[Analysis & Review] WandaVision Episode 4 [Impressions & Easter Eggs]
Hello!
Today I’m writing about WandaVision episode 4, which dropped on Friday 29 January — the points worth flagging, the theories, and my predictions for where all of this goes next.
In this post I’ll write up, briefly, everything that caught my eye on the first watch and the Easter eggs, and then give a proper verdict at the end.
Spoilers ahead
The review of episode 3 is here!
https://movie-paradise-blog.com/2021/01/%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%ac3%e8%a9%b1%e3%80%8fwandavisi/
Every WandaVision episode review is here!
Contents
The source comics & other bits
WandaVision is built on The Vision, volumes 1 and 2. That run was extremely well received and apparently picked up a stack of awards.
Embarrassingly enough I still hadn’t read it, so I took this as my chance and bought it. Read it, and wow, it’s good! This is literature!
I 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 a little at a time on days off.
256 pages sounds short, but it’s a large-format book, so picture one of those big Shogakukan illustrated insect encyclopedias. I think the amount of information in it is on another level compared to any book I’ve had up to now. And it came out in 2021, so it’s current lol
And anyone who’s watched episode 4! It makes you want to go and watch Captain Marvel again, doesn’t iiiit!!!!
Episode 4, “We Interrupt This Program”
Endgame
Episode 4 opens with a set of mysterious lines.
Monica’s here I’m all right. I’ll wait with Grandma and the rest We could just build a spaceship I was blessed with a child stronger than anyone Little Lieutenant
The lines above are lines from Captain Marvel? Something like that?
Monica Rambeau first among them, the people who died in Thanos’s “snap” come back one after another.
And she’s then told that two years after she vanished five years ago, her mother Maria’s cancer came back and Maria died.
Maria Rambeau and Monica Rambeau
Does everyone remember Maria Rambeau the mother and Monica Rambeau the daughter? That’s right. They’re Carol Danvers’s friend and her daughter, the ones who appeared in Captain Marvel!
• Maria Photon Rambeau is this one
• And Monica Rambeau is this one
Captain Marvel is set in 1995, so it makes sense that she’s an adult by now. Sadly, though, her mother Maria has died of cancer… It’d be lovely if the end of something like Captain Marvel 2 gave us Carol at Maria’s bedside!
Three weeks after Endgame
The conversation between Monica and Director Hayward tells you that WandaVision is set three weeks after Endgame.
And going by Peter and Fury’s conversation in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Captain Marvel is apparently too busy to come to Earth, so even if something planet-scale kicks off in this show she probably can’t come and help lol
S.W.O.R.D (Sentient World Observation and Response Department)
S.W.O.R.D (Sentient World Observation and Response Department) / Japanese translation: the Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Bureau, which I’ve been going on about since the episode 1 review, finally turns up in the MCU!
The founder is Maria Rambeau! She’s amazing.
Which means, since S.H.I.E.L.D. was founded right after the war, there’s a gap of about 50 years between when S.W.O.R.D. and S.H.I.E.L.D. were set up. For what it’s worth, in the US — putting it simply — the CIA is the intelligence agency for outside the country and the NSA is the one for inside it. The military is split up as well, into the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army, the Coast Guard, the Air Force and the Space Force. They divide organisations up finely to match jurisdiction like that, so there’s nothing strange about S.W.O.R.D. and S.H.I.E.L.D. existing at the same time.
The head of S.W.O.R.D. is Director Hayward. Going by the flow of the conversation, his predecessor looks like it was Maria. Which makes him the second S.W.O.R.D. director.
The mission is “observation and response.”
Not “weapons manufacturing.”
That loaded “weapons manufacturing” from Monica probably means “we’re a different organisation from our counterpart S.H.I.E.L.D.,” given that S.H.I.E.L.D. was doing things like building helicarriers.
S.W.O.R.D., though —
it used to be “observation and response,”
but now, presumably because S.H.I.E.L.D. isn’t functioning, it seems to do “observation and response” & “weapons manufacturing,” so it can be read as an agency that has effectively taken over what S.H.I.E.L.D. used to do.
And the “sentient” in S.W.O.R.D. probably means, literally, threats you can see. So what happens with “threats you can’t see”? As touched on before, Doctor Strange and company presumably deal with those. Or maybe there’s an organisation that hasn’t turned up yet…?
The protocol Maria set
Maria left behind a protocol for when the S.W.O.R.D. agents who had vanished, her own daughter among them, came back.
One part of it is that space missions are off limits for a while and it’s ground missions only. That’s presumably to allow a period of adjusting to the environment after coming back. Five years have gone by in this case, so it seems like a necessary stretch of time.
In the show Monica gets sent off to observe a town that has vanished from existence as her first job back in the field…
James E. Woo of the FBI
Monica arrives in Westview and who’s standing there but Agent Woo!
