The Prestige TV Podcast - Unraveling the Mystery in the 'WandaVision' Season Finale

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Charles Holmes and Van Lathan discuss their reaction to and analysis of the season finale of Disney+'s 'WandaVision.' Hosts: Charles Holmes and Van Lathan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The scarlet witch is not born, she is forged. She has no coven, no need for incantation. I'm not a witch. I don't cast spells. No one taught me magic. Your power exceeds that of the sorcerer supreme. It's your destiny to destroy the world. I'm not what you say I am.

Hello and welcome to TV concierge, a podcast on the ringer.com. It helps you navigate the vast streaming landscape. My name is Charles Holmes. I am the host of the Ringer Music Show. And I am here today with the host of Higher Learning Van Laithen. How are you doing? I am well. How are you doing, my brother?

I can't complain so many, so many takes, so many discourse. Now that we're finally through Wanda Vision. And this is the second time we're talking after, you know, walking people through the series opening. So first question for you super, super easy. yo, how are you feeling now that everything's wrapped up? I am feeling good, but lamenting the fact that I could be feeling better is the way that I would say. I'm feeling good.

I'm content but not inspired by the Wanda Vising series finale, I'd say. I would say it is, how do I put it? It's like almost like, you know, you go to Chipotle, you know what you're going to get at Chipotle. I'm not expecting a five-course meal, but I don't know if I'm feeling good about myself after inhaling the burrito. That's how I'm feeling right now. Yeah.

That might be a little harsh. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. I didn't hate it. I just think that this is kind of the betrayal of the season finale, which, by the way, the season finale of Wanda Vision was good. In a vacuum, it was good. Okay.

Here's the thing, though. The show's, calling card is really wonderment. It's intrigue, right? And that's what it built itself on. It built itself on what's going on, what's happening. I know you're thinking out there right now, well, eventually they have to answer the questions. They have to answer the questions, but the way they chose to answer them in the series

finale for me was the most boring way possible. This was a more straightforward episode of Wanda Vision than we've ever seen. There was a bunch of fights between a lot of people, a lot of action, and all All of that's great, but it's really not to show. And as far as Wanda Vision as being a part of the larger MCU, you got tidbits of it, but not really any of the amazement. It didn't really point to too many things that were huger or bigger. And it didn't give you a lot of reason for why everything that has happened.

We understand intellectually why, but emotional reason. I just felt like this was a little shallow on that. Yeah, I definitely feel like this end. did in, like for the bulk of Wanda Visions run, I think it was very subversive. It was trying new things out. And then the last episode, we ended up getting the ending

that we generally get with most MCU films, which big CGI fight, everything goes back to normal. But before we get into Spoilerland, I think it's fair enough to say that Wanda Vision didn't push the larger narrative forward as much as I would like. And I don't think it succeeded

in tying up the loose ends that we had cared about emotionally throughout the whole thing. So maybe this is a good way to like say, spoiler alert and get into kind of what the finale did well and what it didn't do well. Fair. I think so. Let's do that. Spoiler warning. If you haven't watched it, go watch it. So let's start up top.

Like the episode kind of begins with finally Agatha, Wanda, duking it out. What do we feel? I was left a little bit wanting by the whole entire fight scene and just the emotional beats of it. I was like, all right. It's not clear what the characters want in this. It's not clear what Agatha really wants.

Agatha wants, I guess she wants to absorb all of Wanda's powers. But the whole thing, how they're fighting each other, what they're doing. The culmination of the fight is Wanda hexing Agatha. and putting Agatha back in a spot.

Wanda made some rooms that she learned from Agatha, which is a tip off to the fact that in the comic books, Agatha Hartness actually helps Wanda refine her powers. But it seems kind of anticlimatic. Yes. This is the episode to where it seems like they've done so much with the episodes leading up to it that they don't know how to end it.

They don't know where to go with it. Because I don't quite buy Agatha Hartness as the complete villain. The end of the sword guy's reign is very anticlimatic. He basically just goes to jail. Even the whole thing with white vision, facing

off with vision, all of this stuff just seems kind of like it's happening but really not for very much of a reason. Or that it seems unimportant. It's not the DNA of the show.

The show kind of lost its DNA in the finale to me. I think the last two episodes, the show lost a little bit of what we had come to know, which is, hey, we're going to take the best sitcoms of this decade.

We're going to deconstruct them and you're going to learn something about these characters along the way. And what we got in the finale is basically them saying, all right, Wanda, you got to punch Agatha, cryola vision.

You need to face off against White Vision. And then, like, the kids are there doing whatever and Monica is in the mix. And I don't think any of those characters were well served. Because to your point, we don't really, we don't know what they want or, more specifically, their wants aren't that clear. It's not really, like, why are, why is Wanda really fighting? Right. Why is Agatha really fighting? Like, the whole vision nonsense with the white vision of the color vision, I'm like, why are these two fighting?

