Spoiler warning! If you’ve not seen this episode yet do not read this review. Go watch it and then come back and read it, because it’s something best experienced without heads up first.
OK, so you’ve watched it now right? Final warning…ok good!
So this episode had so much going on. As with previous episodes (sans episode 4 which was mostly set outside of Westview) this episode heavily imitates a old US sitcom. Whilst in the past we’ve had it mimic shows from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, episode 5 is firmly into the realm of the 1980s and playing into the whole Family Ties era of shows.
Unlike the first 3 episodes which played mostly into the fake reality of the sitcom, this episode bounces back and forth between the sitcom world that the residents of Westview inhabit and the outside world which is just the usual MCU existence.
It’s easy to almost dismiss everything that is happening on the Sitcom side of things as being the false reality where everything that is happening is just to serve the end of making things feel like an old sitcom, but more and more are the cracks of reality breaking through, and every line said by a character in Westview can be questioned and scrutinised to see if it holds some extra meaning.
We begin the episode with Wanda and Vision’s twin boys Billy and Tommy screaming and refusing to go to sleep, much to the dismay of the new parents. Agnes arrives as she often does, and within a minute we get the most blatant breaking of the sitcom reality yet.
Vision hesitated at Agnes’s suggestion that she helps with the children and this lead to Agnes stopping where she was, dropping her usual persona and asking Wanda if she wants her to go again. For some this may seem weird and confusing, but this sequence was intended to resemble actors going wrong in their script and going for another take.
What’s interesting is that Agnes asked Wanda if she should go again as if Wanda were the director of what is going on here. This plays into what we have been shown thus far, and what Monica said at the end of the previous episode in that everything that is happening in Westview is down to Wanda. It certainly ties into the theory that Wanda has created this false reality for herself to give the idyllic life for herself and Vision. But with this being the main working theory, this also now seems too obvious. Agnes definitely seems to have more awareness of the false reality of Westview then Vision often seems to, and it’s just as likely at this stage that she is in some way involved with what’s going on, and may be the true one behind it.
Why Agnes would alert Vision to the fact that something isn’t right is still up0 for debate though. Is she trying to cause issues between Wanda and Vision? Or perhaps she is trying to alert Vision that something is amiss to get his help if she is just someone trapped there by Wanda and fears her. When Monica spoke of Ultron, Wanda ended up throwing her out the town and through the air all at the same time!
Within a couple of minutes of the show starting the children rapidly aged to be 5 year olds, and upon finding a stray dog, they suddenly aged up to being 10 years old. In the real world with Darcy and Monica it’s explained that the children are real and are not “actors” or missing people as so many of the other residents of Westview seem to be.
Monica hatches a plan to get a better look inside the town by sending in a drone from the 1980s, with the theory that the time period wouldn’t alter or reject the old technology as it matched up with what is expected of the era.
As a quick aside, did we ever find out the fate of the bee keeper? He was from the modern era and crawled into Westview in a has-mat suit only for the time period to transform it into a bee keeper outfit. I’m not sure we’ve yet to learn of what happened to him as upon his arrival time seemed to glitch and things went back to moments before his arrival.
Anyway, back to Episode 5. When Wanda saw the drone, we saw that Director Hayward on the outside of Westview ordered it to fire a weapon at Wanda much to Monica’s alarm. He had attempted to kill Wanda as a threat, but it should have been obvious that someone who last week was explicitly said to be more than capable of defeating Thanos on her own wouldn’t have much trouble from a 1980s drone.
This lead to Wanda exiting Westview for the first time. And when she did, she appeared in her Avengers End Game costume and threw the drone at the agents of S.W.O.R.D with the warning not to come back in. She then proceeded to possess all the agents who turned their weapons on Hayward and she reinforced the forcefield which we assume will prevent any more drones or bee keepers entering the town.
It’s been pointed out online that Wanda’s actions possessing the agents and turning their guns back on themselves mimicked the actions which were previously done by both the Michael Fassbender and Ian McKellen versions of Magneto in past X-Men films. This is super relevant given what I’m sure you’re waiting for me to discuss in this article…but we’ll get to the ending of the show in a minute.
Back in Westview Vision is at work, using the miracle that is the internet when an email comes through which seems to be mass read out by everyone in the office and warns Vision that there is something going on because of Wanda. Vision then uses his powers to break the spell of Westview from a co-worker who suddenly seems frightened and warns Vision of ‘her’. Now this ‘her’ may refer to Wanda, but is more likely to refer to another character, with Agnes being the main candidate.
