I didn’t see how I could reinvest myself in the Marvel Universe after Endgame. Characters I had loved and enjoyed had either died, gone away, or been completely changed. The Universe that took B or C characters from the comics an made them our A team had now filtered those A team characters out, leaving the sidekicks. I’m supposed to continue forward with Ant Man? Falcon? Professor Hulk? My heart was too broken with loss, and while that seems overdramatic you have to understand that I LOVED these movies (okay, Thor: The Dark World aside) and it was just over. I didn’t have space or energy for new heroes. I wanted my old ones back.

The husband is more open to these things than me, and so when he asked me to watch WandaVision with him, I agreed if only to keep up with the hype. Everyone was talking about how funny Paul Bettany was, how nice and accurate the old sitcom tropes were, and how laced within the sugary sweetness of the suburbs was a creepiness, a darkness – something wasn’t quite right. I like stories with clues, with mysteries, with something to figure out. I also can respect a female main character working through her trauma, and with her reality bending abilities Wanda Maximoff has the extra juice to fuel her denial stage of grief with an entire neighborhood sitcom wonderland.

Each episode seemed to be a different decade. We start in the 1950s and move to the 1960s, both episodes in black and white. The end of the second episode swirls into color, and next week should be a bit more groovy. With Wanda being so young, and from Sokovia (Eastern Europe), I would argue that this is a huge clue that she is being controlled by…something. Something or someone that is taking her grief about Vision and twisting it for a purpose. We see a control room at the end of the first episode with someone observing Wanda and Vision on several small tv screens. In the second episode a full color toy helicopter with a sword icon lands in her hedges, and a beekeeper swarming with bees crawls up out of the sewer at the end, also sporting the sword/circle logo. The radios in each episode seem to almost have someone calling Wanda’s name, one time even screaming “who is doing this to you?”

I do not care about Wanda or Vision as characters. Their romance was clumsily added in Infinity War and never mentioned prior to that. I am not invested in what happens to them. I am, however, interested in what is going on. What does the sword/circle logo represent? Who is the beekeeper? Where is Wanda and is this happening in her mind or has she brought all this into being in the real world and she’s physically walking around in her own reality inside actual reality? The show is a puzzle for my mind to figure out, separate from the characters, and I’ll continue watching for the solution high. Watching something slowly make more and more sense is a welcome respite from whatever the fuck is going on in the world right now. I can’t say if I like the show yet, but it’s something to wrap my mind around. If you have access to Disney+, you should check it out.

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