WandaVision Series Finale Review

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Lucas Pari, Sport's Editor

Marvel’s “WandaVision” took the world by storm when it released on Disney+ on January 15th, 2021. The series takes place three weeks after the events of “Avenger: Endgame” and follows Wanda and Vision living in the suburban neighborhood of Westview, New Jersey, where they try to conceal their powers as they travel in between the decades and parody famous tv shows. The show became an instant hit, much like other Disney+ original series such as “The Mandalorian” and had the majority of fans and casual viewers alike hooked. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The finale for “WandaVision”, unlike the finale for “The Mandalorian”, left a lot of people, including myself, feeling dissatisfied. Up to that point, the series, I feel had done a good job during the build-up to the finale. The show had viewers hooked, and the intensity and intrigue hit in my opinion in Episode 5, where Evan Peters’ Quicksilver was introduced. Evan Peters, as pretty much everyone knows, played Quicksilver in the X-Men Universe back when the X-Men movies were being made by 20th Century Fox. In the MCU, Quicksilver (Wanda’s brother) was played by Aaron Taylor Johnson in his one and only appearance in 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, where he died protecting Hawkeye and a young Sokovian child. When Evan Peters showed up as Quicksilver, people began to believe that this would be how Marvel would introduce the X-Men into the MCU. However, it was revealed in Episode 8 that Agatha Harkness was controlling her supposed husband, the as yet unseen Ralph, and parading him around as Quicksilver to fool Wanda. In the finale, Monica Rambeau is captured by Ralph, who is giving the powers of Quicksilver by Agatha when he wears a certain magical necklace. Rambeau soon finds out Ralph’s identity as Ralph Bohner, and she soon defeats him. Yep, instead of introducing the X-Men, they turned that opportunity into a boner joke. Now I don’t think that people should get angry just because their fan theories didn’t come true, it’s easy to see that Marvel was baiting people into creating theories by casting Evan Peters. The show does this pretty frequently, constantly hinting at an appearance from Mephisto (Marvel’s version of Satan) but never actually showing him.

The finale of the show itself is quite anti-climactic. The does a very good job at building up to the finale, but when the finale actually comes, it feels extremely rushed and poorly written. the special effects are great obviously but the story of the fights between Wanda and Agatha and Vision and Spectral Vision holds a lot less weight than they should. The Vison and Spectral Vision fight is great when it’s on-screen but it doesn’t hold much emotional depth and it just kind of ends when Vision supposedly gives Spectral Vision a sense of humanity and Spectral Vision just flies away with no explanation. Monica Rambeau (a.k.a. Photon) also is displayed as having powers, however, her powers are never explained, and she just shows up wherever the plot needs her to. One positive I would give the finale is that it nails the emotional aspects of the story, and both Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda) and Paul Bettany (Vision) give great performances, and I believe the ending works well for the series, regardless of the many issues that it presents. The finale as a whole left me dissatisfied, but not angry. I felt that it closed out the series well, but it did not meet my expectations or the expectations of others. For a show that was very well-written throughout the rest of the series, the finale lacked creativity and a lot of what made the rest of the show so enjoyable. The show overall gets a 7.5/10 for me and the finale gets a 5/10.