MAJOR SPOILERS WITHIN.

I’ll be discussing the show solely in the context of the MCU. This means I won’t refer to organisations, characters or events which may give context but which you’d only know if you’ve read the comics.

Monica’s on a mission.

The Fantastic Four(ce) is strong this week. In what is a brilliant episode there is plenty to keep everyone happy. We see lots of little easter eggs, some gigantic reveals as well as character work which left me in pieces.

I want to start with Wanda. Throughout we’ve been exploring her grief and wondering just how much of this was about her devastation following Vision’s death. The relationship between Vision and Wanda has held this together when other parts were creaking – which is to understate just how powerful their relationship has played.

The opening credits give you a sense of what’s going on here – focussing as they do on Wanda almost exclusively, with Vision being added only at the end as a clear afterthought. Movies sometimes use a ‘and Big Name Actor’ to indicate it’s a cameo and it would have felt entirely in keeping here. It feels more than ever like we’re being reminded the ‘broadcast’ element is Wanda’s point of view and it’s not necessarily reliable.

Wanda talks to the camera this episode and is both aware of what’s happening and still bound by certain rules of which she appears unaware. However, this device is knife-edge sharp and provides space for the show to explore her grief. Not in sobbing housewife stereotype but through the lens of someone who can’t understand what they’re feeling because it’s so deep, so alien and so encompassing. We see Wanda grappling with herself, catching her grief out of the corner of her eye as if it’s a living thing and retreating from facing it head on.

And Olsen knocks it out of the park. So much is said without words, so much comes through that I was having to find tissues as it touched my own experiences of loss like a live wire.

On the other side of the coin we have Vision who, with Darcy in tow, is still struggling to understand what’s happening. Darcy does her thing and he has the lid lifted on his situation, on why the person he loves so openly and completely is falling apart and we see how it transforms his understanding both of himself but also of Wanda. Gone is the anger and I’m filled with a bright hope about what Vision will do next.

For any other show we could stop here – this exploration of grief alone makes the show compelling and must see television. Sure there are shows out there doing this as well and possibly better but they’re the ones for whom this exploration is the only point.

Wandavision delivers this exploration while also delivering a superhero story and this week we got it in spades.

We have Monica finding her way back into town – and the way she gets in was astonishing: a twenty second sequence which all by itself was worth stopping and watching again because it tells you so much about her, so much about who she is and where she’s come from and where she’s going. As character development it was some of the best I’ve seen, and the consequences are delightful.

When Wanda finally realises Agnes is something more than she’s understood to this point? We get a new set of opening credits. They paint Agnes as an antagonist. It’s fairly safe to say Wanda’s excursions are classic examples of the unreliable narrator and I wouldn’t trust what we’re shown. There’s no evidence to suggest whether Agnes currently has Wanda’s good or her harm in mind because we don’t know why she’s there. It is entirely possible she’s there to help Wanda through her grief, to help stop her encompassing the whole world in her loss. It feels like an obvious piece of misdirection and it’s impossible to predict whether she’s an antagonist, an ally or something more complex.

Agnes deliberately reveals herself to Wanda without being forced to and despite intervening in what could be construed as an obstructive fashion earlier in the episode – we still don’t know why Wanda is where she is or what she’s doing there – and it’s safe to say Agnes has more of that picture than us, so assuming she’s hostile…well it’s too early.

I started this review with a (bad) joke about The Fantastic Four. With a FF movie announced the MCU is now layering in the seeds for that. We have had the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation hints, the idea of some SWORD ‘astronauts’ being MIA following the Blip and now we have Agatha Harkness. I promised I wouldn’t talk about this in a way that would assume you knew the comics…but I can’t finish this review without highlighting that Agatha is an important character not only for Wanda but also the Fantastic Four and ties directly into Kang the Conqueror, the next big bad in the MCU.

Verdict: The show did a lot of work this week and all of it was good.

Rating? 9 unreliable narrators out of 10.

Stewart Hotston