WandaVision has released its 6th episode, and it only gets crazier from here on now. Nothing goes back to the light-hearted sitcom feel of the show. Rather it is all intense, and honestly a little too intriguing. WandaVision, Marvel’s first Disney+ series, has kicked off Marvel’s Phase 4. While WandaVision has been full of surprising twists and turns, its biggest came at the end of episode 5. But episode 6 changed everything. We got to see that Wanda is not letting go off people in Westview. We’ve seen the town square as a prominent location outside of Wanda and Vision’s home, and we’ve been acquainted with residents such as Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), Dottie (Emma Caulfield), Norm (Asif Ali), Herb (David Payton), and others. However, what the rest of Westview looks like was a mystery until last week’s “All-New Halloween Spooktacular” which revealed a truly disturbing truth about Wanda’s sitcom world and opened up yet another mystery.
As Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and the residents of Westview enjoy the town’s big Halloween celebration on the town square, Vision (Paul Bettany) claims to be on neighborhood watch duties. What he is actually up to is he is doing a bit of snooping and explores Westview further and further away from the town’s center. As he does, he discovers residents who are semi-frozen in place while those who are moving are doing so in slow, repetitive motions. One woman is even repeatedly trying to hang some sort of Halloween decoration, a tear running down her cheek as she does so over and over, suggesting she’s in pain. It’s in this part of WestView, right along “Ellis Ave” which happens to be just at the boundary of Wanda’s energy field, that Vision even discovers Agnes also mostly frozen in place and confused about how to get to the town square.
It’s a pretty disturbing situation. Those who are close to the town square seem to be going about their day-to-day lives, albeit lives controlled by Wanda, with general freedom of motion but those who are near the edges seem to be either frozen or trapped in a very tight loop of motion. The obvious question is why. The series hasn’t really offered any explanation for that just yet, but there are a few theories out there. The first is that Wanda doesn’t have the power to keep up a full-scale illusion that far from the town’s center — though we can probably debunk that one a bit as the end of the episode saw Wanda expanding her bubble to bring Vision back inside her world while, at the same time, also bringing SWORD in as well — and turning them into literal clowns. We see those agents-turned-clowns moving around at normal speed so it’s probably a safe bet that Wanda can extend things pretty far.
If Wanda can hold her illusion over distance, then it is possible that while she’s taken the entire town, the people who are in the town’s center and are the closest to her — thus being able to move “freely” within her manipulated world — hold some sort of significance. The only thing that is clear at this point regarding the residents of Westview is that they are suffering due to Wanda’s manipulations. While that appeared to be mental and emotional initially, it now appears to be physical as well. Now that Wanda has brought even more people into her world — including Darcy (Kat Dennings) who was handcuffed to a SWORD vehicle and unable to escape — it will be interesting to see how they fare as the series heads into its final three episodes.
Wanda seems evil in this because she is ready to compromise on other peoples’ lives to live in her fake reality. Quicksilver, Evan Peters from Fox’s X-Men franchise is also getting prominent now in the show, as Wanda also attacked her. So we basically saw two mutants get into action. Marvel will surely want to do their own thing when it comes to mutants, so a fresh start makes more sense than making the existing movies canon. Much like Vision’s corpse in Wandavision episode 4, Quicksilver appears as his bullet-ridden dead body in episode 6, further drawing parallels between how and why Wanda ended up bringing them back while underscoring that neither is truly “alive” right now. Indeed, as if to really hammer the point home, Taylor-Johnson’s Quicksilver’s death scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron is even shown as part of the “previously on” recap at the beginning of the episode.
WandaVision is currently streaming on Disney+, with three more episodes to go to conclude its first season, with every new episode releasing each Friday.
