It's almost 1:00am. I watched the latest episode of WandaVision (discussed below) then picked up around the house before collapsing in bed to write this blog entry. An entry which won't be posted until morning because I'm sure there are going to be a hundred mistakes that I'm too tired to catch right now.

Yesterday was uneventful. The most interesting thing to happen was when I decided to make a "Barbecue Pineapple Flatbread Pizza" from HelloFresh... then just couldn't do it. I ordered it because meal services often have things that sound disgusting but end up delicious. But when it came time to marinate the pineapple in barbecue sauce so I could slap it on the pizza?

No.

Just no.

There's no way that could ever be considered "delicious" so I put the ingredients away... slapped some Contadina Pizza Sauce on the flatbreads... added mozzarella, parmesan, and feta... then baked them until I had cheese pizzas. They were fine.

Except...

As I was pawing through my stack of drawers to find a pizza cutter, I reached in and ended up slicing my finger on a serrated knife. Took a nice chunk of skin off my finger, but didn't bleed. Lucky me. I can't wait for Spring so I can finish my kitchen remodel, because it's tough living like this. Tough on my fingers, that is.

But Anyway...

My thoughts on the latest episode of WandaVision are in an extended entry...

Needless to say, WandaVision and Marvel comic book spoilers abound...

The penultimate episodes of WandaVision was yet another episode where nothing really new happens... until the credits scene at the very end. Instead what we got was an episode that recaps Wanda's tragic life in the Marvel Studios movies. Something she doesn't want to relive because her entire existence has been one of pain and suffering, but Agatha Harkness forces her into it because she wants to know where Wanda is getting the power to create her own reality... assumably so she can steal it. Because she's evil that way.

It was essentially a checklist of confirmations of what I already knew...

• Agatha Harkness is very old, having been around since the Salem Witch Trials. Exactly like the comic books. Though in the MCU, she's more blatantly evil and power hungry, having killed her own coven (and mother) to gain more power.
• And... surprise! Turns out that the song last week "Agatha All Along" was not true. She was not pulling all the strings. Wanda converted Westview to her own reality first, THEN Agatha sensed it and came to find out where the power was coming from. This was blatantly obvious from the start. "Agnes" (aka AGatha HarkNESs) was one of the only people in the show not controlled by Wanda. She was shown numerous times trying to fit in with everything while obviously being an outsider. It wasn't until she got impatient that she started having a hand in manipulating Wanda by shifting events and introducing her own elements to Westview... like Faux Pietro.
• Wanda watched old American television shows with her family growing up. Since this was the only time in her life where she was happy, those old TV shows formed the basis of the reality she created (which I talked about here).
• Agatha explains that Wanda was a witch from birth, and the reason the Stark Industries warhead didn't explode when it landed in her childhood home was because she used a hex to make it not explode. Apparently her powers would have faded away entirely as she aged... if not for the fact that Baron Strucker experimented on her with the Mind Stone Infinity Stone, augmenting her innate abilities to astounding and frightening levels.

And now... a quick aside. Much of the storyline that's been going on here comes straight out of the comic books. And these are stories that have been told by a number of creators over the years. Writers and artists who have given Wanda an interesting, albeit confusing, life. But there's one man responsible for where this series is actually going... John Byrne... and his run on West Coast Avengers. Yet he's been mysteriously absent from the credits (I've been looking). At least he was missing until this episode...

Maybe I missed it or forgot to look the last couple episodes? Let me know if I'm off base... but they probably didn't credit him until now because Marvel thought it might spoil things if they were familiar with the comics?

And now we get to the only thing that actually happened this episode outside of recapping Wanda's tragic life of pain, suffering, and loss. And it didn't happen until the credits scene! Crazy!

As we saw a couple episodes ago, Wanda went to S.W.O.R.D. to reclaim Vision's body...

Riiiiight out of John Byrne's comics...

Note who is showing Wanda the parts and pieces of Vision scattered on the table there. Mockingbird! Can you imagine if Bobbi Morse from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was the one to show Wanda where Vision was like she did in the comics? Fans would have lost their minds!

Anyway... we were lead to believe that Wanda took that body to her reality bubble in Westview, and that's the Vision we've been seeing all along. Except not so much. The Vision we've been seeing was actually entirely created by Wanda out of chaos magic! She abandoned the "real" Vision's body at S.W.O.R.D. because she sensed he wasn't there. Which means that the director of the organization, Tyler Hayward, still had the body all this time. S.W.O.R.D. has been taking Vision apart and putting him back together again but couldn't get him to power up. But now Hayward has used the energy generated by Wanda in WestView, and The Vision is ALIVE, ALIVE, ALIVE...

But why is he all white and ghostly looking? Oh... that's because it's how John Byrne made him in the West Coast Avengers comic books...

And so... yeah. After an entire episode devoted to recaps, we get the actual Vision brought back to life by S.W.O.R.D. — And I have questions. Will he be a cold, emotionless Vision who lost his personality? Will he be a villain? Will he fight the Wanda-created Vision in a battle for WestView? How will all this carry forward into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness? Or will it? Is Vision even in that movie? We'll (hopefully) know the answers to all this next week in the final episode. But probably not, I'm guessing.

I suppose if there was one other thing that happened in this episode... it would be that they did sync up MCU Wanda to the comic book Wanda at long last. They mentioned "hex powers" and "chaos magic" and even finally even called her The Scarlet Witch...

And how fantastic is Elizabeth Olsen and Jessica Hahn in these scenes? Flawless

And now we're down to one more episode.

It hardly seems possible that they could be introducing Mephisto this late in the game (he being the demon that Wanda stole two soul fragments from in the comics to create her children). They still have so many loose ends with Faux Pietro and Billy and Tommy and Vision and Vision's Body and Agatha Harkness and Hayward and Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis and Monica Rambeau (AKA Photon)... and it hardly seems possible that they can do that in 30 minutes plus introduce a new villain. Unless they end the series on a cliffhanger. How thrilling would that be? TUNE INTO DOCTOR STRANGE AND THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS NEXT YEAR TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS!

I am not so much "disappointed" in WandaVision as I am perplexed by it. I don't get what the point is. Probably because I would rather have had a super-hero action series with character-building elements (like the MCU movies) than a retread of old TV shows that spins its wheels for 8 out of 9 episodes. It's just been so... straightforward and boring to me. All the secrets I was trying to dissect ultimately came to nothing. And what have we really gotten here? A few cameos by Jimmy Woo, Darcy Lewis, and Monica Rambeau for fan service, plus Agatha Harkness. The whole story essentially boils down to Wanda being so torn apart by grief over her tragic life where everybody she ever cares about has been taken away from her that she created her own reality in the town of Westview and based it on those same old TV shows. Agatha Harkness, a powerful witch, senses this power and injects herself into Westview to learn its secrets. And it's taken eight episodes to get there.

Oh well. We have been promised over and over that this series would be a game-changer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and has ONE BIG CAMEO LEFT to shock us with... so I'm hoping the finale will make this entire series all worthwhile.

Because nothing would make me happier than getting to the end and being compelled to watch every episode again from the very beginning because it all built up to something so huge... so incredible... that I couldn't NOT watch it all over again.

Fingers crossed.