WandaVision - Episode 8: "Previously On"

We’re going back in time to discover Wanda’s full origin — and Agatha’s — as we break down WandaVision Episode 8, “Previously On.” Held captive by Agatha Harkness, Wanda Maximoff is forced to relive the most traumatic moments of her life: trapped with Pietro in Sokovia; getting her powers from the Mind Stone and HYDRA; the aftermath of Avengers: Age of Ultron and falling in love with Vision; and discovering Vision’s body post-Avengers: Endgame at SWORD. And this all leads up to a revelation about Wanda’s powers that changes everything. From Chaos Magic, to White Vision, to Scarlet Witch, we’re breaking down all of the WandaVision Easter eggs, Marvel Comics spoilers, and much more from WandaVision Episode 8.

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Full Episode Transcript

Justin:              Zoom, good. I can’t believe I’m hiding in here specifically, so I wouldn’t be bothered.

Alex:                 Ready?

Justin:              Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Alex:                 We’ll clap, right? Three, two, one. Feels like a little peekaboo.

Justin:              Yeah.

Alex:                 One second. Welcome to Marvel Vision, a podcast about Marvel, the MCU, and specifically right now, WandaVision. I’m Alex.

Justin:              I’m Justin coming at you live from the most adult Marvel place I can, my daughter’s bedroom. I got the unicorn balloon popping in the background. We are ready to go.

Alex:                 So here’s what we’re fighting about taping these early episodes. Before we get in and talk about episode eight, “Previously On”, and this will give you enough time to go watch the episode, check it out because we’re spoiling the heck out of it. Typically, this early in the morning, sometimes you tape stuff right in your daughter’s bedroom. Sometimes one of you Pete, over sleeps.

Justin:              Could be, that could be. Marvel Vision is what happens when you get up too early in the morning on a Friday to watch TV. You have to develop Marvel Vision.

Alex:                 Exactly. In case I wasn’t totally clear, Pete our third member did in fact oversleep. So we are taping this without him. I’m sure he will have many thoughts once he finally wakes up luxuriously at 10:00 AM. Has his brunch breakfast, he usually has five eggs and two biscuits, I believe.

Justin:              I can’t believe he can’t wake up this early. I’m up, like five, four or five in the morning everyday just to check and see if WandaVision has been premiered. Even on a Monday or Tuesday, my calisthenics, prepare my farm-fresh breakfast that I send out to Pete.

Alex:                 I’ll tell you what, I didn’t sleep last night. I just kept waking up and now I’m totally jazzed because the title of the episode was previously on and I guessed it. I called it.

Justin:              I was going to say, Alex credit to you. So you couldn’t sleep because you were so excited about getting the title right?

Alex:                 I was nervous honestly. I was lying there, my brain going up like, what if it has this other title? What of the other title? What if I get it wrong this time? It’s not going to be previous now. This is going to damage my reputation for real.

Justin:              Your shattered reputation. You’ve never guessed correctly yet so far. So this is [inaudible 00:02:47]

Alex:                 I did get now in color. So at this point, I have a two out of eight, which is 25%, which is like, I’m going to say what, B+, A, is that how that works?

Justin:              I believe that is how That’s grading works. It’s been so long. Let me ask ne of my daughters that I know that will be bursting in here any minute.

Alex:                 What other shout out that I want to make? An actual shout out before we get in and talk about the episode, a shout out to Rachel Thompson who plays Major Goodner on the show popped up in the last episode. Watched her last episode on YouTube and posted a little clip on her Twitter and was very nice about it. So thank you for that. That was a very cool surprise.

Justin:              We called her out as the big reveal, which she clearly was because she’s such a nice person.

Alex:                 There you go. Surprise. People are nice sometimes. Let’s get into this episode. This is a big one, the overall plot, as you could probably guess from the title and also hopefully again, watching it.

Justin:              From watching it. It’s not called a guest when he just watched something and then know it.

Alex:                 That’s very true.

Justin:              It’s the ultimate guess.

Alex:                 This is the big reveal episode, we walk through Wanda’s entire history with the MCU, get a bunch of recoms there thanks to Agatha Harkness, Kathryn Hahn, officially playing witch, straight up, not like, “I’m a science witch.” But, “I’m a witch.”

Justin:              Actually, Salem based witch.

Alex:                 Yeah, walks her through her history, therapy style to try to find out how Wanda pulled off the Hex. A lot of the things that we thought were true, turned out to be true. We were talking about this actually before we came on. So let’s broad strokes before we get into any specifics, Easter eggs theories or anything like that. How do you feel about this?

