Episode four of WandaVision starts to explain that reported $200 million budget

Rory Cashin

It was already good, but now it is starting to get GOOOOOOOD.

Okay… (deep breath)…

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!

Spoilers for the first three episodes, and the newly dropped fourth episode.

Still here?

Okay, moving on…

As we said in our review of the first three episodes of WandaVision, this show does feel like the MCU’s first proper attempt at a mystery, but maybe the biggest question is how this show is reported to have cost up to $200 million to produce.

So far, it has been Wanda (Elisabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) in a series of sit-com homes, jumping forward a decade or so each episode, and while the hair, make-up, costumes, and set design have all been phenomenal, it seems unlikely that they cost a huge amount to put together.

And so with get to episode four we start to finally get an answer to that question (and a good few more), as we jump back into time, right into the middle of The Blip. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) wakes up sitting next to a hospital bed, and in the bedlam we learn that her mother Maria (aka Captain Marvel’s bestie) died three years earlier, two years after Monica – and half of all life in the universe – suddenly disappeared.

From there we discover Monica is an agent for S.W.O.R.D. (Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division), an organisation founded by her mother, and is immediately sent to investigate a missing person’s case, which she initially sees as being beneath her job description.

She drives to Westview, where she meets up with FBI Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), first introduced in Ant-Man & The Wasp, and we discover that it isn’t just a missing person, but a missing town, as nobody around has any memory of Westview ever existing. When she investigates further, Monica is pulled through a transparent wall of energy, and disappears.

This causes Woo to call in cavalry, with pretty much every agency available setting up a small town on the outskirts of the invisible border into Westview, and one of the many scientists called in to investigate is Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), Natalie Portman’s assistant in the first two Thor movies. She soon discovers a signal emanating from inside the town, and they uncover it is a TV signal… the show we’ve been watching for these first three episodes. And there they spot Monica, on the TV, in full-on 1970’s garb.

The agents begin to find the real-world residents of Westview have been cast in the sit-com, leading to this image:

Before long, we’re caught up with the events of episode three, with Monica mentioning Ultron, and waking up in that field.

So, some things we got answered:

The toy helicopter (it was a drone)
The evil bee-keeper (it was an agent)
How Monica got back outside of the town (Wanda shot her out)
The creepy messages over the radio (it was Woo trying to make contact)

And some new questions were asked:

Why does Vision look so afraid of Wanda at the end of the episode?
Why does Monica seem so certain that Wanda is singularly responsible for the town?
How did the townsfolk know that Monica wasn’t a local?
Speaking of which, on that wall of locals above, you know who we didn’t spot on there? Agnes (Kathyrn Hahn), who doesn’t actually appear in this episode at all
Was that image of Dead Vision the best scary moment the MCU has give us yet?

There is also a fantastic moment of meta-commentary, with the agents scouring each and every frame of the “show”, looking for clues, which is pretty much exactly what we’re doing with the actual show.

By the end, we’re left with two primary hunches for the direction of the series:

(A) Whoever Agnes is, and also potentially her never-seen husband Roger, they are somehow responsible for Wanda going a bit rogue, maybe feeding into her powers a bit to create this town, this perceived safe-haven, but for what reason… we don’t know. It’ll depend on why they turn out to be. If they turn out to be anyone!

Or (B) Wanda is real villain here, driven a bit mad by the loss of her great love, and is unlikely to give it up without a fight. Seeing how many of the perceived evils we’ve been introduced to so far (the toy helicopter, the bee keeper) have turned out to be entirely innocuous, and Wanda’s violent purging of Monica from her home, this could literally be a case of “Live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

We’ll know more when episode five drops on Friday, February 5 on Disney+.