So I decided that if I’m going to have a semi-professional geek blog running while Marvel’s streaming Disney Plus shows, I might as well cover them, so, starting now until…some later date, I’m going to cover each Marvel TV episode on the blog. These aren’t really going to be “reviews”-I don’t plan on judging the episode and telling you how good it was, I just want someone to talk to about the episode, and I don’t know anyone else to go to with this stinkin’ quarantine.
Also, Spoilers for the first seven episodes of WandaVision, probably.
From the offset, WandaVision’s overall concept feels very “comic book-y” to me. Comic books love to play with the medium and reference their own past, and that’s pretty much what this entire series is, just working with the medium of television instead of comics. While I think this is clever, it’s also leads to all the moments I didn’t like on the show. I’ve seen like three episodes of I Love Lucy, but past that, I ain’t seen Friends or The Office or…whatever other shows they’ve been referencing. For the most part, the references are broad enough that I can understand them, but the style has gotten a bit much sometimes.
While I’m also complaining, I really hope the MCU doesn’t end with Wanda as the villain. I think her being the villain is interesting and all, and I get that it’s a good arc, but I really like her as a heroine. Scarlet Witch has such a checkered past in the comics and I don’t know that I want that to extend here. I also really like the romance between Vision and Scarlet Witch, so I want them to be happy, which is, you know, got me invested in the character. Not that they can work out, because Vision should probably stay actually dead.
Oh yeah, and I’m really glad they’ve brought Darcy Lewis back. I’ve watched the first two phases of the MCU, including the oft-derided Thor movies over and over again just by the virtue of doing MCU marathons probably more than is healthy, and she’s one of the characters I’ve gotten attached to just on the virtue of being weird. Now she’s weird and useful, and I really hope she sticks through more of the MCU. She’s at the very least better than some of the other MCU characters we’ve been stuck with, like Maria Hill. Not a huge Maria Hill person, to be honest, she seems like just a stock secret agent.
Oh geez, that’s a lot of complaining. I do like the show, it just feels like I can’t really praise it in a way that is unique. Like, everyone’s been enjoying the twists and turns, and I do think that this sort of plot can improve the MCU overall. Superhero movies are great, but they’re at their worst when they rely too much on the formula, on being by-the-numbers, and we’ve all become sick of that plot. WandaVision flips the script by telling a story in a new way, with lots of creeping psychological horror, which again, makes it feel more like I’m reading a comic book. Comics are relatively cheap to make, so they have a lot of experimentation, with stories dipping into multiple genres and playing with things like art style and panel size. So I feel like WandaVision is finally breaking through some of the barriers that has made the MCU inferior to the comics in certain ways. I think the MCU is better in other ways, but I think they’ve got a lot to learn from how just ridiculous comics can be, where they don’t really say no because of studio rights or because they’re leaning too close to a formula. Obviously, that hasn’t been but so popular with the MCU, but even just having things like Fox’s version of Quicksilver crossing over makes me feel like we’re going past some of the MCU’s limitations.
Christian Vaughan 