Spoiler alert: the following interview with WandaVision The EP and scribe Jac Schaeffer contains spoilers about the final episode of the series “The Series Finale”
If you haven’t read our recap of WandaVisionfrom “The Series Finale”, you can read it here.
But let’s get to the point as quickly as possible with the Disney + / Marvel series EP and editor-in-chief Jac Schaeffer telling us what happened and where Scarlet Witch is going. Schaeffer has a credit story about the next one Black Widow film currently scheduled for release in theaters on May 7, and she co-wrote the screenplay for the MGM comedy Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson The Hustle.
So, as the title of the episode indicates, this is really ‘The Series Finale’, right?
Jac Schaeffer: It’s like what Mr. (Kevin) Feige says, ‘It wasn’t necessarily the plan to have another season, but in the Marvel world you never know.’
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Was this the end you imagined since the beginning of the season, that is, Wanda realizes that she is the Scarlet Witch, Vision and the children disappear with the Spell, and she goes to the desert? Or was there an alternative ending that the writers were playing with in some way or form?
JS: In truth. This is essentially what we imagined from the beginning. This would always be a story about mourning, and we take it seriously, and it is a little bit reductive, but we used the stages of mourning to map the arc of the season and we knew we wanted to take it to a place of acceptance. It’s acceptance in two ways, ultimately it’s Wanda’s acceptance of the Scarlet Witch’s cloak, and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s acceptance of her pain and the fact that she has to leave Vision and the boys go. So, you know, things changed along the way and there were discoveries and improvements and all the intricacies of the ending specifically were always changing, but the actual farewell scene was written at the very beginning and we were all united behind it.
Tell us about how to set up the whole notion of mourning for Wanda.
JS: Your story in the comics is, your story in the comics is one of loss. This is something that in the comics and in the MCU has often defined it and defined its characterization. She has been a more serious character and a character who sometimes seems stuck in her own sadness and grief, so it is obviously where we wanted to start and what we wanted to build. We saw an opportunity with the sitcom overlay to see Wanda and Lizzie experimenting with all these different colors, you know, seeing her happy and mischievous and seductive and all these different things. We could go deeper into all the different sides of this woman, but in the comics and in the MCU this woman suffered more losses than perhaps any other, and that was what we wanted to explore and work with.
When you first introduced yourself to work, how did you prepare for the meeting? You read House of M? Did you have this notion of mapping the stages of grief? What came up with Marvel and what was its angle?
JS: They sent me a lot of comics and I scanned them. I am not a very good comic reader. I have difficulty digesting the stories and I never know which cell to look at, and I don’t know, I am a disappointment, perhaps, for the fandom in that way, but the images are always, of course, very surprising, moving and inspiring, and it was the idea of Kevin Feige marries Wanda and Vision to the world of the sitcom. So, I had these pieces to start with, and so it was also their desire to explore their pain and that everything that happened in this series, this sitcom situation, was some kind of manifestation of their pain and their desire to live in this world of fantasy .
What I brought was a structure for that. You know, having seen it in the comics, I thought it would probably be pretty predictable if we told a linear story of, you know, Wanda is upset and she goes crazy and she creates a fake world and then it’s a sitcom. That didn’t seem interesting to me. It didn’t look like an interesting watch. It seemed a little more difficult due to the numbers and more difficult to go deeper emotionally. So, I launched the idea that we started on this sitcom, and that we are with Wanda without knowing what’s going on and that we plant red herring and wonder if there is any nefarious force that is doing this to her, and that we are with her in the discovery what is she, you know? We start out in denial with her and then move on to anger. It was part of my argument that she cannot expel the character Monica from Hex, and that we started from there, and that in the penultimate episode it would be her complete discovery of the stages of her life and really how it happened, that she has to face it in order to move on, and that’s really … you know, it’s kind of the idea that she has to go to the arsenal to have the weapons in order to defeat the bad guy in the end. Well, in this case, it’s pain. So, she needed to look at everything on her face to be armed with what she needed to triumph and heal at the end of the story.
With Hex up, what about Agatha and Quicksilver? Do they disappear with that? All the inhabitants of the city are themselves again. Can you provoke anything?
JS: Well, as you can see in the episode, Wanda put Agnes / Agatha under a spell at the end. It makes her live the character she created. So, as far as I know Agnes is baking cookies in Westview, and besides, I can only talk about my own series.
