reiterating what foxy said yet two months later, it was also a moment of character development for wanda. She didn't even know she was the scarlet witch or what that meant for her.
Agatha could have been good. What I first thought she was, and which would have fitted, is for Agatha to have been made a fake outside villain by Wanda. She was at a point of the illusion getting cracks and needing a scapegoat to ease her guilt and Agatha turns up at the perfect time. Wanda creating herself a villain that is behind the bad things would have fitted so well. It's a pity Agatha was real.
That’s what I thought had a civilian play the villian to either get her off the hook, or accidentally do it as in her subconscious trying to snap her out of it.
When Agatha was revealed at EXACTLY the moment that Vision was starting to figure it out, this was the theory I had and was rooting for. ‘Invent a generic supervillain so Wanda is not the bad guy’ would have been a much, much, much better twist than ‘YOU ARE THE SCARLET WITCH!!!’ This video makes a lot of great points about the problems with WandaVision’s mystery, but the biggest problem with Agatha as the final villain is that she shouldn’t have been. The antagonist driving the problems of the story was WANDA all along. She abducted and brainwashed hundreds of people as magical grief therapy, but the show uses Agatha to make someone else the bad guy in the situation (even though Agatha’s evil plan targets Wanda, not innocent people). Imagine how much more satisfying WandaVision could have been if its main conflict was between Wanda and Vision, with Vision realizing what the love of his life has done and trying to break through to her. Instead we got CGI energy blasts in the sky. And also those kids singing in the Doctor Strange movie.
Not having seen the show myself but having picked up on broad details through osmosis, I always assumed that the main conflict WAS between Wanda and Vision. I didn’t even know about Agatha until watching this video and yeah, that makes this show look structurally disappointing from where I’m looking.
Having now watched WandaVision, I wonder why they didn't simply go all the way with Agatha mind controlling Wanda into creating all of this, creating events to stress her out to trigger her evolution into The Scarlet Witch to then steal her power or something like that. You can still explore the grief aspect, as people are very often more vulnerable to be taken advantage of in their grief, and you can still stage the entire thing like it was Wanda All Along - because it was, just someone else would be pulling her trigger. Maybe Wanda even accepted a deal from Agatha like she presents in the finale, so Wanda can still have all that guilt. It would have cleared up Agatha a bit too, whose actions seemed....really bizarre. Like is this a therapy session or are you trying to steal this witch's powers? What's the point of helping Wanda confront her demons and sort through her trauma and...make her more powerful because shes healing? I know Agatha was all "omg when did you take the steroids and where do I get some" but the way she spoke to Wanda, backhanded or no, really reminded me of a therapy session LOL I could handle the fucketry of the timeline if that'd been smoothed out a bit.
damn dude thats a really good idea. Been racking my brains as to how they could have tweaked the story so that it would actually work and couldn't come up with anything myself until I read this.
I agree with your changes to the plot. It was definitely rushed to hell and back so they could pump it out fast (especially during the pandemic, which I feel really fucked with a lot of work needed for these shows and movies to be the cinematic masterpieces they were intended to be)
i think agatha is so incredibly poorly written, and it’s such a shame they wasted katherine hahn’s talents for such a mediocre character. anyways, can’t wait to watch agatha all along and her fifty thousand wardrobes or whatever the fuck they wanna call it now
Hell, they could've framed it as Agatha approached Wanda to help her, as a way to help Wanda gain some form or closure and live out a life she wanted, where she could be normal. Agatha could frame it was "I'll handle choosing the location, just try to not use your powers too much, to get used to living a normal life" And then comes the reveal that Agatha was siphoning away Wanda's powers, and preparing for Wanda to ascend to being the Scarlet Witch, but something goes wrong. Maybe Agatha needed Wanda unaware that it wasn't real so she did a memory spell, but it wasn't complete and Wanda begins remembering. Maybe Vision, being incredibly insightful, notices something is wrong and after he finds he's unable to leave he tried to tell Wanda. And then you can lead into Multiverse of Madness by saying that Agatha planted a curse on Wanda so that, if Agatha ever leaves a certain vicinity of Wanda (say, the maximum distance between 2 points in westview, which is the maximum distance of her siphoning spell) it will begin to drive Wanda insane, twisting her perceptions and memories so that she'd cause her own destruction.
i really enjoyed this analysis and felt similarly about the show! The last show that made me feel this way was the BBC Sherlock series, similarly in how they created a "mystery" that the audience could never solve, only to create an unsatisfying plot that mocked the audience along the way
I never made that connection but it's brilliant actually. Sherlock never intended to reveal Reichenbach definitively. Both seemed so mean-spirited to their audience. Joke on people for caring I guess.
Agreed. I love both shows but the fun of a mystery is being able to follow along as an audience member. The “I knew it!” Is a great feeling, so is “wow! I never would’ve expected that!” when looking back and recalling all the clues you didn’t notice. “What? How was I supposed to know that?” Is just frustrating.
That is bad writing on Moffitt's part. 😅 the UK has an amazing list of detective mysteries that focus in the mystery (not all are dark either, some have great humour) and the fact they didn't get a good writer they fully had access to for it broke my heart. There is a reason why Midsummer Murders have been going for years - and it's not because of terrible writing😅
I can't help but think that the Mephisto theorizing was basically in reaction to WandaVision's poor quality of mystery. If the fans only had what the show offered to work with then it was bound to be a negative experience for a lot of people but the theorycrafting carried the show because the audiences were looking for a mystery within the mystery, things that weren't easy to guess since the majority of the fan base already knew the plot of the show before the third episode.
wouldn't it have worked better if it *wasn't* "agatha all along", but that was wanda's doing, as in, wanda put the blame on agatha for causing all of this instead of having go confront her guilt about it? but no, wanda's the hero, they can't make their hero do bad things in her own show, we can make her evil later in dr strange tho, i think i never actually saw that movie
The thing is she still did do bad things. Even if she didn't mean to, she mind controlled an entire town. Then she didn't even apologize and she didn't get arrested. She just walks away with no consequences.
The Agatha thing is wild because comic fans clocked Agnes as Agatha almost immediately because of some stupid broach she wore in one episode. In the same breath comic fans we’re getting annoyed with the set up of the show and LOVED episode 4 for explaining what was going on, so if the goal was to satisfy MCU fans then they arguably did. But like everything in the MCU it’s not really for casual viewers even if it’s more welcoming then other MCU shows.
