It Was Misogyny All Along! A Series of Yes But Also No Reactions to Marvel's Wandavision (Patreon)

It really is ever so much easier to review something when I hated it. Or when I just love it so much. I just open up the Ol' Scrivener and gush.

But with Wandavision...there is just SO much to love.

And SO much to absolutely not love.

And what is not lovable is so directly related to problems with the MCU at large rather than the show as a discreet media unit.

And what is lovable is so directly related to television as a whole damn memetic seascape of ideas and tropes, and being of an age to feel nostalgic but not too critical about all of them, rather than what's actually going on in any given episode.

And then a bunch of both require background knowledge of goddman motherfucking IP law and decades of corporate negotiations and mergers which I really, really should not have to be up to date on to get a joke in a wildly popular TV show.

Plus my own fannish relationship to the MCU is weird, in that I have massive problems with virtually every installment and yet I still see them all on opening day, don't I? I like them enough to have seen many of them more than once, huh? I've spent hours online speculating about them, haven't I? Yeah, you'll take it and you'll like it, fancy girl, shut up.

It's just fucking complicated. Which is not something you usually need to assume crash positions for when plunging face-first into the billions-printing popcorn machine that the MCU has become. (Unless it's Legion, which, along with the Netflix shows, technically aren't canon MCU anymore, I guess? I swear, Keeping Up with the Kontinuity worse than it ever was in the old comics-only days.)

Because I really like this show.

And I really do not like this show.

But I feel a real need to applaud it for at least trying something more stylised, complex, and emotionally available than anything the theatrical releases even brush by on their way to the next explosion. Superhero movies and TV shows are here to stay, since they're practically the only kind of movies still getting people into physical cinemas and making the kind of money Hollywood has come to expect as standard, whatever that says about where we are as a culture, and it says a lot. I would far rather the iterations of this clearly winning formula be more like Wandavision than the (I think we can all agree on this at least) uneven at best films, for all the frowny things I am about to say about Wanda Maximoff's Day Off.

But look. I think a lot of the frantic fan praise of virtually anything coming out of Disney's Milk the Geeks division these days comes from the scarcity mindset of us nerds who grew up when no one was making movies, let alone Serious and Successful Film Events, out of beloved comics, and wearing an Iron Man shirt to school could and did result in Serious and Successful Beating Events. A lot of us feel, deep down, that if we don't love the latest Star Wars or Marvel or DC Extended Cut Bowel Movement enough, it won't make quite as many billions. Which is a more personal fear than anyone who grew up with their taste and identity celebrated by all (you know, normies) might realize. You see, if any given unit of Geek Franchise X doesn't make enough billions, then we won't get any more, and if we don't get any more, the bad old world will return, where knowing the backstory of the Storm Trooper who hit his head on the lintel in A New Hope, or indeed, knowing that the first Star Wars movie is called A New Hope and not Star Wars, or that a Storm Trooper did indeed hit his head on the lintel in it, carried utterly negative social value and was more likely to get you kicked in the head and nicknamed Storm Pooper for the rest of your natural life than profitably monetized on YouTube.

The simple fact that Wandavision contains multiple significant plot points that rely, for both narrative tension and the amount of dramatic space they occupy, on the majority of the audience just casually knowing that the MCU couldn't use the X-Men, the words mutant or Scarlet Witch, or Scarlet Witch's original outfit until the fairly recent Disney/Fox merger, is perhaps the perfect illustration of how far geek culture and Deep Knowledge from the Dawn of Time has come toward the center of popular culture.

Congratulations, everybody! We got called up to the major leagues.

And the game is fucking weird now.

Hell, do you even realize how recently the word "canon" was understood by people's parents as anything other than exclusively a term of dry-ass religious debate?

So, long tangent short, I can't rave about it unburdened by misgivings just because I want to encourage this direction in a cultural behemoth via positive reinforcement, even though basically I am ride or die for Agatha Harkness to an embarrasing extent. Even my (totally gross) love for her is not totally untempered by the fact that I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE, YOU FUCKS.

I have to get a little mad at it. Because I am a little mad at it. Even if the beleaguered nerd part of me says no no just tell them they're good boys and girls who did a good job so they keep doing it.

