We’re in the home stretch with WandaVision and the pace is starting to pick up. There’s a lot to unpack this week so let’s get right to it.

_{Seriously. Spoilers galore are coming. You’ve been warned.}

Episode Seven takes the form of the mockumentary style sitcom, in this
case, a pretty direct homage to Modern Family. It begins with Wanda in bed, with it cutting to her direct address to the camera talking about how “We’ve all been there, letting anger get the best of us and intentionally expanding the boundary of the false world we created”. She also says that she is going to be spending the day alone.

The twins try to rouse Wanda from bed because their “game is freaking out”. A cut to the kids playing video games reveals the controllers they are using, shifting from Wii controllers to Nintendo 64 controllers to Atari 2600 controllers and just being Uno cards. Billy also complains to Wanda that it’s really noisy in his head. When she comes downstairs and makes herself a bowl of cereal, the milk keeps shifting forms as well. In a direct address to the camera, she confesses that she doesn’t know what’s going on.

The credits sequence this time is all about her as well, with multiple images of just her name; on a cake, skywriting, a shop sign, a license plate, and a ransom note that reads, “I know what you are doing, Wanda”.

At the new S.W.O.R.D. Camp, Hayward surveys the hex, which is now enormous and is told that the broadcast is no longer happening. He orders that everything be in place for them to launch today—presumably either a missile strike or an assault of some kind.

Inside the hex, Vision wakes up in the middle of the circus that used to be the S.W.O.R.D. Base. A strongman tells him he’s late for rehearsal with the escape artist, which turns out to be Darcy, now a character in Westview.

Back at the house, Wanda asks the kids if they have seen their father, and they say no and ask if they can look for him. She replies that if he doesn’t want to be there, then there is nothing that she can do about that. The boys also ask about what Pietro had said about “re-killing dad”, and she quickly tells them to disregard everything he ever said because he is not their uncle. When the kids ask who he is, Wanda confesses that she does not have any answers for them and starts to think everything is meaningless. At that moment, Anges shows up and offers to take the kids and give Wanda a day to herself. She promises the kids she doesn’t bite, and then in a direct address, confesses that she did bite a kid once.

As soon as the kids are gone, she starts to relax, but the furniture changes from the modern versions of this setting to previous incarnations. She fixes them, and in a direct address, tries to convince the viewers that she is fine. Spoiler alert, she isn’t.

Back outside the hex Jimmy Woo and Monica Rambeau are driving to meet her aerospace engineer friend. Reading the files that Darcy sent to them last week, they discover that Hayward was actually trying to bring Vision back online, which explains why he’s so focussed on Vision now. They meet up with a friend, who turns out to be a woman called Major Goodner, who I have never heard of before.

Goodner is here with a heavily armoured vehicle, and Rambeau immediately suits up and drives it straight toward the hex.

Back at the circus, after a brief exchange, Vision frees Darcy’s mind, and she has noticeably less trauma than the other people we’ve seen freed. They make their escape from the circus in an ice cream truck, with Darcy doing her best to answer Vision’s questions. The first most interesting of which is that he asks who the imposter Pietro is.

Back at the house, Wanda seems to be slowly losing more and more control over her surroundings and, in a direct address, reveals she doesn’t know why. Someone off-camera asks if she thinks she deserves this, to which she replies with confusion because she knows they aren’t supposed to talk.

This weeks commercial plays, and it is an advertisement for an antidepressant called “Nexus”. This actually has a couple of major implications, so we’ll circle back to that in a bit.

At Agnes house, Agnes re-assures the twins that they don’t have to worry about their mother, but then in a direct address lets us know that she doesn’t want to tell the kids that their mother is “cuckoo for cocoa puffs”.

As Rambeau drives the space rover toward the hex, Major Goodner tells Jimmy Woo that the thing should sail right through the barrier. Of course, it does not. It is expelled from the barrier, with the front half turned into a minivan. Rambeau manages to scramble out before this happens but then immediately jumps into the barrier herself. She pushes her way through, and while the barrier splits her into her various incarnations from before, she is able to keep herself whole and emerges on the other side with her eyes glowing and the ability to see energy.

In the ice cream truck, Darcy fills Vision in on his history (which he still doesn’t remember) and that Wanda had to watch him die twice, once when she killed him and again when Thanos rewound time and killed him again. He takes off through to find her.

Rambeau makes it to Wanda and confronts her with the idea that Wanda is running away from her pain and shouldn’t be. Just when it seems Rambeau is getting through to her, Agnes shows up and takes Wanda to her home. Wanda notices that the kids aren’t there and goes snooping for them and finds a room in the basement covered in vines. There’s a glowing book on a shelf, and now that the jig is up, Agnes enters the room holding Senior Scratchy, reveals herself as the witch Agatha Harkness, and zaps Wanda with a blast of purple magic to the mind and we get a delightful montage that reveals Agatha as having been manipulating things all along.

