1x07 Breaking the Fourth Wall

[7.5/10] I continue to be in awe of the way WandaVision marries difficult emotional truths with the trappings of the televised form. This week, we’ve made it to the late 2000s/early 2010s mockumentary stage, with a style borrowed from shows like The Office and Modern Family. As always, the show does it well, with the talking head segments and characters looking at the camera (or “Jimming”, to borrow a term from Community) that capture the humor of that style of comedy.

The thing that grabbed me about this one, though, is that it uses that form to lean into Wanda’s depression, her sense of meaningless to life after witnessing and suffering so much trauma, her lurking fear that she’s endured so much pain because she deserves it. So often, the show has used its sitcom homages for subtle horror, when there’s something odd at the edge of the laugh track or TGIF rhythms that make us uneasy about what terrible thing might be lurking beyond the polished exterior.

But this week, the jarring part is that we’re still doing the cheery sitcom sheen but instead pairing it more directly with Wanda’s abject despondency. She has trouble getting out of bed. She’s incapable of doing anything. She can’t take care of her kids. Our title character (or one of them, at least), has basically given up.

That’s low-key dispiriting. There’s a realism to all of this. I’m sorry to say I know what it’s like to be with a caretaker who’s suffering from this kind of depression, and once again, WandaVision is unnervingly real in its depiction of it here. The fake ad this week (a pitch-perfect spoof of pill commercials) hints at what Wanda’s going through, weighed down not only by the losses she’s experienced so far, but by the sense that the perfect world she’s constructed is now crumbling too, especially with Vision seeming to have left her.

“Breaking the Fourth Wall” conveys that nicely (and in a visually sharp fashion) as objects within the Maximoff household start fritzing between different eras. It’s a nice way to communicate that Wanda is being overtaxed and overstretched, to where without the object of her affections and the person she ostensibly did all of this for, she can’t hold the focus or will to maintain it. She doesn’t know why, but she seems to ignore it in favor of her depressed stupor, hinting that it’s an emotional issue, rather than a magical one.

There’s other big plot happenings to be enjoyed though! For one, we pair up Vision and Darcy, the latter of whom has been officially sucked into the Hex. I honestly don’t love the pairing, as their comic energy isn’t brilliant. But I suppose it’s necessary, to bring this Vision up to speed on what’s happening both inside and outside this bubble. There’s some good comedy in the impediments that Wanda sets out for Vision to prevent him from making his way back home, and as much as they’re used for comedy, there’s something quietly heartbreaking about Vision’s confessionals, where he’s unusually emotionally raw about what he knows and what he suspects about the things his wife has done and his strange state of identity. Him getting fed up with the construct and just flying toward Wanda is a big move, both in terms of plot and his character.

Arguably just as big is Monica Rambeau not only making it inside the Hex, but maintaining her sense of self. It turns out that her aerospace engineering pal is just a friend of her mom’s who’s willing to deliver a favor, which is admittedly a bit of a letdown. But the purpose is to show the strength of the Hex and, by extension, the strength of Monica when she discovers her powers. The hardcore aerospace tech can’t penetrate the bubble (and even gets turned into a wood-paneled minivan in the process), but Monica wills her way through.

I’ll be honest. I had trouble hearing the echoing voices that presumably spoke important sentiments from Monica’s life as she burst through the barrier. Given her comments later, I took it to be a commentary on trauma, that Monica too has lost people and suffered, but chooses to keep going and finds strength in that, literally and figuratively. The strange body scans were a harbinger -- she’s got abilities of her own, and she wants to use them to help Wanda, to reason with her, as someone who’s experienced similar losses.

The confrontation goes about as well as you’d think, with Wanda trying to blast her away again, but Monica being tough but firm with her target. She’s running out of time though, as Director Hayward not only wanted to use Vision as a weapon, but is planning some sort of tactical strike. I gotta say, that’s my least favorite part of this one. We’ve done the “Government agency guy has a villainous, weapons-focused motivation” time and time again in the MCU. Unless there’s some unseen wrinkle here, it’s just not an interesting twist anymore.

What is, on the other hand, is the reveal that Agnes is behind it all! That may not be a shocking revelation, but it’s still a cool one. I’ll admit, I both thought Agnes was the likely culprit going back several episodes, but also bought into last week’s headfake where she pretended to be under Wanda’s influence. WandaVision unveiling her as Agatha Harkness, another “magical gal” in town, with ominous plans still totally work.

I have to say, I love the “Agatha All Along” montage and the fact that she gets her own theme here. Kathryn Hahn is a total pro, and the way she channels the cheesily cackling and winking baddie vibe on the one hand, while conveying some actual menace on the other, is really impressive. The little outro is very funny at the same time it fills in tons of gaps, and the villainous laughter coda that she killed their little dog too is the icing on the cake.

Beneath that heightened, audience-nudging reveal is some real terror though. The prospect of what happened to Billy and Tommy concerns me, especially when Wanda finds an expansive, gothic basement containing a box like the one that she and Pietro were kept in back in the day. One of the twins, the one seemingly with psychic powers, likes her because she’s quiet inside, something far scarier than it should be. She clearly has plans for them, and children’s lives in danger chills the blood of any adult.

As it reaches its closing stretch, WandaVision puts its cards on the table, telling us who the villains on the inside and outside are, reaching the present (more or less) with its homages, and giving us four superpowered beings within the Hex prepared to do battle to save/protect/convince Wanda of what has to happen left. It’s a hell of a setup, emotionally and story-wise, and I’m excited to see how the show finishes it.

See this is exactly what I was talking about: by focusing more strongly on making things happen within the sitcom, your show becomes significantly more interesting. Your sitcom portions feel less like hostage tapes and more like stylistic implementations and it gives an MO to your narrative. It generally makes for an interesting push and pull between reality and sitcom, but now we're up against a wall--we're out of sitcom decades. What happens now? The 4th wall, Modern Family influence was particularly well chosen considering the awareness of the characters, but it makes me wonder if we're about to drop the sitcom schtick more thoroughly. Even the basement sequence was in the reality aspect ratio, so it can permeate into Westview. I wonder if they'll jump genres and start pulling from other types of shows, not just sitcoms.

But even for how much better this episode worked for me than the previous one, there are a few issues I think we have here. The MCU has often dealt with some over-explaining issues, but in a show dedicated to weird-fiction, explaining things at all becomes something of a taboo. There is also something weird with how Darcy functions in this episode. The schtick with the crossroads felt like she was stuck somewhere in between aware and unaware because of how we are meant to believe that if you are aware in the Hex you're not going to succumb to its sitcom antics. Why could she not just drive around the construction crew? Why would you not just blow through stop lights? I know Vision had a realization about this of his own, so it just feels kind of awkward he wouldn't bring her with him.

Overall, significantly better episode. Feels like the steam is moving finally and it's being done with an eye towards the surreal, which I appreciate. It's a shame it took us until episode seven to get there, though. Considering The Mandalorian had a similar problem, I really hope this isn't a Disney+ signature: weaker opening episodes that lead to stronger conclusions.