[Analysis & Review] WandaVision Episode 8 [Easter Eggs & Theories]

Hello!

Today I’m going to write about WandaVision episode 8, which dropped on Friday 26 February — the points worth flagging, the theories, and my predictions for where all of this goes next.

In this post I’ll write up the things that caught my eye on the first watch and the Easter eggs, briefly, and then give a proper verdict at the end.

Spoilers ahead

The review of episode 7 is here!

https://movie-paradise-blog.com/2021/02/7wandavision/

Every WandaVision episode review is here!

Contents

What I’ve been into lately

I’ve started photographing Hot Toys figures for fun recently. Camera is a ZV-1, shooting RAW and editing in Lightroom.

What I shot this time was

• Hot Toys Television Masterpiece, The Mandalorian, Death Trooper, 1/6 scale figure
• MAFEX No.111 Aquaman, Black Manta

Those two.

Black Manta isn’t a Hot Toys piece, but it’d be nice to keep putting my collection up here going forward~

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.

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. I want to work through it slowly on days off.

256 pages sounds short, but it’s a large-format book, so I think it helps to picture one of those big Shogakukan illustrated insect encyclopedias. So I’d say 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 lol

And then Hot Toys, I suppose lol

The quality is absurdly high and I have about six of them.

Episode 8, “Previously On”

The logo changes

In episode 8 the logo had gone Agatha-coloured lol

Salem, America

Episode 8 opens out of nowhere in Salem, Massachusetts, 1693.

Salem means the Salem witch trials, held between 1692 and 1693. Here’s the summary.

A series of trials that began on 1 March 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, in what is now the New England region of the United States (present-day Danvers). Close to 200 villagers were accused of witchcraft, 19 were executed, one was pressed to death under torture, and five including two infants died in prison. It is the colonial American instance of the witch trials (witch hunts) that spread across a wide swathe of the early modern Christian world, and while the number of victims is not remarkable next to the European cases, it is today considered the most famous of the early modern witch trials

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

The world of witches opens up

WandaVision as a show has pushed the MCU’s world wide open. Episode 8 in particular reveals that a society of witches has existed for over 300 years.

But none of this is a setting that came out of nowhere. Doctor Strange, Ebony Maw from Thanos’ crew, Thor’s realm (his mother especially) — magic characters have turned up plenty already, so there is nothing forced about it at all. If anything it’s overdue lol

A witch tried by witches, and that effect

Agatha used dark magic without permission, and her fellow witches and her own mother are about to put her to death for it.

The thing worth noting here is of course that the magic effect is blue. Going by the magic theory I set out last time, that puts it in the Space Stone family, though who knows~

And this crown effect on Agatha’s mother as well. Maybe it rises up on someone chosen by this blue strand of magic, or something like that?

Stop, I can’t hold it back

Agatha amplified her power using dark magic, but it seems she can’t hold that power back herself.

Judging by what she says and does, the basics of Agatha’s magic seem to be forcing obedience and draining power. And then she trained, and became able to use illusions and the rest.

Salem, America

The brooch on Agatha’s chest was a keepsake from her mother. I cried. Although Agatha is the one who put her in that state lol

Is that runic script carved into the brooch? She’s still wearing it more than 300 years later, so maybe Agatha has some human heart left in her after all?

Wanda’s accent

It seems Wanda’s Sokovian accent comes out when her emotions run high.

Episode 8 has Sokovia scenes in it, so I really want you to watch it with the English audio.

Runes and magic

Agatha’s basement has a barrier on it where nobody but the witch who cast it can use magic. It would be thrilling if that barrier gets turned on Agatha later to outsmart her.

Runes are used for the magic, and I’m fairly sure the same script turned up in Thor’s world, so it would be interesting if Asgard gets tangled up in this later on. Then again runes themselves get used for magic in plenty of other works, so who knows.

Magic and hexagons

The runes written in Agatha’s basement were enclosed in a hexagon, as in the image below. Wanda is the one who wrapped Westview in a hexagon, but Agatha uses hexagons too, so there does seem to be a deep connection between magic and hexagons

Is Fake Pietro an ordinary person?

