I have been a voice with no body, a body but not human and now a memory made real. Who knows what I might be next?
I suppose there’s grousing to do about the whole bang-zap-pow MCU action scenes in this episode. At the end of the day, doesn’t it all just resolve into that standard MCU climax and isn’t that just shameful? Well, look, I mean, you’re not really gonna get me to say it, if it is. Yeah, this episode gets into some bigger action beats, but it seems disingenuous to pretend that, even if the action stuff here was awful, that twenty minutes of action could undermine the real artistry and beauty of the four hours or so of great television that’s come before it. It just can’t and, honestly, the action is kind of okay here. It isn’t bad.
I’m a big believer in the “action in street clothes” thing when it comes to superheroes, so I love that Wanda spends a significant portion of the big smack-down with Agatha still sporting those mom sweats; there’s something genuinely invigorating about a suburban mom in her lounge clothes flying down the street, firing red magic blasts. And I dig the new costume too. As soon as the Vision on Vision fight started, I was like, “They’re going to end up just playing logic games, aren’t they?” and, yes, they did and I loved it. That was a great way to resolve that. And, at the end of the day, Agatha doesn’t get a standard issue villain fate; they do something a little different with her, though I have to say I’m not super-excited about the news I now see that she’s getting a spin-off series. I mean, this series leaves her in a dark place and I kind of loved it; it’s twisted and when Agatha accuses Wanda of being cruel just before Wanda mind-wipes her, you can’t help but feel a pang of empathy for her, wicked though she may be.
Because, you know, this is bad **** Wanda did. But the show walks a fine line of helping us understand that it all occurred out of her brokenness and her trauma while also not exonerating her. At the end of the day, Wanda was a victim, a victim of her own emotions and wounds and a power that she simply didn’t understand and couldn’t control. I think it’s a good arc really for the character. I’ve talked about all the grief stuff and that’s really great, but I think it makes sense for this to also be a show about Wanda realizing that she has to embrace who she is and learn to control herself and her power. It’s a show about trauma and the unhealthy ways we suffer through it, but it’s also a show about taking responsibility and deciding that we have to, ultimately, work on ourselves and that’s where Wanda ends up, working on herself. I’m excited to see where the character goes from here. I’ve avoided the trailers for Multiverse of Madness, so I don’t know anything about what role the character is going to play there, but I don’t think we’ll see Wanda go full villain. I think it would undercut the arc of the the character here; we’ve seen her go there, really, in this show and as she leaves Westview she’s finally on the right track, I think, a journey to understand herself. In Westview, in part thanks to Agatha, she took a journey to understanding her trauma, I think; now that she has, in some way, worked through that, she can begin to work on understanding herself and then understanding her power.
But, yeah, that final scene of Wanda and her family going back to their home one last time is . . . man, it’s pretty tough. It’s about Wanda choosing to recognize things for what they really are and to let go of the past. It’s a beautifully written and acted sequence. I kind of got chills when Vision mused on the mad beauty of his existence. Really, all things considered, his existence has never really made sense and I suppose the lesson is to be grateful. He’s, right from the beginning, been a speculative being, not in terms of his personality, but in terms of his very nature, pushing past what should be able to exist and existing anyway. There’s something there about life, I think, about the spark of life in all of us; none of us HAD to exist, you know, but we do and it can be a beautiful thing. And, yes, it does stand to reason that Wanda and Vision will eventually say hello again. I believe that about many of the people I’ve lost over my lifetime. The show really expresses the sentiment elegantly. It’s a beautiful, poetic statement of faith in the mysterious cycles of the universe. Of course, it’s also just the practical reality that there’s an entirely bleached Vision flying around out there having an existential crisis; don’t think I forgot about that guy. But the sentiment rings true for me as a spiritual person.
This feels like the most chaotic and least focused review I’ve written for this series so far, but, end of the day, yeah, this was just a great series and I pretty well loved it start to finish. There are a few minor missteps and a few things that seem to get lost in the shuffle (I mean, you put Darcy in a circus outfit and then you have her in approximately five seconds of this episode? Really?). But overall, it’s been great and I’m so glad it exists. Honestly, I think it’s a perfect way to start Phase Four, still dealing with the fall-out from the whole Thanos saga by delving into the real human emotions behind the masks and the costumes and the super-powers. Thirteen years in, the MCU is still taking risks, letting creators put their own idiosyncratic stamp on things and focusing increasingly on the emotional realities of the characters. I somewhat fear that the broadening out of all these television series will eventually lead to a kind of deadening effect; it’s just hard to keep the quality up as the output continues to expand. Hopefully, it takes a while for the quality to drop much; at the moment, WandaVision has set a wonderful example of just how great the MCU can be in this new series-based format. Here’s hoping things keep looking up. 4 stars.
tl;dr – finale has some elements of the standard MCU climax, but characters & real human emotions remain front & center as this excellent series comes to a moving, memorable close. 4 stars.