What about Quicksilver? Can we see him again? Everyone loved the meta thing Marvel did here when choosing the Fox / Marvel actor for the role.
JS: What I can say is that I think Evan Peters did an incredible job with that role and I found it a great joy to work with him and see him on the screen, and you know, as a fan, I’m interested to see what he does next.
He is Ralph, husband of Agnes, essentially.
JS: Yes. The idea is that Agatha came to town and took over the neighbor’s house to be disguised, and by chance there was a young man named Ralph Bohner who already lived in Westview. In the writers’ room, we like to write Agatha’s sense of humor, so the idea that she was really talking about her hostage throughout the series really pleased us.
Marvel Comics
Why didn’t Mephisto show up? There was much speculation that Mephisto would be the final villain in the series.
JS: We don’t think this series needed much harm. I mean, the big bad thing is pain, you know, and that’s the story we were telling, and then we got a bonus villain in the form of Agatha Harkness who ended up facilitating Wanda’s therapy, so yes, I think we feel really good about this.
In the first sequence of the final credits, Monica is informed by agent Skrull that ‘He’ needs to see her in space. Many believe that ‘He’ is Nick Fury. Want to comment?
JS: I will not comment on that because I have to go without commenting. But I really appreciate how attentive you are watching and I appreciate all of your theories.
Disney
How do post-credit sequences work? Do you write this on the spot? Or are they written well in advance?
JS: yea. I mean, in all Marvel projects that I was lucky enough to work with, tags are what is constantly evolving because it is the fabric of connection with the next project, it is the transference and, sometimes, they are filmed in a way end of the game. In this particular case with Skrull tags, strangely it was, like, one of the first tags I wrote, and then it went through a lot of iterations, and then we came back to that essential idea. It is that they evolve during the creative process.
Do all Disney + MCU series writers and big-screen features enter a large weekly Marvel writers room? That is, the writers behind Captain Marvel 2 and Doctor Strange 2, and think of ideas for connecting stories? Or is it Kevin Feige or one of the other producers running from room to room for each project and suggesting snacks from an overlapping project that should be included in another?
JS: I can only talk about my own experiences at Marvel, and you know, where I’m sitting from, it’s been more organic than that. I haven’t been in a big room with a lot of different writers on other projects. I sat down with other teams just to put their brains together and make sure that everyone is looking at whatever the problem is in the same way and that everyone has the information they need. Usually, it is obviously Kevin who has the master plan and communicates what needs to be communicated. I liked it because it looks like a living organism. It is not so prescriptive that way. It is a kind of flow. It’s incredible.
But really, why did Vision and the kids have to go?
JS: Agatha says this in the episode: When Wanda created Hex, which was essentially her intuitively casting a spell, she missed and tied Vision and the children to this world. So, she put herself in a trap where she put people under mental control that really made them suffer, which she, Wanda, was unable or unwilling to see. This is what she was doing, and she tied the children to this world. I don’t want to go too deep with the metaphor, but we often think of it as Hex is a giant placenta and she did it all by creating within it, and children and Vision cannot survive outside it.
But here she is, a grieving woman, who creates this world and family to deal with it, and then she has to give up? Why? For the greater good of humanity and the evolution of itself?
JS: yea. For both, because it is wrong to arrest all these people. You know, Agatha offers her that deal in the end. She says, I can fix the spell and I can remove the suffering of everyone, but we all know that if you remove our suffering, we will no longer be human, and this is the journey that she has to take. She has to embrace her own pain and suffering and see what it is, that not everything is sad, that within sadness there is also a celebration of what is now gone.
Where is she in the desert? It’s certainly not Thanos’s hut in Avengers: Endgame because he was in a tropical region.
JS: We, the public, don’t know where Wanda is on the label.
Given that this is a series directed by women, what percentage of your writing room was composed of female writers?
JS: The real writers are half women and half men, but with Mary Livanos, me and my assistant, the room itself was mostly composed of women.
With Wanda being expected to star in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, why did Doctor Strange himself not appear at the end?
JS: I love Doctor Strange as anyone. Yes, it’s one of those things, this is how the chips fall, this is how the cookie disintegrates, that’s what I will say, but I’m looking forward to seeing it on the screen with Wanda in it Doctor Strange 2.