On top of all that, we don't know where they'll go with any of these characters in future movies or shows. We can only sort of guess from the comics they're based on because the MCU is very fast and loose with source material and they have a lot of continuities to choose from. We don't even know if Wandavision will have a second season or not, or if Wanda will turn up in the second Dr. Strange film, though it seems pretty likely. So maybe some of my problems will be addressed down the line and maybe they won't, but talking about them in relation to an ongoing, absolutely sprawling media dynasty, will always has an asterisk whose footnote reads: maybe they know and will fix it later?

There. All that said. Let's get the technicolor fuck into it.

I am exactly of an age to dig this thing all the way through the center of the earth. I grew up in the 80s, when shows like Dick van Dyke and I Love Lucy were on Nick at Nite and The Brady Bunch had only been off the air for a decade so was in near-constant reruns. And not on a specialty channel like AMC either (ha ha remember when AMC used to exclusively air old black and white shit before it was The Zombie Channel? SOME OF YOU PROBABLY DON'T ACTUALLY) on like NBC during prime time. Full House started when I was 8. I was coming of age when Buffy started, entering the workforce when The Office was a hit in the UK and starting my career in earnest when it premiered in the US, growing up during the whole transitional period of the mid-90s to late-00s when TV started to become a Serious Thing whose audience expectations of quality drastically shifted, even for sitcoms.

I am precisely the same age as Angela in My So-Called Life, to give people who are also precisely that age a sharp picture of the timeframe. But I remember unironically watching Leave It to Beaver and Lassie when I was home sick from school because it was what was on mainstream TV, yes, in black and white when other shows were all color. I vividly recall having opinions about the goddamned Andy Griffith Show, and no child needs to have opinions about that. But I was a latchkey kid, so I watched A LOT of TV in a world without American Pediatric Association guidelines on screentime.

I was not alive for the whole history of American television, but I saw it in syndication.

So yeah, I immediately was picking up what Wandavision was laying down. I also am no slouch when it comes to comic book lore, so I didn't even take ten minutes to be 99% certain this was all some kind of grief-coping fever dream because Wanda couldn't take her boyfriend cacking it on the permanent in Infinity War/Endgame and they were definitely gonna have those sort of maybe imaginary twins and lose them sooner or later, because this all happens, with radically different context, in Scarlet Witch's literary continuity.

Which is why it made me so uncomfortable at first that I turned it off and didn't turn it back on until the whole thing had finished airing.

It is some REAL SHIT that Wandavision is the MOST SCREENTIME the MCU has EVER devoted to a female lead (just shy of 6 hours to Captain Marvel's 2, and Captain Marvel is also kind of weird as she doesn’t interact with the rest of the gang much and isn’t part of their friendships or dramas so it feels like a separate franchise. In a very real sense this is the first female-lead installment of the Avengers side of the MCU) and it's all about a woman who can't handle her boyfriend dying so she fucking tortures a town full of innocent people in order to fantasize about being a housewife despite being arguably the most powerful being on the planet god DAMMIT, Marvel, you are a bad person. We waited SO LONG for ANY Marvel woman to get a real complex story and what did you do? You managed to discover a whole new, more holistic way to fail the Bechdel Test. A whole show in which every single thing a woman does is about a man--oh but wait, there's more--AND her inability to control her emotions.

Wanda Maximoff gets an entire television show and for all its quality and seeming focus on her, it's not really about her at all. She's just a plot device to bring Vision back from the dead for future films. The lady's just there to deliver our man.

It's a good fucking thing it WAS Agatha all along (except, I mean...it really wasn't, was it?), otherwise you would hear the top of my head shooting righteous fire out of it like that gif of Anger from Inside/Out for miles around.

You know good and nuclear-powered well that if Disney ginned up an Iron Man show it would not be about him dreaming of cleaning Pepper's drawers in suburban bliss in order to bring Black Widow back. (Nobody's ever going to bring Black Widow back, her asshole friends didn't even give her a funeral while they were busy sending out SO MANY invitations for Tony's.)

And you know that's factually true because almost as soon as Wandavision ended, Falcon and the Winter Solider started, and it's definitely not about any of this shit, despite someone both the titular men loved very deeply having recently died/departed the timeline. It's full of action and saving things from bad people and pretty confrontational, important, political commentary that is very of the current moment.

Whereas Wandavision, and this is my biggest and most inescapable problem with it, the one that my enthusiasm runs smack into around every delighted corner, expends an enormous amount of creative energy on a truly capitvating, outside-the-box structure that accesses a vast universe of really thorny socio-economic touchstones without having very much at all to say about anything it references.

