Loki just premiered today, but I’m holding off to write about it until its season ends (and by that time, Black Widow will be out too. It’s an MCU feast!) I’m still in the mood for a Marvelous Wednesday post, though, so let’s return for a bit to the MCU’s first Disney+ series. As I mentioned in my WandaVision review, I’ve liked both characters well enough in the MCU movies (Wanda moreso than Vision, but he’s no slouch either,) but WandaVision opened them both up in such wonderful ways. Over the course of nine episodes, the characters – and the actors – prove that they’re more than capable of carrying their own story together. Also vital? Their relationship with one another, which really comes into its potential in the miniseries (Wanda-Vision-related spoilers.)
Relationships in the MCU films are tricky. I feel like Marvel has done a lot of interesting things with friendships, both in terms of ride-or-die BFFs like Steve-Bucky or unexpectedly-delightful friend pairings like Thor-Bruce. They’ve also mined a lot of gold from familial relationships, whether we’re talking actual family like Gamora-Nebula or quasi-surrogate-family figures like Tony-Spidey. But when it comes to romantic relationships, it seems Marvel rarely gets it fully off the ground. I feel like, in the movies, the only one that’s ever fully worked for me is Steve/Peggy, and even though there are others that I like (Scott/Hope, T’Challa/Nakia,) they’re more about liking the characters and how they complement one another, more than how the actual romance between them is depicted. Not to mention the aggressively-shaky ones like Natasha/Bruce or Steve/Sharon. The MCU does so many things really well, including with characters and relationships, but far too often, their romances don’t quite stick the landing.
In the movies, Wanda and Vision fall in the middle of the road for me. There are scenes between them that I really like, such as Vision talking to Wanda about the Mind Stone and her powers in Civil War, and by the horrible end for them in Infinity War, I’m sufficiently wrecked. Vision begging Wanda to kill him in order to save the universe, and then poor Wanda being forced to watch as Thanos rewinds time and kills Vision again, destroying half the universe anyway? Holy tragedy, Batman! But there are other times when it feels like the films are trying too hard to show us that a thing is a thing, probably because the two have such limited screentime in the movies and they have maybe eight minutes across different films to sell us on a romance between them so we’ll be devastated at the end of Infinity War. And those trying-too-hard moments fall flat, leaving us with a pretty hit-or-miss relationship for them.
But then, along comes WandaVision. I expected the show to be weird and trippy, and I expected it to dig into Wanda’s trauma, which I was totally here for (I love me a complicated character arc.) What I didn’t expect was how much I would come to enjoy Wanda and Vision as a pair. Their early sitcom exploits are so utterly charming – broad jokes, whacky situations, and all, what sells it are the two of them as an adorable team, the newcomer oddballs in town who are constantly on the edge of being found out by their Idyllic Suburbia neighbors, who only make it through each episode by their tenacity and love for each other. It genuinely makes me so happy to watch them careen their way through a neighborhood talent show together or freak out through a whirlwind one-day pregnancy.
Of course, one of WandaVision’s most crucial traits is the fact that it’s not actually a picture-perfect fairytale sitcom, and so things don’t stay light and frothy forever. Wanda and Vision’s relationship is tested in major ways – even though I know how hurt she is and that she didn’t intentionally create Westview, it’s still heartbreaking to see Wanda try to gaslight Vision in the middle of the series, attempting to convince him that his doubts and suspicions are all in his head. When he won’t be managed and insists on going off on his own to investigate, she falls apart, scarcely able to hold things together as she worries about what she’s done to them. And, as it too often does, it ends tragically for them. Because Vision is a part of Westview, part of the false reality that Wanda created, he can’t stay when she takes down the barriers, and they’re forced to say goodbye to one another yet again.
In amongst those fights and hardships, though, the love between them remains. If Wanda was truly doing this all for herself, she wouldn’t take it so hard when Vision leaves, and if he didn’t still have empathy for how much she’d been through, he wouldn’t be so desperate for them to get back to one another. In the end, they stand together as their house disintegrates around them, holding to the hope that they’ll find each other again if they possibly can.
And in addition to giving us this beautiful depiction of Wanda and Vision as they exist in Westview, the show also takes the opportunity to fill in a bit of their love story that we missed in the movies. Vision comforting Wanda after Pietro’s death is a foundational moment for them that obviously happened between films, and post-Endgame/pre-WandaVision, it’s so sweetly painful to learn that Vision had bought a lot for them to settle down on in New Jersey, to see Wanda stand in the space he meant for them to share and watch her grief pour out of her until it warps reality around her. Just an excellent job in crafting this romance.
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