Justin:              I thought it was good. I liked the areas that the show’s covering. I liked the backstory they’re building for Scarlet Witch. Vision by the end of this episode lands in an interesting place. It was interesting that the big reveal by the end of the episode is knowledge we already had. Like to hear her be like, “You’re the Scarlet Witch.” Is like, “Yeah, we know. That’s why we showed up here.”

Alex:                 The funny thing about that end note, if we want to jump ahead to that last thing is for comic book fans. I’m sure there’s three levels of this almost, right? There’s comic book fans of like, “Yes, we’ve been calling you Scarlet Witch, even if you’ve been call yourself Wanda Maximoff. We know who you are from the comic books.” There’s also MCU fans who’ve been waiting for her to be called Scarlet Witch and I’m sure a bunch of them we’re like, “Oh, shit. They said it. They said the words.” So probably totally worked for them and then there’s the non comic book fans who were like, “I don’t know what that means.”

Justin:              “Is that a big deal? Is that Scarlet?

Alex:                 Which is fine. It’s all fine. What I liked about this episode is sometimes the reveals don’t have to be, [inaudible 00:05:42] all the time or 30 layers of Easter eggs. One of the things the show has been doing really well is it’s been layering in, like we’ve talked about it here on the podcast, lots of different things, all the time, different layers of Easter eggs for sitcoms, for MCU, for Marvel Comics, for everything. Some of them are just like color and some of them mean something, but in this episode, they’ve been doing all along, they’ve just been telling us what’s been happening. It’s more about the outside world has been pulling it apart like we’ve been doing here, when the show has been pretty straight up about what’s happening.

Justin:              Yeah. That’s what Marvel does really well. They’re like, “We have a story we’re telling and we’re going to give you little tangential teases to light you up.” Like the Quicksilver casting, just lit everybody on fire when really it’s just like, that was what it was designed to do in the end at least in this story. Maybe it’s going to be a way of dipping into the multi-verse by having that be the choice there as a larger plot choice. But I respect the move just as a like fun nod or poke to the fan base to be like, “Whoa! They’re doing it. They’re doing the thing.” But they aren’t doing yet, but they got us.

Alex:                 To get a little behind the scenes on that, there was a talk that Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios did with the Television Critics Association this past week and for those who don’t know, this is a trade organization. The panels are very weird. They’re not like Comic Con panels or anything. It’s basically virtually, but the people sitting there taking question, after question, after question from press and that’s it. It’s not about announcements or trailers or anything.

Alex:                 But he did give some really good interesting information about the process of WandaVision and two the things he mentioned, one Evan Peters was very early on, he said that they blue sky everything. They did talk about Alan Donaldson, but ultimately decided, you know what, this Evan Peters thing, if he can pull it off, this is going to be the right thing for the show. But the other thing he said is exactly what you’re saying, that they felt like if they’re going to do weekly TV shows, this is their chance to try to create weekly conversation the same way that they do weekend conversation when they release a movie. So he-

Justin:              By next year, there’ll be a Marvel TV show every week and a feature film every weekend so truly will be our entire lives.

Alex:                 Oh my God, I love it. Bring it on.

Justin:              I love it. I’m dying.

Alex:                 But I respect that. I respect the fact that they were very specific about, “We want to give people something to talk about between the episodes.” That’s really nice. The other thing that I really liked about this episode that I’m curious to get your take on, this is the one that hit me emotionally the hardest. There were a couple of times where I got really teared up in this episode and I haven’t felt that same way throughout the show, but now it has enough weight, not just with the movies in the MCU, but also with the TV show that I feel like we’ve appropriately gotten to that place.

Justin:              What I also give them credit for, this story, the format or the structure of it, it’s pretty like we could see that coming once the episode started, but they do a great job of upsetting our expectation like when Wanda finally sees the Vision’s body in Hayward’s lab. You think, “Oh, this is it. She’s going to lose it.” I love the choice they had of her, like touching his head and being like, “There’s nothing of him here. I don’t feel him here.” And then walking off and like, “Oh, it’s not it.” Then we see her emotional breakdown in Westview at the house they were going to build.

Justin:              That hits so much harder because they got us one step later. Again same thing with the parents. You think you’re going to get this nice “vision” of her childhood life and then it’s upset immediately heartbreaking. They didn’t even have to show us the actual parents loss and then be gone. It was just, we see Wanda instantly fixing her trauma with her powers.

