We watched WandaVision and it was clunky
Mar. 8th, 2021 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexMarvel's first foray into serialized television is awkward, poorly plotted, and seems to have no idea how to manage any of its characters. I waver between two and three stars for this. If it wasn't the only game of this sort playing right now I'd say skip it. If you're a fan you've probably watched it already so it doesn't matter. I can't do this without spoilers so consider not reading this or a thousand other commentaries until you've watched.
The series follows Wanda, and the surprisingly not-dead Vision, through a nine-episode story of what should be mystery. Why is he not dead? Where are they? Why sitcoms? Who is actually doing this? One of the series' main failings is that the writers seem to have no idea how to manage a mystery. We get answers in no sensible order, important points turn out to be letdowns or just dropped, reveals that aren't revealing anything, and when it's done we don't know answers to several important questions.
The series draws bits from several comic arcs, and inspiration from classic television sitcoms over several decades. Unfortunately, this pastiche doesn't lead to either a coherent storyline or feel. Marvel went to significant expense for this series, including reproducing cameras and lighting - and filming in front of a live studio audience sworn to secrecy - for the the past-era episodes. I don't think they got their money's worth.
In addition to Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany's Vision, the series brings back Kat Dennings' Darcy Lewis and Randall Park's FBI Agent Jimmy Woo. All four do a good job of filling out the characters we sort of know and giving us more about where they are now. Newcomers Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Kathryn Hahn as nosy neighbor Agnes are also great.
I can't recap the entire series so I'm going to gloss most of it and focus on the ending, which ought to have been the payoff for the whole thing and instead is just one problem after another.
We start off in the black-and-white era, with two sitcoms filmed in b&w that establish Wanda and Vision living in this weird version of sitcom life. The episodes border on creepy at times and seem to be foreshadowing something.
Eventually, we get an outside view of this, provided mostly by Monica, Darcy, and Jimmy where we learn that the town W&V live in is under some kind of bubble that will come to be called "the hex". Apparently nothing goes in or out which leads me to wonder where they get electricity or food, but handwave magic. Darcy also discovers that WandaVision is a pseudo television show being broadcast and Darcy becomes our (the audience's) stand-in, watching the show with us and asking out loud the questions we have been asking.
Probably my single biggest problem with WV is that they go to some lengths to show us that Wanda has engaged in a mass kidnapping and ongoing torture of dozens or hundreds of people. All the "residents" of their town are actual people who are under forced mind control by Wanda. We get hints that things aren't all hunky-dory and then Vision releases one of them and all he can do is scream and plead. We get plenty of evidence that this isn't an isolated case - these people are suffering and other people are suffering. Children locked in their rooms unable to sleep or use the bathroom - it's horrifying stuff.
But it's played entirely without consequence. At the end, Wanda just flies off with no one saying a word. Worse, they make Monica an apologist for her, which is a major part of why I hate the ending. More below.
My second-biggest problem is that they just don't seem to know how to plot a series. In the penultimate episode we learn that it was "Agnes all along". Agnes is Agatha Harkness, you see, a traditional ... nemesis of Wanda's from the comics. (it's complicated; sometimes they fight, sometimes she's a mentor, sometimes it's not clear.)
OK, so what EXACTLY did Agnes/Agatha do? Did she mind-control Wanda into setting up this fake reality and torturing all these people? Um, probably not? (we don't get enough information in the series to be sure.) Did she use Wanda's grief to force/trick Wanda into doing things? Again, probably not. It seems like Agnes murdered a dog and forced a random townsperson to play a fake version of Wanda's dead brother. Her goal is to steal Wanda's magic, which mostly happens by having Wanda throw magic light at her. All the lead up to that was... set up?
So let's talk about set-up. In what should be the climax, Agatha proclaims that Wanda uses chaos magic and she's the Scarlet Witch. ... That thump you heard was was the entire 'reveal' falling flat. There are two kinds of people watching this - MCU/comics fans who've known these two facts for six or more years, or newcomers for whom the phrases "chaos magic" and "Scarlet Witch" are meaningless because the show does zero to tell you what they are or why they're important. So what should be a dramatic reveal is neither dramatic nor revelatory.
And about that dead brother bit - what a giant waste. Getting the actor who played Pietro in the Fox films, and Darcy exclaiming "She re-cast her brother?!" were brilliant moves. These moves played on the common television trope of characters being re-cast in media res without even a nod to the audience, and also to the reality that Disney/Marvel now owns the rights to things like the X-Men and mutants. This could have been a great gateway, but in the end it's reduced to a stupid dick joke. Yes, literally.