His first appearance since Ant-Man and the Wasp. In episode 4 he comes right out with the things we’re all wondering about, and the way he picks his angles feels like someone who knows comics inside out. Loved it lol
For what it’s worth, Agent Eliot Ness, Woo’s childhood hero, is famous for that arrest of Al Capone.
Westview, vanished
The town where Wanda and the others are… living? is a place in New Jersey called Westview, population 3,892.
There’s something to dig into in the name Westview as well. Wanda is from Sokovia, which is probably in Eastern Europe. During the Cold War it was America on the West side and the Soviet Union on the East side, so given that Sokovia sits on the East, Westview is a pretty clever name.
As for why Woo turned up, it seems to be because a witness who lived in this town (Westview) had run off (though really he’s in the town with his memory rewritten?).
There are several strange things about this town. Namely:
- A lot of people have forgotten the town exists. And even with the Westview sign right in front of them, they don’t perceive it.
- For the people who’ve forgotten the town, anything to do with it gets filled in with a different memory. For example, police officers who are from Westview are convinced they’re from Eastview.
- The conditions for forgetting the town are unclear. If everyone forgets anything connected to the town, why is Woo fine? And why can Monica and others perceive Westview?
- The atmosphere of the town is telling you not to come ← Woo’s own impression?
- The energy field covering the town is hexagonal. And hexagons turn up all over the show besides. ← A.I.M.?
- You can get into the town fairly easily. Why not make the energy field sturdier?
Answers arriving one after another
WandaVision is nine episodes in total, so episode 4 is roughly the halfway turn. And several of the mysteries raised across episodes 1 to 3 got cleared up.
- Geraldine is really the S.W.O.R.D. agent Monica Rambeau
- The person who appeared at the end of episode 1 is Doctor Lewis
- The remote-control toy in episode 2 was, as predicted, something S.W.O.R.D. sent in to investigate the inside
- The radio in episode 2 was Woo trying to make contact with Wanda
- The beekeeper in episode 2 was a S.W.O.R.D. agent in a protective suit who came in through the sewers. What happened to him is still a mystery
*Important* Doctor Darcy Lewis, astrophysicist
Doctor Darcy Lewis, astrophysicist, one of the scientists called in for this whole business!!!! She’s not that easy to spot, but she’s actually Erik Selvig’s assistant from Thor!
A university student majoring in political science, and Jane’s close friend. She helps out as an assistant on Jane’s research in order to earn course credit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_(film)
In episode 4 she’s outrageously useful, coming up with the cathode-ray TV and so on! Want her turning up more and more from here. Is her return a setup for her appearing in Thor: Love and Thunder as well??
CMBR: cosmic microwave background radiation
It seems there’s a huge amount of CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) coming out of Westview.
Apparently it’s microwave radiation that’s been around since a few hundred thousand years after the universe was born. In the show it’s described as radiation left over from the Big Bang. So why is this microwave radiation coming from Westview? Things that come to mind:
- Wanda and the others are genuinely creating a universe. Or doing something close to it, on a god’s level
- They’re doing something universe-related by some means other than the above
Something like that?
Sending you back to Quantico
Director Hayward tells Woo “I’ll send you back to Quantico,” and that’s because FBI headquarters is at Quantico.
Deaths other than the snap
He died, didn’t he.
He wasn’t one of the ones erased by the snap.
As that line makes clear, Tony Stark, Vision, Black Widow, Gamora and the rest didn’t die in the snap, so it would be odd for them to come back to life.
The information written on the whiteboard
Quite a lot of important-looking information is written on the whiteboard in episode 4. The bits marked XX are the characters I couldn’t make out from the footage.
- WHAT WE DON’T KNOW
- WHY HEXAGONAL SHAPE?
- WHY SITCOMS?
- SAME TIME & SPACE?
- IS VISION ALIVE?
- FAILED ATTEMPTS AT XX
- PHONE XX
- DIGITAL
- DRONES
- IF IT’S NOT
- WHAT IS BEHIND THIS?
- SKRULLS?
The real people
The people who appear in WandaVision’s sitcom were the people who originally lived in Westview. Here’s a list of their sitcom character names and their real names.
- The Harts — the Davises
- Norm — Tandon
- Jones — Harold Copter
- Beverly — Isabel Matsueda
- Herb — John Collins
A sitcom per decade
It’s been said since episodes 1 and 2, but the show itself has now spelled out that WandaVision is doing parodies of ’50s, ’60s and ’70s sitcoms.
The mystery of the red colouring
Even from S.W.O.R.D.’s side, things like the red helicopter that showed up in WandaVision’s black-and-white sitcom look like a mystery. Because red is Wanda and Vision’s signature colour? Maybe?
*Important* Are the changes the Reality Stone?
When the S.W.O.R.D. agent went into Westview, the parts of him that passed through the energy field changed from protective suit to beekeeper, in order.
