After a jaw-dropping cliffhanger last week, with Vision growing increasingly distrustful of Wanda, Hayward being exposed as a secondary antagonist, and Wanda’s long-dead brother Pietro showing back up with a new face, which looks an awful lot like the Quicksilver of the X-Men universe, WandaVision Episode 6 crashes into the early 2000s era with style on a very special Halloween episode.
Holiday specials are a staple of the sitcom genre, and for a show with this much eerie goodness led by a character often called Scarlet Witch, Halloween seems like the obvious choice for a holiday for our family sitcom unit to indulge in. When you consider the fact that this entire town is wearing a bit of a mask, with everyone shielding their true identities from the world as they are forced to hide behind pop culture approximations of real life, the choice of Halloween as a thematically-rich holiday deepens.
However, we also have this X-factor of Evan Peters’ Pietro to consider. Is he wearing a new face, as the character had previously been played by Kick-Ass’s Aaron Taylor Johnson in his first and only MCU appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron (within which he was murdered), or is his costume the Pietro identity altogether? Only time will tell, but this week he certainly did not sound or act like any version of Pietro (or Peter from the X-Men universe) we’ve seen. He was quick to play the twin card in order to press Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen, Ingrid Goes West) to be more honest with him about how and why she has created this prefab suburban safe haven for her unconventional family. Could there be an ulterior motive at work? Is Pietro’s presence a treat or a trick for our grief-stricken reality warper?
Elsewhere in WandaVision Episode 6, the other man in Wanda’s life, Vision (Paul Bettany, Solo: A Star Wars Story), has decided to break free of Wanda’s machinations, lying to her about having to ditch trick or treating for the neighborhood watch so he can investigate the town without her interference. What he finds is deeply troubling, to say the least. Keeping with the Halloween theme, we see that the residents of Westview who live outside the immediate vicinity of Wanda and her clan are not faring quite as well as even the people we have met thus far (who, thanks to Vision’s de-whammying of his coworker last week, we know are still suffering internally despite their pleasant outward dispositions). No, these families are evoking a zombie horror film as they stand frozen, lifeless, like department store window displays to help keep up appearances a little more. We see that these people are still alive somewhere inside their minds, a single tear forming on one resident’s face as they see Vision.
The choice to introduce this scene with Vision in full comics costume and jaunty sitcom music, then slowly fading away from the kitschy sitcom world as the horror of these people’s reality suddenly becomes clear, was an excellent choice, and Bettany plays the confusion and distraught concern of the moment perfectly. It is the sort of thing that could radicalize him against his beloved wife. A brief encounter with Agnes (Kathryn Hahn, Bad Moms) does little to assuage his concerns, as he learns from her that he is apparently an Avenger…whatever that is…and also very much dead, to his surprise. More on that in a moment.
While Vision is exploring the darker implications of Wanda’s machinations this week, the one true bright spot to all this, Tommy and Billy, truly take center stage inside the bounds of their sitcom world. WandaVision Episode 6’s sitcom homage recreates to an eerily effective degree, the wonderfully dysfunctional world of Malcolm in the Middle, a show I never considered myself a huge fan of but which has an undeniable nostalgic appeal that WandaVision has awoken within me. The camera angles and kids-only direct appeal to the audience feel as lovingly rendered as its pitch-perfect opening credits sequence.
This choice, however, also moves the audience slightly outside the interior of Wanda and Vision’s relationship and even treats Wanda like a bit of an outsider within her own story. Her scenes with Pietro act as almost a C-plot this week, as Tommy spends the episode in awe of his cool “man-child” of an uncle and he and Billy each develop their own superpowers by the episode’s end. Much like their comic counterparts, Tommy, a.k.a. the cool twin, develops super speed and revels in this realization by the midpoint of the episode.
Billy, on the other hand, appears to take after his mother, with the ability to stop Tommy dead in his tracks (telekinesis, perhaps?) and to sense the emotions of not just his dad on the other side of town but also the soldiers outside of The Hex. “They think he’s dying,” he yells to his mother as he begs her to help his father who has left The Hex for help, only to find that doing so seems to cause him to literally disassemble in front of the SWORD agents standing watch at Hayward’s (Josh Stamberg, The Affair) orders. Wanda’s solution: save Vision by expanding The Hex, sucking in nearly all of the SWORD crew, including Darcy (Kat Dennings, Thor: The Dark World), in the process. Given the struggles Wanda has with the outskirts of town as it is, this significant expansion could cause unanticipated problems for Wanda and company. Just how powerful is she really?
Speaking of outside The Hex, we are treated to some table setting this week, as the inevitable split between Hayward and Monica (Teyonah Parris, If Beale Street Could Talk), Jimmy (Randall Park, Ant-Man & The Wasp), and Darcy finally ruptures, and our crew has to go outside the system to help save Wanda and uncover what’s really going on with Hayward. We find out that he is really after Vision and is connected to some sort of top-secret weapons program, as we have long suspected by now. We also learn that Monica’s cells have been radically reformed by going in and out of The Hex and that going back in again could have unforeseen consequences on a molecular level. Certainly not good news as we see so many other people getting sucked into The Hex by episode’s end. And we get one last tease of Monica’s unnamed astrophysical engineer buddy who is likely to appear next episode. However, as I said, this largely feels like setting the table for a standoff with Hayward next week, and an inevitable conclusion where Monica attempts to channel her own grief over her loss of her mother to convince Wanda that victimizing others is no solution to her lost love.
Next week, we are in for what appears to be the last of our sitcom homages, as Wanda’s powers are pushed to their limit, Tommy & Billy come into their own as enhanced beings, Vision deals with the crushing reality that this place is both immoral and the only way he can live with his family, and Monica continues on her collision course towards Hayward outside of The Hex.
WandaVision Episode 6 ‘All-New Halloween Spooktacular’ is now Streaming on Disney+
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