Was It Agatha All Along?
I’m not so sure.
The family spent the weekend at my wife’s parents. I do them love dearly and I’m happy to spend time with them while we still have them with us. But they have reached the age where they are fairly cognitively rigid.
And they watch Fox news CONSTANTLY. They know that Fox is the enemy at this point, but they just can’t change their ways. However, this problem can be circumvented by the strategic use of children’s television. And they still have a subscription to Disney Plus for the grand kids. So, before the third rerun of Tucker Carlson started that day, I was able to get ahold of the Roku remote and I binged WandaVision.
It’s interesting to watch from that perspective. For one thing, it isn’t all that long, most of the episodes were about thirty minutes and there is only nine of them.
I was able to concentrate on some things that I missed the first time through. Lizzie Olsen did a fantastic job and I should have mentioned that before. She got the expressions and tone of voice that actresses of those periods used in sitcoms. They also got the jokes right for period. The best scene in the show was Vision debating the Theseus Ship Problem with White Vision, it was effective.
But here is the big thing:
There is a violent shift in tone after episode four. Before episode five, there were elements of horror in each episode, and they were pretty strong and they were escalating. Zombie Vision is probably the most effective horror scene I’ve seen since Samara crawled out of the TV.
“For something to be nightmarish, it needs an element of the familiar. It needs to be Mom eating snakes on the kitchen floor.”
And WandaVision had that vibe going for it, up until episode five and then the horror stopped dead in its tracks and WandaVision became a lot more Marvel-ish.
They have also said that Cumberbatch was supposed to the have a cameo as a lead in to Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Apparently, he was trapped in New Zeeland.
WandaVision started filming in November of 2019. Production was halted in March of 2020 when the plague hit town. Part of the problem it had was that it wasn’t supposed to be the first project in MCU Phase IV, that was supposed to be Black Widow followed by Falcon and the Winter Solider. Then WandVision. But due to Covid, Maximoff and Red had to come first. And that meant it wasn’t allowed to be its own thing. It had to be a recognizable as a Marvel production. I don’t think it was meant to be originally.
Marvel has admitted that there were “some rewrites” after production halted. I strongly suspect that these rewrites were a lot more major than they have claimed. And when production resumed these changes turned a lot of pre-established plot elements into red herrings.
Truthfully, I have no way to be certain about my suspicions because this is Disney, and they lie because they don’t remember how to tell the truth. These issues have been addressed by the show’s writers but there are noticeable inconsistencies in their accounts. And it’s not like Disney is above ordering people to lie in order to take the fall for the company. A lot of these accounts came out after Marvel fans started to loudly complain about WandaVision’s J.J. Abrams-style mystery boxes.
When the showrunner tells the audience right ahead of the finale, “you are going to be disappointed by the ending.” That usually means he is the one that is disappointed.
Okay, I’m done here.