Alex:                 That was the first one that really got me specifically because we know where the Stark bomb is. So when they have that pause where she’s watching the sit-com, I was like, “Oh, it’s coming. Oh, this is so sad.” Just having her and Pietro under the bed with the bomb, knowing that we’ve heard this story, but never seen it before, awful. The other scene that I thought was really wonderful, we didn’t get a lot of Vision in this episode obviously with the big reveal with the Vision at the end of the episode, we should probably talk about at some point. But the scene post Age of Ultron probably like concurrent with civil war, right before they really started their relationship or anything like that, I thought was great. The stuff that they’re talking about there, about grief being another form of love. I thought was really smart and pointed and very nice.

Justin:              Yeah, it made their romance real. I’m assuming in the last episode, we’re going to get a lot of that payoff or how they actually feel for each other. But this was such a great little… Because we’ve never really seen too much of this in the movies we got with them together and just like fighting, but never did we see them have any real, super sweet moments. It was just the high emotion of them being together and then the loss. So this was really great. It really helped set up what I assume is going to be the big emotional payoffs next time.

Alex:                 Yeah, I agree. To that point, I think a lot of Marvel fans all along have been like, “An Emmy for Elizabeth Olsen.” Which she’s great, she’s been doing a great job. Everything is super fun, but I haven’t necessarily felt that. This, if anything, is the Emmy’s submission episode for her because there’s so many different emotions and modes that she walks through here.

Justin:              Wanda is obviously submit for the rabbit for the pet Emmy’s for eating that-

Alex:                 Which are on the CW, I believe.

Justin:              Yeah, a hundred percent. For eating that fucking bug. Rabbits eats bugs?

Alex:                 Ugh, I guess rabbits eat bugs. I had a rabbit, but I don’t remember it eating flies.

Justin:              Uh, good. I thought you were going to say, “Rabbits eats bugs. I had A rabbit. I fed it bugs all the time. I’m a sociopath.”

Alex:                 Oh, boy. Should we talk about some of these recoms here because this is a big change to Wanda, her origin, what we get here. We talked about Agatha straight up witch, at the Salem witch trials, sucked her whole coven dry.

Justin:              Sucked the coven. Hey, welcome to Marvel Vision in the morning, we got to sucking coven today. We’re going to be here in the Marvel Vision. Ail suck it up, I’m coming right out.

Alex:                 That’s coffee, my man. This opening scene was great. Wow, Disney-

Justin:              Disney Plus mug.

Alex:                 Really compromising your journalistic integrity to kick off this breakdown of the episode.

Justin:              I’ll tell you what, nothing more journalistic than a Marvel podcast that we excited comic book fans woke up early in the morning to do.

Alex:                 It’s just very funny. That was like a Wayne’s world moment of the person reviewing the thing being like, “Cheers Disney blood.” I thought this opening sequence was great. Kathryn Hahn, I was imagining them filming this and she’s being zapped by a bunch of invisible CGI energy and she has to play the pain of it and then instantly switch it to like, “Ha ha, I got you. I’m sucking you dry coven.”

Justin:              Now, why is that? Because I had that thought pretty much all episode two, maybe it’s because Kathryn Hahn comes from indie films and is sort of known like this quirky background or foreground potentially person. But we haven’t seen her at a big budget thing like this necessarily, maybe that’s it. All episode I was like, “Man, it’s great that they got Kathyrn Hahn to do this.

Alex:                 I also think she’s really good and the energy she brings. She brings this sort of the meme going around, the winking energy to so many of her roles where it feels like she’s looking at us being like, “Is it crazy I’m in this TV show. I’m acting here.” And I think that’s what it is. The fact that she gets to… She has a real audience surrogate power to her. She’s just great to watch. Despite the fact that she’s playing big in this episode every line is like “Well, my pretty eyes, they’ve captured you this time.” Then she still lands it. Even at the end, when she’s in full, hair styled witch regalia it’s-

Justin:              Oh my God, those eyebrows were out of control.

Alex:                 I got them right here so I’m pretty psyched to see them on screen.

Justin:              This is the first time you’ve seen yourself on screen.

Alex:                 I finally see my brow. So she was great. Loved the walkthroughs here. The big recom with Wanda, I was about to say Scarlet Witch, is that she had these witch powers, All Along and the Mind Stone-

Justin:              You love saying All Along, by the way, ever since last ever that’s what you talk about. I’ve seen the tweets Alex. We know you like it.

