Well folks, it turns out it was Exposition Dump O’Clock this week on WandaVision. If you were starting to lose patience over what exactly was going on with our Scarlett Sitcom Superwife and her televisual nirvana, I suspect you were pleased by this week’s offering. However, if you, like me, were enjoying this marvelous trip through sitcom history, “We Interrupt This Program” may be a bit of a let down.
Before we dive into the plot WandaVision Episode 4 (which focuses mostly on letting us outside Wanda’s bubble to see what the rest of the MCU is seeing), we need to take a few moments to reflect on its excellent cold open. It’s a tough break anytime the best part of an episode of television happens to be its cold open, but it’s hard to beat what we see here.
We start out as a woman materializes out of thin air in a hospital room. The woman (Teyonah Parris, If Beale Street Could Talk), who we have known as Geraldine, is quickly revealed to actually be Lt. Trouble herself, Monica Rambeau, last seen as the young daughter of Carol Danvers’ BFF Maria in the 1990s-set Captain Marvel. All grown up, she awakes and emerges into a hallway as people materialize all around her. The scene is chaotic and confusing, like the reverse of a classic zombie film. MCU fans will soon realize that we are in the fallout from Hulk’s “reverse snap” from Avengers: Endgame. For the more casual viewers amongst us, be aware that during the events of Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos snapped half of all sentient life out of existence. Midway through Endgame, Hulk brought them all back, but we never saw the chaos and confusion such an unthinkable event could cause, as our Avengers were too busy battling Thanos’ forces amidst the wreckage of their headquarters.
This scene gives us a tremendous reintroduction to the character of Monica, who left quite the impression in her first appearance and whose comic book history suggested a much larger role to come once we left the 1990s world of Captain Marvel and caught up to present-day MCU. We learn that, just prior to the snap, she was at her mother’s bedside, as Maria recovered from a successful surgery to remove her cancer. Now, five years later, she is forced to reckon with the crushing blow of learning that Maria’s cancer recurred and claimed her life during the intervening years.
The Snap stole more than just five years of Monica’s life. It stole her final years with her mother, and, as we learn in our next scene, likely cost her the opportunity to replace her mother as the head of SWORD, a governmental agency that Maria helped create. It was dedicated to observing potential friends and foes from space and defending the planet accordingly, via astronaut-led space missions. In the years since The Snap, the astronaut program, of which Monica was a member, has been grounded in favor of AI-driven drone and weapon tech, under the guidance of a new, maybe not-so-up-to-the-job, director, Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg, The Affair). Hayward sends Monica off to help the FBI on a “missing person’s case” in Westview, NJ, where she quickly finds out the whole town to be “missing” before being sucked into Wanda’s wonderful world of classic sitcoms, housed inside of a reality warping bubble around the town.
The remainder of the episode is spent ostensibly trying to rescue Monica and figure out what is actually going on in the first place. However, it mostly feels like a lightly entertaining exposition dump. It certainly is fast paced and engaging enough, thanks to the unexpected returns of FBI Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park, Ant-Man & The Wasp) and astrophysicist Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings, Thor: The Dark World), but it is hard not to feel like creator Jac Shafer and EP Kevin Feige are not simply pausing from the fun, bizarre adventure we’ve been on for three episodes to throw fanboys, who love speculating more than classic Nick at Nite sitcoms, a bone. By the episode’s end, we have learned plenty about the “what” but are still largely in the dark regarding the “how” and the “why,” so there are still plenty of mysteries to be had. However, I would have been happier if we held inside of the original conceit another episode or two before bursting the well-honed world of Wanda.
It appears, at the season’s halfway mark, like this could be a real turning point for the series. It will be very interesting to see how the next few episodes go. Thanks to some trailers and official PR photos for the series, we do know that Wanda still has three decades of sitcoms to travel through before this is all over. However, how much time will be spent inside the bubble vs outside the bubble is anyone’s guess, as is the question of what really happened to poor Mr. Beekeeper Man and whether or not Wanda is literally dragging around poor Vision’s android corpse around Westview. The only thing I think we can be certain about is that Monica’s words to close WandaVision Episode 4 (which she delivers after being flung through the literal “fourth wall” in order to exit Westview), “It’s Wanda…it’s ALL Wanda,” are not even close to the whole story.
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