Wandavision is this wonderful mapping of the history of mainstream television and the evolving image of the American family used to explicate grief.

But why?

Why choose this structure for that story?

Because of the pun?

The in-universe reason given, that Wanda grew up loving bootleg American sitcom DVDs in Cold War Sokovia, doesn't satisfy me at all. First, because that is an All New character trait for her so it feels very unearned, retconned in order to get the fun motifs somebody wanted a reason to play with. She's never quoted a sitcom before, she's never behaved as though she knew anything at all about American life, she's never lit up with the pleasure of understanding anyone else's (constant) references to American TV culture even though you'd think she'd be grasping for anything familiar to hold on to. It comes out of nowhere, at the very end, to justify an experimental structure without having to face any of the issues that structure brings up.

But this is a problem mostly because any character trait would be an All New Feature on MCU Wanda Maximoff, as we know virtually nothing about her by the time the credits roll on Endgame. Dead twin brother was Quicksilver, does red things with supermagic, likes Vision. There was so comically little time spent on developing her character that no one ever bothered to explain where in the mopey staring-contest hell her accent went. It wasn't important. Because she wasn't important. She was a sentient gun to be brought out at convenient times, but that gun must always fail. Her function was to fail. Her failure demonstrated the power level of the antagonist, after which she'd just disappear so that the Real Franchise Heroes could take over.

As for her relationship with Vision, the emotional stakes on which the whole of, you know, Wandavision, rests, it is so poorly established in the movies that they're just suddenly together in Infinity War, with barely a shared scene in which Vision isn't condescending to or fighting with his new girlfriend. Which means this whole love affair, you know, the one we're meant to feel is True Cosmic Reality-Transcending #relationshipgoals Love, pretty much had to have started when Vision was keeping her prisoner in the Avengers compound in Civil War.

I LOVE this for her! What a healthy, definitely not at all problematic way for a fucking refugee who was brainwashed by A NAZI like A MINUTE ago, to start her first and only signifcant romantic relationship! Certainly not the actual definition of Stockholm Syndrome, no siree! Surely someone will address this at some point in the six hours of random jokes about Sitcoms Through the Ages? That this woman has literally never known any kind of love that didn't come conveniently packaged in imprisonment and privation under threat of violence, including maybe her dad (who is not, or at least hasn't even been suggested to be, Magneto in the MCU, though probably that's coming now that Disney has access to the X-Men again, but if it does turn out to be Magneto, definitely her dad) except from her brother, who is dead.

Hashtag relationship goals.

Also I have takeout containers in my fridge that have been together longer than these two.

Wandavision assumes that its audience's ticket to ride the Emotions Coaster is a solid pre-existing investment in the relationship of its two leads. It just takes as a given that we believe this was, at least before Vision got Thanos'd, a good, happy, stable relationship, based on trust and decency, that damaged neither of them and was worth All This Drama to save and continue. But man, I don't fucking know these people. Even Movie Vision's appeal is like 110% Paul Bettany and not the script. What I know is it's yet another Hollywood pairing where she's in her 20s and he's 50 but lol it's okay because he's a robot you humorless feminist, and also this Very Special Boning started under the WORST and GROSSEST circumstances and I had zero interest in whether those two wacky kids made it work.

So it's actually pretty surprising how effective the relationship is in Wandavision itself. It feels easy and established and lovely, because the MCU's real superpower has always been casting (with a very few misfires) and these two actors give the material so much. Olsen effortlessly embodies each era of housewife comedy, it's fucking delightful to see Bettany in a 90s coif switching back and forth from all powerful inhuman being to beleaguered husband and dad without missing a beat. They bring everything to their performance that the movie scripts couldn't be bothered to pack in their lunches, and it's mostly just lovely. Nobody ever mentions the icky stuff, of course, because I honestly don't think anyone involved in this slick boi actually thinks it is icky. Just me in the back yelling like usual. WHATEVER I'M RIGHT.

It's all so damn enchanting that the B plot, involving yet another cringily-acronymed government agency trying to figure out what's going on at the approximate pace we're trying to figure out what's going on frankly just annoyed me.Virtually all the pleasure on that side of the show comes from presuming you recognize all these people from other sections of the franchise, but mostly they're just there to make the exposition more interesting and occasionally deliver plot points into and out of Westview like Amazon Prime. Kat Dennings actually just disappears once she drops off Vision in a literal delivery truck, that's how small of a shit the show gives about her character or managing our feelings about her for future movies.