Alex:                 I like it. I enjoy the song. It really is by resting state right now is Agatha All Along playing in my head and it’s driving me a little insane.

Justin:              She’s deadly. That’s deadly.

Alex:                 Wanda had the witch powers from the beginning. That’s what Agatha is walking her through and the Mind Stone only amp them up quite a bit. What do you think about that record?

Justin:              That’s mutant, right? I think that’s being a mutant. It is. It feels weird to say that but in the comic books, that’s what it is. Your powers come to you. We didn’t get to see Quicksilver be very fast here and his youth, but this could easily be it. It’s what they showed us. They just didn’t tell us.

Alex:                 For those who haven’t read the comics this is certainly changed a lot through X-Men and Marvel continuity. But initially it was always this puberty thing around the age that Wanda and Pietro are when the bomb hits. There’s a stressful situation and it activates your powers. It is this metaphor for puberty. Again, it’s been a lot of different things throughout the years, but that’s what you’re hitting on here, Justin. That’s what they do like you’re saying, without saying it. It’s interesting if they call it, witch powers or something like that instead of… There’s a, what is it? 1608 is the Neil Gaiman book where they call it the witch mark or the witch hex or something like that instead of being powers.

Justin:              But I don’t know how you explain Quicksilver. If you’re going to do this for Wanda, it doesn’t make sense for him to have like a witchy amount of speed.

Alex:                 That was a weird thing. I think probably for story reasons, keeping it focused on WandaVision they did and didn’t get into it too much. But I agree with you. I was definitely in that scene where Wanda came in and was like, her witch powers are calling out the Mind Stone, here it goes. Wait, what happened with Pietro when he walked in there?

Justin:              Or maybe they didn’t put him in that room. I don’t know. There were a little questions there. I don’t think they could even at all touch on them because it would have been too much of a distraction story-wise and also getting us into all these questions of like, “What does this mean for the X-Men in the Marvel Universe?” And even if they will start to classify Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch as mutants going forward.

Alex:                 The other thing that it does really nicely as it reminds us that Scarlet Witch and Vision’s powers are tied together by the Mind Stone, which they can kind of bumping around a little bit. They certainly mentioned it a couple of times, but it gives up that very clear line. Honestly, I was thankful for that because this is a very stupid thing. I constantly find it confusing that Loki Scepter which was blue, was holding the Mind Stone, which is yellow.

Justin:              They did a good job of just being like, “Remember this guys, I know this is weird, but we made this movie before we had it really figured out what we were doing.” Someone in the VFX was like, “Let’s make this stuff blue.” And they were like, “Cool, I love how it looks.” And then later on they were like, “Fuck, it has to be the Mind Stone. What do we do here?” So I appreciate that, he cracks and we see a vision of the Vision through the yellow of the Mind Stone. Now let me throw this out to you. Does this call into question their feelings for each other at all, the fact that the Vision is the Mind Stone and she was influenced by the Mind Stone here. Is it real love they have between them or is it just the mind stone connection acting on her own?

Alex:                 Oh, that’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about that. I think it’s real love. We going to go with that at this point, but certainly that Mind Stone could have created some initial connection with them because usually you don’t fall in love with a robot.

Justin:              That’s true. I’ve been in and out of a lot of robot based relationships, but that’s just me, but I also encountered them early on.

Alex:                 They were all like, not love. You never said the big L word.

Justin:              I know exactly we didn’t get that far, especially in robot years. But that’s an interesting question that could be posed because I agree with you. We obviously want them to have a real relationship and real love. That’s maybe something to call into question whatever they feel and whoever the villain ends up being in this series. Because despite all the Agatha-

Alex:                 You really think there’s somebody else other than Agatha?

Justin:              In the scene with Hayward when he’s pushing Scarlet Witch with the body of the Vision, he’s clearly pushing her into a trauma reaction moment. He’s not just being like, “Oh no, you’ve seen our horrible experiment.” He is pushing her to crack there. Maybe I’m reading too much into the scene. The way he’s talking to her and the way he’s like, “Go ahead, go down there, touch it.” It was like this person is doing this perfectly.

