10/20/2023 0 Comments Wandavision stars hollow![]() They’re big ideas, bluntly expressed, but they’re fitting for a show about superheroes that’s really a show about death and mourning. “What is grief, if not love persevering?” he asks her. It’s a line that also matches up nicely with what has become the line from the previous episode when Wanda is grieving her brother Pietro’s death and Vision tries to comfort her. We’re sad for them, because they have this hope that they’ll be able to say hello again, but we know it’s only that: a hope, a desperate, flung-out-into-the-universe hope that somehow - maybe in an existential, first-law-of-thermodynamics way - they will be able to say hello once again. So at the end, when it has all fallen apart and Wanda has to dismantle her magical Vision, those are the two people we’re watching say the line to each other. Within the freedom of sitcom safety, Wanda and Vision could be a happy couple, two people with individual quirks and desires who wanted to have a family and were chastely hot for each other. For a while, everything could just be fine. They were plunked into the safe formulaic confines of classic sitcoms, which meant that although they were stuck in one kind of prison (nothing much can happen because in a sitcom everything’s fine at the end), they were freed from another one. Rather than a Marvel movie’s familiar introductory beats - a sequence where we learn how sad a character is, and then a determined growth into the superhero we all recognize - WandaVision’s first episodes took already established characters and just let them breathe for a while. To at least some extent, the line plays that way in WandaVision, too, and that’s a testament to how effective the series has been at dismantling much of Marvel’s typical character-development strategies and rebuilding them around a different genre. The audience knows, and the characters know, that the hope of saying hello again only exists in a great, unknown afterlife. In real life, or even in a fictional world other than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s a line that makes you burst into tears. ![]() ![]() It’s the kind of line that’s meant to be hopeful, and sweetly tragic. In the TV world, we know what that means.īut Vision and Wanda stand there and Wanda grips Vision’s face the way people onscreen do when things are very intense, and Vision says, “We have said goodbye before, so it stands to reason-” … “we’ll say hello again,” Wanda finishes. What can they possibly say to one another? This has to be the end, and the episode title makes that plain - it’s called “The Series Finale.” Series, not season. Vision will fall apart, and Wanda will be left alone. They’ve tucked the boys in and said goodbye, and now Wanda and Vision embrace, knowing that one of them is purely a figment of the other’s grief-driven magical thinking. She cannot sustain this pretense any longer, so her perfect American suburban life with her husband and two kids (and, briefly, a dog) is all dissolving. Even as Wanda says farewell to the sitcom she’s been clinging to, she’s being yanked back into the larger Marvel universe fold.Īt the end of WandaVision, Wanda and Vision stand together in the world Wanda has lovingly created for them, watching it all collapse.
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