More problems:
1. The writers don't seem to care about Chekhov's gun. Things are introduced early on in the series and then just dropped. For example, early on a townswoman named Dotty appears as a major figure. She seems to be controlling things and is a focal point for us realizing that things aren't at all right. Then she just disappears. Literally she doesn't appear in 5/9 episodes.
Early on, Jimmy Woo tells us that he's interested in this town because there's someone important to the FBI there. A witness is "set up" in Westview and it's this witness vanishing that gets the FBI involved. Do we find out who this witness is? Why they're important? Nope and nope. Topic dropped. Jimmy and Darcy make a big deal of tracing out who all the townspeople are by comparing who shows up in the broadcast of WandaVision with their knowledge of town residents. This all feels like it should be leading up to something important, but no.
2. The writers do not seem to know how to motivate characters. Episode 4 "We Interrupt This Program" is the best of the series. We get Monica's story through her eyes. In under five minutes we know who she is and a lot about why she's doing what she's doing. And then they seem to forget what they taught us about her, leading up to a really bad moment in the series finale.
Other characters' motivations are vague at best. Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) - the director of SWORD - suffers from what Film Crit Hulk rightly calls "Sudden Asshole Syndrome". Literally, he's an asshole out of the blue for no reason, leading to a really bad bit in the finale. We could have easily set this up but the writers either didn't care or didn't bother, or it got cut.
Even Vision gets this mistreatment. He spends much of Episode 7 figuring out that the reality is fake, but in the finale he just declares "this is our home" which he should know is untrue.
3. The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. There are so many things here that make no sense, even admitting all the whackiness of the universe and set-up. Just a few:
- Why does nobody care that Wanda has effectively tried, convicted, and imprisoned Agatha? I mean, maybe they can't stop her but I have to believe she's at least wanted for questioning. But no, nobody seems to care. La de da.
- What happened to White Vision? The "Ship of Theseus" sequence is probably my favorite of the entire series. It's so very true both to these characters and to how comics deal with hero-hero fights. Then White Vision takes off and it's "bye". Nobody seems to care? Nobody asks about it?
- Who actually started this thing? At one point Wanda says, effectively, "I can't remember how this all started." That feels like a rather important bit.
Frustratingly, every one of these things could have been handled with a 30 second scene, or a few lines of dialog. But apparently the writers don't care and think we don't either.
OK, last I want to talk about the finale because I really hate it. The biggest problem, as noted, is letting Wanda off the hook entirely for what she did. She's powerful enough that nobody could have stopped her, sure, but someone should have said something. Instead, we get Monica saying she "understands" what Wanda did. That this is a Black woman excusing a white woman's crimes is a bit on point for me, but all along we've had Monica sympathizing with Wanda and not understanding why. Yes, Monica lost her mother. Yes, Monica would have brought her mom back if she could. I get that. But we're not excusing re-creating Vision here and mostly mind-controlling him. We're talking about the crimes against the townspeople. I see no reason for anyone, let alone Monica, to be understanding of that. And making Hayward a Very Bad Person who is opposed to Wanda is also not an excuse.
The finale really mistreats Darcy. She gets one terrible line in one scene. She is the audience stand-in and should have gotten better. Oh, and we went to a lot of effort to explain how getting pulled through the hex barrier can change people, then we set up a tense scene of that happening to Darcy, and then... nothing. All fine, I guess. No need to worry.
At the climax of the prolonged episode battle, Hayward empties his gun at Wanda and Vision's children. I'm just going to let you think about that for a minute. Why? What possible motivation is there for this person to shoot at children even once? But to make things worse, the children are saved by Monica. She literally puts her body in the way of the bullets. Turns out she's OK, but could she have known that? And why is she potentially sacrificing her life to save what she knows are artificial magical constructs?
Also, apparently nobody thought it would be problematic to have a white cop empty his gun at white children and have a Black woman make a sacrifice play to save them. I have no words for how much that angers me.
The ending, like the series, had some good moments. The last interaction between Wanda and Vision is four minutes of the best part of this series. It is intimate and explanatory. It's appropriate and heartbreaking even on re-watch. I just wanted more like this and the series doesn't deliver that.
The series follows Wanda, and the surprisingly not-dead Vision, through a nine-episode story of what should be mystery. Why is he not dead? Where are they? Why sitcoms? Who is actually doing this? One of the series' main failings is that the writers seem to have no idea how to manage a mystery. We get answers in no sensible order, important points turn out to be letdowns or just dropped, reveals that aren't revealing anything, and when it's done we don't know answers to several important questions.