Alex:                 I could see that. I don’t think he’s an ultimate big villain. I know you’ve been on the Hayward being pretty much this entire time. I do think he’s still a corporate dick, but he’s not able to activate Vision. Maybe Scarlet Witch will be able to do that. That’s potentially why he’s pushing her there. Maybe he does want her to crack so he can throw her into custody of the dissector as well. I really think he is just corporate dick straight out of the movies and that’s pretty much it.

Justin:              Then let me ask you this… This is like getting outside of the show commentary. A couple of the actors have said, “There’s this big actor who we’re going to see in the series.” You’re telling me, you don’t think that’s happening or that was-

Alex:                 No, I’ll tell you what I think is happening there. That was Paul Bettany specifically was like, “There’s an actor I’ve always wanted to work with. We have some really…” I don’t think he uses the word meaty, but “Some really meaty scenes that we have together.” I think the actor he was talking about was Paul Bettany.

Justin:              Oh, really?

Alex:                 That is what a hundred percent my theory right now. I don’t think we’re going to get another cameo. The reveal at the end of the episode of the mid credits, which we could probably get more into the comic book Origin Myths, Hayward has been able to rebuild Vision’s body as we saw. He is activating it using the hex energy that Scarlet Witch left on the drone that he sent in a couple of episodes back. We get this white Vision reveal, this evil Vision, if you will.

Justin:              Ghost Vision.

Alex:                 Ghost Vision, and that’s straight out Vision Quest from West Coast, Avengers by John Byrne. I think it was issues 42 to 50. I didn’t double-check that. I wrote that data off of the volume, but that gives us like two very clear things that they pulled on for the series. There’s one the… At least for me as a kid dichotic shot of Vision all spread out on a table. That he has been dissected as Wanda discovers him. They rebuild him. He comes back without color. He’s completely white. He doesn’t have any as memories and Wanda has just had kids. So that, and you’d probably love this Justin, clears the way for Wonder Man, to profess his feelings for Wanda.

Justin:              Yes, the Vision is like an emotionless ghost essentially and that’s why-

Alex:                 He’s like, “I have no interest in my family. Go ahead. Date Wonder Man. We have the same brain patterns. It’s complicated, don’t worry about it.”

Justin:              “Don’t ask us any follow up questions about that.” I like Wonder Man as a character. In the comics, he’s also been powered up in the same way that Scarlet Witch has, in this series. I don’t know if there’s any real appetite for Wonder Man out there in the world, famously an actor, who’s also a superhero, come on.

Alex:                 What? That’s crazy. To that point, when we get that reveal at the end of the white Vision, evil Vision, ghost Vision, whatever you want to call him, what we were talking about going to this last episode, I don’t think they are dressed suddenly have Al Pacino pop up as Mephisto or anything like that. I think it’s Paul Bettany finally getting to act opposite Paul Bettany and he was tricking everybody the entire time.

Justin:              Wow. It was Bettany all along, is what you’re saying.

Alex:                 Great cameo.

Justin:              “That’s fucked up.” He’s going to get away with saying that about himself. I feel like there’s going to be a one more reveal. You really don’t think so?

Alex:                 No, don’t get me wrong. I think we’re still going to have-

Justin:              This is Marvel, there’s going to be another reveal.

Alex:                 If we want to talk about the stuff after the episode, and there’s still plenty to talk about in the episode, but we got Monica and Jimmy outside the hex working with Goodner. Oh, sorry. Monica is in the hex. She’s been taken by Pietro. I really didn’t appreciate them pushing that hashtag to be honest with you. This isn’t Riverdale. You can’t do.

Justin:              Wow! Okay. Strong interconnection multi-verse of madness of our podcasts.

Alex:                 She’s there. We don’t know what’s going on with her. Jimmy is outside with [inaudible Major Goodner and the rest. Hayward obviously is planning an attack with white Vision. Then you have Darcy is for Vision. Like he’s not even real. He was created inside the hex. There’s a lot of stuff going on there. To throw another character into the mix is a lot given how much focus we’ve had on the characters in the show so far. But I do think we’re going to see Dr. Strange by the end of the show. Showing up and being like, “Hey, you got to come over here. We got to take this book and figure out what’s going on.” Or something like that.

Justin:              You think that we’re going to get Dr. Strange. To me that feels… I understand why that’s makes a lot of sense, but that’s not even a surprise reveal at this point, because we all know that Dr. Strange is like the next chess move here.

Alex:                 Right, that’s what I’m saying. We were talking about right at the beginning. As much as we’ve been dissecting the show and looking for surprises and there have been some really fun twists, a lot of the stuff is very predictable, very purposely so. I keep going back to, what was it, the second episode where they talk about the magic trick and they say, “You got to lay it out for everybody. You got to show them what the workings are so that they know.” That was giving away the whole structure of the show.

