Trash TV: Wandavision
Well folks, it finally happened.
After more than a decade, I’ve been forced to discard my snooty disdain for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I managed to maintain my sense of pop-cultural superiority despite quite liking Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok and Captain Marvel, and really liking Avengers: Infinity War a whole lot. My disappointment with Endgame allowed me to resist the temptation of going full MCU Stan even as the movies diversified in form and scope and generally became more varied and interesting.
But now, they’ve done it. They got me with Wandavision. And all it took was almost completely leaving the superhero stuff behind and transitioning into another genre entirely.
A bit of a preamble first, to explain to my less nerdy (more nerdy?) readers why there was a lot of anticipation for this, beyond just it being the first TV series project tied explicitly into the wider MCU by more than just namedrops and references.
Avengers: Endgame finished off the decade-long story arc that (kind of) began all the way back in 2008 with the first Iron Man movie. Every single MCU movie had, to some extent, been leading up to that finale, so naturally people began to wonder where the overarching meta-narrative was going to go next. There were no big dangling plot threads left over from the Thanos arc, no obvious next villain waiting in the wings.
Coincidentally, around the same time as the next phase in the MCU was starting to come into view, Disney bought Fox and regained the rights to use the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. That second one is crucial, because Fox didn’t just own the rights to the specific X-Men characters; they owned the rights to the concept of mutants as depicted in the Marvel comics. Mutants have been a long-established and very important component of the Marvel shared universe for decades, but have been absent from the movies due to Fox owning the X-Men rights.
Obviously, Disney and Marvel are going to integrate mutants into the MCU, because they have to add those Wolverine Millions to their giant Scrooge McDuck money vault. The question on everyone’s mind was, how? This isn’t like when they got Spider Man back and they had him just show up like, “Here’s Peter Parker, this version of the character got bitten by the radioactive spider six months ago, carry on.” In the comics, the mutants have been a thing since the sixties (or a lot longer, depending on the latest round of retcons) and the Marvel shared setting has been shaped by their presence.
(Incidentally, I have never read a single Marvel comic besides Runaways, and yet for some reason I can rattle off all of this lore and back-room business dealings from memory. That’s how deep these people have gotten their hooks into pop culture)
And then along comes Wandavision, a series about a character who was a mutant in the comics and who used her reality-warping powers in said comics to take away most mutant’s powers. Could this be the solution? Are they going to do a reverse House Of M storyline?
Nope! But it turns out the show had plenty of interesting stuff going on besides Marvel franchise-building.
Wandavision is about Wandavision, a sitcom starring a witch named Wanda Maximoff and an android called The Vision as they try to hide their true natures from the other residents of Westview, a quaint little town in the 1950s...no wait, the 60s...the 70s? Now it’s the 80s.
Something strange is clearly going on here, but never mind! All that matters is that Wanda is blissfully married to Vision, who is totally alive and not dead, no matter what the terrifying reality breakdowns and intrusions by sinister outside forces keep insisting.
Meanwhile, outside Westview, a shadowy government agency is also watching Wandavision. And they’re very keen to figure out who and what has caused the bizarre situation underpinning the show’s reality.
So right away, you can tell that this isn’t like most other MCU properties. That 90% of the show involves things other than people punching each other would be significant on its own, but you have to add to that the fact that it’s taking familiar characters--one of whom very definitely died during his last appearance--and putting them into a surreal situation with no explanation of how they got there or how much time has passed since we last saw them. It’s a smart way of leveraging the show’s status as an installment of an ongoing narrative project.
And then there’s the sitcom element. Most episodes of Wandavision up until the last two are riffing on popular sitcoms of whatever decade the episode is set during, from I Love Lucy to Modern Family. Going into it, I expected this to be a paper-thin veneer of parody, to be quickly discarded in order to get to the sci-fi mystery and superhero action. But that’s not the approach they took.
The sitcom pastiches aren’t parodies; they’re just sitcom episodes, played almost entirely straight and in the early episodes having only very brief nods to the fact that there is actually a larger story at play here and you’re not actually watching a comedy series about a witch and a robot. Moreover, they’re actually good sitcom episodes. They’re funny and well-written, and I found myself getting so wrapped up in the quaint hijinks that I was as discomfited as the characters are when the false reality starts to break down.
