WandaVision 3: Here Be Magic (Spoilers)

[williamjm]

5 minutes ago, Poobah said:

Also I know this is just a general MCU issue but the magic in WV in particular I felt had this weird thing going on where it felt simultaneously very over-explained with all the exposition heavy segments in the last few episodes but also still incredibly nebulous, vague and under-defined in the actual scope and specifics leaving it all just feeling like a plot convenience ass pull. Much like Wanda's powers which have always been kinda all over the place and that definitely stepped up a notch in this finale. Agatha's purple power-vampirism situation never got explained either, except apparently it wasn't strong enough to deal with the Scarlet Witch, whatever that means.

I agree this felt like one of the weaker elements in the finale. The spell battles between Wanda and Agatha didn't work anywhere near as well as the Vision vs Vision scenes.

Other than that I thought it was a good final episode. It does seem appropriate that many of the best scenes did involve Wanda and Vision, which was always the emotional core of the story. I think it could have worked better if Wanda left directly from her home once it ceases to exist rather than decide to take a stroll downtown for a more dramatic exit. Fake Pietro turning out to the be often-mentioned Ralph worked well enough, although the casting of Even Peters did turn out to be a gimmick.

[sifth]

6 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

Naw, she gets the same treatment Tony Stark kept getting. :p

Tony turned people into slaves?

Tony’s biggest issue is the amount of super villains he accidentally created. At the very least he helped to stop most of them though.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 minutes ago, williamjm said:

I agree this felt like one of the weaker elements in the finale. The spell battles between Wanda and Agatha didn't work anywhere near as well as the Vision vs Vision scenes.

Other than that I thought it was a good final episode. It does seem appropriate that many of the best scenes did involve Wanda and Vision, which was always the emotional core of the story. I think it could have worked better if Wanda left directly from her home once it ceases to exist rather than decide to take a stroll downtown for a more dramatic exit. Fake Pietro turning out to the be often-mentioned Ralph worked well enough, although the casting of Even Peters did turn out to be a gimmick.

The casting is wasted.  It was a stupid in joke for the audience and nothing more.  It seems like a terrible waste when the “Multiverse” is such a huge aspect of this Phase of the MCU?

[Denvek]

1 hour ago, Karlbear said:

where the hell Agatha actually came from (the coincidence of her living in Westview when Vision had bought a lot there is not particularly useful)...a lot of it just kind of thudded out quietly. 

It seemed pretty clear after that week that Agatha didn't live in Westview - she came because she sensed Wanda's magic creating the hex, and then took over Ralph's house.

[john]

Yeah, kind of hated it a little. Big CGI slugfest with pretty lights, my least favourite part of any MCU film. The scenes with the two Visions in the library and Wanda and Vision saying goodbye were good. And the Scarlet Witch costume looked cool. Otherwise meh.

Agreed on Hayward. We know he’s a dick, but as far as his actions, he seems entirely to be within his remit. What are they charging him with? Yeah, he shot Monica, but he was a federal agent (international agent even?) eliminating a sentient weapon threat and she stepped in front of his gun, he’s not liable there either. If anything Darcy should be the one arrested.

Although I’m not as badly disposed towards Wanda as most of you seem to be. She was wielding a power she couldn’t even conceive of, never mind use intentionally. Bigger in scope certainly but in terms of wrongness I think the lines are blurred a lot more than things Stark, Banner and Rogers have done over the years.

[Kalbear]

44 minutes ago, Denvek said:

It seemed pretty clear after that week that Agatha didn't live in Westview - she came because she sensed Wanda's magic creating the hex, and then took over Ralph's house.

And she came in like 3 minutes after she created the hex and appeared there? That seems a bit weird. At the very least that deserves more than a passport handwave. 

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Again, shooting an actual person is.

Not if you're a cop

Heck, not being flippant, he's shooting at three people who just assaulted and stopped his team from attempting to stop a terrorist. I'm not sure any court would hold him particularly culpable for that. 

1 hour ago, Poobah said:

Yeah sorry Hayward is definitely a bad guy, sorry ya'll. Anyone willing to shoot a couple of children deserves throwing in the deepest possible hole. Saying they weren't real is all fine and good but they were real enough at the time and he had no way of knowing otherwise, they could reasonably have been the children of one of the residents conscripted by Wanda to play those roles.

