After eight long weeks, we’ve finally reached the end of WandaVision. Though many of the answers that we had at the beginning have been answered, we’re still left with many, many more. Some of those questions were answered by the finale, while others were left hanging, hopefully to be addressed at some point in the future. So, let’s recap the latest episode of WandaVision for the very last time.
If you need a quick recap of each of the episodes, make sure you check them all out here.
And the final caveat for everyone, this post is full of spoilers, so if you haven’t yet watched “The Series Finale,” why the heck not? Go do that and come on back here.
The episode picks up right at the end of the previous one, with Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) holding Billy (Julian Hilliard) and Tommy (Jett Klyne) hostage. She reiterates that Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) has no idea of the depths of her powers. She also reveals her motivations when she tells Wanda, “I take power from the undeserving.” When we glimpse into Agatha’s past, we saw her suck the power from her coven. Agatha wants to do the same to Wanda, to augment her own abilities.
Wanda throws a car at Agatha, which leads to one of my favorite moments in the episode. When Wanda investigates the car that crashed through a house, she sees Wanda’s boots sticking out of a pile of rubble in what I can only assume is a clever reference to The Wizard of Oz.
At that moment, Vision (Paul Bettany) appears. But not Wanda’s Vision; this is Hayward’s white Vision we saw in the post-credits scene of the previous episode. It tries to kill Wanda, but the true Vision swoops in to save her. They battle, rather fiercely, and white Vision tries to kill true Vision by tearing out the Mind Stone. As we’ve seen in Avengers: Endgame, this is the one true way to kill Vision.
Meanwhile, Monica (Teyonah Parris) watches the chaos from a nearby home, and we see that she’s being held prisoner by Pietro (Evan Peters). Monica tries to escape, but Pietro still has his superspeed and uses it to overpower her. It’s later revealed that “Pietro” is a pawn in Agatha’s game and is an actor named Ralph. This is likely the Ralph that Agatha referenced multiple times throughout the series. After this realization, Monica takes down Pietro/Ralph and uses her new powers to discover the charm Agatha is using to control him. She destroys it, setting him free from her control.
Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), stuck outside the hex, is in Hayward’s (Josh Stamberg) custody. He manages to get Hayward to talk about his plan, betting on the fact that the public would believe the Vision, his Vision, that emerges from Westview would be the true Vision, and that his actions to neutralize Wanda would be lauded. Unbeknownst to Hayward, Jimmy steals a cell phone and a safety pin and, when he’s left alone, frees himself from his handcuffs and calls for backup.
Agatha and Wanda continue to exchange blows, and Agatha tells Wanda that there’s an entire chapter dedicated to her in the Darkhold, what she calls “the book of the damned.” She manifests the Darkhold, and we see that it was indeed the mysterious book we saw in her basement at the end of episode 7. It’s an exciting revelation because it opens up so many avenues for future MCU properties and could possibly even tie itself to the upcoming Blade, The Vampire Slayer movie.
Reading from the Darkhold, Agatha tells Wanda that it’s her destiny to destroy the world. To emphasize her point, she frees the residents of Westview from Wanda’s control, allowing them to express the fear they’ve lived in for weeks for the first time. They surround Wanda, and, though they’re obviously scared of her, they tell her exactly how she imprisoned them. Wanda thought she was keeping them safe, but in reality, she allowed her grief to wash over them, making them feel every ounce of her pain. Wanda lashes out, almost killing everyone with her powers. When she realizes what she’s doing, Agatha tells Wanda that the only way to free them is to bring down the hex, so Wanda tries to do that.
However, bringing down the hex also affects her Vision and the twins. Their existence is tied to Wanda’s spell; without the one, the others disappear. So, Wanda is left with the choice of saving the innocents or sacrificing the life she made for herself.
This also proves that the Vision we know was always an illusion, something that we were told back in the second episode. For Wanda and Vision’s magic act, they choose stage names. Wanda was known as “Glamour,” while Vision called himself “Illusion.” Though the names were a reference to one of the pair’s comic stories, the show was telling us all along what was happening.
Once the hex starts coming down, Hayward moves his troops in and surrounds Wanda and Vision. Billy, having seen the trouble unfolding, convinces Tommy that they have to help. The boys use their powers to subdue the military, freezing the troops and taking their guns away from them.
Hayward uses this moment to shoot at them, but Monica throws herself in front of the bullets. The bullets pass through her, being slowed by her powers and falling helplessly to the ground. Though a stray bullet gets past her, Billy uses his magic to stop it. Hayward then jumps in a Jeep, intent to escape, but Darcy (Kat Dennings) T-bones the Jeep with her funnel cake truck, immobilizing him and leaving him with a jaunty, “Have fun in prison!”