I personally think Mephisto was going to be the villain but Disney wanted to swerve the audience because they assumed all MCU fans are obsessed with TH-camrs and their theories when most aren't That's an extremely small niche audience and to try trolling them messed up what they were gonna pay off And they already had a villain that could of not only paid this off it could of gone right into the Multiverse of Madness Mordo Baron, he's connected to both Dr Strange and Wanda in the comics and we already know he hated anyone messing with time magically, so he could of been revealed to manipulate Wanda into causing this hex to prove the world needs less socrcers Hell, even have him and Agatha have an alliance which again works in the MCU and comics fans would love it because they had many alliances in many comic arcs and it fits in the MCU because Mordo expressed many times he thinks messing with reality and time is bad and has serious consequences Wouldn't he be even more livid that Wanda and Stephen are just using magic for personal gains on the levels they've gone when he was upset at Stephen just using the time gem to manipulate an apple?!?!? One of my biggest pet peeves with Disney is how they have yet to pay him off or even hint to him coming back And killing him off in MOM (In a deleted scene) was a big fu to all the fans who were invested in his arc built up in the first Dr Strange movie I did enjoy he was an illuminati member however
@@jknifgijdfui its a reference to a bs sherlock holmes mystery where the murder was found to be done with a boomerang the audience had no way of knowing about. It refers to a mystery purposefully hiding information to make solving it impossible.
@@jknifgijdfuiIn Hbomberguy's video on "Sherlock" he talks about an episode/scene where, from nothing the audience could have known, Sherlock and Irene Adler conclude that a man was killed by a boomerang.
Episode four should have been an X-Files parody of trying to find Monica and uncovering the conspiracy to hide what happened to the town as the government didn't want to scare a population already afraid after Thanos and the end of the world. Then had the reveal that it was reality but left it ambiguous that the effect of the town was bleeding through into the real world.
It’s a great show, but a horrible mystery. The core audience (die-hard Marvel fans) clocked both Wanda being behind it all and Agnes being Agatha Harkness long before the show even premiered.
the second one was only clocked by comics fans. And as stated in this video, comics knowledge is not something the whole audience has (especially not the general/mainstream audience)
As someone who has seen zero MCU content except wandavision (I was bored and the old tv shows are what I watched growing up without cable). I had no clue what was going on at the end lol which def ruined it a bit for me personally but obviously that’s more a me issue I guess? I mean it would be nice if the show could be a self contained story that doesn’t require a lot of lore to watch but. Whatever. I didn’t clock any of the mysteries but I had no hope of doing so. I did dislike how they moved off the Wanda perspective to the agents perspectives because I found them confusing and boring. I wanted it to be just Wanda’s side. Not the outsides side. Or at least a more clueless outside like how I would feel in that position. Instead it was an agency that knows the main characters already so that did spoil a few small things here and there that I wouldn’t know going in. So yeah. Not a good standalone show but also it wasn’t made for me.
I really didn't like the Agatha reveal because the only reason people see it coming is because she's a character from the comics who uses magic and is associated with Wanda. I never read the comics, but I was aware of the theories, so I was actively looking for signs of foreshadowing. But not only was the reveal not built up at all, the story actually tries to throw you off by having "Agnes" do things just to make herself look innocent to the audience that don't have any internal logic to them. It's like in Frozen when Hans smiles dreamily at Anna when she's not even looking at him so it doesn't make sense as part of his manipulation of her, it's just to fool the audience. Kang in Loki was a similar deal. Guy completely comes out of nowhere, relying on your knowledge of comics to get the satisfaction of an "I knew it!" rather than putting any foreshadowing into the show itself. If the show were a self-contained original property and you didn't have outside knowledge and expectations coming into it, and it was purely about Loki's character arc and not a vehicle for introducing new characters and concepts to perpetuate the MCU with, the most logical thematically appropriate reveal would've been that it was another Loki variant who was in charge of the TVA, not some rando introduced at the last minute who Loki has no connection to.
Imo you're right that the mystery plot would have been better served with monica as the detective from the beginning, and they could have still done the different sitcom styles while she was investigating. The who comparison was good at illustrating that point. Agatha maybe should have been left as something like a post-credits scene to set up the next installment. Idk.
thank you for not spoiling legion btw, I had never heard of it before, but now I really want to watch it, so I was a bit nervous you would reveal the mystery
@@JamesWoodall just when I needed some new shows to watch :) I low key really hate when a TH-cam channel spoils a secondary show or movie when reviewing or critiquing the primary material. A lot of content creators don’t give a damn.
8:13 case in point, that example would have been an acceptable solution in a mystery taking place in the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Like... the rules of that world is that toons can only break physics for comedic effect, "only when it's funny", so imagine the perp escaped through a door drawn on the wall then deliberately had an accomplice also try to run through it but slamming into the wall, there you have the joke. Then the accomplice either erases the door as best as they can or hides it behind a shelf or something.
To me, the real subversion would be to twist the source material. If the writers were bold enough to not make it out as Wanda herself crafting the Hex-field but truly instead be her under some form of manipulation, and have Agatha be behind all that, it would’ve been much more appealing. The source material is a widely known reference to the show, and having the show actually built on it and built on subverting it the same time would probably have been more interesting.
When there was the whole thing about Agatha, even though I haven't read the comics I was like "mmm...okay?" And then she was defeated like the next episode so what was the point and when Agatha was like "The Scarlett Witch!😦😳" I was like...yeah? Obviously, don't we already know all of this? Why is this supposed to be shocking?
You make a lot of fair points, though I still enjoyed WandaVison, there was some room for improvement and telling a better mystery. I think Marvel focused more on the emotional backbone and the setup for future releases and didn't focus enough on the art of a well told mystery. Maybe that was intentional or maybe they are revealing a story telling weakness of theirs... Time will tell I guess. Well produced video btw, edits and animations were very enjoyable.
6:10 oh my god the way I felt that in my soul. Thank god Knives Out saved my love for detective dramas because that whole season of BBC Sherlock made it shrivel up and DIE inside of me for YEARS.
You’ve precisely explained why I didn’t like WandaVision as much as I wished I could have. I wasn’t familiar with Wanda or Vision ahead of time, so I wasn’t having to bridge that gap. But even as a stand-alone, so much seemed to be over explained, or completely unexplained, so by the end - when the “gotcha” was happening, it just seemed like a throwaway.
