Directed by Matt Shakman
Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Teyonah Parris, Kathryn Hahn, Randall Park, Kat Dennings, and Evan Peters
Running time: about 30 minutes
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by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, The Red Herring

From my previous recap, you could probably guess that I am fairly satisfied with the way WandaVision wrapped up. Agatha (Hahn) and Hayward were the series’s villains, with no surprise twists or turns in this episode really. Most of the focus remained on Wanda, her feelings and her actions. We’re all human, and we all make mistakes, and superheroes (with rare exception) also make mistakes. It’s just that their mistakes often involve larger stakes. With mind-based powers, Wanda’s magic included, that often involves things that are even more morally and ethically tense.

My biggest issue with the finale, then, is only that it is the finale. If we had gotten even one more episode as denouement, the show might have become one of the few entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to transcend its place in the larger ongoing story (see also: Black Panther). As it stands, with Vision’s (Bettany) next move unknown, Wanda (Olsen) in exile in either Canada or Sokovia, and various law enforcement agencies to clean up Westview, New Jersey. All of these things are punted down to some future entry in the series. While I don’t think everything needed to be wrapped up with a bow on it, just having a bit more time to process the climax of this story would have helped.

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Now that my main gripe is out of the way, there’s a couple of takeaways I want to praise the series for. First among them is letting Wanda be complicated. In trying to work through her grief, she has hurt innocent people. Not intentionally, but hurt nonetheless. While it is unclear to me how much time has passed, the show doesn’t shy away from showing that Wanda’s magic has hurt people. In fact, with how she leaves Agatha, it is almost spotlighted. This show at least validates Wanda’s grief as a powerful emotion that needs to be processed. Too often these things are brushed over and not given the space. This isn’t a happy ending for anyone.

The other thing I loved about the show, overall, was the romantic arc. So much of what falls into popular PG-13 entertainment these days seems to put romance at the edges of the story. But ultimately, WandaVision was about romantic love (and family as well). It showed that no matter how you come together, having a partner to share life with–both the good and the bad–allows both people to be a stabilizing force for the other. So much of superhero movies, and really American popular film in general, is focused on the individual, and while personal growth is important, that ignores the fact that romantic relationships play a huge role in the lives of many people. For all of the pain Wanda may have caused, it was in trying to reclaim a love taken from her too soon. The show never wavered in seeing that purpose as noble, and so much of the feelings the finale gave me were related to ‘love destined to be together across time and space.’ It’s the kind of love only genre fiction can really do, and when done well, always reduces me to a puddle.

While imperfect in some of the execution, those two ideas are ones I will gladly take from the show, in addition to its earlier episodes having fun celebrating the format of television itself. Hopefully Marvel is able to take on more high concepts and stretch even further than this in the future.

The other main takeaway of the series is that Wanda is the first female superhero in the MCU who is allowed to be as complicated and multifaceted as any of the male heroes. She has made mistakes, she has acted out of spite, and broken something while trying to fix it. She’s not unlike Iron Man or Thor or Ant-Man in this way, and makes her much more interesting and whole than Black Widow or Wasp. I hope future stories will honor this complexity.

VisionQuest:

Something something Doctor Strange 2...is where this most likely picks up. Which just makes me wish they had moved all of this a little further down the field.
Chime in with some comments if I should do this again for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I’ll be watching, but I am far less interested in that show’s premise.