The series draws bits from several comic arcs, and inspiration from classic television sitcoms over several decades. Unfortunately, this pastiche doesn't lead to either a coherent storyline or feel. Marvel went to significant expense for this series, including reproducing cameras and lighting - and filming in front of a live studio audience sworn to secrecy - for the the past-era episodes. I don't think they got their money's worth.
In addition to Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany's Vision, the series brings back Kat Dennings' Darcy Lewis and Randall Park's FBI Agent Jimmy Woo. All four do a good job of filling out the characters we sort of know and giving us more about where they are now. Newcomers Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Kathryn Hahn as nosy neighbor Agnes are also great.
I can't recap the entire series so I'm going to gloss most of it and focus on the ending, which ought to have been the payoff for the whole thing and instead is just one problem after another.
We start off in the black-and-white era, with two sitcoms filmed in b&w that establish Wanda and Vision living in this weird version of sitcom life. The episodes border on creepy at times and seem to be foreshadowing something.
Eventually, we get an outside view of this, provided mostly by Monica, Darcy, and Jimmy where we learn that the town W&V live in is under some kind of bubble that will come to be called "the hex". Apparently nothing goes in or out which leads me to wonder where they get electricity or food, but handwave magic. Darcy also discovers that WandaVision is a pseudo television show being broadcast and Darcy becomes our (the audience's) stand-in, watching the show with us and asking out loud the questions we have been asking.
Probably my single biggest problem with WV is that they go to some lengths to show us that Wanda has engaged in a mass kidnapping and ongoing torture of dozens or hundreds of people. All the "residents" of their town are actual people who are under forced mind control by Wanda. We get hints that things aren't all hunky-dory and then Vision releases one of them and all he can do is scream and plead. We get plenty of evidence that this isn't an isolated case - these people are suffering and other people are suffering. Children locked in their rooms unable to sleep or use the bathroom - it's horrifying stuff.
But it's played entirely without consequence. At the end, Wanda just flies off with no one saying a word. Worse, they make Monica an apologist for her, which is a major part of why I hate the ending. More below.
My second-biggest problem is that they just don't seem to know how to plot a series. In the penultimate episode we learn that it was "Agnes all along". Agnes is Agatha Harkness, you see, a traditional ... nemesis of Wanda's from the comics. (it's complicated; sometimes they fight, sometimes she's a mentor, sometimes it's not clear.)
OK, so what EXACTLY did Agnes/Agatha do? Did she mind-control Wanda into setting up this fake reality and torturing all these people? Um, probably not? (we don't get enough information in the series to be sure.) Did she use Wanda's grief to force/trick Wanda into doing things? Again, probably not. It seems like Agnes murdered a dog and forced a random townsperson to play a fake version of Wanda's dead brother. Her goal is to steal Wanda's magic, which mostly happens by having Wanda throw magic light at her. All the lead up to that was... set up?
So let's talk about set-up. In what should be the climax, Agatha proclaims that Wanda uses chaos magic and she's the Scarlet Witch. ... That thump you heard was was the entire 'reveal' falling flat. There are two kinds of people watching this - MCU/comics fans who've known these two facts for six or more years, or newcomers for whom the phrases "chaos magic" and "Scarlet Witch" are meaningless because the show does zero to tell you what they are or why they're important. So what should be a dramatic reveal is neither dramatic nor revelatory.
And about that dead brother bit - what a giant waste. Getting the actor who played Pietro in the Fox films, and Darcy exclaiming "She re-cast her brother?!" were brilliant moves. These moves played on the common television trope of characters being re-cast in media res without even a nod to the audience, and also to the reality that Disney/Marvel now owns the rights to things like the X-Men and mutants. This could have been a great gateway, but in the end it's reduced to a stupid dick joke. Yes, literally.
More problems:
1. The writers don't seem to care about Chekhov's gun. Things are introduced early on in the series and then just dropped. For example, early on a townswoman named Dotty appears as a major figure. She seems to be controlling things and is a focal point for us realizing that things aren't at all right. Then she just disappears. Literally she doesn't appear in 5/9 episodes.
Early on, Jimmy Woo tells us that he's interested in this town because there's someone important to the FBI there. A witness is "set up" in Westview and it's this witness vanishing that gets the FBI involved. Do we find out who this witness is? Why they're important? Nope and nope. Topic dropped. Jimmy and Darcy make a big deal of tracing out who all the townspeople are by comparing who shows up in the broadcast of WandaVision with their knowledge of town residents. This all feels like it should be leading up to something important, but no.
