WandaVision - Final Episode - Review

So here we are after 8 weeks countless theories and even a few fake outs the final episode of wonder vision has aired. the question is did it stick the landing or did it fall into the trap that so many TV shows do?

Spoilers Ahead

The show picks up straight off right after the events of the previous episode with Wanda facing off against Agatha in the middle of the street. The pair do some bantering, throw a few spells around and eventually Wanda gets the upper hand by repeating the action she used against Iron Man and throws a car at Agatha. This was actually beneficial because it helps show that Agatha isn't all powerful, that her abilities might be strong but they do not make her invulnerable, but those abilities also make her a little slippery and she managed to slide away into the shadows and out from under the car. It was at this point that The Vision appeared, now this is the one that was all white and had a blue gem in the forehead and for a moment it looks like it is a very happy reunion, but it then quickly becomes something else. The Vision begins to crush Wanda’s head and while Wanda is unable to do anything, she is saved by Vision, leaving those two androids to fight their own battle while Wanda and Agatha resume theirs.

The problem is while the battle raged on for the Visions, the one between Agatha and Wanda stopped being about throwing magic and instead let Agatha release the citizens of Westview from Wanda's control, giving them a chance to voice their incredibly valid frustrations. Eventually Wanda concedes and starts to open up the Hex and letting the people free, it also has the adverse effect on her husband Vision and her children, in that if the hex goes, they go. Clearly she is unable to let them go, so she stops the Hex from collapsing, before the fighting begins again and while I would like to say the showdown between a witch that's been around for centuries and a witch with infinite power was epic but I would be lying, it was utter garbage.

From all the appearances that Wanda has had in the MCU, we've only ever seen her do handful of things with her powers and then out of nowhere, with no training and no previous indication of these abilities, she breaks them out and turns the tide of battle in her favour. Her ability to turn herself invisible would have been incredibly useful when trying to protect Vision from Thanos, but she has never shown any indication she could do that and to make it even more bizarre, when she reappears she speeds up like she's Pietro, before breaking out her finger wavy mind magic again. Wanda had potential to be an epic character by the end of to show and while she's powerful and that Scarlet Witch outfit is pretty impressive she went from being a 10 to 15 on the power scale to being a 100 and there's never an explanation or even hint as to how it happened.

Even worse, this is not the most confusing part of the show, after all is said and done and she finally undoes her spell, she walked through the centre of town, leaving the car that she drove in and walked past all of her victims, because that is what they are. She says nothing to them and they say nothing to her and while Wanda admits she did the wrong thing to Monica and people are not likely to accept her apologies, she does not even make the attempt, she just flies off leaving an entire town full of people traumatised with nary any level of responsibility. We saw after the Hulk rampaged a town in South Africa that the Stark relief foundation went in to help, we saw again in the opening scenes of the first Spiderman movie that again the Stark foundation was going in to clean up New York City, so the heroes doing the right thing is not a surreal possibility but here Wanda, who has powers to move things with her mind, just abandons everything.

Honestly, that's how all the characters outside of Wanda end up, Monica gets another scene that sets up her backdoor pilot into her own show, Jimmy gets to be the big powerful FBI agent we already know he is and Darcy just vanishes. I do understand that with some of these characters this was not their show, but over many episodes we got to understand them, connect with them and then we get no closure on them, this would be like if somebody ripped the last chapter out of a book and you never got an epilogue. Now there is a very final scene at the end that shows Wanda isolated in a cabin and while she's making a cup of tea for herself she's also astral projected herself into reading the Darkhold which also raises more questions. For one, how did she get the Darkhold, is the Darkhold from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. not the true Darkhold and since when could she astral project herself. Clearly Wanda is not in a good place any Marvel fan will tell you that the Darkhold is not a good book to read, so with her less than stellar mindset this is obviously going to get bad and it may explain parts of how the 2nd Doctor Strange movie will begin.

From a production point of view the show looked fine, there were some nice moments with the characters and how they were framed, but I also feel that this one suffered from a COVID-19 shutdown. There were shots where the camera didn't look like it was lined up correctly to what we were being shown, not in a sense that characters were out of frame but things just didn't look right. Sadly even worse than that, there were also a number of times when the CGI double for the actor became very apparent that it was in play. Elizabeth Olsen was able to deliver solid performance in this final episode and while it didn't quite reach the heights that she did in the previous episode, it was still a wonderful performance. There are moments when you can see she's scared and not for herself but for her family and she really helped sell that, likewise Paul Bettany did a pretty amazing job at playing both Vision and The Vision. While the argument can be said that they are the same character, he does enough to help create a difference between the two that you never have that who's who moment, when obviously not counting the ones pure white and ones purple and green.

The score was a highlight though, it once again, kept the action flowing and when there were sombre moments, it broke out some appropriate music. The scene when Wanda fully changes into the Scarlett Witch, the main WandaVision theme, that has been played in every episode, in a number of ways, is once again played here, but this time it is more haunting and powerful.

For Marvel Studios’ first TV show, it ended with a fizzle, there were too many quick snap events that pushed things forward without context and then even though we know the character of Wanda Maximoff, we are now supposed to accept that she has powers and abilities, that even 10 minutes into the episode she denied having. The questions now remain, how does all this tie into the larger MCU and I honestly couldn't begin to speculate, as there are too many loose threads. Given that Marvel appears to have made a decision to ignore Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., I don't hold out hope that they can keep juggling all these balls, if they continue this way. WandaVision had a lot of potential and each week it kept building up, throwing nuggets of information at us and didn't deliver in the end and that's going to be my takeaway from this, no matter how amazing individual episodes were, the ending was far from great television.

The Score

8.0

The Pros

+After countless times on screen, Wanda finally has her own hero suit

+The final scene of Vision, before his farewell is full of emotion on both sides

The Cons

-Wanda skips town, leaving a wake of destruction and misery behind her

-None of the side characters get any chance for closure, Darcy even leaves off camera