In a mid-credits scene, Rambeau is caught by the false Pietro just as she finds Agatha’s basement.

First off, let me say that I would have liked this episode more if I had ever watched Modern Family. I love The Office and Parks and Rec, but this felt a little off to me, almost certainly due to a context that I lack.

Second, it’s nice that we finally have some idea of who the villains are in this thing. Agatha Harkess, come on down! I love Kathryn Hahn, and she has been fun this whole series, but now that she’s out as a villain, she goes fully arch, and it’s pretty fun. It’s slightly over the top, but in a way that I like.

The glowing book we see in the scene could be one of just about any magical book in the Marvel universe because there are many of them. Remember Doctor Strange? The wizards of Kamar-Taj have a whole library of them. The most famous of these from the comics is probably the Darkhold, but that already appeared in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Now, that shows continuity with the MCU is debatable now, but if we’re really opening up the multiverse, who knows what can happen. What I am saying is that I don’t have a good guess what book that is.

Either way, in the comics, it turns out that the twins that Wanda manifests in a reality that she created end up being pieces of the soul of Mephisto, the literal devil in the Marvel universe. We still haven’t seen Ralph, Agnes/Agatha’s off-screen husband, but maybe she’s trying to bring him into being in the MCU? Or, let’s be honest, there are a ton of demons and dark figures in the marvel comics, so it could be any of them, but Mephisto seems like a good bet.

We finally see Monica Rambeau with superpowers as well. Her third time through the barrier seems to have turned her into her Spectrum persona. Her powers include being able to see and become any form of energy, as well as channel that energy to make herself stronger and fly and such. The dialogue that we hear over her trip through the barrier is from Captain Marvel, including Nick Fury’s line about “learning to glow like your aunt Carol”.

One important note here, too: When she emerges from the barrier newly empowered, she can see all the energy in the hex, and all that energy is purple. Wanda’s energy is red; it’s Agatha’s that is purple, further implying that Agatha has been insidiously manipulating every aspect of life inside the hex.

Still, no word on the witness that Jimmy Woo originally came to Westview to find, but we do get an obvious shot of both Emma Caulfield’s Dottie and the mailman Denis noticing the confrontation between Wanda and Rambeau.

Another loose plot thread is what exactly Hayward and S.W.O.R.D. are going to launch, and even who Hayward is. We now know that project Cataract (cataracts obscure your vision, see what they did there?) as a project to repair Vision. S.W.O.R.D. is a division that monitors sentient weapons, so that makes sense. Hayward had previously said that the agency shifted focus from space to robotics in the post-snap world that also makes sense.

So here’s a wild theory: what if Hayward is actually Ultron. It would explain the fixation with Vision, whose body we are reminded was created by Ultron for himself.

One last thing, I speculated last week that Rambeau’s engineer friend would turn out to be a Skrull, and I was certainly wrong (or, you know, maybe not), but I do love that it just turned out to be a S.W.O.R.D. operative that is loyal to Monica’s mother.

Last but not least, the commercial this week has some pretty big implications. In the comics, there is a place called the Nexus of All Realities, which is a literal gateway to the multiverse, and there are beings (of which Wanda is one) called Nexus Beings, which are unique in that they are constants, they are the same across all realities. Since the woman in the commercial is an obvious representation of Wanda in the episode, I guess Wanda is both of those things. Or at least that Wanda is the key to the multiverse. My bet is that Agatha is trying to exploit that now, and Doctor Strange will need to use it in the forthcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

There are two episodes left of the series, and we are definitely in the Endgame now. The kids are missing, Vision is on his way to Wanda, Agatha is manipulating Wanda, Hayward is about to launch something at the Hex, and Rambeau is in some trouble being confronted by not-Pietro.

I have no idea what will happen, but I bet we get a display of Rambeau’s superpowers and the reveal of who Agatha is is trying ultimately working for soon.

Other thoughts:

• The kids fighting over the game controller and Billy complaining that Tommy “always gets their first” made me chuckle.
• The kids’ outfits also match the colours of their comic book costumes.
• I should probably watch Modern Family, right?

WandaVision Coverage:

1. Review of episodes 1-3: ‘WandaVision’ is delightfully weird and intriguing
2. Recap: Episode One: “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience”
3. Recap: Episode Two: “Don’t Touch That Dial”
4. Recap: Episode Three: “Now in Color”
5. Recap: Episode Four: “We Interrupt This Program”
6. Recap: Episode Five: “On A Very Special Episode…”
7. Recap: Episode Six: “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!”
8. Recap: Episode Seven: “Breaking the Fourth Wall”
9. Recap: Episode Eight: “Previously On”
10. Recap: Episode Nine: “The Series Finale”

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