Favorite Characters: Monica Rambeau (The Marvels)

*Monica-related WandaVision spoilers.*

Okay, so I know that The Marvels isn’t actually coming out until next year, but I’ve written about the two other main players in this upcoming team-up film, Carol and Kamala. And Monica has made her MCU debut, both as a child in her introduction in Captain Marvel and as a smart, badass S.W.O.R.D. agent in WandaVision. Clearly, I need to talk about her now so I’ll be ready to hit the ground running with the group interactions after the movie comes out.

As a child, Monica idolized her mom and her Auntie Carol—she was as clever and tough as the two of them and loved the thought of them kicking ass and taking names as pilots. When Carol returned after her long disappearance and needed Maria’s help to deal with the Skrulls, it was Monica who talked her mom into not backing out of the chance of a lifetime. “You have the chance to fly the coolest mission in the history of missions,” Monica pointed out. “And you’re gonna give it up to sit on the couch and watch Fresh Prince with me? I just think you should consider the kind of example you’re setting for your daughter.”

Fast forward to the post-Blip MCU. The last thing Monica knew, she was a S.W.O.R.D. agent and she nodded off by her mom’s hospital bed as Maria recovered from surgery. Suddenly, it’s five years later, and Monica is forced to learn that, in the blink of an eye, she disappeared with half the universe, and her mom passed still waiting for her to return.

That’s the state Monica is in when she gets tangled up in Westview. Only weeks post-Blip, she returns to work, where everything is different and the world has moved on without her. She’s sent to investigate a strange anomaly in New Jersey and quick gets pulled into it, caught in the Hex Wanda unwittingly created.

Initially, Monica is mind-controlled like everyone else caught in Westview, living out the safe, happy sitcom life Wanda has retreated into. But when she breaks through just enough to remind Wanda of reality, Wanda freaks and ejects her from the Hex to stay cocooned in her own denial. And it’s back on the outside that we start to see what a hero Monica really is.

She doesn’t have her powers yet, but Monica is more than just brave, intelligent, and well-trained. She’s compassionate. She felt Wanda’s grief within the Hex, understanding it as she understands her own grief for her mother. She recognizes Wanda’s actions as a result of deep hurt, and she realizes that their best chance of freeing the people of Westview is to reach out to Wanda, not try to outgun her.

This demonstrates a few different qualities. Obviously, she’s empathetic towards a grieving woman. She sees Wanda as a person rather than a walking collection of scary powers, recognizing that it’s possible to reason with a human in a way that you can’t with a weapon. And she’s practical enough to know that Wanda has S.W.O.R.D. outmatched in every way: if they go in guns blazing, they’re going to lose, and the people of Westview will get caught in the crossfire.

So she attempts to force her way back into the Hex to try and get through to Wanda, after working out a theory for how to get inside while escaping the mind control. She presses ahead despite Darcy’s warnings about how passing through the Hex multiple times will affect her. This is how she gets her powers, which widen her visual spectrum and allow her to absorb energy and phase through matter. Although things shortly pop off after she arrives and she’s not able to really speak to Wanda one-on-one, she uses her new powers to help the family when S.W.O.R.D. manages to break through and assists in helping the people of Westview once Wanda sets them free.

I loved getting to see the adult Monica in action in WandaVision, and I’m super excited to get more of her in The Marvels. WandaVision teased that her thoughts on Captain Marvel have definitely changed over the years, so I’m very intrigued to see what her reunion with Carol is like. And Kamala may be a Captain Marvel fangirl, but I can’t wait for her to meet Monica too!

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.

Relationship Spotlight: Wanda Maximoff & Vision (The Avengers)

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.

Further Thoughts on WandaVision

I realize that we’re now through The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki is on the horizon (with thoughts of Shang-Chi cropping up whenever they feel like it,) but I want to circle back around to WandaVision today – I’ve gotta say, having multiple MCU projects to talk about is a good feeling. WandaVision is a primo mystery-box show, offering up clues to unravel and opportunities for speculation to run rampant with every episode. It’s also noteworthy for just how well it plays around with the sitcom conventions it’s paying homage to. That’s the aspect of the show we’re looking at today (spoilers.)

Even back when it was just a weird conceit, the idea of each episode of WandaVision taking place in a different decade’s sitcom style was such a good one. From the wholesome hijinks of the Dick van Dyke-ish pilot to the schmaltzy Growing Pains-esque ‘80s send-up to the Modern Family mockumentary stylings, it’s fun to unpack the sitcom Easter eggs in every episode. The creators, actors, and production team clearly took a master class in American Sitcom History, and it shows. The clever mimicry reminds me of Community’s strong pop-culture literacy.

Like I said, the detail appears at every level of the production: the acting styles, the tenor of the jokes, the set design (Wanda and Vision’s house morphs internally with each decade, acquiring characteristics that call back to various famous sitcom homes,) the opening credits, the mid-episode commercials (oh man, that Claymation shark in the ‘90s took me back!), right down to the aspect ratios. Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Kathryn Hahn, and co. do a great job tailoring their performances to fit the comedic sensibilities of the different eras, and they’ve got the wigs to match! I love details like Wanda and Vision sleeping in separate beds at the start of the ‘60s (with Wanda using her magic to turn the twin beds into a king) or casting Pietro as the irresponsible brother who blows into town and causes mayhem.

As cool as all of this is, it would be just a well-executed gimmick were it not for the deeper meaning behind the sitcom conceit. It’s shown early on that this sitcom world is somehow of Wanda’s doing, and late in the season, we flash back to her grief-stricken mental break that created the Hex, informed by her lifelong habit of coping with her trauma by indulging in sitcoms that run the gamut from I Dream of Jeannie to Malcolm in the Middle. Viewed in this context, all of it is beautifully heartbreaking. The Hex is unsustainable because, even unknowingly, Wanda is hurting the people she’s trapped there, but she’s not some supervillain bent on domination or destruction. She simply wants a safe little life with the man/synthezoid she loved, in a bright little world where the only problems are the kind that can be solved in half an hour. Seeing this dream from the young woman who lost her parents, her brother, her city, and her love, we see the anesthetic in this delusion, the pain hidden beneath the punchlines.

Furthermore, moving through the decades gets even more interesting because it reflects how sitcoms have gotten darker and more cynical over the years, less of a safehaven than the ‘50s-style delights of the first episode. And so, as Wanda starts losing her grip on the Hex, as Monica “threatens” to remind her of the real life and as Vision starts to question what’s really going on, the sitcoms push forward in time and the plots get more “real.” Whereas before, plots revolved around comic misunderstandings and variety-show shenanigans, things are less idyllic in the later episodes. This is such a smart way to frame the story, shaping it so that it mirrors Wanda’s flagging state of mind.

Kudos again to Jac Schaeffer and the Marvel folks who came up with this and put it all together. It’s entertaining and clever, but more than that, it’s effective and affecting. Like many, I came out of this show far more invested in Wanda and Vision than I was during the movies. I’m excited to see what’s next for Wanda in the MCU and I’m eager to see if she and Vision will find a way back to each other.