11:50 I mean theres also the clue that Wanda says "no" and it rewinds immediately after. That is a clue that she has some form of control. For the sake of argument.
@@aemcpthat is far too vague for anyone to conclude it was wanda. She could have been asking wanda to stop whoever is causing the anomaly, since they are avengers.
I'm SO happy you did Legion. I love that show beyond any other, it really feels like it's too forgotten because it was a Fox thing and not released by Disney. If Disney actually did release it, it would have made more waves
I personally find it annoying how Marvel seems to cater to the comic fans at the expense of movie only fans. Like, someone who already knows who Agatha is can still enjoy the mystery if it's written well; knowing the twist doesn't ruin the story, if that were the case we'd never rewatch anything. But writing poorly just to throw people off who already know everything ruins it for everyone!
you can do the "same mystery from the outside and the inside" thing well, my favorite piece of fiction of all time, umineko when they cry does exactly this. it sets up a mystery with 18 people on an island who all die, showing multiple seperate interpretations of how the story could possibly go from an internal perspective, and also shows the perspective of someone from the outside, 12 years later, as ange, the sole surviving member of the family (due to being sick during the family conference where everyone died) tries to figure out what really happened the day her whole family died. it's an incredibly phenomenal story and i highly reccomend everyone reads it.
I wish Marvel treated their media more like adaptations and stopped trying to full the comic-reading audience. Just like book readers already know the ending, they aren't going to the movie to be shocked or surprised, they (we) just want to the story come to life. The fact that WandaVision was already based on a comic story should have warned them that comic-readers would know. A mystery is still satisfying if you already know the answer because you get to more clearly see the pieces on the way. In fact, I would argue that a good mystery is even more satisfying the second or even third time around. I love rereading Miss Marple's Thirteen Problems not because of the characters or plot, because there isn't much of either, but because I discover new details that point to the solutions or red herrings all along the way.
6:43 I was taught that this was meant as, If a foreigner with customs that a reader is unlikely to be familiar with appears in the story, either, said customs aren't important (then why make it a foreigner), or said customs are important (then you're basing an important part of your story on something that the reader is unfamiliar with and will take a great deal of time to explain, and if you take a great deal of time to explain, there's an expectancy that that person must be quite important to the story) This harkens back to hit 4th point It's unfair for the detective to say something like, "Oh, the word 'thing' is actually supposed to be a word in another language that means 'girl', so this sign was actually the victim telling us that the girl was the killer" in the big reveal, for instance. Though I was also taught that these rules... are more like suggestions
I've had a similar thought about an episode of doctor who and a marvel movie. Doctor Strange ends with him spending what I think was intended to feel like an eternity of him being killed by Dormammu but they dwell on it for 2 minutes before Dormammu just gives up. In the episode Heaven Sent of doctor who, they do so much better at communicating an eternity gone by and the sacrifices the doctor is willing to make.
I was SO surprised to see Legion mentioned here - an absolutely great example to use for comparison that I don't often seen brought up in discussion about superhero media in general. I think it also is important within this discussion about mysteries because it refutes the idea that a comic book series can't keep mysteries from hardcore fans - the way in which the series weaved and interpreted storylines (Especially in season 1) kept it fresh for non-comic readers and X-men fans alike. Edit: Also noticed you defended s2/s3 , really cool seeing that - I agree Legion sometimes gets too over its head for its own good (especially in season 3) but I honestly think the philosophical concepts structure of season 2 and the way that affects the story going forward is brilliant and deserves more credit.
When this video started I screamed "there better be some poirot in this!" and i was not disappointed ♥ such a good video and such good points! I enjoyed WandaVision a lot but I have to agree with what you're saying. You have articulated a lot of things that felt off about the series. Great job!
James, I discovered your channel some weeks ago and watched your Devil wears Prada video (and it's amazing!). I clicked this video thinking "HEY but I liked Wandavision so much even though I'm not a Marvel Fan", but I loved this video. Like you said, it's a change on Marvel narrative but still, could be improved. Great analysis! I learn a lot with your videos :)
I wasnt near my phone, just listening via bluetooth, and suddenly I hear my favorite doctor saying "The library!" a line from one of my favorite episodes, out of nowhere. Well done in making this whovian stop everything she's doing and smile 😊😊😎
I never really considered WandaVision to be a "mystery show", even though there were a lot questions posed. It never really has any of the aesthetic trappings of a mystery and I didn't expect a mystery going in, so really these unanswered questions not having their clues onscreen never bothered me. I don't consider WandaVision to be "bad at mysteries", because why would I even expect it to be "good at" them in the first place?
It took me this long to find the time to watch the video and OMFG, it was great! I don't do the MCU (though I love 90s X-Men and the FOX movies - well, the good ones), but this video having media criticism, Poirot, Doctor Who AND a 'do better' attitude... *I think I'm in love* :D My favorite new channel! Easily.
I haven’t watched the video yet, so there’s a good chance you will bring this up. I feel that they played their hand way too soon. In episode 3 or 4 when the woman wakes up after getting expelled from Wanda’s world they explain nearly everything and pivot into an action show. I feel the mystery would have worked better if the reveal happend two episodes later and if some of the cameos happened sooner, like the woman from the thor movie. These changes would have added more to speculate and scratch our head over, but also make the mystery feel like it was actually important and not ham fisted to have a sitcom romp for 3 episodes
I love all of your video essays, this one is finishing off my binging of them! I hope you continue, these are all great! (If I may posit one criticism; during the grainy film-reel sequences in this, there's a subtle but present and steady high-pitched tone that's a big trigger for tinnitus/auditory issues!)
I can only explain this with the hindsight of having seen knives out, but at the time I was watching, wandavision stopped being a mystery and started being about following the thriller of how will Vision escape, or How Sword will save the people. The mystery elements became extra flair on top of the other genre of fiction I was watching. There are still criticisms to be made in how this genre flip, it's not a perfect show by any stretch, but it worked well enough when I was watching
Thank you for this comment! I think it's odd that people would assume this show was just failing at being a mystery... like Y'ALL. The point of the show wasn't the mystery, but the exploration of what grief can do to people and how Wanda has gone through so much loss and how it's finally broken her but also led her to her power.
