Hello!
Today it’s WandaVision episode 9, which dropped on Friday 5 March — the points worth flagging, the theories, and predictions for where all of this goes next.
Quick notes on everything that caught my eye on the first watch, the Easter eggs, and a proper verdict at the end.
Spoilers ahead
The review of episode 8 is here!
https://movie-paradise-blog.com/2021/03/%e3%80%90%e8%80%83%e5%af%9f%e3%83%bb%e3%83%ac%e3%83%93%e3%83%a5%e3%83%bc%e3%80%91%e3%80%8e%e3%83%af%e3%83%b3%e3%83%80%e3%83%b4%e3%82%a3%e3%82%b8%e3%83%a7%e3%83%b3%e7%ac%ac8%e8%a9%b1%e3%80%8fwandavisi/
Every WandaVision episode review is here!
Started photographing Hot Toys figures for fun recently. Camera is a ZV-1, shooting RAW and editing in Lightroom.
This time it was
Those two.
Black Manta isn’t a Hot Toys piece, but it’d be nice to keep putting the collection up here going forward~
WandaVision is built on The Vision, volumes 1 and 2. That run was extremely well received and apparently picked up a stack of awards.
Also picked up the Japanese book Marvel Taizen, released 21 January 2021 — the kind of book that gets you a very long way into Marvel Comics in one go. Planning to work through it slowly on days off.
256 pages sounds short, but it’s a large-format book, so picture one of those big Shogakukan illustrated insect encyclopedias. The amount of information in it is on another level compared to anything else on the shelf. And it came out in 2021, so it’s current lol
And then Hot Toys, obviously lol The quality is absurdly high. Six of them so far.
Episode 8’s flashback already established that Agatha can drain another witch’s magic. What surprised me here is that she doesn’t need to stay connected to the target to do it. Absorb one single shot — a ki blast in Dragon Ball terms — and the caster withers away anyway.
Thought they’d drag the Vision-versus-Vision fight out much longer, and instead it kicks off in the opening minutes! Dead even on power, too. S.W.O.R.D. really should have upgraded White Vision a bit more lol
Then let us fight for it.
The line from the trailer turns out to be the two of them agreeing to fight Agatha and White Vision together. Their reconciliation, the decision to fight — a properly stirring scene! First time the trailer aired I was certain it was setting up the two of them fighting each other lol
Monica and Fake Pietro meet at the end of episode 7, and the hope was that he’d betray Agatha and fight alongside her. No such luck lol
If only you had a little more “vision.”
Hayward’s line here has real style lol Style and nothing else, mind lol
Breaking out on his own and calling in backup — the man is outrageously good at this! Want him turning up constantly from here on as the resident ordinary human.
The book down in that basement is officially confirmed as the Darkhold!!
It links straight into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and I am losing iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!!! Absolutely losing it!!!!!!!!
This is the indestructible, evil book that appeared in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 4. Read it and it hands you things like the ability to create matter out of nothing, or to open doors into other dimensions. Ridiculous power. Although at the end of season 4 Ghost Rider took the thing off into another dimension, didn’t he… lol
The design in the show was the one above. It’s a monstrous book, so a change of look is fair enough lol
There’s a passage about you in the Darkhold.
The book of the damned.
“The Scarlet Witch is forged.”
“She has no coven and no need of incantations.”
⋮
Your destiny is to destroy the world.
Chthon, god of chaos, is obviously mixed up in this. Details are down in the theory section, “After finishing episode 9”!
That power surpasses even the Sorcerer Supreme.
There’s a term nobody had heard in a while! So Wanda’s power apparently goes past the Ancient One and Doctor Strange.
My name is Sarah. I have a daughter, eight years old.
My face and my voice belong to somebody else.
Why can’t I resist your power any more?
My husband is away on business.
Tell him I love him, and not to come back.
Hearing the townspeople in their own voices once Agatha releases them was brutal. Wanda really has been forcing her grief onto them, and they have been suffering horribly for it. This is a big part of why she ends up living on the run~
One thing that puzzled me: the effect when they’re released is gold, the same colour as Vision.
The rent receipt in Fake Pietro’s room should have been well inside the reach of Wanda’s power, so why is it still in its original form? Been wondering about that one.
Fake Pietro’s real name turns out to be Ralph Bohner.
Agatha apparently can’t issue complex commands the way Wanda can, so she puts a necklace like this one on him instead.
Turns out the beams from Vision and White Vision are a different shape. Didn’t expect that.
So once the Hex collapses, the family can’t exist. Making that call inside a single episode — because Wanda’s heart is a hero’s, presumably.
