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WANDAVISION (Massive Spoiler Thread)


JonnyLaw

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Digging this so far, thought it definitely kicked up a gear this week. Loved seeing how actions in the real world affected the Wanda world. Its definitely more interesting in the uneasy moments, but the cheesy stuff around it makes those moments stand out more so, while they may not be "funny" they certainly play their part. I did laugh out loud at Park's card trick though. 

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This was the first episode my wife watched and she basically said she would totally be into if every episode was like that. It helped that it tied in pieces from the MCU at large.

I am simpleton so I like when even obvious things are done - like even the name of the episode.

I much prefer Jimmy Woo as the comic relief (with Darcy helping out)

 

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On 1/29/2021 at 4:24 PM, Casey said:

If all of those clips are from the next episode, then they're RAPIDLY moving through the sitcom decades thing now. I see Modern Family and 80s/90s style shows spliced throughout it.

The description when you go the Youtube page is "Check out this sneak peak of what's in store for Wanda and Vision in the second half of the first season of Wandavision." so it won't all be just the next episode.

That being said - the next episode has to be at least a hour long if they are going to meet the original length they said the series was going to be

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I mean, episode 4 was basically just a cop procedural.  That’s a format that everybody gets and most people find enjoyable.  

If you weren’t already deeply into the MCU, the first 3 episodes really didn’t give you much to grab hold of or care about.  Just a lot of meta-hijinx without any clear protagonists or discernible character motivations.

But NCIS: Marvel?  Monica, Jimmy, and Darcy have to solve a mystery? That’s an easy thing for people to wrap their arms around.

I honestly think the first 3 eps would’ve been better served if some of (if not most of) the stuff from episode 4 had been incorporated into them.

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53 minutes ago, EVA said:

I mean, episode 4 was basically just a cop procedural.  That’s a format that everybody gets and most people find enjoyable.  

If you weren’t already deeply into the MCU, the first 3 episodes really didn’t give you much to grab hold of or care about.  Just a lot of meta-hijinx without any clear protagonists or discernible character motivations.

But NCIS: Marvel?  Monica, Jimmy, and Darcy have to solve a mystery? That’s an easy thing for people to wrap their arms around.

I honestly think the first 3 eps would’ve been better served if some of (if not most of) the stuff from episode 4 had been incorporated into them.

It's the first show on Disney+ but the way the MCU works, they're not expecting people to be watching this coming in cold. I know a handful of people who have no connection to the Marvel movies that anecdotally really enjoyed the sitcom-with-creepy-undertones vibes of the first three episodes, but let's give them some credit in that they were trying to do something unique and different and create a certain mood by leaning very deep into something. It's ok to think it didn't hit or didn't work because the jokes weren't funny enough; that's ok. But it's a little disappointing to say that the show shouldn't have used all of the goodwill of the MCU and the fact they're doing something in a different medium to try to experiment in the first place.

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On 1/9/2021 at 4:38 PM, The Natural said:

Today I went on Disney+ for the first time since September before WandaVision starts next week. To my surprise I find Agents of SHIELD Season 7 is there, 10/13 episodes! I did a search online to find the first two episodes arrived on 13th of November 2020 with a new episode every week. I'd have started earlier had I known. Great that I'll get to see it!

The 13th and final episode of Agents of SHIELD Season 7 was added this Friday so all of S7 is there. Thought I'd wait for that to happen before watching.

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Is there anyone watching WandaVision who isn’t at least somewhat into the MCU? 
 

I mean, there are people like my parents that see a rerun of Breaking Bad playing on AMC and watch the show for the first time with like episode 5 of season 4. But, at this point, if you’re watching a MCU property, I think they assume you’re familiar with the previous films, etc. 

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I mean, I think the fact that they threw up a late-breaking episode 4 trailer that screamed “WE PROMISE WE’RE GETTING TO THE POINT NOW,” after playing coy the whole way until then, suggest that there was at least some alarm on Disney’s end, based on the viewership trends they were seeing through the first two weeks, that people were bouncing off this show in concerning numbers.  (Obviously, we’ll never know, because streaming.  But there has undeniably been a radical shift in how they’ve been promoting it in the past week.)

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It’s just funny seeing all this doom and gloom, and like @Matt Dtalked about with his wife, my wife has been really enjoying the show.  She’s seen a couple Marvel things, but she’s in no way invested in the Wanda and Vision characters. 
 

I enjoy the show. It’s cool if you’re not really digging it, @EVA.  There just seems to be this trend where people don’t enjoy something and then try to find all kinds of evidence that the thing is obviously a failure. 

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I think anyone would be hard pressed to call it a failure (without access to Disney’s data, anyway).  