15:15 This greatly bothered me on my initial viewing of WandaVision. I was new in the mcu, had just watched all the movies and shows. My brain was running on all the logic of all those previous shows, with no comic book knowledge. So when the Agatha reveal happened... I was super confused. (The scene with Agatha being strapped to the pole). I was wondering if Wanda had suddenly changed the genre of the show, if this was a new trick. Massive confusion all around. I felt like I was watching a different show or maybe I had missed an episode. *Then* I realised the show was serious, witchcraft is a thing in this world. Magic that was different from Dr. Strange exists. And Agatha is a witch, an antagonist. It was so out of left field, it knocked all my immersion away and I had trouble getting back into it during the whole finale.
It would've been really cool if Agatha was sort of a twisted hero of sorts, someone who knew all of what Wanda was capable of but instead of stealing her power wanted to contain it. So, she followed her, befriended her, and pushed her grief past the breaking point so she would create this fantasy sitcom to keep her busy and make Wanda keep her own powers dormant in the pursuit of a domestic life. That would explain why she was always trying to keep the truth away from Wanda and Vision and make her a much better antagonist.
Me, knowing full well I'm stupider than Watson: ....Uh oh. Also those Poirot sketches were hilarious. The entire video was very well formulated and put together, and your logic was well formed and presented. I remember thinking while you explained the mystery rubric that clearly the BBC Sherlock showrunners could have used a good dose of that, instead of throwing it out the window like they were, seemingly, too smart for it. Thank you! Good stuff.
Marvel ripping apart WandaVision of all of it's personality is the most disappointing thing I've ever seen, it had potential to be a very good mystery show with tints of horror.
As far as mysteries go, in my opinion Westworld season 1 and 2 is absolutely legendary. Not to spoil anything too much but these guys were showing us two different time periods/timelines and we didn’t even realize it until the end. Many others will agree but it’s honestly so unique and creative that even those same writers and producers couldn’t duplicate it (season 3 and 4 are…unfortunate?) I’d love to see the notes written down while they were figuring it all out, lol that must be like reading a schizophrenics journal
I liked your film analysis Spoilers for anyone below- who hasn’t seen Wanda vision or watched this video. When Agatha was revealed to be the big bad. I kept getting hocus pocus and Halloweentown vibes. I mean burning at the stake the evil book had to be a reference from hocus pocus and there seemed to be a lot of Halloween town references. Agatha outfit looks similar to Calabar from Halloweentown, the chanting in Latin, the being the friendly next door neighbor (he was the mayor but he also the grandmas next door neighbor and the mothers ex boyfriend in the movie I think) Even her standing on a billboard confronting Wanda is similar to him confronting the kids at the ending of Halloween town. Not only that but Wanda kids have visions similar to the youngest daughter in Halloween town which is how they were able to defeat him in the first place. And Calabar was also aging people in the movie theater similar to what Agatha was doing and in the sequel Calabar was turning them into black in white and “normal”. Not only that but in the movie the kids find out their “witches” very similar to what Wanda was told. She’s a witch. The scarlet witch. At the end of the movie the oldest daughter Marine is allowed to come to or stay in Halloween town and continue her training. And something very similar happens to one of the characters on wandavision- Rambeau in the movie theater is told by someone at the end that she will be able to go into space and by her mothers authority no less or because of her mother. (I even think she’s still in Wanda “hex” when she’s told this) (and earlier was told she couldn’t fly into space because of her mother’s orders) Now we see Wanda keeps transitioning people and herself into different tv shows of the decade and in later American television (I think) I remember there being a resurgence of “witchcraft” shows but with more or less storyline involved. Both for adults and kids shows. (Charmed and W.I.T.C.H.) So I thought Agatha wasn’t going to be a witch but a person casted by Wanda subconscious to play the antagonist of her tv show. So I thought Agatha wasn’t going to be a villain but Wanda own subconscious was ironically playing into her own television show.
I see a lot of your points, and I agree that the show would probably have been stronger if it was more of a mystery. I didn't go into it expecting much of a mystery personally, but I can see how making it one would have been compelling. There is just one point I'll contest you on. When you mention Agatha playing her role too well, specifically in the scene where Vision "wakes her up". When I watched that scene, personally, it immediately told me that the fan theories were true and that Agnes was lying about who she was. Because compare her waking up to Norm. Norm gasps and looks around, asks Vision what day it is and where he is, panics, talks about needing to get in touch with his sister about his sick father. Agnes? She immediately starts talking in this really hammy awe-struck tone that just sounds so fake to me, which I feel was most likely on purpose for this exact reason. I mean think about her reaction. The first thing she does is realize that she's talking to The Vision and ask if he's there to save them, then does the overly dramatic "You're dead!" shout over and over again before laughing and saying all is lost. It's so corny, I immediately bought into the idea that it was Agatha putting on a show, partly for the fun of it and partly to see if she could get any more hints of information from Vision. Sorry to ramble on about that, I just love that detail of that scene, and sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who sees it since I've seen no one else bring it up, everyone seems to take that scene at face value.
I find it fascinating, that the Sherlock Holmes stories break many if not most of those rules. 😂 The reader is mostly clueless until Sherlock explains everything and in many stories the solution is something exotic that no normal reader could ever know about. Plus, he constantly finds clues, while the reader is kept in the dark until the great reveal. But the stories are still wildly beloved. But then again, the Sherlock Holmes stories are older than these rules, so that's that, i guess.
An example of a mystery told from different sides- one of my family’s new favorite shows is Yellowjackets. The story follows a girls soccer team who’s plane crashed in the canadian wilderness and whom, presumably, resorted to cannibalism. It follows them in the wilderness and them as adults 20 years later. But the whole time you are trying to figure out what happened in the forest: who died, how did they live, who got eaten, how did they get rescued. And youre falling further and further into the question as you see them devolve in the wilderness and see more of them as adults: are they bad people? Great show!! Super fun to speculate on id suggest it for any mystery thriller fans
I’m so glad you brought up Doctor Who! When I first saw the trailer for WandaVision I immediately thought of the Silence in the Library episode and how well done and heartbreaking it was
Legion is one of the best shows I've ever seen and is one of the best examples of doing surrealism without making it completely incomprehensible or too blunt and obvious. It hit such a good sweet spot where you still feel disoriented, but you feel grounded somehow in the dream of it all
It’s a crime you only have four videos up. I’d love to see you deconstruct Cruella, Mulholland Dr, Robert Altman, 2046, Spike Lee, and what the hell happened to Ang Lee’s career.
When I watched this as it was coming out with my roommates, they watched episode 4 without me. I was there for the rest of it, but I hadn't even noticed when we watched ep 5 that I had missed anything. It was a good few episodes until we started seeing sword agents acting like we should know these people, that I was like "what is happening right now?"
