One of the things people want more about Marvel’s film production? Connection. Where is this character during this moment, how this event connects with a hundred other narratives? WandaVision, Marvel Studios’ first crack bringing their movement to streaming television is no exception, but it’s doing it in a way that no other Marvel release has.
WandaVisionin most recent episode– after three bizarre, alienating and sometimes deeply tragic introspective tales of Wanda Maximoff and her syntezoid husband in the sitcom’s happiness– said something fans are more than ready for: where does all this go? The episode took a step back from the world of Westview to tell us what was going on outside of it, in small and large ways, and it was the kind of thing we normally expect from Marvel’s interconnected narrative. Here are some characters you know from the movies! Here’s a reference to another one! Someone has to say Avengers a few times, just in case you forgot that these guys were last seen too being beaten or beaten by Thanos!
But the deeper connection to the broader MCU in “We interrupt this program” is not ThorDarcy (Kat Dennings) showing up to find out what’s going on, or the fact that Ant Man Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) finally understood the card trick – it was the opening scene.
G / O Media can receive a commission
We need to see the end of what became known as “The Blip”: the moment when Avengers: Endgame where, five years after being taken out of existence, Bruce Banner wielded the Infinity Gauntlet to resurrect billions of people and undo Thanos’ great calamity. We see Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris, who had, up to this point, appeared in WandaVisionreality of the sitcom as “Geraldine ”) reformed from the ashes, it was also launched during the events of Infinite War– but it is not a moment of triumph as the people around you come back to life. There is no peace in Monica’s face, only confusion and abject terror.
As Monica stumbles into the hallway of a hospital, turning around stunned doctors and civilians, screaming for her mother Maria as people come into being around her, there is nothing of the comedy, dark or not, when we saw a version of this moment in Spider-Man: away from home. As it matches the suspense tone WandaVision plunged to this point in the disconcerting moments when Wanda realized there was something out about her happy and hectic life in Westview, Monica’s experience with the blip seems like the closest thing Marvel has done to horror fiction. It’s claustrophobic, a long hallway shot that follows Monica firmly as she passes people, as scared and confused as she is. It is punctuated by a hazy soundscape of screams and screams, just cut to focus on the intensity of Monica’s heartbeat.
It’s short – maybe a minute at most, if that, between Monica’s return and she meeting the doctor who took care of her mother – and it only takes a few moments to breathe. The first is tougher, when Monica collides violently with another man in the middle of the return, momentarily awakening her from her stunned silence. The other is when she, in the sea of petrified people around her, recognizes Dr. Harley, but even that moment of respite is delivered to Monica’s personal horror when she finds out not only what happened to her and hundreds of people around her around, but that his mother has been dead for years.
However brief it may be, its cold lingers even as the episode moves on to bigger intrigues and other connections. It’s a brilliant scene, your intention is not just to connect WandaVisionof the place in the larger MCU timeline, but to use its laser-guided focus to map our own confusion and awe at the moment – we just had three episodes of Wanda and Viz satirizing comedies, what hell it is!? – in Monica’s own experience.
Obviously, this is not the first time that we have seen the ramifications of Blip in different pieces of Marvel media. Endgame focused on exploring the immediate benefit that it provided, which suddenly all of our lazy heroes (except Black Widow, sorry Nat) were now back, and more than ready for a battle with Thanos’ forces. As mentioned before, Spider-Man: away from home treated the event more like a comedy mistakes– his general exploration of what would happen logistically in a world where billions of people died and returned was another setting for commemorative videos of tacky high school and teen antics. But it is also where we get the Blip as a name, a piece of dark and comic nomenclature to mark the destruction of a collective nightmare with an indifference that suits the Spider man lightness of the films.
WandaVisionin taking is anything but. He sees the script in a vital way in the tone with which this moment was shown to us before, not only in terms of interpreting it as terror rather than hopeful, but by directing his focus to a single character. The use of this important moment in the tapestry of the Marvel film timeline is not empty, contextualization of fact checking for the benefit of someone somewhere accessing a fan wiki and adding a plot point to a list. Say something about Monica’s mood as she walks into what she’s about to experience in WandaVision as well as a reflection of the show’s own tonal shift in general between the sitcom tribute and darkness, the total reality acting as the subtext of that tribute. He takes this general idea and presents it as something deeply personal and traumatic.
There is a terrible sense of inevitability in the media of the shared universe, that interesting things will findhe connection with tThe Whole enters the scene to get them out of the way, as if what we were seeing was this connective tissue, instead of the flesh of any drama we find ourselves experiencing. But WandaVisionIntelligent interpolation of one of the MCU’s biggest events is a great way to show how these connections can serve drama on a much smaller scale … and launch us into a pretty scary loop in the process.
To learn more, be sure to follow us on our Instagram @io9dotcom.