to us are some of the best and most under appreciated the MCU has ever put in front of us—Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis are both funny, sharp additions to the series, and great people to have on the outside. Both characters have made weaker movies shine solely through their presences—Darcy through her banter with Jane in Thor and The Dark World, and Jimmy in Ant-Man and the Wasp. This was the only way to make the sections outside of Westview engaging, so they’ve nailed it on that front. (When did Darcy get her doctorate, did Jane write her recommendation letters, was she there at her graduation, I just have so many questions, I missed Darcy so much.)
It’s enjoyable to watch their efforts line up with the interruptions we’ve seen in the show thus far: the drone, the plea through the radio, the notes being taken on the broadcast, the bee keeper. Watching them piece together who on the show is who in real life is a true nerdly joy, the sort of team effort that I always want more of in sci-fi yarns. Every time people break out a whiteboard and start tacking things to it, I get excited. And I don’t even like whiteboards that much, I just like watching nerds write on whiteboards. There’s meta fun to be had here too, watching them ask all the questions the audience is asking, and plotting them out like genuine scientific inquiries.
The blanks this episode fills in leave more questions in its wake, however, the sort I’m not sure the show is going to circle back around on. For example, is Wanda framing this reality as a sitcom for herself, or with a background understanding that it can be viewed? Because that fundamentally changes the idea of “censoring,” knowing who it’s being censored for. Does some part of Wanda know she has an audience, or is she ultimately censoring for herself?
Wanda’s cognizance in all of this is the actual mystery, and it’s important to remember that any brief lucidity doesn’t mean that she’s fully aware of what’s happening; trauma can do many things to a person’s mind, and part of that could be broken up by brief periods of cogent thought. The end of the episode sees Wanda seemingly aware of the fact that her surroundings are manufactured, that she’s keeping them in Westview because she knows the world outside won’t support the fantasy… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that she knows it all the time.
Thoughts and Asides:
- Pet peeve: There should be a more current picture of Maria on the wall at SWORD. I get that the actual actor is still a young woman, but Maria herself was older while she was running the place, and they could have done some photoshop to show us what she looked like pre-retirement.
- The fact that Jimmy calls SWORD in on this issue seems to indicate that there’s cooperation between the federal government and these organizations (that act in a more global capacity), which is all kinds of interesting to consider. Most films and shows that deal with law enforcement groups always harp on the idea the none of them get on, and everyone is always threatened by everyone else’s jurisdiction, but Jimmy notices something weird is going on, and immediately calls it in. And then he just gets to hang around SWORD HQ and help them figure things out. So curious about what sort of rules are in place for these operations.
- There’s a suggestion here that there are a lot of “episodes” that we’re not seeing, which then leads to a whole new slew of questions. For instance—does the broadcast ever stop? Or are these people awake indefinitely, acting out Wanda’s fantasies? What happens when they run out of resources—can Wanda create more of them? Is she doing that already?
- CMBR is a real thing, registered for the first time in the 1940s, and is one of the discoveries used to support the Big Bang Theory.
- Is the beekeeper guy dead, or folded into the Westview reality? We never find out what happens to him.
- Of all the people within Westview that they name, Dottie doesn’t appear to be on the board yet at all, and Agnes is up there without a name… which makes the likelihood of either or both of them being someone important that much more probable.
- Vision’s appearance at the end of the episode is how his body looked after the Mind Stone was forcibly removed from him by Thanos, and yeesh. That was rough. The question of whether or not Vision is actually dead is a big one here, and perhaps the one I’m least excited to find out.
Presumably we’re back to the sitcom setup next week. See you then.
Emmet Asher-Perrin is kind of annoyed that we aren’t seeing all the episodes that Darcy and Jimmy get to see. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
