Some Thoughts on Wanda Maximoff in Multiverse of Madness

*Spoilers for Multiverse of Madness and WandaVision.*

Okay, now that I’ve gushed all kinds of Moon Knight feelings onto the internet, it’s time to circle back around to Multiverse of Madness for a bit. There are some things I like about the second Doctor Strange movie—the visuals are great, Strange himself works a lot better for me here than he did in his debut film, and I enjoy America’s introduction—but on the whole, I can’t come away with an overall positive feeling on the movie, and a lot of that is down to how it deals with Wanda.

First of all, I’m not trying to be a Wanda apologist here. She’s a very complex character who’s done a shit-ton of wrong things, and I’m not opposed to seeing her go down immoral paths. And she’s so powerful that, when she does break bad, it’s no surprise that she’s incredibly hard to stop. But I really do feel like they did her dirty here.

My main issue is that Wanda’s storyline in this film makes her entire journey in WandaVision feel pointless. I love the exploration of Wanda’s psyche in WandaVision, how her grief and her power combine in astounding ways and she allows herself to be blinded to the hurt she’s causing in order to anaesthetize herself from her sorrow for just a bit longer. When she comes out of it and finally reckons with just how badly she’s harming people, she’s horrified, and she gives up everything she wants in order to make it right. She says goodbye to the children she created and watches Vision disappear yet again. After the events of WandaVision, she secludes herself, in part to study the Darkhold, in part to explore her magic in an environment where she can’t hurt anyone.

To have her very next appearance in the MCU be full-blown villainy, willingly killing multiple people in horrific ways to claw her way through the multiverse and find Variants of her sons, makes me ask what that beautiful, dark exploration in WandaVision was for? What was WandaVision itself for, other than introducing Billy and Tommy? It’s so disappointing to me.

Some have been quick to point to the Darkhold. After all, it’s a powerful magical object that corrupts everyone who tries to use it. But 1) “Wanda loses her senses because of an evil book” is way less compelling than what we see in WandaVision. And 2) even though the Darkhold appeared on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. several years prior to making its flagship-MCU debut in WandaVision, the film tells us that the Darkhold corrupts without ever showing us the process of that happening. We only see Wanda, and a Strange Variant in another universe, already corrupted by it, and hear secondhand about another Strange Variant who was corrupted by it. This thing is like the One Ring of the MCU, but we never see how it’s affecting people. By Wanda’s first scene in the film, she’s already all the way gone.

If they were gonna do “Wanda turns evil because of the Darkhold,” I really wish we could’ve seen the slide, the descent. Let Wanda come to Strange talking about the multiverse, about needing a way to be reunited with a Billy and Tommy from another universe. Let them find America together—to help Wanda try and navigate the multiverse, not to have Wanda attempt to kill a child to steal her power. Let Wanda initially want to find a Billy and Tommy who’ve lost their Wanda rather than trying to supplant her own Variant, but let her grow increasingly impatient/desperate as America struggles to wield her powers. Let us watch her shift from asking, to demanding, to trying to take for herself. Let us see her at times recognize that her thoughts aren’t fully her own, and let those clearheaded moments gradually fade as the Darkhold gains more of a hold over her. In short, if we’re going to have Wanda be a villain immediately after WandaVision, show us how she gets there.

Like I said, she’s in so much deeper here than she is in WandaVision. There, she’s mentally torturing people with her own anguish, but at first, she’s not entirely aware that she’s doing it, and later, it’s acknowledged that she’s subconsciously tried to mitigate some of the damage, such as mostly keeping the children in Westview asleep so they don’t feel what the adults are going through. Clearly, this is all still awful stuff, and I’m not excusing it in the slightest. I’m just saying that it’s a different tenor of awful than wanting to kill a 14-year-old girl and successfully killing multiple superheroes in agonizing ways, frequently while doing her best impression of The Ring.

One thing I do find interesting, though, is that Wanda never kills any Variants of her old friends back in the main MCU universe (like Iman Vellani, I don’t feel right calling it 616.) She doesn’t kill a Natasha Romanoff, or a Sam Wilson, or even a Johnny Storm who looks like Steve Rogers. These are all Variants of people she’s never met. She may have seen the photo of Peggy in Steve’s compass at some point, but she didn’t know Peggy. Granted, a big part of this is just the easter-egg fun of bringing in these various surprise characters for the Illuminati. But as a byproduct, it means Wanda is never confronted with the choice of killing anyone with the same faces as her friends. I wonder what she would’ve done.