[Analysis & Review] WandaVision Episodes 1 & 2 [Impressions & Easter Eggs]
It’s been a while!
First post in about a year lol
Since then I’ve graduated from graduate school, I’ve managed to land the job I wanted, and I’m learning something new every day!
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
So, the Marvel shows have finally started!
I went into that in detail in the post below
And the episode 3 review is here, by the way
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/
Also, while writing this post I read the article below. It was tremendous.
https://www.club-typhoon.com/archives/2021/01/15/wanda-vision-drama.html
Every WandaVision episode review is here!
Contents
The source comics & other bits
WandaVision is built on The Vision, volumes 1 and 2. The synopsis of that comic runs like this.
Vision, the synthezoid — created by the hand of Ultron, the mad android bent on wiping out humanity, and yet turning his back on his creator to take his place in the ranks of the just. Having won the trust of his teammates and everyone around him as the most upright of the Avengers, he begins a new life on the occasion of his transfer to Washington D.C. as the Avenger attached to the White House. He looks for a house in the suburbs of the capital, takes in a wife, a daughter and a son who are synthezoids like him, and resolves to live a “human” life. And so, at 616 Hickory Branch Lane in Arlington County, Virginia, where the elites who work at the heart of the United States live, the lives of four synthezoids trying to be “normal” begin. But one incident sets the gears of their life grinding out of true. And then a terrible tragedy… A strange, outlandish, dangerous psychological family horror from Tom King, the sharp young writer known for the unusual background of a former CIA officer. The rare masterpiece that stands for 21st-century Marvel Comics has arrived at last!
https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4864914699/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
That run was very highly rated, and apparently picked up a stack of awards too.
Embarrassingly, I hadn’t read it yet, so I took this as my chance and bought it. Come on, hurry up and get here~~
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 it might help to picture one of those big Shogakukan illustrated insect encyclopedias. Which means I’d say the amount of information in it is on another level compared to the books I’ve had up to now. And it came out in 2021 lol
Episode 1
Vision, back from the dead?
Vision turns up right out of the gate!
But Vision should be dead — the Mind Stone was taken from him in Infinity War…
[Analysis & Review] Avengers: Infinity War [Impressions & Trivia]
[Analysis & Review] Avengers: Endgame [Impressions & Trivia]
The opening, made new
That opening that plays before every Marvel film has now been redone to take in everything up to Phase 3!
Tony’s last moments are in there too, and for someone who has followed the MCU all this way it’s deeply moving. I think Phases 4 to 6 will match Phases 1 to 3 — no, go several times beyond them — so I’m looking forward to it!
The parody
Episode 1 was apparently a parody of I Love Lucy (1951-1957), a sitcom that aired in America. Had no idea….
I’d always assumed it was a Bewitched parody lol
In Japanese terms it’d be something like a parody of the Japanese series Otoko wa Tsurai yo, I suppose. Getting to learn about works like this, still loved in their own countries, really is fun.
The mysterious ad
Halfway through the story, an ad for a toaster suddenly turns up.
The bits worth watching are surely
- The lamp on the Toastmate 2000 has colour in it and glows red.
- The toaster’s maker is Stark Industries
those two, I’d say.
The song Vision sang
The song Vision sings to draw Mrs Hart’s eyes away is “Yakety Yak” by The Coasters.
Clever staging
First off, this episode was almost entirely a sitcom from the black-and-white era. So while 16:9 is the standard in 2021, it was built in a 4:3 frame. And in the scene at the end that goes to colour it returns to 16:9 — a really elaborate piece of work~
The scenes where Wanda uses magic follow the filming techniques of the period, staged with reverse playback and piano wire and the like. Not reaching for CG in those places is somehow lovely lol
Next, episode 1 used the same kind of composition and shots you always get in sitcoms, like the image below
As for why every sitcom ends up with the same feel: the audience laughter is part of it, obviously, but apparently it’s because the “camera shots and lighting” are the same. The site below explained it clearly.
https://note.com/mottyan5/n/n090e4a550683
But the scene in episode 1 where Mr Hart chokes on a strawberry was different.