@@UltraVioletKnight ....clearly you’ve never read the books lol but I won’t stop your bandwagon, she’s an awful person that deserves everything being thrown at her today 🤮
@@UltraVioletKnight i mean it didn't get so incredibly famous for no reason - jk is probably ideologically beyond saving at this point, but the books are fun and engaging even if they're not outstanding
I remember thinking Agnes was Agnes Harkness and only remembered the characters name was Agatha when it was revealed on the show… the only thing spoiled was my misremembering her name
I feel like it was most likely a great concept ruined by studio interference. They didn’t trust audiences to keep watching the slow burn the first few episodes promised. We need cameos, quips, fight scenes, and an unambiguously evil villain.
My whole beef was that WandaVision led us into thinking Mephisto or someone (Dr. Strange?) commanded by Mephisto was setting everything up for Wanda with Aggie playing the quirky Drop-In Character because Mephisto's watching Wanda play around in the world and using/puppeteering her power the longer she's in it, only for Monica to catch on and try to rescue her but Wanda is too consumed by grief to want to leave/so sucked into the "sitcom" that she tries to stop her, thinking that it's her "time to have fun." Instead, nope. The sitcom was *all her fault.* The commercials weren't Dr. Strange at all, *nope.* Also, your mystery is bad if by the 4th episode where SWORD pops in it immediately hijacks the rest of the show to the point where you forget it originally began as a sitcom pastiche.
For me, the problem with WandaVision is that its mystery is… Just not that interesting. Wanda created the Hex and, well, that’s it. And I think the writers knew that and, thus, decided to cover it up with misdirection after misdirection (allowed to do that with the serial formula), but as said in this video, that’s simply not fair, and all clues end up being incoherent and downright contradictory in hindsight. One of the worst scenes of the show for me is the Agatha All Along section, because the whole song and the ending reveal of the episode it’s a part of, make it seem like this is the huge twist, that Agatha orchestrated it all but… She didn’t. Hell, the very next episode reveals that no, it wasn’t actually Agatha, but Wanda herself who started and kept up the Hex’s façade for her own personal reasons, and Agatha was just a player in Wanda’s playfield. Pietro is another good example, merely ending up as a misdirection to the lack of a substantial mystery. But if we were to go along with how it’s revealed and the implications it brought, then it would seem this new revelation was huge to the story’s mystery, that it means something. But it didn’t. It was just a dick joke. And thus, the clustered nature of the “mystery” the writers came up with is revealed. I just think the concept got too big for the writers initial idea, and just ended up playing catch-up on a game they set themselves up to lose. I remember being so disappointed by the finale of this series, not only for its shallow writing and downgrade into yet another CGI battle that the story didn’t need at all, but also because all the clues and build up created throughout all the weeks the show ran, didn’t lead to anything of substance. I don’t think the concept was bad, quite the contrary, I think it could have been quite a good story and mystery, but the writers clear lack of experience in creating and sustaining an interesting mystery, along with Marvel’s incessant need to make everything a big, over the top battle, along with subpar performances from the secondary cast and a shallow, by the books script, kept it from being anywhere close to being great and, for me, made it one of the worst Marvel projects of their filmography.
I actually enjoyed the show, but I was a Marvel Comics fan, so it was not a mystery to me. However you make good points on how it could have been improved.
i feel like you could maybe do inside out and outside in both in one story, but you'd have to do it simultaneously. you could even do interesting things with each perspective giving different sets of information, some of which may conflict, forcing the audience to come to their own conclusions about which information is more likely to be accurate
This show gave Truman Show vibes bc we know the answer to the mystery (for the most part) but we still like seeing how the characters interact with the world around them
Excellent analysis. Of course what you didn’t realize at the time was that WandaVision was just set-up content for The Marvels content and for the next Doctor Strange content, and probably not worth anyone’s time or engagement
As someone who did not exactly watch the Marvel movies, I genuinely enjoyed the mystery, because I didn’t know anything about Wanda and Vision. So I suppose this series is for someone like me, who is yet not very familiar with the Marvel universe. I believe that’s why they actually explain what happened in the movies through the series.
Really good video, thanks. I love the idea of "playing fair", as an escape game designer I always try to use it in my puzzles. I often say that if it's a good puzzle, players want to kick themselves after solving it, but if it's a bad puzzle, players want to kick the person who created it.
Episode 4 pissed me off so much because just giving us a 20 second shot of the outside world and then going RIGHT back to the fake TV world would have been such a great hook. Instead, we get an entire episode dedicated to unraveling everything before putting us back in.
Liked this allot. I, too, didn't care for the show, and while I have some of my own thoughts on the matter, I was glad to see a 'Wandavision's not good" video that wasn't an angry, reactionary cry for help.
wandavision's 'mystery' angle was so bad i genuinly didnt even think they were going for that. i thought it was just a cash grab fluff show. though i did like it
This was a masterful examination. Earned a new sub with this. And the 1st season of Legion WAS amazing. Too bad the remaining seasons never reached that level.
I can agree the first season is the strongest, but seasons two and three are by no means weak. Season two is a bit obtuse, and I didn’t feel I’d fully appreciated it until my second watch, but it builds to a stunning conclusion. And while season three is perhaps a bit too goofy, it’s playing with some fantastic ideas. The time eaters are terrifying!
It was never supposed to be a mystery. It's horror with a superhero veneer and some dark comedy. The monster was chased away, but wasn't properly dealt with in the end, a standard horror trope. The only mystery is how people thought there was a mystery to solve.
MCU has a problem with introducing new concepts as if they were always there. Not only are these literally different from the comics, but they don't make any sense in the MCU before the reveals
This is a great video and also nicely articulates the issue I had with Sherlock. None of the mysteries in that are remotely fair which is why it was always so infuriating.
Eh, I loved Agatha as a villain. You can’t really complain that she acted for the audience's benefit because, well, there literally was an audience watching Wanda’s sitcom within the show. And I think her demonstrating all the ways she failed to nudge Wanda awake was to emphasize just how deep in denial Wanda really was. My only complaint about Agatha is that she felt like a performer after she revealed herself. As in, I felt like she was purposefully making herself out to be worse than she really was for whatever reason. But I guess that’s just a testament to her acting skills, lol.