When White Vision tells Vision that his programming directive is to destroy Vision, Vision “defeats” it by confusing it. He poses the thought experiment of “the ship of Theseus.” In the experiment, Theseus’s ship sits in a museum. As the boards age and rot, they are replaced with new boards, until all of the wood is brand new. Is it, at the point, still the ship of Theseus? White Vision realizes that, though he has all of the original “boards” of Vision, he does not have the “rot,” or the memories of experiences of Vision. So, in essence, neither of them is the true Vision, while both of them are the “true” Vision. Vision then clears the blocks to White Vision’s memory banks and it undergoes a change once it can access those memories. Free from Hayward’s control, White Vision flies off.
Agatha offers to fix Wanda’s hex if she just gives up her magic. Wanda, fed up with everything, flings hex bolts at her, telling her to “take it, I don’t want it.” It’s a power-filled final battle, and little by little, Agatha drains the chaos magic from Wanda, leaving her a withered shell. But just as Agatha goes to deliver the final blow, she’s powerless. Wanda managed to put her new education of magic to use and etched a few protection runes into the shell of the hex, rendering Agatha powerless. It’s a great “Chekov’s Gun” moment, and also proves that Wanda is capable of learning about her powers in order to master them.
Wanda accepts her destiny and the chaos magic flows through her, transforming her into the Scarlet Witch. It’s an exciting moment for comic book fans like myself who were looking forward to Wanda becoming the powerhouse we know her to be. She even has a sweet new costume that’s more along the lines of her comic book outfit. Man oh man, I really hope there’s a line of WandaVision Marvel Legends figures in the future because I want a Scarlet Witch so badly.
After Wanda defeats Agatha, she sentences her to an existence she’d chosen, that of the nosey neighbor, Agnes. Agatha would rather die than spend life as a regular person, but that doesn’t stop Wanda.
Wanda then starts bringing down the hex barrier, closing it in on itself slowly. As everything begins to return to normal, she and Vision take the boys home for one final night. They tuck the twins in, wishing them a tender, heart-wrenching good night, before retiring into the living room for their own, personal moment.
Vision wants to know how she was able to revive him. Wanda explains that he’s the piece of the Mind Stone that gave her powers and was created by her sadness and her hope. It’s truly a heartbreaking goodbye. Knowing Wanda created this “reality” for herself to have one shred of normalcy in her life after losing everyone she’s ever cared about… to have all of those taken from her is hard to watch.
After the hex drops, Wanda makes her way back to the center of town where she makes amends with Monica before flying away.
But wait! There’s a couple of post-credits scenes in this episode. The first finds Jimmy taking control of the crime scene, and Hayward is led away in handcuffs. An FBI agent approaches Monica to be debriefed and leads her into the movie theater. Away from the crowd, the agent says she was sent by an old friend of Monica’s mother and reveals herself to be a Skrull. The Skrull says, “he would like to meet with you. Monica asks where and the Skrull points up. We’re left to assume that the “friend” is Nick Fury and that he wants to recruit Monica for the outer space station that we see him in in the post credits scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home.
The second scene happens after the standard eighteen minutes of credits. Wanda is alone in an idyllic cabin in the middle of nowhere. She makes herself some tea, and the camera continues to truck deeper into the cabin. Soon it reveals the Scarlet Witch studying the Darkhold. The voices of Billy and Tommy ring through her mind, shouting for help. It’s a great setup to what many comic fans have speculated: that Billy and Tommy will become founding members of a new super team, the Young Avengers. This is also probably the lead-up to Wanda’s next appearance in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. We know Elizabeth Olsen stars in the film and an unstable Wanda in control of the Book of the Damned is just the kind of threat Doctor Strange’s talents would help with. Right now, I’m definitely curious about what’s in store for Wanda, and I’m already salivating over the release of the next Doctor Strange flick.
WandaVision has been a hell of a ride from beginning to end and left most of us guessing at every turn. Many of the fan theories turned out to be true, while others never came to fruition. But it’s the sign of a fun show when fans can have many of their predictions just be completely eradicated, but fans are still left amazed by the end result.
I, for one, was absolutely blown away by WandaVision. I loved Wanda’s evolution and the emotional rollercoaster she rode to get there. It had many genuinely funny moments and many genuinely sad moments. Though this seems to be the end for the WandaVision series proper, hopefully, Scarlet Witch will be given other long-form narratives in the future and not be relegated to the secondary cast.
