In “Previously On”, the longest episode of WandaVision yet, viewers were given an Agatha Harkness-guided tour through the “reruns” of Wanda Maximoff’s pre-laugh-track life. While last week’s episode left fans with looming questions about Agnes’ big reveal, an insistently catchy earworm in “Agatha All Along” and a newfound appreciation for actress Kathryn Hahn (Transparent, Mrs. Fletcher), the series’ penultimate episode saw Hahn’s character hell-bent on determining the source and scope of Wanda Maximoff’s powers for her sake as well as the audiences.
Opening in Salem, Massachusetts during the Witch Trials, WandaVision presented an abridged variation on the witch Agatha Harkness’ comic book origin story. According to Comicbook, the groundwork for Agatha’s powers deriving from the consumption of her coven’s magic may have been laid as early as episode 6, with the “Yo Magic” advertisement.
While “Previously On” establishes the extent of Agatha’s powers up front, the magic user confesses that the mysteries of Maximoff’s ten-fold abilities drew her to Westview for an investigation of her own. Dropping the tricks she employed in the background of previous episodes, Agatha explains precisely how she was manipulating the plot in Westview, in semi-patient anticipation that Wanda would drop the façade.
One of Agatha’s bombshells was that the highly buzzed-about “recasting” of Wanda’s late brother Pietro Maximoff was entirely her doing. Agatha’s smoke-and-mirrors Pietro implies that fans might have been pre-emptive in crying multiverse after WandaVision’s fifth episode. However, with just one episode left and an anticipated expected tie-in to Doctor Strange and The Multiverse of Madness, there’s still hope that an MCU multiverse will become formally canonized in the series.
Evan Peters’ (X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse) appearance as Pietro on WandaVision opened the door for fan speculation regarding expected cameos later in the season. Believing that Peters’ casting implied there was a larger pool to draw from than the MCU’s existing players, fans began pitching chaotic litany of potential guest-stars for WandaVision.
However, unlike the show’s fans, Agatha Harkness proved more concerned with Wanda Maximoff’s past than her future. In an attempt to uncover precisely how Westview was transformed into an idyllic sitcom backdrop, Agatha forced Wanda to revisit some of her greatest personal tragedies from losing her parents, undergoing Hydra experimentation, suffering the loss of her brother and, ultimately, being robbed of a proper chance to grieve Vision by Tyler Hayward.
Elizabeth Olsen’s (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers: Infinity War) performance on WandaVision has been met with praise from fans and critics alike, and “Previously On” saw her explore Wanda’s grief to the fullest extent. Initial social media reaction to the episode focused heavily on the emotional weight Olsen brought to Wanda’s past.
A glimpse behind-the-scenes of Wanda’s MCU story-arc revealed that sitcoms have underscored the character’s most traumatic life events. In her times of emotional need, Wanda turned to the safe-universes and comfortable, foregone conclusions of series such as I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch and Malcolm in the Middle. Not only have all these formats been stylized by Wanda on-screen in a sitcom born of her grief, WandaVision’s producers utilized Bewitched’s wire-tricks and consulted Dick Van Dyke (The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Poppins) to make Marvel’s reimagining of these televised eras as accurate as possible.
The New York Times has called WandaVision “practically a documentary” for its depiction of “television as both escape and prison”. This unofficial thesis is confronted and probed in a much more direct manner in Friday’s “Previously On”.
Though many have speculated that Marvel comics villains such as the Grim Reaper or Mephisto have been the ones secretly pulling the strings of Wanda’s robust powers, “Previously On” shows audiences that the moment of Westview’s creation came purely from Wanda herself. This realization led Agatha to the conclusion that Wanda is a powerful practitioner of chaos magic known as The Scarlet Witch.
Wanda finally receiving her comic book mantel was one of the episodes’ biggest moments and instantly rocketed the terms chaos magic and Scarlet Witch to trending positions on Twitter. A “rerun” which featured Wanda interacting with an infinity stone and glimpsing her Scarlet Witch silhouette therein served as an additional delight for comic book readers.
As if Agatha, in full witch-regalia, holding Wanda’s sons captive and revealing the ultimate result of her investigation into Wanda’s powers wasn’t enough suspense leading into the show’s finale, WandaVision provided another mid-credits scene. “The scene introduced a major game changer for the Vision,” Comicbook said of the episode’s hidden final moment “by introducing a brand new version of the Android Avenger.”
Weaponizing Wanda’s magic against her, Hayward further solidifies his position as WandaVision’s predominant antagonist by bringing Vision back to life. Hayward’s Vision is all white and references a variation of the character seen in the comics. White Vision has fought alongside the Avengers in the past, and Comicbook goes as far as to speculate that the mysterious actor Paul Bettany (Avengers: Infinity War, A Knight’s Tale) had referenced he was excited to work with on the series may actually be himself.
While “Previously On” answered questions regarding Wanda’s powers and Westview’s origins, it managed to save plenty of suspense and mystery for the season finale. An episode void of the newly-powered Monica Rambeau, newly-hexed Darcy Lewis, Wanda-born Vision and rogue agent Jimmy Woo, leaves plenty of character-arcs to wrap up in next week’s finale. Additionally, the identity of Monica’s “aerospace engineer” from episode six still looms alongside expectations of a Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Doctor Strange) appearance to tie the series into the upcoming Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
Marvel Studios President, Kevin Feige, recently gave an inconclusive answers as to whether WandaVision would receive second season at Disney+. WandaVision’s finale could provide answer itself by either bringing a definitive end to the story it set out to tell or leaving threads unresolved, prompting audiences to stand by once more.