Being a bad guy does not imply going to jail. Otherwise, ya know, shouldn't Wanda be going to jail? 

1 hour ago, Poobah said:

There's also no evidence that killing Wanda would have ended her spell either, even when Agatha was draining her the reality stayed intact. Perhaps another spellcaster like Strange could have been brought in to dispel it or whatever but I'll never buy that escalating with a heavyhanded military response is anywhere close to right. He wanted his own pet super-robot to do black ops with! This the kinda guy who'd be totally down with the sentinel program in the xmen verse.

Sure! Which was also totally legal. Again, what are they charging him for? And what did he do wrong, exactly, when the alternative was letting thousands of people get tortured to satisfy one person's fantasies?

1 hour ago, Poobah said:

Anyway from the start it was his attempts at manipulating Wanda by goading her with Vision's disassembled remains that may well have set off this entire situation.

Yeah, he totally made Wanda torture all those people. She didn't really want to, but sometimes she just gets so angry

 

[DaveSumm]

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

Interesting that the Darkhold has a totally different design to when it appeared in Agents of SHIELD, confirming (?) that AoS is not canon to the mainline MCU.

I had the same thought, it was an odd choice considering they could’ve made that literally any book and no one would particularly care. It seems like they’ve intentionally gone with the smallest possible change to cautiously brace the AoS fans that their show is losing canon status... I can’t remember what happened with the book in AoS, is there a tenuous space to say it made its way to Agnes, and she made the cover less shit? 

8 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm not thrilled with the idea that Wanda might be the Big Bad of at least DS2 and maybe all of Phase Four (or Five if they're laying pipe for much further down the road?) as that seems a bit Phoenix Saga-ish, something that has failed to work on-screen twice now. Maybe they can do a better job of it, but still.

I’m not sure why everyone’s concluding she’s a big bad now, I took her final scene as if she’d developed some kind of ‘emergency detector’ for going out and helping people. But it wasn’t clear. (Edit: just read the other posts that it was her kids, so yea maybe she breaks the multiverse getting them back). I can certainly see the point of view that she should be considering the torture she’s subjected the town to, but I don’t know that that’s where they’ll go. At least they attempted to arrest her. But yea, Monica’s line was rather forgiving. 

Also, I wasn’t sure why Wanda couldn’t make a house sized reality. Leave the family there while she went off to try and figure out a permanent solution? I considered that she herself couldn’t leave, but then we saw her do that when she turned all the guns on Hayward. 

[sifth]

9 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

You know Ultron killed hundreds if not thousands of people, right?

Your point? I don't recall Tony ordering him to kill any of those people. The blame is on Ultron for those lives. Tony might have brought the character into existence, but that's as far as the blame goes for Tony. Ultron was never made to even be a weapon of death, he was created to be friendly AI like Jarvis/Vision. 

[sifth]

1 minute ago, Mr Gordo said:

Oh so it's ok cause he didn't MEAN to create a weapon of death? OK!

At least in Tony's case it was an unfortunate accident, one that helped to fix. What's Wanda's excuse................she was sad. That totally justifies slavery.

[Maltaran]

29 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I had the same thought, it was an odd choice considering they could’ve made that literally any book and no one would particularly care. It seems like they’ve intentionally gone with the smallest possible change to cautiously brace the AoS fans that their show is losing canon status... I can’t remember what happened with the book in AoS, is there a tenuous space to say it made its way to Agnes, and she made the cover less shit? 

The AoS Darkhold showed up in Runaways season 3 in the hands of Morgan le Fay, although I forget what happened to it at the end - it may have ended up in the Dark Dimension.

[DaveSumm]

2 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

Uh, well I will assume you've never had to deal with grief or human emotions.

And, you know, what wanda did was also an accident. Did you watch the show? At all?

I mean ... let’s not pretend it was that clear cut. She wasn’t 100% hoodwinked into the entire thing was she. She has at least some culpability here. She knew enough to go out and threaten the SWORD agents to keep things running.

[sifth]

9 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

Uh, well I will assume you've never had to deal with grief or human emotions.

