Jordan Ogihara January 30th, 2021 - 12:05 PM
As WandaVision proceeds to enter the latter half of its inaugural season on Disney Plus, its connections to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe only continue to grow. According to TV Line, the fourth installment in the science fiction drama, “We Interrupt This Program,” broke from the sitcom stylization of the previous three episodes to explain the show-within-a-show’s relationship to the real world by focusing on Captain Monica Rambeau, portrayed by Teyonah Parris (Dear White People), who had previously been seen as the mysterious Westview neighbor Geraldine. Parris encouraged the Marvel fandom to keep thinking and theorizing about WandaVision on her Instagram following the fourth episode’s premiere.
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MCU fans first encountered Rambeau as a child in the care of her mother Maria (Lashana Lynch, Still Star-Crossed) in the Nineties-set blockbuster Captain Marvel. Maria’s fate is addressed directly in “We Interrupt This Program” when it is revealed that Thanos’s epochal Snap in Avengers: Infinity War affected Monica as well, and that by the time she returned, her mother had succumbed to cancer and passed away, as reported by Comic Book. Maria’s legacy of bravery continues, however, via the extra-governmental intelligence agency she founded in the mid-Nineties, S.W.O.R.D. (Sentient Weapons Observation and Response Division), TV Line reports.
The episode goes on to clarify that, despite fan theories that Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen, Sorry For Your Loss) is being controlled by some outside force of evil, she holds sole dominion over the television world she shares with Vision (Paul Bettany, Dogville), Comic Book reports. It allegedly exists inside an energy field in New Jersey that radiates cosmic microwaves overlaid with a television broadcast signal: “The implication is… pretty clear about what’s going [in]to creating this fantasy world: a twisted combination of magic and tech. The ‘magic’ is Wanda’s Infinity Stone power… while the ‘tech’ signal… presumably emanat[es] from Vision’s dead body,” via Comic Book. This theory would suggest that Wanda devised the sitcom universe in a desperate attempt to keep Vision alive, both figuratively and literally.
“We Interrupt This Program” also presents an answer as to the identity of the enigmatic beekeeper first spotted in WandaVision‘s second episode. He is a S.W.O.R.D. agent sent to investigate the energy field via the sewer system, but his Hazmat suit reportedly metamorphoses into beekeeper garb to blend in with Wanda’s non-threatening retro sitcom world, according to Comic Book. As a bonus Easter egg for Marvel super-fans, the agent is played by the franchise’s frequent stunt rigger Zac Henry (Ant-Man and the Wasp), as reported by Comic Book.
The next episode of WandaVision arrives on Disney Plus on February 5. Single episodes will continue to drop on a weekly basis until March 5.