Which is really all that B plot is about. Managing our feelings about a handful of characters, not necessarily for this story, but for use in the future. It's so cynical and calculated it makes Tim Robbins in The Player look like a freewheeling fairy princess on gossamer wings of sincerity. You're supposed to like Jimmy Woo so they can bring him in later to be the face of S.H.E.I.L.D if they need the government to be the good guys this time, or hurt him to raise the emotional stakes. A truly baffling amount of time gets spent establishing Spectrum for all that they never use any of her nine canonical superhero names, and fully assume you will recognize her from Captain Marvel, a movie you of course will have seen and remember in detail, in which she was a kid, and care about what happened to her mom without any prompting. Spectrum, in Wandavision, exists to bridge Captain Marvel to whatever property they have planned for her in Phase Seventeen or whatever. Which is not great for one of the few Black women Marvel has let say a word onscreen. Her powers don't matter to this plot, her character's only arc in this story is non-powered to powered, and any of the possible thematic links concerning motherlessness or grief or the lure of the past are given no or only cursory attention. As in "my mom died too" and that's about it. But you need to like her, so that they don't have to spend screentime in a film convincing you to like her. So here she is, clap for that you stupid bastards, as the President would say, and I guess her powers came from Scarlet Witch but also by accident?

And who gives a shit about Darcy, apparently. (Poor Kat Dennings.)

Everything that happens outside the Hex is just a backdoor pilot for the next phase of Marvel films and I could not care at all once I realized that.

Inside the Hex, you just have to bow down before the set designers, propmasters, and credits...makers? I don't know what you call the people who make credit sequences. But the best ones worked on this show, they're fantastic, and somehow even more so as the decades get closer to the present and tropes you never thought about smack you in the face and you realize oh yeah every show talked direct to camera for awhile, that was a whole thing and oh shit every 90s show had the same "edgy" credits didn't they? Any one of us could parody the 50s-90s in our sleep at this point, they've calicfied in their agreed-upon meme forms and parodies followed each decade almost as soon as they ended. But as you get closer to the present, it's harder to see the trends because we're just swimming in them all the time. And it was all wonderful, part of the real joy of this show. Was that actually for real the Full House house? The attention to detail was truly next level.

But again, I can't help asking...why? Because she's Elizabeth Olsen so her sisters were part of that iconic TV parade o' tropes? Because reasons? Wandavision has absolutely subzero interest in interrogating the American vision (so to speak) of itself as projected through television, not in terms of gender or economics or cultural evolution or even the progression of postmodern metafiction in mainstream media. So why did they set up a show that cries out for that interrogation? There is this fundamental disconnect between the text and the theme that fucking BOTHERS me. It feels like cheating. Like we wanted to do something people would praise us for but we didn't want to bring that home to actually saying anything. We liked the idea, but then the implications were super awkward so we kind of just left it outside to fend for itself while we all went out for pizza.

Which brings us to Quicksilver.

You guys.

So awhile ago a third season of Twin Peaks came out and because it's David Lynch IT HAS TO BE GENIUS AND IF YOU DIDN'T LIKE IT YOU JUST DIDN'T GET IT MAAAAAAN.

Watching that season of Twin Peaks was the first time I ever thought: damn show, why are you being mean to your audience? They're here for you, dude. They love you. Why are you being such a turd to them when you could just as easily make a story that gives them any little thing they might actually want and is still just as complex and mindfucky as you like? Let people like things, jesus, it's not bad art just because someone got a little satisfaction out of it for thirty seconds.

Wandavision's treatment of Quicksilver and Evan Peters was the second time.

That shit was just mean. And they knew it, too. They had to know it, because they got on the phone and called up Evan Peters on purpose, they kept it secret on purpose, because they knew fans would lose their whole entire minds the second he came onscreen. They knew, because holy super speedy cats, the X-Men Quicksilver was miles better than the MCU one, everyone would be eating their own hair with excitement over getting that character back, that they'd stay up all night making up theories about the multiverse, that the fan frenzy would be visible from space.

And then they used all that goodwill to make a boner joke.

What the actual fuck.