Right. Like, really. Agatha is going to be in Westview I guess hexed but there is no Westview so I guess she's going to be the only resident of West of Westview now

and part of this I would say is our fault so we created all these grandiose schemes online is Re Richards the Aerospace Engineer is are we going to see the birth of the mutants

here? Are all these other things going to happen? What does all this mean? The commercials in all of these episodes have not been explained. They haven't been explained as to why they exist. And if they were explained, I missed it. I've watched every episode multiple times. It was thought that the commercials the commercial breaks had some kind of specific meaning. You know, they were all talking about hydrant, stuff like that. It seems like they almost ran out of gas. And it's like, Wanda was doing all of this. None of these people exist.

We rebirth vision. White Vision now has vision's memory. So at some point, vision is going to come back. And Wanda's kind of figuring out she's going to, you know, in the post-critic scene, you see her flipping through pages. She's learning things. Maybe she's trying to hear a kid's voice. She's going to try to bring Billy and Timmy back

or manifest them in some way, whatever. But the big cameo that they promised, they said a Luke Skywalker-like cameo was coming. Did I miss that? Did I miss that? Seriously? Did that... It was...

No, I think what they meant was by Evan Peters Pietro. You know, for those that don't know, Evan Peters played Quicksover in the Fox Universe. I think that's what they were referencing. But he ended up, like, they ended that plot line with a dumb boner joke, which honestly just set me off. I'm like, don't, like, really, that's what you're going to do? And here, I'm going to push it back on you then.

Sure. Is it hourful? or is it the fan's fault for expecting like Mephisto and Reed Richards and all of these things? Or is that the way Kevin Feigy and the MCU has taught us as a viewers to think about the Marvel universe

because they've always been very like, hey, did you see this Easter egg? Hey, make sure you stick around for the post-credit scene. The Winter Soldier might be there if you watch Closin' Up in Captain America, all this stuff. So I don't know if it's necessarily our fault

or the fans' fault. if we've been rewarded for a decade plus by digging into what does this mean for the necks and stone. But you know what the thing is, though? I don't agree. I think those Easter eggs are never really a part of the story. They don't have anything to do with the story. They put the Easter eggs in there.

If you watch Iron Man 1, Cap Shields on the table, everybody knows that. They don't have anything to do with the movie. It's like nothing to do with the movie. As a matter of fact, it almost doesn't make any sense for him to be tinkering with Cap Shield when Captain America hasn't even come out of the ice yet. Or maybe he has.

I'd have to look at things chronologically. Maybe it was just before them. But certainly, if he's doing that, there are no Avengers, so why is Tony working with Shield? He doesn't meet Nick Fury until the end of that movie. I know it was his father who had made the Shield. So it's all kinds of things. Those Easter eggs really never have to do very much with the main storyline.

I think that what this series, what we thought was that all of these little hints were going to lead to much bigger things. And they kind of didn't. They all had to do with the story that we were in. But the story, which is the bigger MCU story, at the end of this, we didn't see Dr. Strange. We didn't see Mephisto.

It wasn't clear exactly where this story is going. And that in and of itself, wandered somewhere in a shack in the end credit scene, Like I said, she's reading through the book and she's learning things and she's doing stuff like that. But it's unclear where we're going to go from here. We know we're going to continue her story, but it doesn't lead right into multiverse of madness. Do you think then that that's also part of the failure of doing these as a TV show then? Because it made sense once I finished it, I was like, oh, yeah, they never were going to put a nice little bow on this because Wanda has to show up in the Doctor Strange movie.

Monique Rambo has to show up in Captain Marvel too. Vision is going to show up wherever. Billy and Tommy are going to be in Young Avengers. It was almost like after I watched it, I was like, damn, they really could never have given us a satisfying ending because all of these characters have more stories to tell everywhere else. And I guess that's what made me sad where I'm just like,

oh, you could have ended this in a cool way, but because of the corporate machinations of like Disney and Marvel, it's almost impossible. The ending was satisfied. just uninspired for me personally. I was satisfied with it, but I think for a show that kept turning up,

that kept raising the stakes every single episode. Every single episode, they raised the stakes. For it to kind of be like in the way that it did and just sort of like I said, a straightforward Marvel beat them up,

I'm just wondering, you know, it's just a little, weird. Even the whole thing with Billy and Tommy. It was actually kind of cruel having to watch the kids kind of get wiped away by the whole deal. I love

that part. Oh, did you? I love that part. All right. Here's the thing. If I take my comic book hat off and I just look at as a viewer, you know, you want to write your characters into situations where you do the most painful thing to them. You take it

away the thing that they most love. To really pushed them further. And I did not, like, when I was watching it, I felt for Wanda, probably, I felt more for her in this episode than I did in any of the other episodes. Of course. Because taking the way those kids was cruel.

