Why don’t you know? Am I dead?
No, no. Why would you think that?
Because you are.
So, WandaVision bursts into the nineties with an anarchic take on Malcolm in the Middle and, for whatever reason, I find this episode to just be a slight step down on the quality level from the rest of the series so far. I wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that this particular sitcom format has no real nostalgic effect on me; but neither do the eighties really and I loved last episode. Maybe it has more to do with this episode coming after the strongest episode of the series so far. Or maybe it has to do with some spoilers, which we’ll get started on NOW.
I thought the kids were fine in Very Special Episode, but I really struggled to have any interest in them at all here. I just basically didn’t find them either funny or particularly good in the dramatic moments. So that somewhat hurt the episode. I’m also surprisingly mixed on Evan Peters’ performance here; he’s an actor I typically really love and he’s doing a good job leaning into the trope of the “wacky-uncle-from-a-90s-sitcom” but I still didn’t really love it. Contrast with Kathryn Hahn’s performance as Agnes; she has also really leaned into the tropes of the sitcom character she’s playing in every episode, but she’s also shown you that there’s more there than meets the eye, that there might be something under that facade. I didn’t really get that same sense from Peters’ Pietro. And I’ll just say that everything he’s saying in this episode? Total bull****.
There’s still a lot to like here and even a couple of things I loved. Bettany’s performance as Vision is exceptionally good as is Kathryn Hahn’s. The scene between Bettany and Agnes is probably the highlight of the episode. And I am starting to waver on my big theory that Agnes is the big bad, ONLY because the show has just leaned into “hinting” that to such an over-the-top degree. She’s literally dressed like, and outright cackles madly like, the Wicked Witch of the West. Is this so over-the-top that I’m convinced it’s a red herring? May . . . be. I still think she’s the villain, but I’m less positive in the theory. I liked the usage of the costumes in this episode as well; one of the ways that this show has been, from the very beginning, absolutely superlative really has been the costuming. They’ve nailed every era perfectly and the costumes in this episode are really great.
Also, something that I kind of picked up on with this episode that I thought was really smart was that the arc of the history of television sitcoms really kind of mirrors the arc of this show. As the show progresses, you can’t help but feel that Wanda is getting more and more out of control, with the Hex itself and the people in it, also starting to get out of control. As Vision slowly starts to figure things out and SWORD slowly starts to infiltrate the Hex and more and more figures appear that Wanda clearly isn’t controlling, like Pietro and the twins, Wanda’s reality has become more hectic and chaotic, which is also EXACTLY the arc of sitcoms, all of which leads to this episode being the one where Wanda is most out of control and the sitcom genre the episode is mimicking also being the sitcom at its most anarchically nineties. I don’t know if I expressed that well or not, but the realization was cool. As the situation in the Hex becomes more chaotic and less controlled, so too do the sitcom genres Wanda mimics, going from the buttoned down fifties, which featured only a single moment of reality intruding into the very classically styled filmmaking, to now in the nineties, where Wanda’s confusion and lack of control over all the men in her life is depicted in a fast-cut, jittery-camera technique. Really, really great from a storytelling perspective.
The episode’s climax, with Vision breaking out of the Hex, in someways just felt like a retread of the previous episode, when Wanda broke out; when Wanda walked out, I thought it was an “Oh ****” moment, but this just wasn’t as shocking, though Bettany’s performance is good enough in the scene that the moment works. And the explosive expansion of the Hex is a great “Oh ****” moment and I loved it. Truly can’t wait to see what nonsense happens to Darcy now that she’s in the Hex. This should be one-hundred percent delightful. Anyway, this is in no way a bad episode of television; it just seemed to fall a bit short of the near-perfect episodes the series has had so far. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – this episode isn’t bad and certainly has pleasures, but it has more than one element that doesn’t quite work. 3 ½ stars.