This is what I was talking about earlier. The whole plotline relies on fans knowing that Evan Peters played Quicksilver in another movie and why, which is a fucking weird thing to assume everyone knows, but then, having accessed that geek maelstrom, they just kicked sand in everyone's face and went ha ha that's what you get for caring about the exact things we've spent millions convincing you to care about, nerds!

Cool.

Could've just as easily not done that. Could have written an actual story point there. Since the next movie is literally about the multiverse. But Marvel TV is so scared of creating continuity problems for the films it constantly pulls its punches so that the shows don't commit to anything the big important movies might have to deal with down the track. That shit was mean. Mean to the fans, mean to Evan Peters, just a dick move for no good reason.

And then there's Agatha. Who I adore. Who makes this whole show. Who I am vastly more interested in than basically anything else in the MCU at this point. A lot of people have said they knew it was “Agnes all along” (best part of the whole gig) because why hire Kathryn Hahn otherwise, but Kathryn Hahn has a long history of being better than the material she's cast in, so I was surprised enough. And I love everything about her. It really shows that Marvel has done itself a disservice by throwing out so many garbage tier villains, and so few of them female. Villainesses are the best! We should have been doing this years ago!

But if we're into Agatha we're into the end and the end is just where this show comes apart into a bunch of seriously fucking gnarly issues that no one at all wants to deal with BUT YOU BROUGHT US HERE, YOU MADE THIS MESS, YOU HAVE TO CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF, JFC.

Count 'em off, maestro.

1. In a world where The Incredibles literally exists and is playing in a West view theater, it's a definite choice to make the one charismatic female villain (no Hela doesn't count, she's a frown and a costume) Marvel has ever deigned to give us monologue her way into telling the hero how to defeat her COOL SHE'S ONLY HUNDREDS OF YEARS OLD LOVE HOW SHE GETS GOT WITH THE MOST CLICHE POSSIBLE TIRED-ASS SHOWGIRL MOVE.

2. I guess someone loaded up the craft services table with cliches that day because Scarlet Witch is one of the most powerful beings in Marvel and her entire motivation is her husband and babies, neither of which are any more real than the goddamned Easter Bunny. It feels like we have regressed so much with this I swear my eyeballs hurt from rolling. Women can be motivated by things that neither come out of nor go into their vaginas. I KNOW. So hard to believe! Why, what else can even happen to a simple lady-person? And yet. It wouldn't be that much of a problem if Marvel had given us more woman-led properties, but they haven't, and after that NASTY-ASS NONSENSE with Black Widow's tragic infertility making her a monster on par with an uncontrolled Hulk, I don't really want to hear anything else about women and babies out of this money factory, but I most definitely didn't want to watch this very interesting show devolve into yelling about kids and boyfriends instead of, Christ on an imaginary cracker, literally anything else. Even Agatha looks vaguely disgusted. Tony Stark had a whole plotline about his love for his kid without making that his only character trait or having him only discover his true powers because of his baby.

It's all part of this older than Dick van Dirt hedged narrative bet when it comes to women. Women's power can only be deployed in defense of children and/or the continued stability of the heterosexual family unit. Women can only discover themselves and their agency in the act of childbearing and rearing, and anything extraordinary they do is only heroic when she does it for them, particularly male children, because they're the ones who really matter.  Otherwise, like Agatha, she's a villain.

Women's power, when not confined to home and family, is scary and threatening to the patriarchal (yeah I used the P-word, we'll all live) status quo. Which is what sitcoms have always been about. The establishment, stress testing, and restoration of the status quo. And you’d think there would be some coherent addressing of this, or inversion of it but there isn’t, it’s just played straight and not connected to the sitcom thing at all. YOU GUYS BROUGHT IT UP. WHY’D YOU BRING IT UP IF YOU DIDN’T WANT TO GET ALL THE WAY INTO IT?

It's all so damn tired. And tiring. I don't enjoy constantly pointing this out, you know. I GET BORED JUST TYPING IT. Vision gets to fight himself with fancy words, reinstall his hard drive, and then fuck entirely off to the next film without a thought for his wife and children. Wanda's final post-credits scene is still about her fucking imaginary friend-babies so I guess that's where we're going with this forever. THANKS, WHAT A REVOLUTIONARY PIECE OF META-MEDIA, GROSS, I HATE IT.