Agatha didn’t make the incident happen

It looks like Agatha didn’t control Wanda into causing the incident — she came along afterwards out of interest in the spell Wanda put on the town, the way she did it, and what she really is. Which means every prediction I’ve made so far missed lol

And apparently even Agatha, who has lived over 300 years, couldn’t work out how a spell on this scale was cast.

Magic using a cicada

Agatha used a cicada to show off “magic that controls the mind” and “a small illusion.” The basic abilities of a witch are gradually coming into view.

That said, the magic Wanda was using involves complex control and reality-warping, so it seems to be on a completely different level from Agatha’s.

The Yggdrasil book

There’s a book about Yggdrasil, famous from Norse mythology, down in Agatha’s basement! Does that mean magic outside the Doctor Strange strand has its source in Asgard?

A trip through Wanda’s past

Agatha wants to know Wanda’s secret, so she casts a spell that lets them relive her past. The way it turns into something like a film studio set late in episode 8 shows off how nasty Agatha is, which is lovely~ And this magic is exactly like Stark Industries’ B.A.R.F. lol

Bravo!!

Why the sitcoms

Wanda’s family in the Cold War era were extremely close, and even though they were on the Eastern side they were a household that loved American culture.

And here’s the part that absolutely destroyed me: the reason Wanda was acting out sitcoms in Westview is that it brings back those happy hours. I cried

Heartbreaking…

One thing that stuck with me in episode 8 is the walnut episode, season 2 episode 21 of The Dick Van Dyke Show. That episode ends with the whole thing turning out to be a dream, and the scene of wishing that her parents’ deaths in the missile strike could be a dream ending as well was so sad…

The gift was there from the start

It turns out the Stark Industries missile wasn’t a dud — it was Wanda’s rudimentary probability-manipulation magic.

In the comics the Scarlet Witch before Wanda was Wanda’s mother, so maybe it’s a bloodline with a secret in it?

The Mind Stone experiment

Wanda didn’t gain her abilities from the Mind Stone — it amplified them. Was that the setup all along? If so it’s astonishing. And the Infinity Stone footage that was in the trailer has now turned up, so it looks like the Infinity Stone revival storyline I’ve been predicting for ages isn’t going to be shown either. I cried

The point worth flagging here is the way the Mind Stone starts moving on its own, as though it has a will. As was said back in episode 4, CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) is coming out of Westview, so if the root of magic is cosmic energy, maybe it responded to Wanda’s aptitude for magic (her cosmic aptitude)?

A vision of the Scarlet Witch

The apparition (the vision) the Mind Stone showed her was a silhouette of the Scarlet Witch. Is that a personality inside Wanda… the finale should tell us.

The missing footage

The footage of the moment Wanda was chosen by the Mind Stone had been cut out for some reason

This is the same phenomenon as the one in WandaVision episode 4, where the scene of Monica being thrown out looked cut out when viewed on S.W.O.R.D.’s monitors.

So it seems the Scarlet Witch power sleeping inside Wanda was already up to mischief at that point.

Wanda and Vision

Isn’t this the scene where Wanda and Vision connect with each other for the first time?

That exchange is so moving… it was wonderful… I want both of them to be happy. I cried

And then…

Agatha’s crying lol

Hmm, are those tears her real feelings… If they are, she’s far too hard to get a hold on. But she goes and puts her hands around both boys’ throats right after this… so she’s a bad person after all?

The negotiation at S.W.O.R.D.

In episode 4 Hayward said Wanda stole Vision’s body from S.W.O.R.D. headquarters. But! Wanda had in fact been negotiating perfectly rationally.

Hayward, though, was merciless.

Well, he is an unprecedented artificial human (a synthezoid) made of precious vibranium, so the impulse is understandable…

A painful sight

That dismantling scene hurt to watch. I cried

On the other hand, I think it’s a valuable scene that makes it very clear Vision’s body really is a metal robot.

There were a few things about this scene that bothered me, though, so I’ll get into them in the “After finishing episode 8” part of this post!

Parting with Vision

Even after being treated like that by Hayward, she realises there is no soul in the body in front of her, and leaves S.W.O.R.D. quietly. Episode 8 has so many scenes that shake you, and that’s wonderful~~

The emotions explode

Wanda arrives at the plot of land where she was supposed to live with Vision. The memories of him, and the sense of how much he treasured her, finally make her emotions explode.

