Wandavision

 For the first time in over a year, the MCU is back, though on the small screen, with a project that feels like it could only ever come on the small screen.

Wandavision, I think, is a show of Marvel Studios taking the good will they've earned over 12 years of consistent (at least eventually) fun and well-made, if also consistently conventional superhero movies, and doing something far stranger than they have in the past. Though I was never a big superhero comics fan, I am a big fan of the MCU's cinematic adaptations, due in large part to the emphasis on likable and interesting characters that make all the action feel more meaningful.

But this kind of mind-fuckery is probably my favorite kind of story to get into, and Wandavision looks like it will be going to some very strange places.

That being said, it's a slow burn. The first episode is presented almost entirely without comment, as a 1950s domestic sitcom. Wanda and Vision are a newlywed couple who have moved into a nice new home, and we get a lot of hoary 50s-sitcom-style jokes (that are nevertheless delivered and written well enough to actually garner some genuine laughs) that also refer to the fact that she's magic and he's some kind of sci-fi robot.

The episode mostly focuses on a sitcom-style plot, in which they find a date on the calendar (today, naturally) that is circled with a heart, but neither can remember what the heart is meant to signify. While Wanda plans a romantic anniversary celebration with the help of friendly (and I'm sure actually super-evil) neighbor Agnes, Vision realizes that he's having his boss, Mr. Hart, over to dinner - a high stakes dinner that could mean a promotion if it goes well or losing his job if it doesn't.

Hilarity ensues as Wanda and Vision have to try to re-jigger their romantic evening to be a more formal affair with guests. And then, as Wanda serves breakfast for dinner, Mr. Hart begins to choke.

Up until this moment, everything has been shot from the classic multi-camera sitcom style. But here, the camera closes in, and we have a brief moment of Lynchian (I've hear multiple people compare this scene to David Lynch's stuff, and I suspect Lynch will be a major influence on the show, given that he's one of the foremost artistic critics of 50s Americana) horror as Mr. Hart jokes and his wife (played by Debra Jo Rupp, always excellent) simply laughs awkwardly and tells him to "stop it" as if he were doing something embarrassing. Vision phases through Mr. Hart's throat to extract the obstruction, and Mr. Hart gets up, coughs, and seems none the worse for wear - the dinner party has been a success, and the sitcom format is restored.

The episode is an exercise in subtle tension. You can genuinely get swept up in the 50s sitcom plot, laughing at the jokes and the charming stars. But we all know that something is going on under the surface here, and when the cracks in the facade show, the possibility of something weird, and quite possibly sinister, poke through.

Roughly midway through the episode, there's a commercial break advertising some new kind of toaster from Stark Industries. In demonstrating said toaster, the light on it begins to blink red - the only color we've seen in the whole episode, and the sound it makes is certainly not what you'd expect from a toaster. The Stark Industries (here, at least) slogan is something like "Forget your past. This is your future," which is a bit off for the kind of gee-whiz super-science that you might expect the 50s version of that company's outlook.

When the episode ends, we see a set of fake credits, but then we see that this is being watched on some monitor elsewhere, and someone seems to be taking notes.

The show is playing the long game, but it's very clear that something odd is going on. First and foremost, let us not forget that Vision is dead - he died in Infinity War, and there's nothing to indicate that he was brought back in Tony Stark's counter-snap (given that Vision died shortly before the original snap, it would seem he wasn't covered under "bring everyone who got snapped away back").

While the Lynchian moment of Mr. Hart and his wife seeming to get stuck, like automatons, suggests that the other people in this sitcom reality aren't really people, I suspect that the heartbreaking reveal will be that Vision, likewise, is not real either. I suspect that Wanda really is the primary protagonist here, and the decision she'll have to make is whether to forsake reality to stay with the... strange robot-man she loves, or to accept that he's gone and leave her lotus-eater machine.