Spoiler Warning ahead for Episode 4
For years, people on the internet have gone out of their way to make theories and speculations about the upcoming MCU films and for a time, people started to get a sense of the direction that Marvel Studios wanted to take these films in. Albeit being by reading the source material the films base themselves on, seeing set pictures, breaking down trailers and clips frame by frame. These are all standard things fans and writers do when they try to unravel the mystery behind any project. I include myself in the list of people who spend their time trying to piece together a story based on these facts. And it would help me predict many plot points from previous MCU projects at the time. But WandaVision truly is a challenge to many theorists. Mainly because Marvel has broken its standard formula and genuinely surprises us each week with every episode that comes up. And Marvel truly wasn’t lying when they said “We just don’t know what to expect.”
The mind of a theorist can be truly interesting at times. For example, when watching the first minute of the 4th episode and seeing Monica “return”, I thought of a number of different theories in a span of a minute. At first, I thought we were following the events of what happened after the 3rd episode and that what we saw was just Monica’s mind coming back after being “Geraldine” in Westview for so long. Then I thought that what was happening was that Monica had actually obtained her powers and didn’t know how to control them. As we cut to the hospital room, my theories started to fall apart as I realized that we were back at the time of Avengers: Endgame, when the snapped or “blipped” were brought back by Bruce Banner. What happened there was a brilliant example of what happened to everyone who had been theorizing about WandaVision and the direction this show will take. And it did a brilliant job of changing up the script on all of us.
There’s a scene in Episode 4 where pretty much every single theorist gave a collective sigh as they had to erase everything they thought they knew about WandaVision and start from scratch. And you can tell Marvel had a lot of fun making that episode as a lot of us could potentially relate to being in S.W.O.R.D.’s position. When S.W.O.R.D. started identifying the people in Westview and revealed0 that they were just “cast” in Wanda’s reality, so many theories about this show just collectively went out the window. Herb as the High Evolutionary, The Harts being amalgamations or demons that are after Wanda’s children, Phil Jones, and the possibility of Arcanna Jones appearing in this series. The point being that Marvel really flipped the script on us by making us think that we know everything when in reality, we practically are still in the dark about this show, and every episode introduces a new aspect that leaves fans just buzzing with new ideas. “What happened to the beekeeper after Wanda said no? Who is censoring the broadcast of what’s happening in Westview? Why is it even being broadcast in the first place? Is Wanda literally imagining all of this happening with Vision’s dead corpse?” And that’s just from this last episode alone.
This is why WandaVision is so interesting in the first place. We’ve grown used to expecting big Marvel fight scenes and straightforward stories in the films. But by having a story like WandaVision play out as it does, it allows fans to make theories and try to look back at what the big mystery of the show truly is, only to realize that most of what they thought they knew was wrong. Having scenes like the ones where S.W.O.R.D. is at the command center watching the first episode of WandaVision as if they were us really allows for fans to have more of a connection to the characters of the show and its what keeps bringing back fans for more to try to uncover the mystery of what’s really going on in WandaVision. So maybe, in this new phase of the MCU, Marvel’s new plan isn’t really to follow the same ol’ strategy, but rather explore the universe it’s established with new characters and different storytelling formats that could make the films and shows less predictable.