21:13 See, at the time, I *did not believe* the solution in Episode 4. I wasnʼt convinced it was wrong but I didnʼt take her word for it either. Because there was still evidence against it at that point, still some mysteries that didnʼt add up with that explanation. And some of those are explained by it being Agatha All Along and some of those really were Wanda despite the evidence we had to the contrary.
If this was marketed as a mystery, I missed it. I went in knowing all the twists, and viewing it as a character study. And for that, I got a lot of satisfaction. Maybe the ending could have been less action-heavy, but hey, Marvel's gotta Marvel.
I rarely watch mystery shows or movies, but regularly I read similar mystery/detective books. Only once have I actually been surprised by the reveal of a killer. In hindsight, it was obvious who it was, but I'd managed to miss all the clues for once. Loved that book. It gave me all the clues, but I was just too tired or whatever to miss it. Didn't want to see the clues, almost. Simply didn't want to believe that the character in question was the one. Wish more media in general could be like that.
to give wandavision credit where it is due, this show's concept was such a bonkers new direction for the mcu that I think they were trying to work with what they could. Most of their previous works didn't delve into the sureal weirdness and meta narratives that wandavision did (and it took them a while to actually try it again imo) I can imagine wandavision being held back a bit by some higher ups being unsure if they're willing to put this kinda risk on this project. They also weren't expecting it to be the leading show in their line-up (That was supposed to be Captain and the winter soldier, which was designed to be a much more "mcu-like" 6-hour-movie that they split into parts). Covid caught everyone by surprise and shook up the schedules. So a third in line movie got bumped up to the main spotlight.
I think Rule 5 is useful if you think of it from a modern perspective. Translate it to ‘ensure none of your characters are glaring negative stereotypes or simple caricatures, because it’ll muddle up the mystery and reflect poorly on you as a person’…
The mystery falls flat because the crucial details and character identities are already clear to us. We're aware of Agatha's true nature as a witch and sense something sinister about her from the start. However, the show excelled in playing with our expectations. Initially, it cleverly led us to believe that Wanda might be a pawn in Agatha's or Hydra's scheme, only to pull the rug out from under us with the twist that Wanda was orchestrating everything from the beginning.
You know what could have been fun? If the inside and outside were two different shows. So we have Wandavision, this sitcom parody where we the audience alongside Vision learn that something's wrong, and we start to uncover the clues. Meanwhile, we have an entirely different show, let's call it S.W.O.R.D. for simplicity, about this division handling anomalous threat, and around the same episode where Vision learns in Wandavision that something's wrong, the division in S.W.O.R.D. learn of an anomalous town that does not exist and they begin to investigate it. And as both shows progresses, they become more and more interconnected, without ever completely giving away that they're the events from two different perspectives. Do stuff like, have the voice on the radio in Wandavision be played by one of the characters in S.W.O.R.D. and have them mention at one point that they tried to send a message into the anomaly, but received no response. Also, if they wanna pull the Agatha twist, have Agatha be the missing person that the one agent remembers, and have her be like, his aunt or something. That way the audience knows there's a something special about Agatha that might also extend to her relatives, allowing them to bypass Wanda's magic. Again, have the characters in S.W.O.R.D. discuss this missing person with a picture of her, but with different clothes and hair so that, while it's no secret they're played by the same actress as Agatha, viewers might not clue in immediately that they are the same person. Then, I would say in the third or second to last episode on each show, the connection is revealed (ideally at this point, there should have been enough clues for the audience to think that makes sense), and announce a short hiatus of maybe a month, before the last episodes. Thus viewers who didn't spot the connection are able to catch up on the other show, viewers who did can watch both shows with new eyes, and people can put the clues together to figure out the final twist, which the episode after the hiatus showcases, with these episodes being the same on both shows; that Agatha was behind it all along.
Thank god I wasn't the only one confused by the "Agatha All Along" twist I thought I was missing something...but it turns out the show was
My jaw dropped when they revealed that Scarlet Witch was The Scarlet Witch. I didn’t see that coming.
Ik I'm 2 months late but it wasnt meant to be a plot twist for fans
Nobody ever called wanda the scarlet witch in the movies before
"No way!"
reiterating what foxy said yet two months later, it was also a moment of character development for wanda. She didn't even know she was the scarlet witch or what that meant for her.
Also when they show us that Vision is Vision, but _not_ Vision... But it's totally Vision. But in true it was Wanda all along.
I'm three years late but that still made me snort 😂
Agatha could have been good. What I first thought she was, and which would have fitted, is for Agatha to have been made a fake outside villain by Wanda. She was at a point of the illusion getting cracks and needing a scapegoat to ease her guilt and Agatha turns up at the perfect time. Wanda creating herself a villain that is behind the bad things would have fitted so well. It's a pity Agatha was real.
That’s what I thought had a civilian play the villian to either get her off the hook, or accidentally do it as in her subconscious trying to snap her out of it.
Such a better idea! You’re right. That would’ve fit so much better.
When Agatha was revealed at EXACTLY the moment that Vision was starting to figure it out, this was the theory I had and was rooting for. ‘Invent a generic supervillain so Wanda is not the bad guy’ would have been a much, much, much better twist than ‘YOU ARE THE SCARLET WITCH!!!’
This video makes a lot of great points about the problems with WandaVision’s mystery, but the biggest problem with Agatha as the final villain is that she shouldn’t have been. The antagonist driving the problems of the story was WANDA all along. She abducted and brainwashed hundreds of people as magical grief therapy, but the show uses Agatha to make someone else the bad guy in the situation (even though Agatha’s evil plan targets Wanda, not innocent people).
Imagine how much more satisfying WandaVision could have been if its main conflict was between Wanda and Vision, with Vision realizing what the love of his life has done and trying to break through to her. Instead we got CGI energy blasts in the sky. And also those kids singing in the Doctor Strange movie.
Not having seen the show myself but having picked up on broad details through osmosis, I always assumed that the main conflict WAS between Wanda and Vision. I didn’t even know about Agatha until watching this video and yeah, that makes this show look structurally disappointing from where I’m looking.
@@Poodlestroop Worst part was that I was watching a better usage of the Darkhold side by side in Agents of Shield.