3. Speaking of LADY BULLSHIT WHAT GETS DONE TO LADIES, it's just so awesome that Agatha gets to be stuck in a mind-prison forever, controlled like a puppet, in what everyone has assured us is horrendous torture, for the crime of...honestly it's actually pretty unclear what Agatha has done wrong here in the strictest sense. She got caught up in the spell, never hurt anyone, gives Wanda a little much-needed therapy and on-the-job training (it’s just another kick in the teeth that this incredibly powerful woman isn’t even doing it on purpose, she has no skill or even the first idea what she’s doing, it’s just her ICKY UNCONTROLLABLE GIRL FEELINGS channeled through her UNFORTUNATE XX CHROMOSOMES and naturally EVERYONE SUFFERS because FEELINGS ARE DISGUSTING), tries to take on some of her workload, which she clearly can’t handle, and then gets cacked because reasons. Probably because of her eyeshadow. That was pretty crazy.

But Agatha didn’t do any of this dark mind-control shit! Oh, wah wah she killed her mom—her mom and all her mom’s toxic Goody Karen friends were gonna kill her so you can’t even get too mad about that! WE ALL HAVE MOMMY ISSUES OKAY IT’S COMPLICATED WHOSE PARENT HASN’T TRIED TO RITUALISTICALLY DRAIN OUR POWER AM I RIGHT. Agatha’s villain status comes mostly from an assumed background awareness of the comics. Onscreen, she does considerably less morally-questionable things than Tony Stark has done. Lookin’ at you, Ultron. And the military-industrial complex. And causes far less damage than Loki, who not only gets to dance a festive jig into the sunset every time while the fans cheer, but is getting his own show after being a douche, then killed. Loki literally invaded Earth and directly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and that was just the FIRST Avengers movie. AND he killed his dad (and kind of his mom too). But Agatha cosplayed Kimmie Gibler so FLAY HER MIND FOREVER.

Edit: Ok I forgot that she killed the dog. I know how we all feel about dogs but come on now. First of all, that dog could have been fully imaginary, you don't know. Wanda sure does gin it up out of nowhere. Second, if it wasn't fictional, maybe it was a racist. Or had a podcast. Or both. Agatha Harkness did nothing wrong, is my point. The Agatha All Along song is such a bop that it distracts from the fact that it 100% was NOT Agatha all along. She had nothing to do with this. She was just a rubbernecker trying to investigate some serious stupid on the astral plane. How many dogs hit the rainbow bridge like a furry confetti-gun when the Avengers come to town? Don't get upset now, Sarah McLachlan, because it's a lot. And none of those dog-killers get imprisoned in a radio controlled meat drone for all time.

Agatha Harkness is essentially magical OSHA, and she turned up to an UNSAFE worksite to hand out some long-overdue fines. That's pretty much it. It was WANDA all along.

4. So…you gotta ask. Is this a villain origin story? Now, we don't know, and in the comics Scarlet Witch is very much an ambiguous figure who is not always a hero, but the whole Westview situation is bad, y’all. She tortured a couple of hundred people for weeks. For her own emotional gratification. Not to save the world or get an Infinity Stone, not because she was forced to, but because she couldn’t control herself. After she knows what she’s doing, she still fights to keep using other humans like puppets, and after it’s made completely clear to her that what she’s done is terrible, evil torture, she does it again to Agatha.

But everyone is somehow okay with it because Agatha…is not at fault for any of this. COOL MORALS, GOOD GUYS.

What is the actual difference between what Wanda does to Westview and what Kilgrave does in Jessica Jones? I suggest to you the answer is that meme of Pam from The Office saying they’re the same picture.

But I don’t think it is a villain story. We are meant to be super pumped for the name Scarlet Witch and the costume (again, relying on our knowledge of IP wars to know why that’s significant and why they weren’t used before now, which is a bold move, Cotton). Nothing cues us to think Wanda is lost or that we shouldn’t still think she’s a good person. The most beautiful parts of this show, dealing with grief and loss, all come at the end, after it’s perfectly clear that Scarlet Witch done fucked up and is only mildly interested in unfucking it, as long as she gets to keep all the stuff she likes from the upfucking. We are supposed to feel for her in these moments, they are the emotional climax of the show, and nothing in the music or blocking or dialogue hints that this is anything but true love.

“What is grief but love persevering” is a fucking astonishingly good line. It’s one of the best the MCU has ever put in an actor’s mouth. But once you stop crying and think about it…all that wasn’t so much love persevering as turning people, including your partner and children, into mind slaves living a terrifying lie. VERY HEALTHY, #SQUADGOALS.