Taking away vision, that last scene where they're talking, I'm like, oh, like, they're really going to do this to her again? Like, what? Like, it made me mad as a Marvel fan, wanting to see the Young Avengers, wanting to see everything else. but as a viewer, I'm like, they really did put Wanda through the ringer.

And like, I almost, like, I almost wanted to shed a little bit of a tear at that moment. That didn't emotionally affect you? Yeah. No, you're right. It did. It was very sad. It was cruel.

I felt, I felt bad for Wicking and Speed. Like, just to be honest with you, they don't know. And it makes her, for all of the show that we've had, this part, this episode,

may Wanda Maximoff look like the biggest villain. Because it wasn't just everybody in Westview that she created. Those kids were sentient that they had their own awareness and consciousness, and she birthed them only to have to kill them. So all of that stuff seemed a little inartfully done at the end. It seemed like there are finalities where they complete the story, and then there are finalities where it feels like they ran out of story.

And to me, both of them can be execution. to a degree where they're not horrible, but one is always better than the other. Completing the story is better than just running out of the story. Now, obviously, it's difficult to complete because these characters are going to exist in other iterations. We all know we're going to see Vision again. We all know we're going to see Wiccan and Speed again.

We're going to see Maximoff again. Rambo is going up. She's going to meet Nick Fury. She was talking to a scroll. So we know that we're going to see these characters again. but they didn't give us anything to be excited to see these characters again. It's like, okay, so now it's not just about seeing them again.

We know we'll see him again, but we want to be excited about seeing them again or to be excited about seeing again. We have to have an idea of where we're going to see them next. So going off what you said, though, I want to actually go off what you said. Do you think that they let Wanda off a little Scott-free because we learned in the previous episodes,

she's effectively torturing these people. She has birthed children, sentient beings. Same thing with Vision. It seemed like they were saying, like, Vision has some semblance of a soul. Billy and Tommy have some semblance of a soul. So not only did she effectively have to kill off three of her loved ones,

but what seems like for months, she's been torturing these people. At one point, they said, the blonde hair woman, I'm forgetting her name, her daughter was, like, trapped in her room. Like, she was begging one to please. let my daughter out, that was like,

they dropped the ball and I'm like, whoa, you can't reveal that she's been torturing these people, you know, for months,

and then just not do anything with it. To me, this is the way that Marvel is most faithful to the comic books. I'll tell you why, the MCU. As a comic book fan,

you know, Charles, that these people do horrible things issue by issue, you know? Yes. Hulk will go bersert and take out a whole American city. When the Avengers need Hulk again,

They say, Hulk, it's not your fault. Come back and you're with us. We'll do something. We'll help you out. We're about to watch a whole series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, go back and watch Captain America Winter Soldier and watch how many shield agents

Bucky just brutally murders. Like, Bucky was just killing people. I understand he was under, his mind was controlled, but he was just killing people. So that part of it to where she's done all of these things. And now we're just going to forget because she's a hero and she was sad that she took dozens of people hostage. That's kind of true to the common books and true to how things go. The thing I don't like is that the people like right around her, her kids, the people that she's supposed to love, that's like self-inflicted grief and like little people.

And it was just, it's weird that we got no sort of. we almost didn't get to have closure with them. They're just gone. Almost like they got blipped away again, like at the end of Infinity War. It's just, they're just gone. So one thing I did note is that I thought was very funny is that earlier in the episode,

when Vision and the kids are disappearing, they did the little Lego brick thing that they did in House of Them, which I thought was incredible for when she's, like, breaking down. So you are right. It's faithful to the comics in the way that, you know, we see what Scarlet Witch did with House of M, and now in the current comic,

she's just running around like nothing happened. Everyone's like, all right, she's here again, who cares? Yeah. But if we want to go to the future, potentially, let's talk about the post-credit scene. Let's do the first one, and then the second. For those who might not remember, Monica Rambo gets taken into a theater by an FBI agent.

Turns out that FBI agent is a scraw. What do we think of that first post-credit scene? I mean, we're getting up for, you know, we're going to have secret invasion here pretty soon. Probably is now going to be involved in Sword some way because the old director of Sword turned out to be a major jackass. So Nick Fury is probably going to be involved in Sword. If not in Sword, he's up there, you know, working with the scrolls

and whatever that's going to be. So Photon, or is she's Photon or Spectrum? Or is she both? She's photon. I think it's been Photon, Spectrum, Pulsair, and Captain Barber. She's had like four different. Yeah. So I think that, you know, she's going to start to learn a little bit more about how to use her powers,

how to control her powers, and you'll see her in Captain Marvel 2. So that problem, all of that stuff, and this is, by the way, if you're just a fan of the MCU and you don't know about Secret Invasion, you don't know all that stuff, this is the nerd stuff that this is the background of it, you know, kind of how those scrolls are going to be involved. So you think Secret Invasion is going to be the next Infinity War type situation? That's your guess. Probably. I think it makes sense

and it makes sense if you're thinking of how do we potentially introduce a bunch of characters and then pull the rug from out under you? Scrolls is a very easy way to do it. Very easy way to do it. As far as Wanda at the end of the episode,

I think she's using her powers to look at ways to get her kids back and to see how she can figure them all out because remember Scarlet Witch isn't to the peak of her powers yet, which is a scary notion. No.

