Doctor Strange 2 fixes WandaVision’s biggest problem

It’s only been about a year and a half since Disney Plus launched its first Marvel Cinematic Universe TV series, WandaVision. However, it feels like 10 years ago in cultural terms. With so many MCU shows and films since then, it’s easy to forget how confused and frustrated some viewers were over the ending of WandaVisionHow contentious was the last episode among MCU veteran stalwarts. But it’s worth revisiting now that Doctor Strange, in the Multiverse of MadnessIt is now out because it retroactively adds a lot to the old movie WandaVision’s more baffling decisions make far more sense. With the series’ unaddressed questions finally cleared up, WandaVisionRetrospectively, it seems even more fulfilling.

It was a new, exciting entertainment universe that we were all stepping into. WandaVision It was officially launched on January 20, 2021. Disney Plus launched in November 2019 with a solid launch, but its first year was mostly dependent upon the Disney archives. Many of these were still available for streaming on other platforms. By 2021, it was still unclear what the streaming service’s original-content plan would eventually become, and whether it had the long-term clout to challenge streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon or if it would just live on as a kind of well-stocked online library. (At least by that point it was fairly clear it wouldn’t quietly shutter after a few ignominious months, like Quibi did in December 2020.)

In January 2021, practically all significant theatrical movies, the year’s MCU offerings included, were either being postponed or morphing into unheard-of direct-to-streaming releases. No one knew what the Disney Plus MCU TV series would look like. WandaVision The first.

Image by Marvel Studios/Disney Plus

This show was the most popular and well-received of all Disney Plus shows to date. It has been eclipsed by other Disney Plus showsWandaVisionIn terms of audience, few have had the same impact on the cultural landscape as it. Its week-to-week mysteries and puzzlebox design made it a favorite among bored and isolated viewers eager to discover new theories and obsess on its surprises. These revelations often doubled as culture-dominating memes.

And then the show abruptly ended — and the complaints poured in about the point in the story where it stopped. It became clear that sometimes-superhero Wanda Maximoff was literally enslaving hundreds of terrified, miserable people, psychically forcing them to play background characters in the happily-ever-after sitcom-family fantasy she’d created with her reality-warping magic. That revelation was hard to square with the show’s playful, goofy early episodes, or its profound and obvious sympathy over Wanda losing her lover, Vision (Paul Bettany), both in the MCU movies before the show and then again during it.

It was not clear that the finale took the tragedy of this situation enough seriously. There was no sign that Wanda — the sympathetic, grieving protagonist who weeps as she allows the magically generated re-creation of her lost love to dissolve in her arms — really understood or cared about what she put the denizens of Westview through by using them as living props. Never was there the shame or remorse that one would expect from someone who has hurt people. Wanda makes one small apology to comparative bystander Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), but Monica lets her off the hook by saying the Westview citizens Wanda brutally kidnapped will never understand what she “sacrificed for them” by eventually allowing them to return to their real lives.

And Wanda’s resolution with secret series villain Agatha Harkness is particularly chilling. When she traps Agatha in a simpering, shallow false persona and leaves her to live out a terrible fake life in Westview, she’s taking a useful step toward solving one of the MCU’s biggest ongoing problems. But she’s also doing something straight-up villainous, and the fact that she’s doing it to a villain doesn’t make it land any better — at least until Multiverse of MadnessThis makes it much easier to see how the end of WandaVision was supposed to be read.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.]

Image by Marvel Studios/Disney Plus

Wanda’s final choice with Agatha — rewriting reality in her mind and body as Agatha helplessly begs for mercy — is a particularly difficult scene to swallow for viewers who want to come away from the show with their sympathy and respect for Wanda fully intact. This contrasts with the sad and sentimental moments immediately preceding it. Wanda puts her imagined children to bed, and then she desperately looks at Vision, her fake Vision, before allowing him to fall apart.

Wanda, however, is revealed to be the ultimate villain Doctor Strange, in the Multiverse of MadnessThis makes Agatha’s resolution much more clear. She isn’t a sympathetic hero doing an inexplicably terrible, merciless thing. She’s a survivor who’s given into despair, and is now fully embracing how her horrifying new power level gives her complete and utter control over other people, including the ability to take her pain out on them.