That assembling shot is superb! The one scene that represents WandaVision, as far as I’m concerned.
And the music underneath it sounds like the Avengers theme. Lovely!
Neither is the original ship.
And both are the original ship.
Perhaps the “corrosion” is
the memories piled up over time.
The question of whether the Westview Vision is the same Vision gets raised exactly as flagged in the previous episode’s review. Both of them land on the corrosion being accumulated memory, which makes White Vision the genuine article as far as the Vision up to Infinity War is concerned.
The Westview Vision revives the original Vision’s memories, the ones left inside White Vision. Where he goes from here is covered in the theory section below.
A scene to remind everyone that what Wanda does best is attack the mind.
Agatha may have engineered it, but her trauma being the burning that killed her mother and her coven is fascinating.
A spell can’t be changed once it’s cast.
A spell once cast can’t be put back… meaning the changes to people’s bodies, Monica’s first among them, and the lives created like the twins and Vision, can never be undone. That’s the reading, anyway.
“Within the runes”
“only the witch who cast them can use magic.”
Didn’t expect the guess made in the previous episode’s review to come true this fast lol
A trick that turns the enemy’s own power against them is thrilling every single time. Which is exactly why I’m so excited for the Loki series.
Wanda works out what she actually is, and finally awakens completely!
That costume screams superhero. The best.
Agatha ends up with her memory erased and sealed away inside Westview. What happens to her next is in the theory section!
The last time Wanda and Vision were in this house was when he lied about heading out on Halloween patrol. Everything that happened since, and now they come back as a real family. That gets you right in the chest.
Thank you for choosing me to be your mom.
The boys half sense what’s coming in this scene… Though from Wanda and Vision’s side, presumably they wanted it all to be over while the boys were asleep…
I read somewhere once…
that it’s bad luck to say goodbye in the dark.
Really, I just
wanted to look at you properly.
(Wanda) And?
I see you.
What am I?
You are…
the piece of the Mind Stone that still lives in me.
A body of circuits and blood and bone that I built.
You are my sorrow and my hope.
And above all, the thing I love.
I was born as a voice.
Then I was given a body.
And now I hold a real memory.
This exchange carries a double meaning, and it’s the thing that saves Wanda from falling to villain. Full argument in the theory section!
And Vision’s face being bright when he wonders what he’ll become next was wonderful!
And, and — Vision’s tears play as him going past the original Vision and turning into a new living being!
We have said goodbye before.
So it stands to reason…
We’ll say hello again.
This goodbye is beautiful too… impossible to watch dry-eyed…
Not goodbye but see you again. Corny, and it works~….
There is no film called Tannhäuser Gate. It looks instead like a nod to the most famous monologue in science fiction cinema, the “tears in rain” speech from Blade Runner. At the climax of that film, Roy Batty, leader of the replicants, murmurs it in the moment before his death — the impossible things he has seen out in space, the C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, and how all of it will fade with time.
The Tannhäuser Gate, spoken by an artificial human in his last moment as one of the memories he treasures. And in WandaVision it turns up right before the final goodbye between Wanda and a Vision who knows he is about to disappear. (Come to think of it, Paul Bettany, who plays Vision, and Rutger Hauer, who played Roy Batty, do look somehow alike…)
— The River
The cinema marquee that turns up near the end comes from Blade Runner! Had absolutely no idea. The River are on it as always!
https://theriver.jp/wandavision-finale/3/
The person Soren is pointing at is obviously Fury, out in space. Far From Home sits later on the timeline, which means the ship in that film’s post-credits scene had Monica aboard the whole time!
Wanda has gone astral and is reading her way through the Darkhold. To get the twins and the Westview Vision back, presumably? Doctor Strange loses consciousness in his physical body while projecting, so this also shows how far Wanda’s potential runs.
Theory section starts here!!
Laying this scene out:
That’s the shape of it. The way I read it, the scene carries a double meaning and is what saves Wanda. Here’s what that means.
Those two points. Number 2 is why Wanda doesn’t fall to villain, as far as I can tell.
A villain out of the Ghost Rider comics. He apparently has reality-warping power as well, and he once granted the wish of Peter Parker, otherwise known as Spider-Man. At a price, obviously…
So why bring Mephisto up at all? Because Marvel have stated outright that WandaVision leads into Doctor Strange 2, and Mephisto is the name everyone expects to show up in Doctor Strange 2.
https://theriver.jp/wandavision-not-appearing/2/
So here’s a guess at exactly how it connects.
Wanda picks up the boys’ voices right at the end. My guess (though it’s close to self-evident in MCU circles by now?) is that those boys are being held by Mephisto down in hell.
