It’s good medicine, angel. The only way forward is back.
Well, after a couple of episodes that were really only weak when considered against the insanely high standards of the series’ first five episodes, things have bounced back dramatically with this episode, which is, in my opinion, another contender, probably only the second one, for best episode of the season. I was a little worried about the exposure of the big bad in last week’s episode; does this mean we’ll have two episodes of punchy-zappy-bang-bang fighting? Well, no, it doesn’t. Can’t speak to next week, but this week we got a really heart-breaking and emotional episode about trauma and sorrow and grief.
I saw people online talking about how this is the second episode of the series, after We Interrupt This Program, to not really interrogate any sitcom tropes. But they’re wrong; this episode engages with one of the most venerable (and strange) sitcom traditions: the clip show. This episode does, in fact, subvert the clip show; it does show us things we already know about: the death of the Maximoff parents and the ticking clock of the Stark bomb; the experimentation with the Mind Stone by Hydra; etc. But instead of just being reheated clips of exactly what we’ve seen before, the versions of those stories we see here are revisionist, changing everything, really, about what we thought we knew about those events. And they’re deeply emotional, often hard to watch really. Olsen’s performance is top of the charts here and as she relives these deep traumas she never goes too big or over-the-top; she keeps the pain down where we recognize it as completely real. I mean, this humanization is what I’m always chasing in these kinds of stories. It’s the real interest of the superhero genre, the juxtaposition of super-human power with human frailty. It’s Tony Stark flying a ******* nuke up into space and obliterating an invading alien armada . . . and then coming back to earth and having a panic attack in a restaurant. It’s Thor channeling the energy of a star . . . and then losing himself in grief and shame for five years. And it’s Wanda, leveling up her powers, altering reality for an entire town, but doing that only because she’s finally been so emotionally broken by her trauma that she can no longer process the loss of those she loves. Wanda becomes, during her time creating and controlling the Hex, probably the most powerful being on Earth . . . and doing so only because she has no strength left at all.
So how to even deal with the best scenes in this episode. I think the quasi-retconning of Wanda’s powers is really well-done and I like it. The notion that the experimentation with the Mind Stone only awakened powers that were inherent in her works for me and the scene where the Scarlet Witch appears inside the light of the Mind Stone is fantastic, the MCU once again blending magic and science to create the equivalent of a spiritual experience during a scientific experience. Likewise, the name drop at the end of the episode when Agatha finally names Wanda is an epic mic-drop ending for the episode: “This is Chaos Magic, Wanda, and you are the Scarlet Witch.” I’ve loved the way the MCU has used/not used the comic book names for the characters; not using “Captain Marvel” at all in the movie titled Captain Marvel is one extreme while Tony Stark’s marketing savvy and bad-ass owning of “I am Iron Man” is the other. But this . . . this might be the best way a character’s comic book name has been introduced in the MCU so far. And, of course, the creation scene is a real gutpunch, the Vision of WandaVision flowing out of Wanda’s heart into reality, her love and her grief made real. Vision is not just her love by virtue of being the object of it; he is literally created and made out of her love.
But I think my two favorite scenes were two of the quietest moments in the episode. The quiet conversation between Wanda & Vision at Avengers HQ, which features probably the defining line of the series with “What is grief but love persevering?”, is just beautifully acted by both Olsen and Bettany. It’s just amazing how Bettany is able to play Vision’s non-humanity in a way that feels both alien and yet not distancing. There’s an innocence to the character that has really defined him for me ever since that amazing scene between Vision and the last Ultron drone in Age of Ultron; as Ultron castigates Vision for his foolishness at aligning with humanity, Vision only smiles and says, “Well, I was born yesterday.” He brings that same innocence and yet empathy to this scene. But the high point here may well be its most harrowing moment, the moment when we feel Wanda’s grief at its most horrified as she and we both look on a butchered Vision, disassembled, pulled apart and cut open, drained of life and color. “I can’t feel you,” Wanda whispers and my heart absolutely broke at that moment. Rarely have I seen a story about grief that captures the horror of it, the existential reality of seeing the empty shell of the person that is gone and feeling . . . well, horror is simply the word for it.
So, look, this episode is brutal and draining and brilliant and powerful and beautiful. It’s an amazing piece of television, balancing plot requirements and bold retcons with real emotional significance. It’s right up there with the very best episodes of this series and with the best things the MCU has done to date. Facing death and sorrow and grief as real things that exist even in a comic book reality, showing that these kinds of brutal emotional experiences can destroy and defeat even the strongest among us, this is, to quote Agatha, good medicine for comic books fans and non-fans alike. Now this is really something. 4 stars.
tl;dr – emotionally resonant, often hard to watch, and beautifully performed meditation on grief is among the best things the MCU has offered viewers to date. 4 stars.