For an episode with so many (smaller) answers about what the heck is going on in WandaVision, the bulk of this week's episode, titled "We Interrupt This Program," didn't center around the titular characters, though even the brief moments we got with them seemed to clarify a lot (more on that later). What it did center around, thankfully, was how the show now seems to line up in the MCU's timeline (we've had hunches before, but this is the first definitive measure we can make); this episode, more than the first three episodes, truly makes the show feel like it is a part of the bigger MCU picture more than just hinting at connections and obscure references, which resulted in a more rewarding experience.
We started with a perspective of the MCU we haven't seen before: a person returning from Infinity War's "The Blip." From a visual perspective, it was fun to watch the CGI basically go into rewind mode to bring the person back into one piece (hopefully this gets memed similarly to how "The Snap" was all over the Internet). The returning person is Monica Rambeau. We got such a cool insight into the moment when she regains coherence. Countless thoughts were going through her mind, and whispers from many people (I'm positive that one of those voices was Brie Larson's, another nod to Captain Marvel). I remember hearing Spider-Man's brief description of what happened to him when he snapped in Endgame, and but now we got to feel a little bit of what that was like. Pretty cool.
Monica, of course, is the daughter of Maria Rambeau, who was Carol Danvers' best friend in Captain Marvel. Monica was a victim of the snap, but Maria was not. Maria fittingly believed her daughter would come back in the same way she never gave up hope that Danvers would return someday (she didn't expect Carol to be superpowered, of course!).
Monica doesn't get to enjoy that same hope. When she blips back into existence to the hospital she was in when she first disappeared, she learns that her mother passed away. To her, it was instant, of course. A nurse tells her that Maria died a few years ago while she was gone. It's fun to see the chaotic, helpless feeling Monica has as she tries to get her head around what's going on and deal with such traumatic emotions so suddenly, especially since we've only experienced the chaos from the perspective of those who survived the snap to this point.
Monica tries to return to some semblance of normal by returning to work, thus bringing the Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division - or S.W.O.R.D. - into the spotlight. We get snippets of the organizations' history (much more on that later), including that Maria was instrumental in the creation of S.W.O.R.D. in the first place. As someone who watched Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. every single week while the show was going, it felt quite familiar in some respects; just seeing the towering building gave me Winter Soldier vibes (and the early episode of AoS for those who remember that!). She even gets an assignment, though it's not the one she expected. S.W.O.R.D. directory Tyler Hayward tells her to stick to terrestrial missions for the time being, which is pretty thinly-veiled MCU speak for "We're not going to show you what S.W.O.R.D. is up to yet, but we want you to know they're around."
This terrestrial case, of course, is more than enough for Monica. She discovers what we as the audience already know is a confusing, difficult situation with Wanda and Vision.
Other task forces are involved with this case, too, including a few individual recruits, one of whom was a pleasant surprise: Darcy makes a return! Kat Dennings reprises her role as Jane's former intern, though it now appears she's earned a name for herself. She's called in to help assess the situation, and she even uses what I perceived as modernized versions of the tech she, Jane, and Dr. Selvig used in Thor: Dark World when they were trying to understand the convergence. Here, Darcy uses the tools to discover that a broadcast signal is underneath whatever bubble has encapsulated Westview (apparently there is no Westview, according to the police officer, but there's an Eastview, of course! Very funny). She stills brings her irreverent wit and charming humor, which is a nice levity for the often-serious tone of the show. It's especially fun to watch her give commentary to the highlights of Wanda's "show."
Another character who makes a return is agent Jimmy Woo, the FBI agent who was a thorn in Ant-Man's side. He first talks to Monica about taking the first available flight out of Oakland - and that triggered sensors in my brain. Oakland is where Black Panther and Shuri set up the International Wakanda Outreach Center when they first unveiled Wakanda to the world. To me, this implies that the Outreach Center is open and running. Maybe we'll see it in Black Panther 2?
To reiterate, we discover we're reliving what we've seen so far on WandaVision through the perspective of S.W.O.R.D. and all the others involved. It's interesting to see answers to the smaller mysteries (such as the helicopter and radio message) that we've seen so far from a different perspective. The guy in the hazmat suit, for example, isn't really all that villainous after all.
While all the perspective shifts were nice, and while we did learn a lot more about what's going on in a fun, unique way, the episode mostly doesn't advance the story past what we've already seen. Still, my feelings towards Wanda definitely have shifted. It's not looking good for her, is it? It's almost certainly her doing all the rewinding/deleting manipulation going on, but I suspect there's more to the story. At the end, she caught a glimpse of Vision as he sort of looks in true reality (hint: he died in Infinity War). For a super brief moment, I almost felt as if someone is masquerading as Wanda (more on that in the notes). Regardless, Wanda is fun to watch in this situation. It's like, how much do you want to press your luck messing with her before making her too angry?
As good as this episode is, it felt like an accumulation of what we already learned to expect from this show so far. I fully expect next week's episode to give us a much bigger "reveal" for the arc of the show and maybe glimpses into the true problems going on here. I sure hope so, anyway, because we're running out of time to get to that. (Watch, next week will be mostly another sitcom homage again).
Notes:
-Okay, time to rant about S.W.O.R.D. It was not clear how long S.W.O.R.D. has been around, but boy it did it certainly seem like it's been established for a while. This makes sense if Maria Rambeau had something to do with its establishment. The million-dollar question, of course, is where has S.W.O.R.D. been this whole time? We've absolutely dealt with extraterrestrials and cosmic space threats to this point in the MCU. If S.W.O.R.D. has been around for any amount of time, there's no reason they shouldn't have gotten involved at some point. My fear is that the writers will somehow imply that they were around working in the background this whole time. On a personal note, my wife already hates Captain Marvel because she wasn't around when, you know, aliens were attacking the Earth or for other catastrophic events throughout the MCU (I keep trying to tell her that she probably was busy or got bad reception on Fury's communication device that he gave her). I had less of a problem with Captain Marvel's absence, but I absolutely will throw my remote across the room and into the TV if S.W.O.R.D. supposedly has been around this whole time. Especially since I've seen Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and there was no mention of them (AoS SPOILERS: they did leave open the possibility that some of the agents from that show may appear later, possibly as S.W.O.R.D. agents).
-I worry that we're venturing into this fan-servicey territory where every innocent-looking character is potentially a greater, secret character. When they're going through the characters appearing on Wanda's show, she's pulling up their real profiles and realizes they are missing persons in true reality. This could be a bad sign for Wanda's motivations. And it didn't help in her final scene of the episode after revitalizing the "walking dead" version of Vision. "This is our home," Wanda says. "Don't worry, darling. I have everything under control." Clearly she wants to stay in her own world, eh?
-They pulled off the widescreen aspect ratio trick again to imply when things are back under Wanda's control.
-The nice things about watching an MCU show at home is having a pause button. I paused while Agent Woo was writing on the white board, and I caught that someone wrote "Skrulls" on the white board. Could there be some identity-theft shenanigans in the works?
-Crazy theory time: When Monica sent the helicopter into the town, only for it to disappear, it changed colors to fit Wanda's idea of a retro look, and when it came back out of the realm, it stayed the colors it changed into. This now makes me wonder if Dr. Strange is in on what's going on. Like, did he create this bubble to contain Wanda from continuing to hurt people? It seems like a different realm than, say, the mirror world, because things are truly affected, but I do get the sense that this realm wasn't initially created by Wanda; rather, Dr. Strange is trying to keep her under control while helping her out of whatever situation she's in. I'm sure I'm way off, but it'd be interesting if something like that was happening.