I hasten to add that this is only true of the first six or so of Wandavision’s nine episodes. Later on the show’s actual plot takes much greater prominence and the sitcom elements do start to feel more like thin parodies, the writers no longer having the time to flesh out the episodic storylines while also advancing the overarching plotline.
(To be honest, I feel like they should have maybe dropped the gimmick earlier than they did; as it currently stands, maintaining the stylisation of Malcolm In The Middle and Modern Family in episodes six and seven means that some events in the “real” story don’t land quite the way they were intended to).
Wandavision is bouncing around between a lot of different styles of film-making and storytelling, and it handles this surprisingly well. In its early episodes it even manages to pull off David Lynch-esque horror, which isn’t something I was particularly expecting. But eventually the show has to move fully outside Westview and start revealing what’s really going on and how this all ties into the wider MCU, and this is where I was afraid the whole thing would lose me. I was afraid that the usual MCU mush--a cheap, generic visual style that somehow manages to be repetitive even as it encompasses wild, fantastical locales and multiple different genres--would be even more crushingly uninteresting when contrasted with the sitcom experimentation.
But I was pleasantly surprised: even the sci-fi government agency/military superhero stuff has its own, distinct visual and directorial flare that the MCU as a whole has always lacked. In fact, it frequently looks higher-budget than the MCU normally does, which is strange because I can’t imagine this project got anywhere near the mega-bucks of an Avengers movie.
I should pump the breaks a bit here and hasten to add the disclaimer that Wandavision won me over because I had a pre-existing disposition towards liking the MCU. I was willing to meet the series halfway on some of its weaker elements, which I’ll get to a moment. If you’re completely hostile to the MCU, or just completely uninterested, then this show isn’t going to change your mind.
(You probably wouldn’t understand anything that’s going on, anyway. This is one for the movie fans only; if you don’t know who Ultron is, what “the blip” was or why it’s important, or what the actor playing Wanda’s brother looked like, then a lot of the story is going to go completely over your head.)
Speaking as someone with a residual interest in this shit, I appreciated the way the series fleshes out the character of Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch. Up until this point she’s been a side character hanging around the periphery of whatever movie she was in (like all of the female superheroes before Captain Marvel, ahem), so it’s nice to have this very extended chunk of screen time devoted to her. Wandavision also restores a lot of the more interesting features the character had in Age Of Ultron; in that movie she had this creepy horror movie vibe going where she was moving like a J-horror villain and using spooky mind control powers, but in her later appearances her powers were quietly downgraded to red glowy telekinesis. Without getting into spoilers, Wandavision takes that particular dial and cranks it back up to eleven.
About those weaker elements. The show does, in its finale, revert to the usual MCU template of CGI superhero battles, but I’m willing to give it a partial pass on that because the particular villain being fought is entertainingly goofy, and because the battle relies on Wanda and Vision outsmarting their opponents rather than just winning in a straight fight.
On the other hand it does commit one of my big action movie bugbears, which is having a final fight where the hero manages to just pull off some clever trick and beat the villain who they’ve previously been powerless against, rather than the hero attaining victory by making a significant choice or reaching some point of character development in the act of defeating the villain. I guess if you were being charitable you could read that into the way the last fight plays out, but the thing Wanda is tacitly accepting about herself via the method she uses to win the fight is something she’s only been struggling against since the start of that episode, so it falls a little flat.
However, the series does have a satisfying emotional resolution of the actual primary character throughline immediately after this, so it’s not too big a deal. And the final battle is really stupid. I’m willing to forgive a lot for either a satisfying emotional pay-off or ridiculous batshittery, and Wandavision has both.
Another issue I had with the series is its heavy use of retcons. Continuing the MCU trend of introducing elements from superhero comics that I find off-putting (shared universes, multiverses, cross-over events), we now have egregious retcons where the nature and origins of a character’s powers are re-written via extensive flashbacks to reveal what was “really” going on the whole time. I’m willing to mostly forgive this because the new backstory is significantly better than the old one (Wanda’s original origin felt like a placeholder written into Age Of Ultron while Marvel tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a deal with Fox that would let them make her a mutant), but they’re flying too close to the sun. At this rate some absolute mad lad at Marvel is going to try to do the Clone Saga in a movie, and then the universe will collapse.