“I’m sorry,” she tells Agatha before stealing her agency, memory, and personality. “No you’re not, you’re Cruel!” Agatha spits at her. Turns out, Agatha was right — and her read on the situation was the key to what was going on at the end of the series. Agatha was right once more.

Wanda lovers have protested against Wanda turning into a murderous, full-force villain. Multiverse of Madness, and that’s certainly a fair response. Particularly if the reasoning behind that decision is “The Darkhold corrupted her,” which neither WandaVision This movie doesn’t really go into detail. But whether Wanda’s grief and rage would take her in such an extreme direction is a completely different conversation, and a much more complicated one. This is the simple thought: The ending of WandaVision makes more sense, now that it’s clearer that Marvel Studios was deliberately withholding information about Wanda’s state of mind and future intentions rather than telling an indecisive or muddled story.

Still, the tonal changes and indecisiveness are a problem. WandaVisionIf you view it as an independent project. However, Marvel Cinematic Universe does not allow for standalone projects. Each new movie and show is part of a larger, continuous narrative. This big narrative is the backdrop to everything. WandaVision It looks stronger, more planned, and much better now. Re-watching the series finale immediately after the movie, it’s much more obvious how Wanda’s anguish and her feeling that she’s lost everything important in her life helps inform her grim choices and lack of empathy or humanity in Multiverse of Madness.

Image by Marvel Studios/Disney Plus

And it’s similarly clearer why she doesn’t apologize to the citizens of Westview for turning them into agonized puppets, why she doesn’t try to justify her behavior or connect with them. It’s because she’s already decided that their pain isn’t as important to her as her own. She knew what she was doing to them to create her fantasy world was shattering, painful, and terrifying to them — they told her so, and she didn’t relent any more than she relented with Agatha. That’s such an ugly, stunning revelation that it’s hard to reconcile with the elements of WandaVision That she dwells on her compassionate side.

But her selfishness and growing indifference to other people’s lives are also right out there in the open in that finale — and in retrospect, throughout the series as a whole. She’s still got enough shame left to make that little “Sorry for the trouble” comment to Monica, but not enough to try to offer restitution or apologies to her victims, and certainly not enough to behave nobly or kindly toward her fallen enemy. She’s already moving on to the next attempt to ease her pain, by exploring the Darkhold and finding a way to make her imaginary kids real, no matter who it hurts this time around.

The hardest part of Multiverse of Madness for Wanda fans to buy is the way she decides she’s willing to murder innocents to get what she wants, from killing teenager America Chavez by stealing her multiverse-traveling powers to destroying anyone who tries to protect the girl. But it’s actually a comparatively small step from being willing to torture an entire town of strangers for days to being willing to kill one girl. WandaVision She could have stated more clearly that she was at the end of her rope, but instead it was just about teeing it up to be a surprise. Multiverse of Madness.

The depth of Wanda’s selfishness and cruelty still feel like a huge leap for the character fans knew back before Avengers: Infinity War. But Wanda hasn’t been that character for a while. Looking back, and watching WandaVision again, it’s clearer than ever that laying the groundwork for her decisions was a major part of what the series was doing. Now that we have the ending that the series couldn’t offer, her whole arc makes more sense and feels more complete. We’ll have to wait to see if that ending is true, and if Marvel intends to continue it in the future. Perhaps that second, highly hypothetical season ofWandaVision isn’t as unlikely as it once looked.

There’s just one significant problem, though — rewatching WandaVision again makes it clearer than ever that Wanda’s original passion was for recovering Vision and living out a perfect fantasy life with him. It was the right time Multiverse of Madness rolls around, she seems to have all but forgotten him, and she’s focused solely on her children. She never brings up any reason she wouldn’t be looking for a universe where he still exists. Does she know that any alternate version of him would still gently talk her down from killing people — including alternate versions of herself — to get to a world where she still has kids? Is it possible that she has lost him so many times, she is afraid of losing him again. While there are many ways she could justify shifting her focus, neither is the truth. WandaVision nor Multiverse of Madness Providing any assistance to viewers. Multiverse of MadnessThe biggest problem is solved WandaVision’s ending, but it can’t fix its own issues at the same time.