But she's not quite there yet. So I think that she's commuting and she's learning and she's doing all these different things. And that's going to be, in its finality, that's going to be the answer how we get Wicking and Speed, Tommy and Billy, into the MCU. Yeah, I think if I'm just putting on my comic book hat and everything we know about Dr. Strange into the multiverse or whatever they're calling that, I think Billy and Tommy are trapped in the multiverse. And Scarlet Witch is going to abuse her powers. trying to get them back, and Dr. Strange is going to be like, you can't mess up the multiverse while I'm here.

And obviously, like, this is, and then I realize, I'm like, oh, they're aging them up. So by the time she gets to them, they'll be teenagers. Boom. We're ready for Young Avengers. Like that's, that's all.

And in the comic books in Young Avengers, basically they say that Wanda, Wanda can create souls and that even when these kids are destroyed, the souls go into other bodies. So there's a bunch of different ways we're going to see Speed and Wicked. They're not dead.

Yeah, they're not dead. They even know that they're brothers. So it's kind of, but once again, all of these are questions that we're, that we still have. But the answers to the questions we already had, I just thought we're done in a very uninspired way. Not in a bad way. It was fine. I'm not mad.

I expected to leave with more of a wow factor at the end of the last episode than I had. So a couple speed round questions. How do we feel about Wanda's new, more comic book accurate uniform? That's the best part of the episode. I was like, they went there and it looks, we gotta be honest, it looks way better than whatever cheap, like,

trench, leather trench coat they had her in for years. I like the fact that this, that this actually ended up being like, this was her origin story. This is when she became, not, not Wanda Maximoff,

but Scarlet Witch. Think about it. They took, what is it, seven years to call her by her code name. So it's like, it, To me, that was the best part of it, that in this series, she became the Scarlet Witch.

Oh, that's, I think that, if that was the thing that they pulled off well, like that is like a, all right, finally, we're not tiptoeing around it. She's going to have the costume. She's going to have the tiara. We're going here. White Vision. Where do you think we'll see him next? I don't know.

If you went by the storylines from the comic books, you know, he comes and he takes on all the Avengers. And it's interesting now because he has his memories. So white vision now is vision. So it's interesting where he would go. Stark's dead. So I don't know who he turns to. Stark's dead. Rogers is the oldest shit.

So those are the two leaders of the Avengers. There is no Avengers team right now. They don't have a leader. And we don't know if he has his emotions. We know he has his memories. But it was unclear if this is like vision, vision with all of his emotions, or it's just a robot with the memory. of his previous life.

Right. But even if he just had the memories, right? So even if he just has the memories, he knows there's more to him than just being a mindless weapon. So you would think that that would influence whatever decision he would make next. So I don't know.

I don't know. There's so many questions. I don't know where the Avengers stand right now. I don't know who the leader of the Avengers are. I don't know any of this stuff. So I don't know where he would go or what the next time we would see him. I would imagine he would pop up

in multiverse of madness in some way. No, I agree. I agree. And last question, we're a couple weeks away from Falcon and the Winter Soldier. What do you hope maybe

Falcon and the Winter Soldier take or learn from Wanda Vision and what do you hope that they do a little bit different? So I think it's going to be a completely different show in almost every regard because it's like a stripped down

sort of military show. So I don't want to hold too much of a Wanda Vision standard to it. But what I will hope is that, look, Marvel has a lot of story to get to. And I like having unanswered questions, but I also want those questions answered in a way that feels like it was worth them having been asked

in the first place. So I don't think you'll have to worry that much about the Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I think the show will be different, so different tonally. But I hope they understand just how much people are invested into everything that they do.

And, you know, you want to pay off. So that's all I'm saying. You want them to push, I want them to push the narrative forward Like, I don't want the TV shows to be like, hey, we're not really going to do that much different. Like, hey, if you don't put, like, Sam in the Captain America costume, if we don't see some, like, movie level type narrative progress, I'm going to be a little upset. Of course.

You're right. Absolutely. But, yeah, that is Wanda Vision. Thank you guys so much for listening to hear more from Van. You can listen to him on Higher Learning. It comes out every Tuesday and Friday. Make sure you listen. I love the show.

And if you want to hear more from me, I'll know. the host of the ringer music show we come out every tuesday we'll see y'all later