Having now watched WandaVision, I wonder why they didn't simply go all the way with Agatha mind controlling Wanda into creating all of this, creating events to stress her out to trigger her evolution into The Scarlet Witch to then steal her power or something like that. You can still explore the grief aspect, as people are very often more vulnerable to be taken advantage of in their grief, and you can still stage the entire thing like it was Wanda All Along - because it was, just someone else would be pulling her trigger. Maybe Wanda even accepted a deal from Agatha like she presents in the finale, so Wanda can still have all that guilt. It would have cleared up Agatha a bit too, whose actions seemed....really bizarre. Like is this a therapy session or are you trying to steal this witch's powers? What's the point of helping Wanda confront her demons and sort through her trauma and...make her more powerful because shes healing? I know Agatha was all "omg when did you take the steroids and where do I get some" but the way she spoke to Wanda, backhanded or no, really reminded me of a therapy session LOL I could handle the fucketry of the timeline if that'd been smoothed out a bit.
damn dude thats a really good idea. Been racking my brains as to how they could have tweaked the story so that it would actually work and couldn't come up with anything myself until I read this.
I agree with your changes to the plot. It was definitely rushed to hell and back so they could pump it out fast (especially during the pandemic, which I feel really fucked with a lot of work needed for these shows and movies to be the cinematic masterpieces they were intended to be)
agetha didnt control hershe manipulated her with the idea
i think agatha is so incredibly poorly written, and it’s such a shame they wasted katherine hahn’s talents for such a mediocre character. anyways, can’t wait to watch agatha all along and her fifty thousand wardrobes or whatever the fuck they wanna call it now
Hell, they could've framed it as Agatha approached Wanda to help her, as a way to help Wanda gain some form or closure and live out a life she wanted, where she could be normal.
Agatha could frame it was "I'll handle choosing the location, just try to not use your powers too much, to get used to living a normal life"
And then comes the reveal that Agatha was siphoning away Wanda's powers, and preparing for Wanda to ascend to being the Scarlet Witch, but something goes wrong. Maybe Agatha needed Wanda unaware that it wasn't real so she did a memory spell, but it wasn't complete and Wanda begins remembering. Maybe Vision, being incredibly insightful, notices something is wrong and after he finds he's unable to leave he tried to tell Wanda.
And then you can lead into Multiverse of Madness by saying that Agatha planted a curse on Wanda so that, if Agatha ever leaves a certain vicinity of Wanda (say, the maximum distance between 2 points in westview, which is the maximum distance of her siphoning spell) it will begin to drive Wanda insane, twisting her perceptions and memories so that she'd cause her own destruction.
i really enjoyed this analysis and felt similarly about the show! The last show that made me feel this way was the BBC Sherlock series, similarly in how they created a "mystery" that the audience could never solve, only to create an unsatisfying plot that mocked the audience along the way
I never made that connection but it's brilliant actually. Sherlock never intended to reveal Reichenbach definitively. Both seemed so mean-spirited to their audience. Joke on people for caring I guess.
Agreed. I love both shows but the fun of a mystery is being able to follow along as an audience member. The “I knew it!” Is a great feeling, so is “wow! I never would’ve expected that!” when looking back and recalling all the clues you didn’t notice. “What? How was I supposed to know that?” Is just frustrating.
That is bad writing on Moffitt's part. 😅 the UK has an amazing list of detective mysteries that focus in the mystery (not all are dark either, some have great humour) and the fact they didn't get a good writer they fully had access to for it broke my heart. There is a reason why Midsummer Murders have been going for years - and it's not because of terrible writing😅
I can't help but think that the Mephisto theorizing was basically in reaction to WandaVision's poor quality of mystery. If the fans only had what the show offered to work with then it was bound to be a negative experience for a lot of people but the theorycrafting carried the show because the audiences were looking for a mystery within the mystery, things that weren't easy to guess since the majority of the fan base already knew the plot of the show before the third episode.
The fans were expecting way too much of the writers
they way wanda fell under her own spell instantly upon seeing vision if front of her gets me in the heart everytime
wouldn't it have worked better if it *wasn't* "agatha all along", but that was wanda's doing, as in, wanda put the blame on agatha for causing all of this instead of having go confront her guilt about it? but no, wanda's the hero, they can't make their hero do bad things in her own show, we can make her evil later in dr strange tho, i think i never actually saw that movie
The thing is she still did do bad things. Even if she didn't mean to, she mind controlled an entire town. Then she didn't even apologize and she didn't get arrested. She just walks away with no consequences.
@@bobafettjr85 no that’s what I’m saying
@@rowandunning6877 Oh sorry. I misunderstood what you were saying.
The Agatha thing is wild because comic fans clocked Agnes as Agatha almost immediately because of some stupid broach she wore in one episode.
In the same breath comic fans we’re getting annoyed with the set up of the show and LOVED episode 4 for explaining what was going on, so if the goal was to satisfy MCU fans then they arguably did. But like everything in the MCU it’s not really for casual viewers even if it’s more welcoming then other MCU shows.
I personally think Mephisto was going to be the villain but Disney wanted to swerve the audience because they assumed all MCU fans are obsessed with TH-camrs and their theories when most aren't
That's an extremely small niche audience and to try trolling them messed up what they were gonna pay off
And they already had a villain that could of not only paid this off it could of gone right into the Multiverse of Madness
Mordo Baron, he's connected to both Dr Strange and Wanda in the comics and we already know he hated anyone messing with time magically, so he could of been revealed to manipulate Wanda into causing this hex to prove the world needs less socrcers
Hell, even have him and Agatha have an alliance which again works in the MCU and comics fans would love it because they had many alliances in many comic arcs and it fits in the MCU because Mordo expressed many times he thinks messing with reality and time is bad and has serious consequences
Wouldn't he be even more livid that Wanda and Stephen are just using magic for personal gains on the levels they've gone when he was upset at Stephen just using the time gem to manipulate an apple?!?!?
One of my biggest pet peeves with Disney is how they have yet to pay him off or even hint to him coming back
And killing him off in MOM (In a deleted scene) was a big fu to all the fans who were invested in his arc built up in the first Dr Strange movie
I did enjoy he was an illuminati member however
"There's an idea in classic mystery fiction called 'Not A Fucking Boomerang!'"
elaborate
@@jknifgijdfui It's an hbomber guy reference
, so it isnt actually an idea in classic fiction
@@videogamee6037 what does it mean regardless
@@jknifgijdfui its a reference to a bs sherlock holmes mystery where the murder was found to be done with a boomerang the audience had no way of knowing about. It refers to a mystery purposefully hiding information to make solving it impossible.