I just think that the first 3 episodes, while they had their charms, were fundamentally busted on a storytelling level, and that all the ways that episode 4 really worked on a fundamental level (and point towards a more promising latter half of the season) really underscore how badly they biffed their conceptualization of the show’s first act (and also how easy it would’ve been to fix those problems by just moving some things around).

Hopefully, they have made all their mistakes early (unlike the aforementioned DEXTER season 6), and now that we have an actual protagonist with clear motivations pushing the story forward, we’re going to be in for a much better ride the rest of the way.

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The thing is, nothing about what happened in episode 4 really burned any of the major mysteries at the core of the show (exactly what is going on in Westview* and why, and how it can be stopped).  All it really did was backfill some small details that ultimately really proved to not be that important, other than to obscure what was going on outside (the nature of the radio broadcast, the toy helicopter, the beekeeper, who was watching on TV, etc.).  All the major questions are still in play.

It really takes nothing away from the mysteries at the heart of the show if you know that Geraldine is Monica, that Jimmy is on the radio, that Darcy is watching, that some poor man nobody cares about is the beekeeper, etc.  In fact, it actually adds drama and suspense to those scenes (which the first 3 episodes were largely devoid of) if you know what our protagonists are doing in those scenes, because then the viewer is asking questions like “Is this going to work?” or “Are they going to figure it out?” rather than just “WTF?,” which are much more emotionally engaging places to be, narratively.  Again, one of the reasons I think this episode resonated so strongly is because people LIKE figuring out mysteries alongside characters who are also trying to solve the mysteries.  Tale as old as TV, and then some.  It just becomes a more narratively engaging show and fundamentally sound story if you at least comprehend the SWORD side of the story earlier on.

*”It’s Wanda” I guess counts as a major reveal (in the mind of the show, at least, even if that was clear to pretty much everybody watching from the jump), but it very easily fits back into its place at the end of episode 3.  Nothing from episode 4 filled in any additional information needed to get Monica to that conclusion.

Edited by EVA
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On 1/31/2021 at 1:21 PM, EVA said:

I just think that the first 3 episodes, while they had their charms, were fundamentally busted on a storytelling level, and that all the ways that episode 4 really worked on a fundamental level (and point towards a more promising latter half of the season) really underscore how badly they biffed their conceptualization of the show’s first act (and also how easy it would’ve been to fix those problems by just moving some things around).

I don’t think there’s any way that episode 4 works the way it did without the first three episodes being the way they were. If you’re saying 1-3 should have been more like 4, then as Matt said, that’s an entirely different show.

I don’t think the “reaction” to the show caused them to rethink how they put together preview clips for the internet. If anything, I’d be willing to bet they fully expected any such reaction, which is why they released the first two episodes at once. That way, they only spent two weeks setting up the mystery.

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7 hours ago, The Natural said:

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Any one have any idea what the design on Darcy’s outfit references? Between that and the helicopter spotlight shining on her in the last poster, I’m officially intrigued.

ETA: I also just noticed the beekeeper in the last poster. Not quite a character shot, but not a background image either.

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Something that occurred to me the other day and has fascinated me ever since, vis a vis how much someone has to know in order to care about or be invested in WANDAVISION:

Let’s say you’re an MCU fan, but not an avid comic reader (which I imagine accounts for the vast majority of the people who watch these movies)...how much do you *actually* care about the Wanda/Vision relationship?  I mean, just based on what was in the movies.

Because pretty much their entire relationship occurred off-screen, in between movies.  

We see them beginning to develop an affection for each other in CIVIL WAR, but that’s all; they don’t actually get together...and then the next time we see them, in INFINITY WAR, they’ve been in a relationship for two years, they get like one scene that’s actually about them as a couple, then Vision dies.  They had barely 15 minutes of screen time together prior to this show.  We never saw them *actually* fall in love, never even really got to know them as a romantic pair...And yet now the Mouse has invested $100 million in a show that’s all about processing the grief of the end of this relationship that we saw, maybe, 2% of in the movies.

That’s wild shit.  Like, that might be a crazier gambit than what they tried to do with the first 3 episodes.  Like, “You know that old storytelling rule about showing, not telling?  Well, we’re going to do the exact opposite of that, then bet a small country’s GDP that it won’t matter because our brand is all that matters.”

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Not to beat a dead horse, but that’s another reason why it was worth establishing their dynamic over the course of the first few episodes.  My mom watched them despite having only seen some of the Iron Man movies, so those eps established their relationship using familiar tropes while laying the weirdness groundwork. (I don’t think she’s watched the fourth episode yet, and I’ll imagine she’ll be weirded the fuck out by Vision’s head.

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i didn't like episode 4 that much.  i hated pretty much everything about the earth shit from the first two Thor movies and Kat Dennings brand of humor needed to stay in phase 1.  

i still love the show as a whole i just hope it stays more in Wanda's world and less alphabet boys comedy.  

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