![]() ![]() Somehow, one suspects, the bubble must be pierced, the relentless normal of the Marvel-verse must be reset for the next airdrop of content.īut WandaVision has been fun while it’s lasted, turning what could have been a one-joke spoof into something both chilling and relatable. But the larger MCU’s imperatives loom in the background like a battleship-grey helicarrier. Seven episodes in, I don’t know any better than you do where WandaVision will end. She is the perpetrator of the sitcom’s inside job, the surrogate through which we can acknowledge its overperfection while still enjoying it. What, after all, is a sitcom wacky neighbour but the id of the show, its chaos agent? She is the one who can be snarky where it is sweet, libidinous where it is chaste, expressive where it is repressed. Hahn revels in every part of the role, morphing from plaid-skirted busybody to bawdy Jazzercise queen to cackling Disney villain. ![]() The show’s engine, though, is Kathryn Hahn as Agnes, the couple’s nosy neighbour throughout the decades who is revealed in Episode 7 to be Agatha Harkness, an ancient mystic and the true force behind Westview’s transformation into a rolling sitcom tribute. Bettany is more of an odd fit - he’s two TV conventions in one, the straight man and the secret alien - but plays both aspects of the role gamely while selling Vision’s slowly dawning unease. Her I Love Lucy-era housewife is a glowing orb of screwball energy in a Modern Family-like mockumentary, she seems possessed by the spirit of Julie Bowen. Wanda stays one step of her anguished reality by trying on different versions of meticulously scripted happiness - in a prime-time genre, the family sitcom, that made women central since TV’s earliest days. It excels first as bittersweet romance and second as horror, playing off our dual relationship with family sitcoms: that we return to them as a place of familiarity and comfort, even as we know that they’re uncanny and false. ( The Brady Bunch alone, the target of the third episode, went through its own self-ironizing cycles, complete with a parody movie, a solid generation ago.)įortunately, WandaVision is more than parody. ![]() The early read on WandaVision was “sitcom parody.” It’s not very groundbreaking as that, since spoofs of sitcom clichés - on Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, Mad TV - have been around so long that they’re clichés in themselves. The correct amount of prior knowledge to enjoy WandaVision, it seems, is either a comics library’s worth or almost nothing. ![]() I am not enough of a Marvel superfan to give you the full thumb, though I am told that for aficionados, there are Easter eggs and references aplenty. Westview, their stage set, is a real town, its reality magically warped and its residents mind-wiped to maintain a fantasy of prime-time domesticity - down to a pair of twin boys, who are born and grow in time-lapse TV fashion. Vision is dead (as dead as an android can be), killed in an earlier Avengers movie. If not: Wanda and Vision’s sitcom bliss is indeed an illusion. So I’m going to assume that, if you care about spoilers, you will have stopped reading by now. How WandaVision reveals what it really is, week by week and decade by decade, is the show’s biggest surprise. ![]()
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