Why that guess? Because in the comics, Wanda and Vision’s children are pieces of Mephisto’s soul, and the twins end up taken by him. They are reincarnated and born again later, so there is some mercy in it. (Details here)
So maybe Wanda’s power comes from Mephisto in the first place, and the children she made with it are his property?
Conclusion: when Wanda turns up in Doctor Strange 2, the likeliest shape of it is her teaming up with Strange to pull the twins out of Mephisto’s hands.
The devil himself actually has a deep connection to Spider-Man.
It’s all in the comic Spider-Man: One More Day. The story runs roughly like this.
That girl being the daughter who will never be born is devastating… Full details here.
Whether Spider-Man: No Way Home actually does One More Day looks tight on running time, but Tom Holland’s contract as Peter Parker runs out after it, so there’s every chance he trades away his powers for a quiet life where nobody knows who he is.
The original Vision ran on the Mind Stone. My assumption had always been that his personality, the phasing and the beam from his forehead all came from the stone. But this White Vision is clearly running on something else. Personality and emotion work without the stone, going by what’s on screen — the other abilities, though, very curious lol Hope it gets explained down the line.
For what it’s worth, Infinity War had them trying to remove the stone anyway, so maybe Vision’s body never needed the Mind Stone at all.
Baphomet, first of all, is the demon who appears at the witches’ sabbath. And Wanda’s pose in that final shot looks a lot like Baphomet. A demon tied to witches, so it surely means something.
And the cover of the Darkhold looks vaguely Baphomet-ish too… sort of lol
As above, the Darkhold and Ghost Rider are closely tied. Although Ghost Rider was the one who carried it off in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., so how does Agatha have it? lol
Would love to see him turn up in Doctor Strange 2.
Wanda’s power turned Monica into a superhero with abilities of her own. And those abilities appear to be built on this.
In the comics Monica goes on to be the second Captain Marvel. She keeps changing code names — Photon, Pulsar, Spectrum — while working as a superhero throughout. Her ability is to turn herself into any type of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum: light, electricity, radio waves, microwaves, ultraviolet, gamma rays. She can also move at the speed of light.
— The River
So in the MCU it looks like a power that changes her body to match whatever energy she’s facing. Her eyes and her body going yellow against bullets is odd, though.
There are blue and purple effects in there as well, and it’d be great to see all of that pinned down later.
White Vision has the original’s memories back, and my guess is that he’s gone to the Avengers Compound to find Tony.
Here’s why. In the flood of images when he recovers his memory, the latest point on the timeline is the shot above of Wanda destroying the Mind Stone. Which means White Vision knows nothing about the five years after Infinity War.
So heading for Tony and the others is basically locked in. What White Vision does from here is worth watching closely.
Chthon, god of chaos, is a character with deep ties to Wanda. In the comics, Wanda’s mother was a witch to begin with, and Wanda was born inheriting that power. On top of that, Chthon’s blessing hands her an outrageous power called chaos magic.
The site below goes into Chthon in serious depth, so it comes highly recommended.
A full breakdown of Chthon’s powers and background [Marvel character guide]
Read that piece and it turns out the one who wrote the Darkhold in the comics is Chthon! Surely that locks in his MCU appearance!
And the word chaos turns up inside WandaVision itself, as above. Genuinely locked in.
The MCU is going to keep piling on god-tier characters like this, and the scale is going to blow wide open. Eternals is presumably the prologue to all of it! Cannot wait!
Last one. What Agatha was actually after, and where she goes from here.
The problem isn’t power, it’s knowledge.
That line shows how much Agatha values knowledge. She mocks Wanda for having none of it, too. And she only came to Westview after Wanda caused the Maximoff Anomaly, so her goal — as she says in the show — was curiosity about Wanda. Not a pure villain, then.
You have no idea what you’ve unleashed.
I’ll come and find you when I need you.
Now for what comes next. In that exchange Agatha points out that Wanda’s awakening is going to bring enormous upheaval. Mephisto or Chthon related, presumably. And Wanda says she’ll come back when she needs her, so Agatha could well return as a good partner, a mentor…? Maybe. There is one thing worrying me, though… which is…
The worry is Mordo, Doctor Strange’s senior at Kamar-Taj.
At the end of the first Doctor Strange he says there are too many sorcerers, and he does in fact go around stripping the power out of amateur sorcerers.
So there’s a decent chance Mordo comes for Agatha, memory and personality sealed away, to kill her!
And that’s the end of the WandaVision review series! The first MCU show on Disney+, and it turned out to be a piece of work with no compromises in it anywhere. Astonishing quality!
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier starts on 19 March, so the reviews carry straight on! Stay tuned!
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