Well, so that’s how it goes. I was completely convinced this was something A.I.M. or Hayward or Agatha had engineered.

Chaos magic and the Scarlet Witch

Some seriously important keywords came flying out at the end there. I’ll talk about this in the theory section of this post as well.

White Vision

There was a post-credits scene this time too lol

A pure white Vision!! And the look of him seems to have been restored, but it seems booting him up needed energy that comes from the Mind Stone.

The theory section starts on the next page!!

*Important* After finishing episode 8

Mysteries still left

Hexagons

Why Westview is hexagonal in shape in the end, why the hexagon motif shows up in the TV broadcasts as well, why the runes in Agatha’s basement are enclosed in a hexagon, and so on. Maybe it’s all because magic treats the hexagon as a casting circle?

The Fox Pietro’s face

By Agatha’s account, Pietro in the end was just an ordinary Westview resident that Agatha was controlling to act as though he were Pietro. I’ll call him the WandaVision Pietro from here on. The question is why the WandaVision version has the Fox version’s face. The MCU does have a case of observing that doppelganger phenomenon: Spider-Man: Far From Home has a J. Jonah Jameson with the same face as the Sam Raimi version, so this WandaVision version might be the same kind of case.

Although there’s also a chance the Maximoff Anomaly causes something strange in the WandaVision version’s body and he picks up super speed lol

The Disney Pietro’s powers

This episode told us that Wanda’s inborn talent for magic was amplified by the Mind Stone. Which raises the question of what’s going on with the powers of the Disney version of Pietro, her blood relative. If magic is inherited, then the Disney version’s inborn talent for magic got amplified too. But is there even such a thing as magic that makes you move fast? Wanda, Agatha, Thor’s mother — the basic magic is mental, and physical enhancement belongs to the Disney version alone. So that part is a bit of a mystery too.

The Scarlet Witch and chaos power

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzZD84HCSow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-8kx9ccMvY

The videos above are what I based this on.

In the comics the setup is that Wanda’s mother was a witch to begin with, and Wanda was born inheriting that power. On top of that, a blessing from Chthon, god of chaos, grants her an outrageous power (chaos magic).

After that she has twins with Vision, but those children are actually pieces of Mephisto’s soul, and the twins end up being taken by him. They are reincarnated and born again later, though, so there is some mercy in it. (Details here)

With that comics setup in mind, here come my predictions for Mephisto, the Scarlet Witch and chaos magic in the MCU.

My conclusion is that Wanda’s children are made from Mephisto’s soul just as in the source comics, and that in episode 9 they get carried off to hell (or another dimension) by Mephisto. And then in Doctor Strange 2 it turns into her fighting Mephisto alongside Strange, doesn’t it? The grounds for that prediction are that Mephisto is rumoured to appear in Doctor Strange 2, and that WandaVision has been stated outright to connect directly into Doctor Strange 2.

Next, the Scarlet Witch. As I wrote in this post and in the episode 7 one, I get the feeling MCU magic has some kind of connection to the Infinity Stones. So my thinking is that chaos magic is the name for enormously powerful magic that is specifically tied to an Infinity Stone, and that each wielder has a name of their own. In Wanda’s case she’s bound to the red Reality Stone, so presumably that’s why she was called the Scarlet Witch. It looks like wielders of chaos magic will be turning up from here on as the post-Infinity-Stone thing!

M.O.D.O.K. shows up

Between the beekeeper in episode 2 and the hexagons scattered through the whole show, I simply can’t help hoping for A.I.M. to appear! lol

The comics have a character called M.O.D.O.K. who was created by A.I.M. and became its leader, so I’m praying that magic in WandaVision mutates either the episode 2 beekeeper or Hayward into M.O.D.O.K. lol

That A.I.M. prediction is here

About M.O.D.O.K.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU2JYhXVE3o

M.O.D.O.K. was an ordinary human to begin with, but experiments enlarged his head and gave him psychic powers — a modified human created by A.I.M. WandaVision does depict changes to the structure of the body, so a villain like that being born wouldn’t be strange at all.

Did Hayward steer this?