Justin:              Yeah. But on the other side of the magic trick, it can’t just be like, “And that’s everything I just told you I was going to do that. Ta da!” There’s usually a surprise in there somewhere.

Alex:                 Yes. I don’t know, Maybe we’ll see somebody else show up, but bringing in Dr. Strange for the end makes sense. We’ll have obviously a post credit scene or two. Frankly, given that they’ve been doing mid credit scenes for the last two episodes I guess, we’re probably going to see an actual end credit scene after that teeing up Dr. Strange two or Spiderman three or something like that. That wouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Maybe even three, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll see multiple post credit sequences.

Justin:              That’s the real Marvel way.

Alex:                 Yeah, really surprise people. Maybe Falcon and Winter Soldier will show up and be like, “We’ve got a series next. Two weeks from now.”

Justin:              “Stick around guys.”

Alex:                 Much less on the mysteries. We should probably talk about… Do we want to go through talk about other Easter eggs and things?

Justin:              Yes, it is almost Easter. I know it’s time to start finding last year’s stinky old eggs.

Alex:                 One thing I do want to mention just for the previous episode, two things we missed a little bit that people pointed out in the YouTube comments in particular. If you’re listening to the podcast by the way, we also have a visual YouTube version of this. If you’re watching on YouTube, you already know that.

Justin:              Nice job. You get the added bonus to see my children’s bunk beds and their extensive book collection. Let’s not forget about this cute ass lion.

Alex:                 Here’s the things we missed though, the opening credits we call them The Office credits and the theme music was The Office, but they were actually straight up off of Happy Endings, which is something we didn’t quite pick up on. There’s also a quick shot of the middle there of some very ransom style letters that say, “Wanda, do you know what you are doing?” Which in retrospect is weird and I’m not 100% sure what was going on there.

Justin:              I wonder whose point of view that’s from. Is that a S.W.O.R.D. style observation? Is that someone in the town? Is it a further reveal that we haven’t got to yet?

Alex:                 It might be the town. We didn’t really talk about this yet, but there’s this great sequence where Wanda drives into Westview. It’s a piece of shit, New Jersey town.

Justin:              Wow, Alex.

Alex:                 It really is. Everybody’s so sad there. They’re having a bad time.

Justin:              They are having a bad time but [inaudible 00:27:45] is giving piano lessons. He’s still bringing the music.

Alex:                 The postman who we’ve been very suspicious of it turns out to be a pizza delivery boy.

Justin:              After all that, he’s just like, “Nope, just bringing a calzone into something.”

Alex:                 Then Mrs. Hart is also there. She is sitting, looking very sad at a cafe. So we get a couple of senses of them which I thought was interesting. Other stuff that I wrote down is not necessarily Easter egg things, but I thought were interesting. We get the switch to the Purple Marvel Logo at the beginning to tee up, Agatha back in Salem, 1693. I liked the little twist of that scene too, of everybody gathering her up and then who turns out to be her mom and saying, “Are you a witch? Well, good.” Basically that was a nice little twist on that scene.

Justin:              That’s a great scene in general. Talking about the switch from Agatha Harkness in the comics is just like an old grandma who’s like, wow, this is a problem. In the show, she is super powerful like a real villain.

Alex:                 I love the line where she says, “Please, I can be good.” And her mom says, “No, you can’t.” And then tries to shut her down. What do you think they were trying to do? Were they trying to kill her? Where they trying to bind her? What do you think was happening in that scene?

Justin:              If she was able to suck their powers out, I feel like other witches were going to suck her powers out and vanish her, basically kill her. To me I was like, “Oh, they’re burning her at the stake.” If this was the Salem witch trials, it wasn’t actually humans trying witches. It was witches trying witches, one witch remains Supreme.

Alex:                 We get a little glimpse… I wrote this down. We get a glimpse of runes. I’m not a really big rune guy, that’s why I don’t read them. But there was one-

Justin:              But you seem like a rune guy.

Alex:                 I know. If you look over there, I have my rune lab. I don’t know what it is.

Justin:              That’s a pornographic drawing that you have on your wall.

