WandaVision (2021) Review
6/10
A newly married couple move into a house in a town called Westview. The husband can’t be seen using his abilities. The wife is hiding a pregnancy. It’s filmed in black and white, in front of a studio audience, in 1950s aspect ratio. The 6 is a split verdict on a series that changes shape halfway through. For three episodes it’s the strangest thing the franchise had made, and by the ninth it’s two women fighting in the air over a town. That’s where these things go.
What survives is the idea underneath. A person has built a place where the loss didn’t happen, and the series is honest that her comfort is harming everybody inside it.
I’m torn on this one, and I suspect the show is too. The first three episodes delighted and unnerved me in equal measure, and I’d have happily watched six more of them. Then it turns into the thing every Marvel project turns into, and I felt the air go out of it.
The Pastiche Is Exact
Each early episode adopts a decade of American sitcom and commits to it completely. The show matches aspect ratio, lighting, film stock, credit typography, laugh track, joke construction and even the rhythm of a scene change to the era it’s copying. That accuracy makes it disorienting instead of cute. A parody signals to the audience that everybody involved is above the material. This is performed straight, with genuine sitcom timing. That means the viewer spends three episodes watching something that’s competent at being a thing it shouldn’t be.
Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany are doing skilled comic work that nobody had asked them for. The physical business with a dinner party, the misunderstandings, the timing of a door opening at the wrong moment, all played at the pitch each decade demanded.
Kathryn Hahn is doing two performances at the same time and only one is visible on a first viewing. Agnes as a nosy neighbor is accurate to every version of that character across forty years of television, delivered with no wink and no hint that anything else is happening.
Hahn is my favorite thing in the whole series. She plays the nosy neighbor so precisely that I bought her completely, and it’s a real pleasure to realize later how much else was going on under that performance.
The audience laughter is the detail that unsettles people and it was a deliberate technical choice. Early episodes were shot in front of a live audience on a real soundstage, so the reactions are genuine. That means a viewer is hearing actual people enjoy something they can tell is wrong.
Pastiche only works if it’s performed with respect. The moment a work signals that it’s better than the form it’s imitating, the audience relaxes, and relaxation is the opposite of what a strange structure needs. The test is whether your imitation would function as the real thing. These episodes are competent sitcoms. That competence makes the moments of wrongness land, because the audience has no ironic distance to retreat into. Use the form’s own conventions to hide your information. A sitcom cuts away from anything uncomfortable, which gives the series a built-in mechanism for concealing what it’s not ready to show, without a single contrivance.
The Commercials
Each episode breaks for a thirty-second advertisement. A toaster, a watch, a bath soak, a paper towel, an antidepressant. None is explained and no character reacts to them.
Every one encodes something the protagonist can’t look at directly. The toaster’s timer ticks and then the image cuts. The watch is a brand tied to a weapons manufacturer. The soak promises to let you escape to a world of your own making. They’re the most inventive thing the streaming era produced, and the reason is economy. Thirty seconds each, delivered with no commentary, requiring the viewer to do all the interpretive work, in a franchise that normally explains everything twice.
They also change the show’s tone permanently. Once you understand what they are, the rest of the series becomes legible as something constructed by a person under pressure, and a rewatch turns the pastiche from a gimmick into a symptom.
The last one is the harshest. An antidepressant advertisement, delivered in the flat reassuring cadence those things use, promising to let you go back to the world you came from. It arrives at the point where the construction is failing, and nobody in the show acknowledges it. The commercials are the reason this gets a 6 from me and not a 4. That antidepressant ad is chilling, and I think it’s the bravest thirty seconds Marvel has put on a screen.
Then the Plot Arrives
Around the fourth episode the series cuts outside Westview to an agency, a command tent and a group of people explaining what the audience has been watching.
That decision is defensible and it costs the show everything it had built. The strangeness was the engine, and installing a group of characters whose function is to describe the strangeness converts a formal experiment into a mystery with investigators in it.
What replaces it is competent and ordinary, and it loses me. There’s a sinister director with a plan, a colleague turned antagonist, a witch with a motive, and a superhero origin running in parallel for a character who wasn’t the subject. I stopped feeling unsettled and started waiting for the fight I knew was coming. The finale delivers two aerial fights, a reveal about a name, and a second version of Vision introduced and disposed of. Nothing in it is badly made and none of it is what the first three episodes promised.
The conversation between the two Visions is the exception and it’s the best scene in the back half. Two versions of a person debating the ship of Theseus, quietly, in a library, while everything around them is exploding. It’s the only moment where the finale remembers what kind of show this was, and it lasts about ninety seconds before the fighting resumes.
An outside perspective on a strange interior is almost always a mistake. The moment a character stands outside the phenomenon and describes it, the reader is handed a stable position, and the disorientation ends. If you need an external view, put it late and keep it brief. The information is rarely worth what it costs, because the reader will accept ambiguity for far longer than most writers believe.
Notice which question the audience really had. Nobody watching the first three episodes wanted to know which agency was investigating. They wanted to know what was wrong with the woman at the center, and the series answered the smaller question at length.
The Line Everybody Quotes
Vision, inside the fabricated world, says that grief is love persevering. It’s the most widely quoted line the franchise has produced and it’s worth examining instead of admiring.
In context it works, because it’s said by a person the protagonist invented, to console her, inside a construction she built to avoid the feeling being described. A comforting sentence delivered by a coping mechanism is a sophisticated piece of writing.
Pulled out of context, the way it usually travels, it becomes a greeting card, and out there I find it a little cloying. The line is good because of who is saying it and what he is, and the series is careful never to have a real person say it.
That care is the show’s best quality and the thing that holds the 6 up. The series isn’t sentimental about what Wanda has done. Westview’s residents are conscious, trapped and suffering, and the show makes the audience watch it.
What It Was For
The series was the first Marvel streaming project and arrived in January 2021 into an audience with nothing else to watch. That produced a weekly discussion cycle the franchise had never had.
That cycle turned out to be a problem the show couldn’t survive. Nine episodes of audience theorizing built expectations no finale could meet, and a series about a woman processing a loss was received as a puzzle awaiting a cameo. The most discussed casting decision in the series exists largely because the audience had spent weeks deciding it meant something, and the show found itself having to answer a question it had never once asked.
It also established the pattern the phase then repeated badly. A distinctive premise for a few episodes, a conventional resolution, and a character extracted at the end for use in a film. Here the extraction is handled well and the film it fed didn’t return the favor.
The 6 is generous to the front half and honest about the back. This is a formally ambitious piece of television that becomes an ordinary one, and the ambitious part is good enough that the drop is worth sitting through.
Weekly release creates a conversation and the conversation becomes a competitor. An audience theorizing for two months will construct something better than your ending, because they’re collectively imagining and you’re delivering one thing.
The defense is to make the ending about a person instead of an answer. Emotional resolutions can’t be guessed in advance and can’t be disappointing in the same way, because there’s nothing to be right about. For a serialized story, decide early what the reader is waiting for. If it’s information, you’re in a race you’ll lose. If it’s a decision by somebody they care about, you can still surprise them in the last chapter.
Should you watch WandaVision?
Yes, for the first three episodes and the commercials. They’re the strangest and best television Marvel has made. I land at a 6 because the back half throws that strangeness away for a sky brawl I could have predicted from the pilot, and it still rankles. The front half is good enough that I’d sit through the drop to get it.