And, you know, what wanda did was also an accident. Did you watch the show? At all?

She has a scene where she walks out of the town and literally tells the SWORD solders, "leave me and my pretend town alone or I will kill you", yea, that totally just screams she wasn't in control of her actions. 

I've had to deal with grief quite a bit, just this year alone from how Covid has effected my family. It still doesn't justify slavery in any way, shape or form.

[sifth]

2 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

That's true. Just this idea that this is somehow the worst most evil thing any MCU character has done just...some of you are unfeeling robots. I dunno. Also I hate Tony Stark apologists.

If it makes you feel better, me and my friends mock Tony Stark all the time, for how many super villains he's created. It's basically become a running joke for us, whenever an MCU film came out that featured him.

[Liffguard]

10 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

Oh so it's ok cause he didn't MEAN to create a weapon of death? OK!

That's an interesting philosophical question actually. By all appearances, Ultron was self-aware and free-willed. If you create a sentient being that then goes on it commit crimes, are you culpable, or is it entirely on them? Or a mix? Are parents culpable for the crimes of their children?

Anyway, I thought the final episode was very mixed. I liked the character interaction scenes; Wanda and Vision saying goodbye, Vision debating with himself etc. I didn't particularly like the cgi fight scenes. Why even bother with magic if you're just going to have people throw different coloured fire balls at each other? There was nothing imaginative or visually interesting about it (contrast the fight between Thanos and Dr Strange in Infinity war, which had portals, turning black holes into butterflies, creating self-duplicates etc. not saying it was flawless, but there was a bit of imagination in there).

Also not a fan of how they just glossed over Agatha's final fate. It's already been established that when Wanda forces people to play a roll it causes them pain. Just gonna put the bad guy under mind-control torture and not even question it?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

18 minutes ago, Mr Gordo said:

That's true. Just this idea that this is somehow the worst most evil thing any MCU character has done just...some of you are unfeeling robots. I dunno. Also I hate Tony Stark apologists.

Tony Stark apologists?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, Mr Gordo said:

People who think Stark is a paragon of virtue and heroism and has never made a mistake in his life, etc. Haven't seen any here but you find them in more...well LESS moderated fan sites. It's a longer conversation then I can have at the moment.

What makes Stark interesting are his weaknesses and failings.  I don’t understand why anyone would want to say those are virtues?

[Frey family reunion]

Um, so I guess no Immortus?

[Leofric]

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The whole Dottie bloody hand seems to have been a gigantic Red Herring.

I took it one of two ways, either hearing Jimmy on the radio caused Wanda to loose control for a second, letting reality slip in.  Or  because Dottie was actually physically hurt and bleeding it overrode the illusion.

4 hours ago, DMC said:

How dare you omit Heimdall.

And Natasha is still dead, as her movie is  set in the past.

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

My question precisely.  If White Vision is “Vision” why did he abandon Wanda?

I assume it will take him some time to assimilate the revealed memories and he will return later once he has integrated them all.

[Ghostlydragon]

15 minutes ago, Leofric said:

And Natasha is still dead, as her movie is  set in the past.

It was only the Infinity War deaths I was talking about where 3 of 4 have survived in a way.

I really hope Nat isn't bought back. She's an amazing character but you can't just do a Gotham and keep resurrecting people.

[Werthead]

5 hours ago, Ghostlydragon said:

Loki lives with his pre Thor Ragnarok personality, Gamora survives being from a time of having not developed feelings for Peter Quil and white Vision is around with memories of everything that original Vision gave him.

I've said before that my real hope for Loki is that they get to the end of that story and in order to keep the time stream intact, they realise they have to return him to New York in 2012 with the Space Stone, and you realise that the Loki in Loki is the Loki who is fated to die at Thanos's hands in Infinity War.

If they handle the character development correctly, it might retrospectively make his shift in character and demeanour from the megalomaniac in Thor and Avengers to the somewhat more human and relatable character in Dark World, Ragnarok and Infinity War make a bit more sense, if he'd been through a whole ton of stuff in the interval that he can't tell anyone about.

It'd take perhaps significant storytelling cajones to do that, but it would be pretty good.