Alex:                 There was clearly an M logo, was one of those runes. It might’ve been a typical rune. It wasn’t like straight up house of M logo, which is something that’s mildly imply inspired the show. But that seemed pretty blatant to me to have that big M there, either for Mutant or for Magneto or something like that. Again might just be an Easter egg versus a clue. But I thought that was pretty obvious.

Justin:              What is the difference between an Easter egg and a clue, really?

Alex:                 A clue is something that indicates an upcoming plot point. An Easter egg is just a fun thing that is there.

Justin:              Mm-hmm (affirmative). Very fine line in this show.

Alex:                 I don’t celebrate Easter, but Easter eggs usually lead to nothing, right?

Justin:              No, I’ve solved a lot of murders based on stuff I’ve found. Let me just say I’ve solved a lot of the murders. Too many for a normal person.

Alex:                 Also we’ve got a couple of shout outs to the comics we got. Wanda did a probability hex, which is something that she does in the comics. Also, by the end we find out that she has chaos magic, which is again, something that she messes around with way too much in the comic books. Also an interesting note, I thought we speculated what was going on with the commercials. That maybe the commercial people were her parents. They’re not her parents.

Justin:              No. They do a good job of illustrating that in this episode that they were… Those two traumatic moments. I love the way when the red light starts to flash on the missile, the Stark bomb, I was like, “Yes, direct connection to that first episode the commercial there and the stress of that combined with the like, Oh, you’re feeling her stress from watching that commercial version of it. That first episode I thought was great.

Alex:                 But I guess some of the commercial people are more people trapped in Westview at this point.

Justin:              Yeah. I guess that’s probably on a logistic point of view. For me, the commercials then are the hurt or broken parts of her psyche as a break from the part that she’s made beautiful, how she wants, it’s the darker part emerging in the middle of it.

Alex:                 A couple of other-

Justin:              Commercials are evil parts of the Vision.

Alex:                 Exactly, yeah. That’s why I have my TiVo so I can skip the commercials.

Justin:              You’re a witch in a way.

Alex:                 Absolutely. That’s their tagline right? “You’re a witch,.” The other little things we didn’t really talk about the sitcoms. We were correct about that she used to watch them in Sokovia. That’s exactly where that comes from. That’s her comfort place. That’s why she goes there with the hex, which I thought was great. I love seeing the scenes for the people who didn’t really pick up on the one-to-one of like the Van Dyke Show or Malcolm in the middle, but all of those scenes are straight up in the show. There’s one scene with a doll, that doll is in there at some point. The thing with, what’s his name, Bryan Cratson watching the thing collapse that was in one of the opening credits as well. So all that stuff is right there. I thought that was great. I also love for the MCU perspective that they layered in the Avengers music in this episode, which we haven’t really heard, which was pretty cool and fun. That’s all I wrote down. Did you have anything else you want to chat about?

Justin:              I think that covers a lot of… We touched on it as we went around. Did I mention that the rabbit eats bugs? God.

Alex:                 What do you think is Scratchy is? Is he just familiar, is that it? Or is Al Pacino or Mephisto.

Justin:              He’s Al Pacino.

Alex:                 He’s Al Pacino?

Justin:              A hundred percent.

Alex:                 Last shot of the show is going to be where Scratchy said, “Huhaa You didn’t think I’d be here. Did you? I can go into any role. I was the devil once now I’m a rabbit.”

Justin:              “I was also the bug.”Hu haa!

Alex:                 Before we wrap up here, what is on your vision board for the final episode of WandaVision Justin? What do you want to see?

Justin:              We are going to get a massive fight. We’re going to see Monica Rambeau really come into power setting her up for Captain Marvel 2. I’m very curious where we end up with Scarlet Witch. I feel like perhaps she’s going to be lost in… One other thing I want to talk about. We got the word nexus last episode, which it doesn’t touch on really anything in Wanda’s past. So that makes me feel like it’s where we’re going, Scarlet Witch is going to be lost in the nexus of all realities.

Alex:                 We talked about that the last episode like you’re saying maybe it’s a movie length episode, potentially. Maybe we get some enormous fight. They certainly teased that it’s one of the biggest things Marvel has ever done. Maybe a tear. That is the thing that actually tears a hole in the fabric of reality that sends off all this bolts over stuff in Dr. Strange two and Spiderman three. So we’re not really dealing with that in the show, but the after effects of what happens with the Agatha and Wanda battle is potentially the thing that leads to that.