Asking Wanda “you’re planning to bring him back to life, aren’t you?” somehow feels like steering her into the Maximoff Anomaly. From Hayward’s side, Wanda went home normally right after that exchange, so he probably thought the plan had failed, and then a few hours later the Maximoff Anomaly happened in Westview — lucky him, presumably. Going by what Hayward says, the repair of Vision’s body was going well and only the startup wasn’t working, so he must have been trying to use Wanda to get a lead on it.

Agatha Harkness (the comics version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip8qMNfe4EM

I’d recommend this piece as a reference too.

Let me put down the comics version of Agatha for the record.

A witch so long-lived that she can remember 500 years before Atlantis sank beneath the sea. In the 17th century she moved her base to North America and formed a coven. But in 1692 the Puritan witch trials began. Firestar slipped across time and space into that moment and was about to be burned as a witch, and Agatha saved her. After that she moved to New Salem, the secret city in Colorado. When Franklin Richards — the eldest son of Reed Richards and Sue, who has reality-warping powers — was a baby, she worked as his nanny. She was also the Scarlet Witch’s teacher in magic. For a while she was believed to have been killed by the Scarlet Witch. She has a familiar, a black cat called Ebony (really a powerful creature from another dimension, kept in the form of a cat).

https://w.atwiki.jp/studentx/pages/1257.html

She appears in The Vision 1 & 2, the source comics, along with her beloved cat, so putting her in the series made perfect sense. She’s in the mentor position, so maybe they end up working together later? And it would be interesting if she turned out to know Doctor Strange.

About White Vision

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o0mivs3_iA

The comics Vision has a machine body just like the MCU one, but his mind was made by copying the brainwaves of a human called Simon Williams. After that, various things happen and his personality is formed by copying the brainwaves of a scientist called Alex Lipton, and then more things happen and he even ends up as a pure white Vision with the personality stripped out, like the comic image above. After that a personality is copied in once more, and he builds a new family to live with — that’s The Vision 1 & 2, the source for WandaVision. Vision literally built the family himself, mind lol

So the White Vision who turned up at the end of episode 8 is very likely to be a killing machine with no personality. He probably merges with the Vision in Westview, and ends up with Hayward’s restored Vision as the body and the Westview Vision as the mind. Wanda and Vision in particular haven’t met since episode 6, so a moving farewell in episode 9 with neither of them ready for it feels a bit too convenient. So it looks like he comes back as a New Vision.

Hayward’s lie

When Wanda visited S.W.O.R.D., Vision’s body had by any reading just been crudely taken apart. But going by what Hayward says in the post-credits scene, it seems they had been dismantling and reassembling him millions of times ever since Infinity War. Personally I’m not sure whether the body Wanda saw at S.W.O.R.D. really was Vision, or whether that body and the White Vision in the post-credits scene are the same one.

For what it’s worth, as this image shows, Vision didn’t vanish in the snap, so if they wanted to, dismantling and reassembling the body could have gone on right from the end of Infinity War. Did Tony know about this, I wonder?

The identity problem

Whether the Vision who died in Infinity War and the Vision brought back to life in Westview can be called the same person is a mystery. Because, as episode 8 makes clear, the WandaVision Vision is a being made purely out of Wanda’s memories. Has Wanda herself come to terms with that? Or does the story just carry on without worrying about it?

The WandaVision Pietro and Monica meet

Monica was found by the WandaVision version at the end of episode 7, so where does that go from here? I’d really love the WandaVision version to betray Agatha.

The envelope in the car

It has a V written on it, so it’s certain that Vision is the one who bought the land. The mystery is whether Wanda brought this envelope with her in the first place. And if not, maybe someone like Hayward planted it to push Wanda over the edge?

Next time it’s finally the finale!!! Cannot wait!!!

News that caught my eye

https://theriver.jp/sm-marvel-sony-worked-out/

Apparently Tom Holland’s contract runs out with Spider-Man: No Way Home. I cried

There’s said to be a very good chance of him playing the role again, so that much is a relief. Would love to see him turn up in Sony’s MCU, in Morbius and Venom, going forward!

Episode 9 review

Episode 9, the WandaVision finale, is here!!

[Analysis] Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 [Impressions]