Boy, losing Cloris Leachmen and Cicely Tyson in the same week? That's a sobering way to close out January after closing out the shit year that was 2020.

Last night I blew all my energy dishing up Jake and Jenny's wet food, leaving me no energy to cook for myself. I had eaten a veggie burger early in the day while running errands, so it wasn't a big deal. I ended up eating some Cheez-It's and drinking a Coke Zero then calling it good.

Which of course meant that I woke up hungry in the middle of the night.

Which resulted in my eating another handful of Cheez-It's, but I digree.

The problem with waking up in the middle of the night is that it also wakes my cats up. They are perfectly happy to let me sleep and rarely bother me when I'm lost in slumberland, but all bets are off if I wake them up. First Jenny wanted pets. Then Jake wanted pets. Then Jenny came back again for more pets. According to my Apple Watch, I finally fell asleep again after 2:30am. Was that handful of Cheez-It's worth it? Probably not.

Four-and-a-half hours later when I was awakened by Alexa so I could feed them breakfast, I noticed that THEY weren't the least bit tired. I guess when you spend the entire day sleeping, you always have surplus energy.

In other news... I stayed up 'til midnight so I could watch the latest episode of WandaVision, where things are finally starting to happen. It only took four episodes, but okay. It wasn't necessarily great, but it does hint that great things are coming. If you've already seen it and are interested in my spoiler-filled thoughts, you can find them in an extended entry...

The consequences of all the people that Thanos vanished with "The Snap" coming back after "The Blip" has only been hinted at in Spider-Man: Far From Home. In the latest episode of WandaVision (entitled We Interrupt this Program) we get another glimpse, and it's pretty sweet. We see Monica Rambeau get "undusted" then wandering through a hospital where people are reappearing. We also find out that her mother, Maria Rambeau, was a founding member of S.W.O.R.D. and her fighter pilot callsign was "Photon." Which, coincidentally, is one of the super-hero names that (comic book) Monica adopts. Sadly we also learn that Maria eventually died from cancer.

But the main takeaway from the episode is something that I've suspected from the start because it's straight out of the comic books: the town of Westview and everything that's happening is entirely created by Wanda... likely as a result of the mental trauma caused by the death of both her brother and her synthetic boyfriend, Vision. This was hinted at all along with Wanda "rewinding" things that happen which she doesn't like.

This is all discovered by Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) who is Jane Foster's (Natalie Portman) intern from the Thor movies and relayed to FBI Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) from Ant-Man and the Wasp. Both of which I was happy to see again. Interesting to note that Jimmy Wu has noticed the hexagons that keep appearing in Wanda's broadcast, and noted as much on his whiteboard. This is clearly a reference to Wanda's abilities in the comic books, which has always been referred to as "hex power." Whether that's literal in this case, we don't know, but we also have those bees showing up (shades of A.I.M., Batman!), which build hives with hexagonal cells, so probably?

All I can guess is that Wanda must have watched a lot of old American television reruns when she was a kid in Sokovia, and that's formed the basis for the reality she's created... as well as her American accent.

But is there something or someone behind all this? Is Wanda being manipulated? That would be likely, as a comic book movie is not a comic book movie without a villain. My money would be that it's Mephisto. In the comics Wanda used pieces of his soul to create twins Tommy and Billy (Thomas and William in the comics) out of chaos magic, so it kinda makes sense he's in the mix somewhere...

Of course in the comics Mephisto deconstructs Billy and Tommy when he reclaims the shards of his soul, which resulted in even further trauma for poor Wanda which, in turn, eventually results in a warped reality of her making, much like the reality she's making in WandaVision...

But House of M is another story entirely.

A few things...

• Vision is shown to be an animated corpse at one point, which is likely the best explanation for why he's alive in this series. One can only guess that since Wanda's powers in the MCU come from the Mind Stone which gave Vision life in the first place, that this is the key to reviving him permanently.
• It remains to be seen if Agatha Harkness is going to make an appearance. In the comics she is a magic user who trains Wanda to control magical forces outside of her mutant powers. That could be what kicked off the entire Westfield delusion in the first place... and leads directly into the Doctor Strange sequel. Kathryn Hahn, dat you?
• It sure looks like Vision is going to have a face-off with Wanda in an upcoming episode. He's questioning reality with each passing minute, and Wanda is probably not going to like that. She sure didn't when Monica Rambeau did!
• Was I the only one who audibly gasped when Jimmy Woo did the card trick that Ant-Man taught him? That was pretty cool.
• While the idea of Mephisto being the ultimate villain is in my head... there's something to be said for the idea that there is no villain at all. Everything is just Wanda's way of dealing with her trauma and not her being controlled in any way. Because there's certainly precedent for this in the comics.

Guess we'll find out more next week.