Alex:                 The other thing that I think we glanced over a little bit, that I think is super important for the last episode is the one Wanda-Vision relationship. The big thing that we’re going to get is this. Now we know non real Vision who was created by Wanda in the hex is going to have to tell her, “Let me go. You have to let go and move on with your life. You have to move past this grief.” We’ll potentially have white Vision going forward in some way, but it’s not going to be the Wanda-Vision relationship we know and Wanda is then going to go forward throughout the movies.

Justin:              I’d be curious if the Vision will stick around. I like the idea that the ghostly Vision is a character that we encounter more. That emotional sadness, every time we see him we’ll be like, “Ah, shit. They were so happy when they were in TV. I still do think we’re going to get one more reveal despite your Paul Bettany theory. I know you’re riding high because you got previously on right. But I do think that we’ll get that. Did you have another theory you want to drop in?

Alex:                 Just about the title of the episode. I’ll throw it out there. Again, I have this really good track record of 25%.

Justin:              Cocky, confident.

Alex:                 Depending on what direction we go, it could be one of two titles for the last episode. I think either we’ll see, “We’ll be right back.” If there’s a little bit of a dot, dot, dot at the end of the episode, or alternatively, it’ll be, “This ends our broadcasting.”

Justin:              Wow. “Be right back” or “we’ll be right back” is really nice. Also has a reference to the black mirror. One of the best black mirror episodes that they’ve made.

Alex:                 The big thing on my vision board though, I know we’re kind of going far a field of this very set section of the show.

Justin:              I know, really format breaking this episode.

Alex:                 The big thing I do want to see is the emotional catharsis here. Even more than the superhero fights and Agatha going better and better with Wanda and ghost Vision going against hex Vision or whatever we want to call him. The big thing is I want to see what happens with Wanda and Vision. We also didn’t talk about Billy and Tommy at all. The implication right now is, if Vision can’t survive outside the hex, neither can Billy and Tommy, but I don’t think that’s true. I think we’re going to see a reveal of teenage “Billy and Tommy” by the end of this. That’s going to be one of the big things that spurs us into somewhere down the road, several years, young Avengers. I think we’re going to get an actor reveal for both of them.

Justin:              I bet we’re going to get a post credit sequence will be them being either placed for adoption or being separated and put into different lives and we’re going to just know who they are really setting that longterm Easter egg for young Avengers.

Alex:                 That is it for Marvel Vision. We have one more episode here. We’re going to get up even earlier and make Pete wake up earlier, get into even weirder places when we tape the episodes that’s going to be very exciting. But if you want to support us patrion.com/comic book club, also, we do a live show every Tuesday night at 7:00 PM to Crowdcast and YouTube come hang out. We would love to chat with you about WandaVision. I choose Android Stitcher or the app of your choice to subscribe and to listen to the show. If you’d like to rate and comment on iTunes in particular, that’d be much appreciated.

Justin:              We love that.

Alex:                 We love it. Socially, Marvel Vision pod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Well. right here for the end of the episode-

Pete:                what’s up? I made it, I’m awake.

Alex:                 AP?

Pete:                what are we doing?

Justin:              What’s up, man?

Alex:                 How you doing? I was just doing the wrap up.

Pete:                Oh man. How about that WandaVision?

Justin:              What’s on your vision board, Pete.

Pete:                Ah, you know what? It was Agnes All Along..

Justin:              She snuck in and pressed your snooze button.

Alex:                 Real quick because we are wrapping up the episode, but I want to know your thoughts. Did you actually watch it Pete? Did you just wake up and get on the zoom?

Pete:                I woke up and I tried watching and then I got a zoom invite, so I saw a very witchy beginning. Salem witch trials were real guys.

Justin:              That’s a good takeaway right there.

Alex:                 Thanks for tuning in Pete. Thanks for jumping in. Always good to see you. We were just talking about this, but next week we’re going to wake up at 3:00 AM. [crosstalk 00:39:52]

Pete:                Might as well. I mean, what’s the difference? Justin, you are covered in adorable things. This is a lovely image of you.

Justin:              Yeah. Just me and-

Pete:                And the color pink.

Justin:              Yeah, a hundred percent.

Alex:                 This is great. I’m really glad we wrapped up like this. [email protected] for this podcast with many more. Until next time, set your alarm folks. [crosstalk 00:40:18]

Pete:                It’s not, you’ve got to turn up the volume as well. You can’t just set the alarm, the volumes important sometimes.

The post MarvelVision: WandaVision Episode 8 – “Previously On” appeared first on Comic Book Club.

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