Review: WandaVision Occupies Its Own Quiet, Odd Space in the Marvel Universe

Marvel’s WandaVision begins after the events of Avengers: Endgame, with newlywed superheroes Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a.k.a. Scarlet Witch, and Vision (Paul Bettany) arriving in the small town of Westview sometime in the mid-20th century. Eager to blend in, they hide their powers and settle down into suburban domesticity. Wanda, capable of manipulating space and time, plays the housewife, while Vision, a shapeshifting supersonic android, dons the façade of a white, blond breadwinner.

The show trades the dire stakes and intergalactic scale of a typical Marvel film for lighthearted intimacy. Rather than battling genocidal supervillains, Wanda and Vision contend with dinner parties and talent shows gone awry. They spend almost all of their shared time at home, figuring out how to live and thrive together, and they rub shoulders not with a seemingly infinite roster of superheroes, but with everyday suburbanites, including Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), a yenta with a penchant for slinging wonderfully cheesy jokes about her husband.

The series apes mid-century sitcoms: their black-and-white images, cheery theme songs, and use of laugh tracks. It’s a pleasantly snappy shtick bolstered by the ample theatricality of Olsen, Bettany, and the supporting cast. Like the sitcom material it spoofs, the show’s central conceit is referential, recalling The Truman Show: It becomes clear early on that we’re watching Wanda and Vision, in the present, unknowingly star in a TV series, also called WandaVision. Who’s creating the show, who’s watching it, and the degree to which the citizens of Westview are in on it remain a mystery throughout the three episodes provided to press.

The veneer of Wanda and Vision’s reality begins to crack when they realize that they can’t remember why, or from where, they came to Westview. The glitches escalate, growing more menacing and resulting in WandaVision’s most creative and stylistically alluring sequences. When local mean girl Dottie (Emma Caulfield Ford) enters a trance and shatters a glass in her hand, her blood spills startling red on the monochrome world. Later, after a Westview resident reveals knowledge of Wanda’s past, she tries to ease the resulting tension with a joke—but the laugh track has cut out, and the joke’s silent landing puts a pit in your stomach.

Both Wanda and Vision sense that something’s amiss in Westview, but Wanda, unlike Vision, appears to actually exercise a level of control over the show within the show. On one occasion, she sees an ominous figure on the street outside their home and gravely says, “No,” causing time to rewind, putting her and Vision back in the house and allowing them to wrap up the episode with a hug and a smile at the camera. Elsewhere, it looks like the in-universe show itself turns the clock back, with the same result of replacing dread and anxiety with neat resolution. The do-overs suggest the manufacturing of a utopia of white picket fences, an effect echoed in Vision’s boy-next-door exterior. They’re illusions meant to lull the residents of Westview—or, perhaps, just Wanda and Vision—into unthinking, pacifying tranquility.

It’s admirable how sharply WandaVision deviates from what most viewers might expect from the first Marvel series to hit a streaming service. The fine line that it toes, between the sitcom sendup’s near-cloying cuteness and the unnerving jolts of its interruptions, is eccentric enough to almost make viewers forget that they’re watching a flagship series inheriting the billion-dollar legacy of the Marvel IP. But as the enigma of Westview starts to retread familiar Marvel Cinematic Universe terrain, hinting at clandestine organizations and dot-connecting conspiracies, context catches up to the audience: WandaVision officially begins Phase Four of the MCU, ushering in the latest age of crossovers and tie-ins. But for now, at least, the series is endearingly insular, occupying its own quiet, odd, fenced-in space.