‘WandaVision’ Episode 8 Review: A Powerful Journey Through Wanda’s Grief
WandaVision
“But what is grief, if not love persevering?”
~Vision to Wanda in WandaVision Episode 8 ‘Previously On’
I’m not sure we’ve ever had such incredible writing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we’ve seen in WandaVision over the past eight weeks. With only one week left, I’m already starting to grieve a little bit about coming to the end of the line.
While I’m excited to find out what happens next—who is the mystery cameo? Is Agatha really a bad guy? What happens when White Vision blasts into Westview?—I’m sad that it’s all going to be over soon. Hopefully Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness continues the story.
Speaking of grief, it turns out that the most important thing about WandaVision is its exploration of loss and grief and how even superpowered people struggle to cope with these things. Indeed, that quotation from Vision up above may be the single most profound thing I’ve ever heard any character say in the MCU. It’s such a powerful concept distilled down into such an elegant phrase. What is grief if not love persevering? I admit, Agatha wasn’t the only one wiping a tear from her eye during that scene.
Here’s Vision’s full quote about loss and sorrow and grief, as he tries to comfort Wanda whose loss of her brother threatens to swallow her whole. She tells him she’s going to drown and he says no, she isn’t. Why not, she asks.
“Well, because it can't all be sorrow, can it?” he replies. “I've always been alone, so I don't feel the lack. It's all I've ever known, I've never experienced loss because I have never had a loved one to lose. But what is grief, if not love persevering?”
Wanda and Vision
The entire episode is backstory right up until the end, and we learn a bunch of important details about the current conflict along the way.
The opening scene features Agatha, several hundred years in the past, being led to a pole in Salem, Massachusetts. It appears the witch is going to be burned—until we realize that her captors are witches, too.
It turns out, Agatha has been toying with dark powers beyond her age and station, and the coven has had enough. Even her own mother—the coven’s head witch—refuses mercy when Agatha pleads for her life. “I can be good!” Agatha cries out. “No. You can’t,” her mother replies.
But Agatha is not to be trifled with. As the witches poor their deadly power into her, Agatha simply absorbs it, sucking each of her sister witches dry, including her mother. She emerges unscathed and, presumably, that much more powerful.
Most of the episode, however, is about Wanda’s backstory. Agatha has been trying her best to get to the bottom of Wanda’s story and how she tapped such enormous power using more subtle measures, but her patience is not a bottomless well and she’s done messing around. Wanda can’t free herself, either, thanks to the runes of protection that Agatha has crafted in her stone basement. Wanda, powerless against her, has no choice but to go along for the ride.
The first stop is Wanda’s childhood. It’s TV night in her Sakovian home. Her and her parents and Pietro all sit down to watch a very specific episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show—Season 2, Episode 20 “It May Look Like A Walnut,” a particularly weird episode of the popular sitcom that dives into sci-fi and the “it was all just a dream” trope.
They were happily watching the episode when their apartment was bombed, her parents killed, and she and Pietro trapped inside among the rubble for two days next to a Stark Industries bomb that turned out to—fortunately—be a dud. This was all alluded to in the first episode’s Stark Industries Toast Mate commercial.
From here we travel to Wanda’s time at Hydra, where Hydra scientist Baron Wolfgang von Strucker and his cronies perform experiments on her and Pietro and many others. This is where Loki’s staff comes into play. Inside its glowing blue gemstone lies the Mind Stone itself which, in a blast of yellow power, awaken Wanda’s powers. (Pietro’s also, but not in this flashback). Amidst the glowing light, Wanda sees a shadowy figure—herself, it seems, as Scarlett Witch.
While Wanda waits in her cold room she watches more sitcoms. This time The Brady Bunch.
Later, during the conversation about grief, Wanda is in her and Vision’s first home together where she watches Malcolm in the Middle (and I wonder to myself how different this show would have been if she was into different types of television, like Breaking Bad).
Finally we come to the near past, to Wanda’s visit to SWORD and a series of revelations that really bring the entire show into focus. It turns out that Wanda did not storm the SWORD HQ to retrieve Vision’s body. It also turns out that Hayward was trying to reanimate Vision all along and turn him into a powerful sentient weapon that he’d have control over.
Hayward is a lot more devious than we at first thought. The video he showed to both the audience and his own people, including Monica and Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis, was only a half-truth. Wanda broke some glass but after that she just grieved over Vision’s body. She never took him with her.
