WandaVision

Our Verdict on WandaVision

WandaVision is the best thing Marvel Studios has ever made, and also the clearest demonstration of why Marvel Studios cannot be trusted. The series, created by Jac Schaeffer and directed by Matt Shakman, begins as a genuinely brilliant formal experiment: nine episodes that progress through the history of American television sitcoms, from the 1950s through the 2010s, with Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) as the married couple at the center of an increasingly wrong suburban fantasy. The first three episodes are so good, so committed to their premise, so unusual for a superhero property, that you almost forget you are watching a Disney+ series designed to sell the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Almost.

Because by episode four, the spell breaks, and what replaces it is a competent but ideologically conventional MCU product that uses its formal innovation as camouflage for a deeply progressive moral framework. The show's defenders will tell you it is about grief. That is true, but it is about grief in the way that a Times op-ed is about current events: the surface is accurate, but the framing does all the work. WandaVision is about a woman whose personal trauma is so profound, so cosmically unfair, that her enslavement of an entire town of innocent people is presented as something that happened to her, not something she did. That framing is the show's central ideological move, and everything else -- the sitcom pastiche, the mystery-box plotting, the fan-service cameos -- is in service of making you accept it.

In any morally coherent story, a character who imprisons thousands of people in a psychic nightmare against their will, who forces them to play roles in her domestic fantasy, who causes them physical and psychological distress every moment of every day -- that character would be the villain. WandaVision does not make Wanda the villain. It makes her the protagonist whose grief we are meant to understand and forgive. When the citizens of Westview are finally freed in the finale, one of them tells Wanda, 'They'll never know what you sacrificed for them.' This line, delivered to a woman who has just ended the torture she chose to inflict, is so morally inverted that it functions as a kind of Rorschach test. If you hear that line and think it is beautiful, WandaVision has worked on you exactly as intended. If you hear it and think it is grotesque, you are seeing the show's ideological machinery for what it is. The line is not an accident. It is the thesis. Wanda's victimhood is the only moral currency that matters. The people she victimized are an afterthought, a prop in her healing journey. Their suffering exists to make her sacrifice meaningful. This is victimhood meritocracy in its purest form: the more you have suffered, the less accountable you are for the suffering you cause.

The show's secondary characters reinforce this framework. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is introduced as a capable SWORD agent who returns from the Blip to find her mother has died. She is immediately undermined by the acting director, Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg), who disrespects her expertise and eventually tries to kill her and Wanda's children. Hayward is not a character; he is a function. He exists to make Monica look good and to give the audience someone to hate more than Wanda. His villainy is so cartoonish -- experimenting on Vision's corpse, shooting at children, lying to the FBI -- that it serves as a misdirection: if Hayward is this evil, how bad can Wanda really be? The answer the show wants you to give is 'not that bad.' The answer the show's own evidence suggests is 'worse than Hayward, actually, because she did it to thousands of people for weeks while he was just a corrupt bureaucrat.' But the show does not want you to do that math. It wants you to feel for Wanda and hate Hayward, and the juxtaposition is designed to short-circuit your moral reasoning.

Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) is the show's best character and its most honest one. She is a witch who has been alive for centuries, and she sees Wanda's Westview project for what it is: an immense, uncontrolled expression of power by a woman who does not understand what she is doing. Agatha's theme song, 'Agatha All Along,' is the show's high point -- a genuinely clever meta-joke that works as both parody and plot revelation. But Agatha serves a structural purpose that undermines Wanda's moral accountability. By making Agatha the 'real' antagonist -- the one who wants to steal Wanda's power -- the show gives Wanda someone to defeat, which transforms her from perpetrator to hero without her ever having to reckon with what she did to Westview. The finale features Wanda fighting Agatha while the citizens of Westview beg her to let them go. She lets them go. She is celebrated for it. The show treats this as a resolution when it is actually an abdication.

The performances range from excellent to functional. Elizabeth Olsen does career-best work as Wanda, grounding cosmic grief in recognizable human behavior. Her sitcom performances, shifting styles from decade to decade, are technically impressive and emotionally legible. Paul Bettany has the more difficult job: Vision is dead, and the Vision in Westview is a construct Wanda created from her grief. Bettany plays him as a sitcom husband who gradually becomes aware that something is wrong with his reality, and his growing unease gives the middle episodes their dramatic tension. Kathryn Hahn's Agatha is so much fun to watch that you almost miss how cynical her function is -- she is the villain the show can safely defeat, the external threat that allows Wanda to transition from problem to solution without ever facing justice.

Technically, WandaVision is remarkable. The period-specific production design, costume work, and cinematography are among the best things Marvel has ever done. The progression from 1950s Dick Van Dyke Show aesthetics through 2000s Modern Family mockumentary is executed with obsessive detail. Christophe Beck's score weaves period-appropriate sitcom themes into the broader MCU musical vocabulary. The theme songs by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez are miniature masterpieces of pastiche. All of this craft is in service of a show that ultimately wants you to feel sorry for a woman who enslaved a town, and the gap between the formal achievement and the moral content is where WandaVision lives. It is beautiful. It is wrong.

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