So we’re left with the woman with the most MCU screentime having used it to be a housewife and also brutalize a whole lot of people and then punish someone else for it.

That is just…a lot to unpack from an already overstuffed suitcase.

And I return as ever to why. Why this, why her, why now. Wandavision wants the shiny structure but doesn’t use it to say anything about the characters or narrative or history. It could have been a whole thematic thing about the confines of the American imagination, the hidden toxicity of the aggressively marketed nuclear family, the ways in which powerful women have, for millennia, been kept down and imprisoned in unsung reproductive labor, used like puppets to create a happy life for men to express their power over. You would think imprisoning the mind of a powerful witch in a suburban housewife's body and narrative would be a MOMENT, but it's not, because we've spent 9 episodes establishing how great Wanda thinks that narrative is, never once so much as daydreaming that the narrative itself is a prison, so the focus is simply on Agatha losing control, not the specifics of what's happened to her. Which is hashtag choices, because Westview doesn't actually exist? It's a barren lot in a demolished neighborhood? So is Agatha just gonna walk around the rubble offering the ants cookies or what? 

LOL NO ONE CARES NEW SHOW DROPS NEXT WEEK

Because all that? Is not what this show is about. At all. It’s not something Marvel even wants to touch, even as far as letting Agatha get into it and do the Gone Girl thing of putting Home Truths in the villain's mouth. It’s even odder since a major theme of all the MCU franchise units is chosen family—which exists precisely to break the stultifying bonds of these kinds of culturally enforced familial roles and create something healthier and more nurturing. But no. Wanda is all in on the awesomeness of the stay-at-home suburban dream. Which would be fine if Marvel hadn’t been so fucking stingy with letting women do anything for so long, but they have. So it feels squarely about continuing those messages on the nature of women’s power and where it belongs and the villainy of not using it mainly in the interests of biological (white) children.

Wanda herself shows no dissatisfaction with any of the eras, she is fully invested in her role and getting back to that is, I guess, going to be her entire motivation going forward. The show faithfully reproduces all these narrative moments down to the most painstaking detail, but stops short of actually engaging critically with them. Or engaging at all except for laughs.

And that’s what was most piercingly missing for me. The piece coming around in the end to connect the form to the content. It will always be not as good as it could have been for me because it choked in the end and quietly delivered the revived Avenger and restored IP property to the next films as it was told.

And that’s just a problem with anything like the MCU. It can’t take huge risks because that might cause problems for other writers down the line. Its main function is to make more of itself, not make every part of itself the best it can be. So we get a show that looks fantastically original on the surface, but actually just serves us a mess of lukewarm unexamined misogynist laziness with a jaunty theme tune and hurries us along to the next attraction before we can get too attached to the lady with the cool eyeshadow.

I really liked this show. And I really did not like this show. It was so good, and then it chickened out. And while I try not to beat up on things too hard for simply not being what I thought they should be, generally speaking, a piece of media should have something to say. The theme of the show is grief, the form is historical sitcoms, and they never talk to each other. Wandavision created a lot of problems for itself—moral, rhetorical, contractual, narrative—by using this captivating structure to do little more than stall and make jokes and fill the time before the last episode, and it’s deeply disappointing. We waited an awfully long time for a lady Avenger to get the spotlight and we got…true happiness is being Donna Reed, girl power comes from unnatural darkness and chaos, and ladies sure do love babies, don’t they? In the year of our Lord 2021. Cool story, bro. The only way it makes much sense to me is if Wanda IS going to end up a major antagonist, but she’s an Avenger, and I just don’t see a heel turn lasting beyond one movie.

On another show I really like, Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK, a queen named Ginny Lemon walked the runway in a frumpy dress and then did a dramatic quick change to reveal…the same frumpy dress.

And that’s what this is. We used misogynist sitcoms that showed women’s power being crushed, confined, and subverted into the service of her husband and children, implying that anything else can cause nothing but problems for everyone…to tell a story about women’s power being crushed, confined, and subverted into the service of her husband and children, implying that anything else can cause nothing but problems for everyone, only we played that mofo completely straight so you wouldn’t accidentally think we were criticizing the great uncomplicated history of American television (now 75% owned by Disney) or the treatment of women in superhero comics, perish the thought, now praise us for giving a woman a show at all.

It’s so much work and drama and flair, but in the end, it’s the same dress.