On top of that, Monica was in modern clothes when she went into Westview, but when Wanda threw her out she was still in her sitcom outfit.
Which means changes to clothing and shape are irreversible. The changes persist even after coming back out of Westview into the outside world.
Writing this off as “Wanda’s magic” seems too hasty to me. Because MCU Wanda doesn’t have the ability to change the shape of objects, not so far. In the comics, though, she does have reality-warping powers.
Since the episode 1 and 2 reviews I’ve thought this show would depict the return of the Infinity Stones, or something taking their place, so my read is that this run of changes is the Reality Stone plus something else. The reason it can’t be the Reality Stone alone is that, as Infinity War shows, changes made with the Reality Stone don’t last long. Though of course it’s quite possible that a few hours after Monica gets back to reality her clothes go back to normal…
The apparition of Vision’s death
After throwing Monica out, Wanda ends up seeing an apparition of Vision as he was when he died in Infinity War.
What are we watching tonight?
…
This scene was extremely good. Vision’s distrust of Wanda and his unease were right there on his face. So it’s presumably shaping up as Wanda, who wants to live with Vision, versus Vision, who doesn’t want a happiness that drags everyone else into it…
The ending is “Voodoo Child”
The ending of episode 4 was Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child”!
The analysis and review start here!
After finishing episode 4
The mystery of the hexagon
Since the episode 1 and 2 reviews I’ve been arguing that the hexagon — meaning A.I.M. — might be the keyword for this show. Details are in the episode 1 & 2 reviews.
What I’m paying particular attention to in episode 4 is why the energy field is shaped like a hexagon.
I mean, a circle or a square or some shapeless blob should be fine too? The fact that it’s a hexagon anyway must mean there’s a need for it to be a hexagon specifically.
Hexagons show up in football goal nets and in honeycomb. As physical properties, they’re apparently highly efficient at distributing force, and they give the largest area for a given length of perimeter. https://cerana.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-111.html
Personally I think A.I.M. is supplying an energy field with a honeycomb structure, the best there is for spatial efficiency, because they want to bring the Infinity Stones back and spread this strange space across the whole planet. So my prediction is that around episode 8 this honeycomb structure starts multiplying more and more…
Is Director Hayward A.I.M.?
Director Hayward makes his first appearance in episode 4, and the way the awards are arranged in his room caught my eye a little.
That shape is a hexagon (a honeycomb), so I’m half wondering whether he might be an A.I.M. man~ lol
Guests from Captain Marvel, Thor and Ant-Man and the Wasp
Monica, Agent Woo, Lewis and so on — (I already knew about Agent Woo, mind) — loads of characters from all sorts of MCU films are starting to pile in!!
With the films the usual pattern is a lead-level MCU character showing up and everyone going wild, but with the shows the so-called supporting characters get the spotlight too, which is lovely. Looking forward to which other characters turn up from here. Wonder if we might get Coulson~~
The trailer for what’s coming and the poster (added 2 February 2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBGun9FXJYI
The trailer for the coming episodes is out.
Monica becomes a hero?!
In the comics she apparently becomes a hero called Spectrum, with the ability to turn her body into light. She seems to have operated under names like Photon and Pulsar in the past, though…
https://amecomi-now.net/captain-marvel-photon/
Wait. Photon?
Right — given that her mother’s middle name is Photon, it’s all but certain? that something happens to Monica’s body in this incident and she becomes a hero called Photon with the ability to turn her body into light lol. She’s getting a full medical scan in the promo, too.
“Something happens to her body” might be a bit too convenient, but as someone pushing the Infinity Stones-return theory, and given that Captain Marvel got her power from the Tesseract as well, I think it’s a surprisingly plausible turn.
Who is Agnes?
A new poster has been released.
The thing that stands out is Agnes’s position in it, of course.
Being on the poster that big surely means she becomes a pretty important character from here.
Don't miss a *moment* of @MarvelStudios' #WandaVision, now streaming on #DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/mh8lfLyQjZ
— Disney+ (@DisneyPlus) February 1, 2021
The sitcom accelerating further
From the look of the trailer, the townspeople get rewound and paused and so on, so you can tell Westview’s balance is going off.
So the images below probably aren’t each getting a whole episode to themselves — they look like they’ll be used all in one rush. Meaning the ’80s-through-2000s sitcom parodies get done in one go.
Still, would love them to do a parody of Full House, the signature work of Ashley Fuller Olsen and Mary-Kate Olsen, the real-life older sisters of Elizabeth Olsen who plays Wanda~~
Look forward to episode 5 and beyond!
Episode 5
Episode 5 is here
[Analysis & Review] WandaVision Episode 6 [Impressions & Easter Eggs]
Missions are mainly run by robots and AI now, not people.
We use sentient weapons too.