In that eerie scene the camera position changes completely, and I think it turns into the kind of shot you’d get in an ordinary film or drama.
So rather than running the whole way in sitcom mode as an homage to shows from 60 or 70 years ago, it weaves in 2021-style staging now and then, and lifts the whole thing into a story with real light and shade.
Wonderful. Also, the wife’s smile in this moment is genuinely frightening
Last thing: Wanda tells Vision to “help him” here, and the way she says it feels like she’s wrecking the stage she went to all that trouble to set up. There was also a vague sense that the two of them are aware this world is a fabrication.
Key words
From Mr and Mrs Hart and the neighbour Agnes come
- Where did you come from?
- Why don’t you have children?
- What’s your special song?
- Why did you come here?
and so on — questions about the two of them and their past, and astonishingly Vision and Wanda couldn’t answer them. It was more that they couldn’t remember. But Wanda does give Sokovia as her home country, so it isn’t simple amnesia either.
S.W.O.R.D.
At the end of episode 1 there’s someone watching — monitoring? — Wanda and Vision’s exchange in exactly the way we watch television. What to note here is
- The final scene is in colour and the frame is 16:9
- Where the man is looks like a laboratory? Somewhere full of machinery
- The image showing Wanda and Vision carries a hexagonal honeycomb motif
- The notebook the man is holding has the S.W.O.R.D. mark on it.
In this section I’ll write about S.W.O.R.D. The S.W.O.R.D. mark is the image below.
And let me introduce what kind of organisation S.W.O.R.D. is, going from the source comics.
S.W.O.R.D. (Sentient World Observation and Response Department) is the counterpart to S.H.I.E.L.D. It monitors activity inside and outside Earth’s solar system and intervenes as necessary. Its headquarters is a space station in Earth orbit.
https://www.gamesradar.com/what-is-sword-and-how-could-it-appear-in-the-marvel-cinematic-universe/
In the comics S.W.O.R.D. seems to be something like a rival organisation to S.H.I.E.L.D. S.H.I.E.L.D. watches Earth, and S.W.O.R.D.’s purpose is to watch for threats from beyond it.
In the MCU it does feel like S.H.I.E.L.D. carries S.W.O.R.D.’s role as well. If I remember rightly, Doctor Strange had a line about S.H.I.E.L.D. and the rest being there to defend Earth from the visible threats that come at it, while sorcerers like Strange defend against the invisible ones.
Among fans who love the MCU there’s a rumour that S.W.O.R.D. is the new organisation taking over from S.H.I.E.L.D. And true enough, S.H.I.E.L.D. was more or less destroyed in The Winter Soldier. The show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does have S.H.I.E.L.D. surviving rather than collapsing entirely, and shows it defending Earth, with Fury turning up now and then, but its connection to the main MCU has thinned out season by season. As a way of solving that kind of meta problem too, rebuilding it into a new organisation called S.W.O.R.D. strikes me as a very good move.
On top of that, at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home the real Fury was aboard a spaceship, and since the ship’s shape resembles the image above, people are saying that must surely be a S.W.O.R.D. ship.
[Discussion, review] “Spider-Man: Far From Home” [Impressions, Trivia]
Is the honeycomb structure AIM?
In the previous section I said that the image showing Wanda and Vision carries a hexagonal honeycomb motif. And honeycomb in Marvel means AIM (Advanced Idea Mechanics)!
For what AIM actually is, I think the video below explains it most clearly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9GmlhpGUtg
The short version, for anyone who can’t watch videos~: AIM came about when Hydra’s scientific-weapons division broke off and went independent, and they’re a terrorist group aiming at world domination with high-tech weapons.
So going by the comics, S.W.O.R.D. (good) and AIM (evil) should be hostile organisations — then why is a man who looks like a S.W.O.R.D. agent watching an image carrying AIM’s motif….
I’ll get into that in the final chapter of this post, “After finishing episodes 1 & 2.”
Episode 2 starts on the next page
