WandaVision – Season 1 Episode 4 Recap & Review

We Interrupt This Program

Episode 4 of WandaVision begins moments after Thanos’ snap is reversed as a woman named Monica and a number of other people in the hospital all come back from the dead. Unfortunately her Mother was not one of the people to disappear, and she died 2 years before.

We then jump across to S.W.O.R.D. Headquarters (Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division) as Monica arrives to work. She greets Director Tyler and he catches her up on what’s going on. Space is obviously full of threats but they’re more vigilant and weary than ever before after what’s happened.

Half the soldiers left behind have completely lost their nerve while Monica remains focused on her job. Only, she’s grounded for now, thanks to her Mother’s wishes.

Well, her mission sends her across to Westview for a missing person case. There, she meets Agent Woo who, along with several other officers, confirm that Westview doesn’t actually exist. In fact, this isn’t so much as a missing person case, it’s more like a missing town case. With a toy helicopter (the same one from episode 2), Monica flies this into the town ahead but it suddenly disappears from view.

It turns out the entire town is surrounded by an energy field, and as Monica reaches out to touch it, she’s sucked inside.

We then cut forward 24 hours as the group set up a response team outside the energy field. There’s a signal coming through, one that sees the team collect up old-style TVs in order to broadcast the message.

Woo is worried, especially given how little they know about this energy field, and remains concerned  that this could exponentially increase. For now though, they all gather together and watch as Wanda and Vision’s sitcom plays out.

Tyler rallies the troops to try and figure out what this means, as they believe the universe has created a sitcom for two of the Avengers. As the camera pans out from the end of episode 1, this ties in with S.W.O.R.D. doing their best to try and process what’s happening.

Episode 2 of the show, played out behind the screens if you will, deepens the mystery as the FBI agents all work together to bring up detailed files for a number of different people. Within that though is Monica, going by the name of Geraldine. Darcy has a theory to broadcast her own signal onto Wanda’s radio and does just this. As we soon find out, all the people inside this sitcom are actually real people who are now trapped.

As we catch up to where we left off last episode, Scarlet Witch blasts Monica out the energy field. Only, Wanda seems to be torn between two sides and turns to see Vision as a distorted, disfigured corpse. Only, when she looks again Vision is back to normal. What is going on?

The Episode Review

WandaVision is a perfect example of why season reviews for TV shows should be reserved for the whole show, or at least with a mindfulness over how the story beats progress across an entire 10/13/24 episode show. Bearing in mind critic reviews for this were based on 3 episodes, there’s no way you could accurately judge the quality of this show based on that.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some incredibly talented writers out there. In fact, there’s some amazing critics across the globe but this way of working, this archaic structure of judging an entire season based on a handful of episodes is not helpful to anyone looking to see if a show is worth investing a good chunk of time into. Anyway, I digress.

Episode 4 of WandaVision rewards the patience of viewers, delivering an excellent episode that finally gives some answers after 3 episodes of homages to sitcoms gone by. It’s a game changing episode in many ways, revealing subtle clues around what’s going on with a nice word play on the whole S.H.I.E.L.D. idea.

All those teases across the previous 3 episodes tie in beautifully to this follow-up and I’d imagine this structure will continue going forward, delivering sitcom-centric episodes followed by one that jumps out and ties everything up together.

This is definitely one of the best episodes of the year so far and the future for Phase 4 of Marvel – if this episode is any indication to go by – looks to be very bright indeed.