I've had a few days to sit on what I thought about Marvel's WandaVision. I know you come here for my hot take on comic book shows I actually take the time to watch. Let's get to it!
To be honest, I surprisingly liked this show. I will give it a solid B+, but that is still high praise from me. Specifically because I don't care for Scarlet Witch and the Vision in their comic forms and even less so in the Marvel movies. Both are extremely powerful and had to be de-powered in weird ways to make them work in the movies. Also, despite how good the actors are, who really cared about them? Not me, that's for sure.
So one thing I will give this show praise for is it fleshed out the character of Wanda. We get backstory (finally!) and at it's core, it's a story about someone trying to deal with the grief of a loved one. Getting this insight made her infinitely more interesting and convinced me that Elizabeth Olsen is a good actor.
There was also a great deal of tension in the first few episodes of this show. You knew something was off and you had to wait for the show to slowly reveal itself. I will admit that I initially didn't like the conceit of this show. We were going to see Wanda and Vision's life play out in this faux TV sitcom universe. I was impatient through the first two episodes, but that started to wear off once they revealed more of what was truly going on. In retrospect, I think that was a good choice.
This was a slickly produced show and I liked the lesser characters they pull in from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They obviously can't get any of the big guns, but you like to see consistency and believe that all these characters exist in the same universe unlike some shows (looking at you, Agents of Shield). I like Jimmy Woo, I don't mind Darcy and I loved seeing Monica Rambeau. So having those be focal points of the cast were a good move. Also, how awesome was it that we got to see the Quicksilver we all love from those Fox X-Men movies. That was a nice surprise.
I think what worked against this show and for many of my comic book nerd friends are our expectations. We have not had any Marvel content in a while and we all knew events here would lead into some of the movies coming up. So this show gets weighed down by what we wanted versus what their Vision (see what I did there?) was. Me personally, I kept hearing rumors that maybe, possibly, this could lead into the Fantastic Four making an appearance. Maybe we thought Mephisto was involved. Perhaps we were going to get a House of X style thing and in the reverse, we get mutants and the X-Men get brought into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So as the show kept doing more reveals, I was disappointed that NONE of the theories I thought panned out. It's unfortunate because the Agatha Harkness reveal, while seemingly underwhelming to some, works in the context of this show.
The other expectation is that because these are super heroes, we're going to get a lot of super hero battles. In a way I wanted that, but I'm glad we didn't get too much of that. I love hand to hand combat stuff, but I loathe battles where lightning bolts, energy beams, projectiles in general are just shot back and forth from a distance. This show had a take on that at the end, but at least it wasn't a couple of episodes worth.
At the end of the day, it got people talking and I loved being able to be part of the moment and see reactions from people or talk with friends about it. In that way, the show was effective. It was a creative show and it also sets up Wanda for bigger things in this post Avengers: Endgame world. Like I said at the top, I was not a fan of either character, but this show helped change that. Now if we can just find out what happened to Vision. If you watched the show, you know what I truly mean.
