Wanda…Visions. I watched WandaVision, and this is what I thought.
This past Friday we got the first two episodes of Wandavision, the first MCU foray into television. The show focuses on Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, and the corporeal representation of Tony Stark’s Jarvis AI, The Vision, as they inhabit a seemingly idyllic, yet mildly sinister and confounding, Bewitched style existence. The show bears some similarities to Tom King’s character defining miniseries about The Vision while seemingly also incorporating elements of the 80’s miniseries about the duo, mainly the magically created twins that eventually become the Young Avengers Speed and Wiccan.
As for the plot of the current series and predictions, I think that the show follows Maximoff after the events of Endgame living in a SWORD operated artificial suburb that was created to monitor and contain. All of the neighbors she and Vision interact with, like Monica Rambeau, are agents playing characters that have been sucked into the fantasy world she has created with her chaos magic. The tell on this is the inclusion of the twins, which I feel will also indicate the true villain.
While there is an Easter egg of the Grim Reaper’s armor, I feel that this is a red herring and a nod to the Tom King miniseries. In the series, The Vision creates his own idylic family and sets them up for a perfect, suburban synthezoid life in northern Virginia. In the miniseries, the inciting event that destroys this facade of bucolic bliss is the appearance and subsequent murder of the Grim Reaper by the Vision’s wife, Virginia. Now, the cause of the enmity between Vision and the Grim Reaper is that the Vision’s brain waves are copied from Wonderman, Simon Williams, the brother of the Grim Reaper. In the MCU, the Vision’s brainwaves are based off of the JARVIS AI, so there is no connection to the Grim Reaper. However, the twins, who are created entirely by Wanda’s chaos magic do have a plausible connection to a possible villain.
In both the MCU and the comics we already have multiple, established rulers of pan dimensional domains, planes and hellscapes. We have Hela, Dormamu, Hellstrom, Ghost Rider, and an upcoming Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness movie. What that means is that we have extra-plannar beings interacting with the MCU earth. And that means that we have walls separating them, and if someone was to start tearing at the fabric of one plane, it would theoretically weaken the walls. To wit, the farther Wanda pushes this bending of reality, through the program WandaVision, the easier it will be to set up this Multiverse of Madness, so who’s behind it?
In the comics, Wanda’s twins are absorbed into Master Pandemonium. Whether Master Pandemonium, a comparatively minor extra-plannar threat compared to a Mephisto, Dormammu, Nightmare, Shuma Gorath, or a Blackheart, as far as mass appeal remains to be seen, but I do think that’s probably what we’re looking at as far as main antagonists due to the lack of a tangible connection to Grim Reaper, the comics, and future projects in the MCU.
