It's Friday, AKA the best day, and we all know what that means: It's time to figure out what's happening on WandaVision!
This week's episode of our favorite new Disney+ show did not offer us any more surprise appearances by any Marvel-adjacent superheroes from other franchises, but it did open up Wanda's world in a whole new way (multiple ways, really) we can't say we were expecting.
We've got absolutely no idea what's going on, and we're quite frankly thrilled about it. When was the last time TV was this exciting? When was the last time we were all collectively anticipating weekly episodes like this? Not even Game of Thrones was on this level, and while The Mandalorian came close, WandaVision Fridays are on a whole other level. WandaVision Fridays are keeping us alive.
Anyway, on this WandaVision Friday, we learned several important pieces of information.
1) Director Hayward (Josh Stamberg) is hiding things, like the fact that he's been tracking Vision and all residents of Westview.
2) The further you get from the center of WestView, the creepier and less alive the residents get.
3) Vision (Paul Bettany) can't survive outside of the Hex.
4) Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) doesn't know how this all happened (or so she claims), but she's fully capable of expanding the Hex in an emergency.
It was late '90s Halloween in Westview this week, with extreme Malcolm in the Middle vibes putting Billy (Julian Hilliard) and Tommy (Jett Klyne) at the center of the story. They were mostly hanging out with their cool uncle Pietro (Evan Peters), who kept confusing Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) by not sharing the same memories she did of her childhood. While the twins were busy discovering the fact that one has super speed and the other shares his mother's magic, Pietro was questioning Wanda. How did she do this? How did she choose the roles that the residents played? She didn't really have an answer.
Meanwhile, Vision escaped from Wanda's watchful eye by saying he was on Neighborhood Watch patrol. He walked to the edge of town and saw how people appeared to just be frozen in time, then ran into Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) on a drive. She acted confused and asked if he was an Avenger there to save everyone. She specifically called out Wanda for having imprisoned the town (everyone else has just said "her"), but honestly, we still don't trust her. Agnes is up to something!
But anyway, this encounter sent Vision to the edge of the Hex, and he tried to walk through it.
On the outside, Hayward had just expelled Monica (Teyonah Parris), Jimmy (Randall Park) and Darcy (Kat Dennings) from his base for trying to defend Wanda. Darcy had hacked into the computer system and uncovered his nefarious tracking system, as well as a mysterious project called "CATARACT." Monica and Jimmy headed out to meet Monica's aerospace engineer friend "over the ridge" while Darcy stayed behind, watching Vision's journey through Westview on the tracker.
Darcy then watched as Vision tried to push through the Hex, and realized that Hayward and all his soldiers were there to meet Vision, but clearly weren't there to help him. Vision was being torn apart as he tried to get to the outside world, and no one was doing a thing about it. They even handcuffed Darcy to a truck to hold her back.
Inside the Hex, one of the twins could magically hear that Vision was in danger, so Wanda simply froze everyone around her and expanded the Hex, turning the S.W.O.R.D. base in to circus tents and soldiers into clowns. Vision was restored, and Darcy got swallowed up too (though we did not see her Hex transformation). Hayward managed an escape, but only barely, and Monica and Jimmy were also spared. But everyone else in the vicinity is now trapped in Wanda's TV show, and that's where the episode ended. It was an absolutely rude thing to do and the wait for the next WandaVision Friday is going to be excruciating!
The possibilities here are very exciting and the questions are endless. What if Darcy now essentially turns into Kat Dennings' character from the sitcom 2 Broke Girls? Is Hayward's CATARACT project a reference to how cataracts mess with VISION? Who is Monica's aerospace engineer "guy?" Who sent this fake version of Pietro, and is Pietro actually supposed to be alt-universe Pietro or is he just an actor whose role in X-Men is just an Easter Egg for the audience?
With each episode, the twins have become more important. But are they even real? How do they exist? And how much control does Wanda have over them or over anything at all?
It's clear that whatever reality Wanda thought she was living in is falling apart, but what's on the other side of it? Is Wanda going full villain, or is there another baddie pulling the strings and using death to manipulate one of the Avengers' most powerful members?
We'll be thinking about it endlessly until next Friday, so we'll see you then!
New episodes of WandaVision stream Fridays on Disney+.