2. The writers do not seem to know how to motivate characters. Episode 4 "We Interrupt This Program" is the best of the series. We get Monica's story through her eyes. In under five minutes we know who she is and a lot about why she's doing what she's doing. And then they seem to forget what they taught us about her, leading up to a really bad moment in the series finale.
Other characters' motivations are vague at best. Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) - the director of SWORD - suffers from what Film Crit Hulk rightly calls "Sudden Asshole Syndrome". Literally, he's an asshole out of the blue for no reason, leading to a really bad bit in the finale. We could have easily set this up but the writers either didn't care or didn't bother, or it got cut.
Even Vision gets this mistreatment. He spends much of Episode 7 figuring out that the reality is fake, but in the finale he just declares "this is our home" which he should know is untrue.
3. The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. There are so many things here that make no sense, even admitting all the whackiness of the universe and set-up. Just a few:
- Why does nobody care that Wanda has effectively tried, convicted, and imprisoned Agatha? I mean, maybe they can't stop her but I have to believe she's at least wanted for questioning. But no, nobody seems to care. La de da.
- What happened to White Vision? The "Ship of Theseus" sequence is probably my favorite of the entire series. It's so very true both to these characters and to how comics deal with hero-hero fights. Then White Vision takes off and it's "bye". Nobody seems to care? Nobody asks about it?
- Who actually started this thing? At one point Wanda says, effectively, "I can't remember how this all started." That feels like a rather important bit.
Frustratingly, every one of these things could have been handled with a 30 second scene, or a few lines of dialog. But apparently the writers don't care and think we don't either.
OK, last I want to talk about the finale because I really hate it. The biggest problem, as noted, is letting Wanda off the hook entirely for what she did. She's powerful enough that nobody could have stopped her, sure, but someone should have said something. Instead, we get Monica saying she "understands" what Wanda did. That this is a Black woman excusing a white woman's crimes is a bit on point for me, but all along we've had Monica sympathizing with Wanda and not understanding why. Yes, Monica lost her mother. Yes, Monica would have brought her mom back if she could. I get that. But we're not excusing re-creating Vision here and mostly mind-controlling him. We're talking about the crimes against the townspeople. I see no reason for anyone, let alone Monica, to be understanding of that. And making Hayward a Very Bad Person who is opposed to Wanda is also not an excuse.
The finale really mistreats Darcy. She gets one terrible line in one scene. She is the audience stand-in and should have gotten better. Oh, and we went to a lot of effort to explain how getting pulled through the hex barrier can change people, then we set up a tense scene of that happening to Darcy, and then... nothing. All fine, I guess. No need to worry.
At the climax of the prolonged episode battle, Hayward empties his gun at Wanda and Vision's children. I'm just going to let you think about that for a minute. Why? What possible motivation is there for this person to shoot at children even once? But to make things worse, the children are saved by Monica. She literally puts her body in the way of the bullets. Turns out she's OK, but could she have known that? And why is she potentially sacrificing her life to save what she knows are artificial magical constructs?
Also, apparently nobody thought it would be problematic to have a white cop empty his gun at white children and have a Black woman make a sacrifice play to save them. I have no words for how much that angers me.
The ending, like the series, had some good moments. The last interaction between Wanda and Vision is four minutes of the best part of this series. It is intimate and explanatory. It's appropriate and heartbreaking even on re-watch. I just wanted more like this and the series doesn't deliver that.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-08 04:52 pm (UTC)I had not kept track of all those details, so now that you point them out, it's glaring and awful. The early chatter of "this is great" kept me going and hoping it'd all come together.
Since I'm not a marvel person, I didn't know that Agnes/Agatha was an existing character. Good to know there's some pre-existing drama there, but talk about disappointing for "why are you here" -- what were the chances that a powerful practitioner just happened to be where Wanda set up shop. That alone was shoddy storytelling.
My other big gripe was Hayward- his motivation absolutely didn't work for me and I was VERY WTAF about shooting at kids.
Anyway. I could go on, but my time's up. Time for work! Thanks for putting into linear progression the shit that was needing pointing out.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-08 05:07 pm (UTC)I also thought Agatha's intro story was awful. It's a cheap shot to use the Salem Witch Trials setting for this. Also, who in the 1600s has that kind of make-up? It felt very kid-costume-play-acting that the SFX didn't cover up. Again, contrasting with Monica's intro story that was so good this one felt very rushed and clunky.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-08 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-08 08:38 pm (UTC)I literally had to stop and think "is this really supposed to be in period because it sure doesn't seem that way". Being thrown out of flow that way is :(
no subject
Date: 2021-03-09 01:43 pm (UTC)But the Salem thing was terrible. I thought she should have been Scottish in the early 18th century, where maybe a coven has to punish/kill a talented youngster to keep from attracting attention from the puritan church or "occupying" English..., but I know too much history.
