*Contains Spoilers*
The lift gets lifted on (at least part of) the puzzle box in the latest episode of the Marvel Studios Disney+ show. Ditching the sitcom setups that have characterised the first three episodes, episode four is all about setting up the deeper links and details of what’s going around outside the cuddly sitcom environment of Westview, revealing just who is watching along with us.
In the last episode, new neighbour Geraldine (Teyonah Parris) was thrown out of the town and back into reality after dropping the name Ultron to Wanda, after the birth of her new twin boys. Geraldine, who is in actual fact Monica Rambeau, the daughter of Captain Marvel’s best friend Maria Rambeau, and agent of SWORD (a space version of SHIELD, basically), takes the initial focus on this episode. We’re taken back a few months to reveal Monica re-emerging from The Blip to find five years have passed, her mother has died and SWORD has moved on without her. Keen to get back to work, she takes an assignment helping out the FBI (Ant Man and The Wasp’s Randall Park) with a missing persons case in the town of Westview, where it quickly becomes apparent that something strange is going on.
When Monica gets pulled through the shimmering border that surrounds the town, agents of SWORD quickly descend to set up a perimeter to begin their investigation. Brought in to help is one Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), who manages to find a way to tap into a mysterious broadcast that’s coming out from the town in the form of old-fashioned sitcom episodes starring Wanda and Vision.
Those that got a kick out of seeing WandaVision adapt to different sitcom stylings will have to wait another week to have more of that, but for now the wrappings are now coming away to reveal a show that looks and feels more like an MCU movie. This is an episode certainly designed to colour in some of the blanks that some viewers were already beginning to find frustrating (as Twitter seems to have revealed). It does mean that this episode is much less intriguingly weird than the previous three, and it is a little underwhelming that it introduces so much of what’s happening in reality in one go.
That being said though, the show still has a great deal of fun going back over the previous three episodes as we see Dennings’ Darcy and Park’s Agent Woo effectively play the part of Marvel fans, watching each episode. They’re sat there with a notepad and a bag of chips in front of the TV discussing theories and making connections with what they know about previous events that have happened in the MCU timeline. I’m sure every Marvel fan watching the show can relate somewhat to that experience. The pairing of Dennings and Park is also a treat, as both have a very funny and witty rapport with each other, giving a light-hearted Mulder and Scully vibe that should be fun to see fleshed out more, either here or in other MCU properties.
It is also very satisfying to see Parris have more screen time as Monica Rambeau. Parris has long been a very charismatic actress, and seeing her finally revealed as Monica is very exciting, particularly when considering she is likely to have a bigger part in the MCU as a whole going forward (she is confirmed to appear in Captain Marvel 2). Her scene where she returns from the The Blip in the middle of hospital that is thrown into a panic due to a huge number of people suddenly reappearing has an eerie timeliness to it, mirroring news reports that we see everyday of hospitals at over-capacity dealing with COVID patients. Parris plays the scene with an excellent measure of panic and disbelief, making it an important scene that adds an extra human dimension to a significant event in the MCU.
I certainly missed the dynamic between Olsen and Bettany in this episode, who are largely only present through scenes we have already seen. But one particularly eerie image near the end of this episode throws us back into Wanda’s clearly troubled state of mind, demonstrating that it may still take some doing to reach out and pull Wanda back from the world she has seemingly constructed for herself. Some question marks remain, however, as to whether there may yet be a darker force at work, meaning that while this episode does fill in some of the blanks, there are still plenty of corners of this puzzle box still curiously in the dark.