Billy and Tommy are sad when their new dog Sparky dies and Agnes is present to see them ask Wanda to bring the dog back from the dead. Agnes again seems to break character and asks Wanda if she can do that, to which Wanda explains to the children that she doesn’t have those powers.
There is precedent in the comics that Wanda can raise the dead, and it would certainly seem to be the case as this episode also shows that several days earlier that Wanda had broken into a S.W.O.R.D facility and stolen Vision’s remains. This is put over as Wanda stealing the body by Director Hayward, but it struck me as strange that if they knew she had done this why had it not been brought up before this point? Is it more likely that Wanda was rescuing Vision? Was she stopping them from using his body as a weapon? This episode went out of it’s way to explain that Vision had said in his living will that he didn’t want to be used as a weapon.
All this mystery lead to the shows final scene where Vision confronts Wanda and they have a full on superhero stand off in mid air. We’ve seen with the children and the stalk in previous episodes that in Westview Wanda doesn’t have complete power over everything, and we’ve also seen that a piece of bubble gum is enough to disable Vision, so who knows if these two fought who may come out on top. Vision starts accusing Wanda of having manipulated the town and that he doesn’t feel like he can trust her, and that she is making everything in the town happen.
Wanda denies this, and Vision points out that other then their children there are no other children in the town. This could play into a line Agnes said earlier to express that children can’t be controlled, and it would certainly make sense with Wanda unable to use her powers to make them sleep or stop them aging.
As Wanda and Vision’s argument continued, the couple are suddenly interrupted by the door bell ringing and Vision thinking that Wanda had purposely made this happen to interrupt their dispute. Wanda denies this, and it’s interesting that just a minute earlier Wanda seemingly tried to brush off the argument by rolling the shows credits. This was fun from our perspective, but it’s not really clear what the credits rolling would mean to them? Can they see credits rolling to signify the end of an episode? And if so what does that mean they do then? Surely that couldn’t actually ever end their conversation??
Wanda then went to the door to answer it for the stand out moment of the show thus far, as we see that Evan Peter’s version of her brother Pietro turned up fresh form the X-Men films.
For those who don’t understand the context of this or why it’s relevant, before Disney bought Fox, the rights to the X-Men were with Fox meaning that characters who were X-Men couldn’t appear in Avengers related films. There was literally one exception to this, and that was in the character of Quicksilver aka Pietro, who along with Wanda had the dual status of both an X-Men and an Avenger.
Whilst both characters could therefore appear in both the X-Men and Avengers film series, it was only Quicksilver who appeared in both, and were played by a different actor in each franchise. In the Avengers series, Quicksilver was played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whilst Evan Peters played the role in the X-Men films. What’s so interesting here is that back in 2012, the Avengers had killed off the Aaron Taylor-Johnson version of the character in the MCU many years before there was any talk of Disney buying Fox, so it’s one of those weird stars lining up situations that the opportunity would arise for the one character who appeared in both franchises to leave an open spot in the MCU.
With the already confirmed Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness coming out in the future and Spider-Man 3 expected to bring in actors from lots of previous films, this appearance by Pietro here marks the first time the multiverse may have truly come into effect (JJ Jameson in Spider-Man Far From Home may be another example, but we’re not sure what that means yet).
In a huge nod to what the audience may be thinking, Darcy who is watching the exploits of Wanda and Vison on a monitor questions if Wanda has recast her brother. This is as meta as it gets, as whilst this is a recasting of her brother it is simply using another actor who already was playing the role for a different company.
The fact that Quicksilver can appear from the X-Men movies now leads to so many possibilities including the appearance of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, or Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Most likely and what may have already been hinted at in this episode, may be the appearance of Magneto. Magneto in the comics was the father of Wanda and Pietro, and was specifically named as Quicksilver’s dad in the X-Men movies. In the MCU it wasn’t acknowledged that Scarlet Witch or Quicksilver were mutants or the children of Magento due to the rights issues, and this episode specifically named their parents as other people. It’ll be interesting to see how they start to explain the difference in appearance between the two Quicksilvers and what this will now mean for the introduction of mutants and the X-Men into the MCU. One thing is for certain and that is that the multiverse has now begun to pay off the dreams that many Marvel fans have been dreaming of for years!
