After five episodes WandaVision has finally come together and “On a Very Special Episode” is the best episode so far.
In Westview, the time period has moved forward to the 1980s with Wanda and Vision struggling with raising their quickly aging twins and acquire a dog. However, Vision begins to question the reality he’s living in.
S.W.O.R.D. realizes that Wanda is in control of Westview and all its residences. They also realize that Wanda is even more powerful than first thought.
As WandaVision has progressed it has gradually revealed more and more of its mystery. This episode finally reveals what S.W.O.R.D. knew – Wanda took Vision’s body and turned Westview into a sitcom world. Monica said that Wanda controls all the people in the town and they experienced incredible pain. Monica also discovered that Wanda has the ability to change matter, hence why items that enter Westview change appearance.
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The episode also showed the different approaches within S.W.O.R.D. Monica wants to try and reason with Wanda, feeling that there was still some good left in her, whilst others wanted to go for a more aggressive approach. It was a typical dynamic because the higher-ups only want quick results. It led to one of the best scenes in the episode where Wanda leaves Westview to warn S.W.O.R.D. to back-off. Monica did come up with a clever way for getting into a device into Westview so she could try and communicate with Wanda.
Members of S.W.O.R.D. theorize why Wanda has turned Westview into a suburban paradise. Wanda wasn’t just suffering from grief for her husband, she had lost her father when she was a child, experimented on by HYDRA, lost her brother during Avengers: Age of Ultron and accidentally caused civilian deaths in Lagos. It’s no wonder she created a perfect world for herself. All the commercials in the episodes have referenced these events in some way.
A small mystery that was answered in this episode was why the static field used hexagons. It was simply to justify calling Wanda’s powers a hex.
In the previous episodes, it was established that Vision was having suspicions about the reality. In “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience” Vision asked what the company he worked for did and in “Now in Color” the neighbors told the android that Geraldine wasn’t from Westview. The walls of the Westview reality break even more when Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) fluffs her lines and Vision uses his powers to give Norm (Asif Ali) a brief moment of lucidity. This culminates in Vision having an existential crisis and confronts Wanda before she can reverse time.
The big question that lingers is the role of Agnes. In the previous episode S.W.O.R.D. found out the real identity of the residents of Westview, except Agnes. She appears anytime Wanda and Vision need help and usually has the item they need. In the first episode, Agnes brought food for the dinner party and in this episode, she acted as a babysitter and had a doghouse ready. As stated, Agnes fluffed her lines which no other character has suffered, and she was unfazed by the twins’ sudden aging. Agnes found the body of the dog and tries to convince Wanda to bring the dog back to life. Agnes clearly knows a lot more than she lets on and this leads to two questions: what’s her game plan and who does she want to resurrect?
“On a Very Special Episode” ends with a big twist that raises even more questions. It’s a twist that could have implications involving the multiverse that will appear in future MCU projects. Or it could just be an illusion for Wanda to cope with her grief. We will have to wait to find out.
“On a Very Special Episode” did an excellent job at combining events within Westview and S.W.O.R.D.’s response, answering some questions and raising some new ones, and being both a traditional MCU story and a major mystery.
