We watched WandaVision and it was clunky

Marvel'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.