But before she left SWORD, a thought had been inserted into her mind, ever so subtly by Haward himself. “I just want to bury him, that’s all I want,” Wanda tells him when she arrives. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Not everyone has the kind of power that can make their soul mate come back online...forgive me, back to life.”
Hayward here is not only lying about dismantling Vision as an “ethical” duty, he’s essentially taunting Wanda, telling her that she has the power to bring him back—because that’s exactly what he wants her to do. Without the Mind Stone (which was destroyed) there’s no real hope to bring Vision back from the dead. No hope, that is, other than Wanda.
Agatha
She leaves without Vision’s body and drives to Westview where, it turns out, she and Vision have a plot of land where they’ve planned to build a house and grow old together. The town itself is quite a lot shabbier than Wanda’s sitcom version. It’s dirtier, weeds have cropped up in yards and the houses sport faded paint and sagging awnings.
She falls to her knees weeping. Then she roars and her power surges out of her. The house is built around her in a swirl of red magic. Then the magic expands outward like a supernova, washing out and transforming the entire town into a black and white, ever so much more manicured, version of itself.
Vision is born of this same magic. He’s not a corpse reanimated, he’s a piece of Wanda’s extraordinary creation. It explains why he was unable to leave the Hex—and may hint that Tommy and Billy are also incapable of leaving, though there could be more to that story.
This is what Agatha was looking for. The story of grief and loss—of Wanda’s parents and brother and Vision himself—that led her to this place, to this wild “chaos magic” as she puts it. When the walk through time ends, Wanda hears her children calling for her help.
She runs outside to the street, where Agatha—cloaked in black and purple—hangs above the street, purple cords of magic wrapped around Tommy and Billy’s throats.
“You have no idea how dangerous you are,” Agatha says, crackling with purple energy. “You’re supposed to be a myth. A being capable of spontaneous creation. Here you are...using it to make breakfast for dinner.”
“This is chaos magic, Wanda. That makes you a Scarlett Witch.”
The credits roll. And, for the first time in the MCU, Wanda’s superhero name is uttered. Pretty cool!
White Vision
There’s a post-credits scene once again this week. It’s quite a bit more important than the scene we got last week, also.
In it, Hayward and Goodner—the engineer Monica called in to help her with the tank they tried to use to break into the Hex—use the magic-infused drone to power up Vision’s now-complete (and colorless) body. White Vision will almost certainly be devoid of any feelings for Wanda and will be used by Hayward to try and take her down. What Hayward’s bigger plans are remain to be seen, but he’s clearly a bad guy with no regard for the rule of law. He was supposed to dismantle Vision, instead he’s brought him back to life as we all feared—though up until this episode we thought Vision’s body was stuck in Westview.
What is Hayward really after here?
I’m also surprised that there wasn’t some deal with devil that gave Wanda all that power, as I really was expecting some tie to Mephisto here. I suppose that could still happen but it seems unlikely.
Meanwhile, I’m honestly not sure if Agatha is really a villain or if she’s just a sort of anti-hero. What’s her stake in all of this? Why did she want to get to the bottom of Wanda’s powers so badly? I question that she’s a bad guy simply because none of her actions were truly harmful or wicked. Even the dog she killed might not have been real. The rest of her magic seems to have been an attempt to get Wanda to reveal herself and her true powers to Agatha, not to harm anyone.
She may have Tommy and Billy by the throat but . . . are they even real? Maybe Agatha is actually helping Wanda in her own way. Or maybe she has ulterior motives. I guess we’ll find out in next week’s ninth and final episode.
All told, this was a bit of a divergence from the formula but it still worked perfectly. No commercial this week and very little Vision. Monica, Jimmy and Darcy were all absent so we haven’t figured out what happened to any of them. Presumably at least Vision and Darcy will show up any minute now—Monica, too, unless she’s been captured by Pietro aka Fietro/False Pietro aka Agatha’s creation.
With a mystery cameo next week and a bunch of threads to tie up, I have only the highest hopes for WandaVision’s finale. If the writing and acting and production continue at this level, this could easily end up being the best thing the MCU has done period. I’m agog at how brilliant WandaVision has been so far. It’s exceeded every expectation.
Let me know what you thought of this episode and what you predict for the finale!