Spoiler Free

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.

Agatha takes Wanda on a journey.

Episode 8 is focused. Focused on Wanda and who she is and where she’s come from. We get the culmination of the best piece of character work in the MCU to date and I feel it will be hard to beat it in future. Why? Because these eight episodes lay out the heart of Wanda Maximoff, bringing the audience right into the core of who she is and asking us to live that life with her. It’s a brilliant piece of writing and structuring; Olsen (and Bettany) deliver it with real power.

I’m writing this review without spoilers – it will be slightly shorter as a result, but the reason is that I want to preserve the work this show is doing for your viewing and not for reading it here.

There is a still a lot to say.

The show runner, Jac Shaeffer, and her team have done something really brave and really powerful. I’m not talking about the television format conceit – as clever as this is they’ve really developed it to serve a deeper and riskier play.

We’ve speculated in the past few weeks about Wanda’s grief, about her loss, of Vision specifically but also how it’s only the latest event in her life of having the things she’s loved stripped away from her.

I hoped the show would double down and take her grief seriously. Not simply as a mechanism for driving the story but to explore what it means for Wanda.

The show has done exactly that and in having the courage of its convictions I think it is simply the most grown-up content Marvel have created. I don’t mean it’s not suitable for kids (mine are absolutely entranced by it) but in that it is dealing with real themes we will all have to face at some point and it’s doing it with dignity and honesty.

What’s astonishing is the show is giving room to these emotional beats even as it weaves everything else into serving the story. It’s not that they’re played alongside action and scheming and super powered fights, it’s that those elements arise out of the emotional heft of the main characters’ experiences. That’s not an easy structure to deliver well but they have done so, and I am blown away by it.

The show has never been without its faults – the list of utterly perfect films and television is exceptionally short, but as with all the greatest shows, none of that matters right now because WandaVision has reflected my own grief back at me in a way I recognise, in a way which brought my feelings right back to me years later.

There were lots of little expository bombs this week. I think you’ll enjoy those too; some were cheesy, some were cliff hangers, but they were there in service to the story.

Originally this show was scheduled to run later, after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It leads directly into Doctor Strange 2. Yet I can’t help but feel the fact it has run earlier is going to help set the direction and landscape in which Marvel can take its story telling because they’ve got to look at this and see the massive triumph for what it is and know they can do more.

We still have the final episode to see, there’s a lot to deliver (although I think less than some people think as the clarity of the central motif of ‘grief explored’ does not need much embellishment). I hope it sticks the landing because I want this to succeed so, so much.

Rating? 10 grief counsellors out of 10

Stewart Hotston