The Deep Sadness of Marvel’s <em>WandaVision</em>

Read: Avengers: Infinity War is an extraordinary juggling act

For a project that’s been touted as a “big swing” for the franchise, the characters haven’t actually taken any big swings so far. Vision and Wanda are a literal (super)power couple, but neither is working on saving the world. The three episodes screened for critics contain no major set pieces, and no clear villains. Red flags pop up consistently—an incident at a dinner party, a colorful toy helicopter in a black-and-white bush, a woman named Agnes (an excellent Kathryn Hahn) who’s a tad too interested in their lives. But Wanda pays them little mind, brushing them off and forcing her environment into an appearance of normalcy.

It’s unclear how much control she has in shaping this reality, but her need for stability prevents her from acknowledging that anything’s amiss. She likes playing house with Vision, hitting relationship milestones they never got the chance to reach in the films. She magically creates wedding rings, flaunts their bond at a local talent show, and births twins by the third episode. Without a Big Bad in sight, Wanda is the warden of the world they’ve found themselves in, and whether she knows it or not, the show’s antagonist is her grief.

That’s a deeply satisfying twist for a character who, in the comics, typically drives maximalist story lines. Wanda’s abilities and intricate family history invite farfetched plots with calamitous consequences, often those that involve rewriting realities. Given Vision’s death, Olsen’s on-screen version of the character could have easily been used to fuel a more dramatic and action-heavy story of vengeance. But WandaVision, at least for now, is instead opting for a close examination of Wanda’s psyche as she copes with her loss. It’s a choice that brings to mind the work of the comic-book writer Tom King, whose celebrated graphic novel about Vision transplanted Wanda’s spouse into suburbia to observe his inner struggle with control, normalcy, and the fact that he isn’t, well, human.

Transplanting Wanda into a sitcom world serves her story the same way, interrogating her state of mind rather than testing her powers. Everything is so meticulously designed to look fake, from the spotless sets to the hanging backdrops to the wire-controlled special effects. The dialogue is over the top; the laugh track—and, in the first episode, a live studio audience—is intrusive. Each of the self-contained sitcom story lines forces Wanda to keep a straight face, smiling as if nothing has hurt her. The obviously strange nature of the situation makes Wanda’s plight both more painful and more intense. She’s ignoring it all to see what she wants to see—a feat that doesn’t require any magic, just the kind of extraordinary will, denial, and mental compartmentalizing a person musters in mourning. Fantasizing about a life one didn’t get to lead—a marriage, a pregnancy, a cute suburban community to call home—can hold that anguish at bay.

The show is inevitably going to fold into the larger Marvel story. Off-screen (or rather, off-off-screen), the series also carries the Marvel Cinematic Universe into “Phase Four”—the franchise’s post–Endgame saga of stories that’s expected to introduce the multiverse and feature far-flung characters from throughout the galaxy and beyond. Due to the pandemic, WandaVision is the first project to feature characters from the MCU films released in almost two years, and fans who’ve been itching for something mind-blowing to make up for the wait will delight in the Easter eggs and connections to the films. The character of Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who appeared as a little girl in Captain Marvel, arrives in Episode 2. A voice on the radio calling to Wanda sounds suspiciously like that of the actor Randall Park, who played the FBI agent Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man and the Wasp and is confirmed to be in the show’s cast. Any comic-book fan probably has a theory or two about the identity of Wanda and Vision’s children. And the show-within-a-show format teases the existence of a world outside of Wanda’s, indicating something more ambitious to come.