![]() It takes a moment for Wanda to realise her left hand has blackened and decayed. Wanda manages to free her kids and sends them to their room but Agatha seems to ‘catch’ Wanda’s powers (or is it spell? Magic?), claiming she takes power from the “undeserving”: “It’s kinda my thing,” Agatha declares. She offers to let Wanda keep Westview trapped in her world of make-believe if she surrenders her powers to Agatha. Picking up immediately where ‘Previously On’ left off, Agatha makes it clear what she wants: Wanda’s powers. It follows the rule of good action sequences: it exposes character. Perhaps because the emotional stakes for Wanda and Vision resonate more personally than when the heroes are forced to fight CGI faceless hordes slamming into each other. And I must say, as far as action-heavy third act climaxes go, ‘The Series Finale’ outdoes nearly all the ones in the Marvel movies. The latter happens more smoothly than the former: some endings feel rushed and abrupt, but only because it opts to focus mostly on Wanda and Vision, who are, after all, the titular characters of the show. Only after Vision started suspecting all was not what it seemed did the mystery grow less interesting and the suspense of how Wanda would react did the show actually find its legs, most notably on the penultimate episode, ‘Previously On’, still the show’s watershed moment and perhaps the MCU’s too.īy and large, ‘The Series Finale’ sticks the landing in the action-heavy visual effects bonanza episode spinning multiple plates, needing to conclude the story while setting up new threads, and so on. On an individual episode basis, the show does stumble here. Looking back, I still stand by that assessment. ![]() Beyond the sitcom gimmick, it had little to offer outside a mystery box- what’s going on, and how is Vision alive?- while character development was thin. Much as I enjoyed its recreation of different sitcom styles from the 1960s to the late 2000s, WandaVision also left me frustrated. Remarkably, ‘The Series Finale’ stands in contrast to when watching the show at the beginning. ![]() My opinion to superhero fare churned out by Marvel and DC remains unchanged: they are Hollywood’s equivalent to fast-food chains and the determining factor is whether you prefer McDonald to Burger King.īut it is worth considering: though it’s a ‘first season’, there’s nothing about WandaVision that’s first season-y as the leads were introduced six years ago in the motion picture Avengers: Age of Ultron any ‘second season’ is really sequels to the Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel movies (more on that later) on top of it all, this show’s production value probably cost as much as all eight seasons of Game of Thrones (rumour has it each episode of WandaVision came with a whopping $20 million price-tag). ![]() I realise these are serious questions to a show that arguably gets more scrutiny and thought than it merits. Needless to say, that plan didn’t pan out so much as it got heavily panned.Īll this puts WandaVision in unchartered territory and poses a strange dilemma: how do you look upon this as? A TV series? A limited series? A long movie broken over nine episodes? Is it a sitcom or a drama? Is it fantasy? What is WandaVision even? The closest anyone came to testing this strategy prior was Ron Howard and Sony with their adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, where a TV show would fill in the story gaps between the planned film instalments. But WandaVision occupies that overlapping sliver of the Venn Diagram where it is spun-off an existing feature film and based on popular IP (the MCU) and moreover, leads into future feature films on the horizon. TV shows have been based on popular IP, such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. TV shows have been spun-off from existing features such as Stargate, Fargo, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they do so with an execution and, moreover, with an entirely different cast. So ends WandaVision, Marvel Studios’ first foray into television directly tied into their interconnected universe known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and there’s nothing quite like it made before to compare it with.
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