Yup.
Date: 2021-03-09 03:38 am (UTC)I was pretty intrigued throughout, although the cookie was definitely crumbling by the penultimate episode, and the last episode was like: wait, what? Did they accidentally show the wrong thing or something? That felt like a B reel that would appear in the Extras section.
I think where they went wrong initially was having a giant real-world reveal in Ep 4 or whatever it was. That felt too early.
Also, if you're going to serialize something weekly, then don't be afraid to make it complicated. "Oh look, Random Asshole Boss" is not complicated, it's just boring. That said, I'm a big fan of not making it complicated based on previous lore: have easter eggs that are throwbacks to old stuff, but make anything critical path of answering what's going on be new to everyone.
All that said, I think a lot of people found The Truman Show to be an uplifting story rather than a horrifying dystopia, so I guess I was mostly just like "oh, this again" when Wanda just shrugs at having mindcontrolled a bunch of people and wanders off sans apology.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-19 06:35 pm (UTC)Hmm. I have a nitpick or two, but that's largely right IMO.
I didn't mind it quite as much -- I would give it three stars -- but I suppose that's probably because it basically matched my expectations. In particular, I wasn't expecting the ending to be remotely conclusive, because it isn't an ending, and I wasn't expecting one: this is almost certainly chapter one of a story that is going to play out over the next several years, crossing through various TV shows and movies. So I look at things like White Vision flying off with the assumption that we're setting up a storyline that will return later. (I'm specifically looking forward to seeing where they go with Monica and SWORD.)
And sadly, the "Wanda takes over the world and gets away with it" is a pretty well-worn trope at Marvel. The mind-control aspect was more ghastly than the usual versions of this (she usually just casually rewrites history and/or physics), but the notion that she upends, and sometimes ruins, peoples' lives without much consequence is in line with several major storylines. Marvel has never quite decided whether Wanda is truly a character, or a dangerously whimsical (and not necessarily sane) cosmic force, and that shows.
We'll see if there are consequences down the road -- the very end makes pretty clear that there's some nasty stuff going on, but I'm not sure where it's going. (My guess is a variation of the Chthon storyline, but we'll see.)
But yeah -- there are a bunch of pointless loose ends, and some deeply fucked-up failure to think through scenes like the attempted shooting at the end. Overall, I didn't feel like I wasted my time watching it, but it certainly could have been much better with simply a more thoughtful script.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-19 07:13 pm (UTC)First, this is a new thing for the Marvel team in several ways. I think their reach exceeded their grasp in this but that's not wholly surprising given how new everything was.
The analysis I liked best (I may try to re-find and link it) pointed out that there are some very specific connections between the exact episodes of the series we see Wanda watching and things that happen in WandaVision. This commenter posits that Wanda does not know she's broadcasting a sitcom at least at first.
The hypothesis is also that the series really blundered in the "Agatha All Along" moment. What Agatha did (it's claimed) is she provoked Wanda into having children. First, by hiding all the children in Westview but talking about them constantly, then by planting the idea that a 'perfect' family like Wanda wants has to include children. Then (again it's claimed) Agatha causes the children to age and then kills their dog so they will put pressure on Wanda to bring it back and she'll have to confront - and then blatantly lie about - the extent of her power.
I think this is a really good hypothesis and accounts for several loose ends, but the series just falls flat in showing it and instead makes the Big Reveal into a "no shit we've known that for years" moment.
Most commentators I'm reading agree with the Chthon hook. He might be the big bad of Dr Strange 2. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-19 07:25 pm (UTC)White Vision is a prime example of this. Did he go back to SWORD? Did he go to Mars to meditate? Did he go to someone else for advice? Did he revisit places from Vision's memory to see if they resonated? All of these are valid future story elements but with zero set-up they're going to be deus ex machina when he shows up again.
I don't think this has to be long or expository - a simple 15-second clip would have set it up. By contrast I think they did a really good job when they showed Hulk flying away solo in the plane. That was clearly future set-up (which they then blew completely but that's another problem).
I also think I would not have been so mad about Wanda skating away if (a) they hadn't made Monica her apologist and (b) nobody SAID anything. One of the best parts of bringing in Darcy was that she gave voice in-show to things viewers were asking. I mean just having Darcy wonder out-loud "Hey, isn't she just walking away from a major crime scene?" and Jimmy saying, "Yeah we'd love to question her, but how do you suggest we stop her?" would do it. Ditto for Agatha's fate.