@@jknifgijdfuiIn Hbomberguy's video on "Sherlock" he talks about an episode/scene where, from nothing the audience could have known, Sherlock and Irene Adler conclude that a man was killed by a boomerang.
"Silence in the Library" is one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who episodes!!!
Mine too such a great who done it episode
Probably in the top-ten best stories, classic and modern.
Episode four should have been an X-Files parody of trying to find Monica and uncovering the conspiracy to hide what happened to the town as the government didn't want to scare a population already afraid after Thanos and the end of the world. Then had the reveal that it was reality but left it ambiguous that the effect of the town was bleeding through into the real world.
It’s a great show, but a horrible mystery. The core audience (die-hard Marvel fans) clocked both Wanda being behind it all and Agnes being Agatha Harkness long before the show even premiered.
well i didn't know that agatha character
the second one was only clocked by comics fans. And as stated in this video, comics knowledge is not something the whole audience has (especially not the general/mainstream audience)
As someone who has seen zero MCU content except wandavision (I was bored and the old tv shows are what I watched growing up without cable). I had no clue what was going on at the end lol which def ruined it a bit for me personally but obviously that’s more a me issue I guess? I mean it would be nice if the show could be a self contained story that doesn’t require a lot of lore to watch but. Whatever. I didn’t clock any of the mysteries but I had no hope of doing so. I did dislike how they moved off the Wanda perspective to the agents perspectives because I found them confusing and boring. I wanted it to be just Wanda’s side. Not the outsides side. Or at least a more clueless outside like how I would feel in that position. Instead it was an agency that knows the main characters already so that did spoil a few small things here and there that I wouldn’t know going in.
So yeah. Not a good standalone show but also it wasn’t made for me.
@@Zelda00Gamer thank you, i can indeed just skip this one. Im happy ppl had fun!
I really didn't like the Agatha reveal because the only reason people see it coming is because she's a character from the comics who uses magic and is associated with Wanda. I never read the comics, but I was aware of the theories, so I was actively looking for signs of foreshadowing. But not only was the reveal not built up at all, the story actually tries to throw you off by having "Agnes" do things just to make herself look innocent to the audience that don't have any internal logic to them. It's like in Frozen when Hans smiles dreamily at Anna when she's not even looking at him so it doesn't make sense as part of his manipulation of her, it's just to fool the audience.
Kang in Loki was a similar deal. Guy completely comes out of nowhere, relying on your knowledge of comics to get the satisfaction of an "I knew it!" rather than putting any foreshadowing into the show itself. If the show were a self-contained original property and you didn't have outside knowledge and expectations coming into it, and it was purely about Loki's character arc and not a vehicle for introducing new characters and concepts to perpetuate the MCU with, the most logical thematically appropriate reveal would've been that it was another Loki variant who was in charge of the TVA, not some rando introduced at the last minute who Loki has no connection to.
Imo you're right that the mystery plot would have been better served with monica as the detective from the beginning, and they could have still done the different sitcom styles while she was investigating. The who comparison was good at illustrating that point. Agatha maybe should have been left as something like a post-credits scene to set up the next installment. Idk.
thank you for not spoiling legion btw, I had never heard of it before, but now I really want to watch it, so I was a bit nervous you would reveal the mystery
In the first draft I did, but then I realised I didn’t need to. And I’d much rather intrigue people to seek out such a great show!
@@JamesWoodall much appreciated
Same!
This! What you have shown has gotten me wanting to watch it now! :)
@@JamesWoodall just when I needed some new shows to watch :)
I low key really hate when a TH-cam channel spoils a secondary show or movie when reviewing or critiquing the primary material.
A lot of content creators don’t give a damn.
8:13 case in point, that example would have been an acceptable solution in a mystery taking place in the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Like... the rules of that world is that toons can only break physics for comedic effect, "only when it's funny", so imagine the perp escaped through a door drawn on the wall then deliberately had an accomplice also try to run through it but slamming into the wall, there you have the joke. Then the accomplice either erases the door as best as they can or hides it behind a shelf or something.
To me, the real subversion would be to twist the source material. If the writers were bold enough to not make it out as Wanda herself crafting the Hex-field but truly instead be her under some form of manipulation, and have Agatha be behind all that, it would’ve been much more appealing. The source material is a widely known reference to the show, and having the show actually built on it and built on subverting it the same time would probably have been more interesting.
Honestly. the premise and the hook is so well done, so interesting, the set up is great..and then the ball drops soooo hard.
Indeed, it kinda kills the rest of the show for me if the pay-off isn't good, and the pay-off for Wandavision is extremely poor
When there was the whole thing about Agatha, even though I haven't read the comics I was like "mmm...okay?" And then she was defeated like the next episode so what was the point and when Agatha was like "The Scarlett Witch!😦😳" I was like...yeah? Obviously, don't we already know all of this? Why is this supposed to be shocking?
You make a lot of fair points, though I still enjoyed WandaVison, there was some room for improvement and telling a better mystery.
I think Marvel focused more on the emotional backbone and the setup for future releases and didn't focus enough on the art of a well told mystery. Maybe that was intentional or maybe they are revealing a story telling weakness of theirs... Time will tell I guess.
Well produced video btw, edits and animations were very enjoyable.
This aged well
6:10 oh my god the way I felt that in my soul. Thank god Knives Out saved my love for detective dramas because that whole season of BBC Sherlock made it shrivel up and DIE inside of me for YEARS.
You’ve precisely explained why I didn’t like WandaVision as much as I wished I could have. I wasn’t familiar with Wanda or Vision ahead of time, so I wasn’t having to bridge that gap. But even as a stand-alone, so much seemed to be over explained, or completely unexplained, so by the end - when the “gotcha” was happening, it just seemed like a throwaway.
11:50 I mean theres also the clue that Wanda says "no" and it rewinds immediately after. That is a clue that she has some form of control. For the sake of argument.
And the fact that the boss’ wife directly addresses Wanda and tells her to “stop it”
He addressed that at 13:40
@@aemcpthat is far too vague for anyone to conclude it was wanda. She could have been asking wanda to stop whoever is causing the anomaly, since they are avengers.
i feel that once people became unsatisfied with wanda vision's ending, that it was a sign that the MCU was starting to dwindle in popularity.
I'm SO happy you did Legion. I love that show beyond any other, it really feels like it's too forgotten because it was a Fox thing and not released by Disney. If Disney actually did release it, it would have made more waves
I personally find it annoying how Marvel seems to cater to the comic fans at the expense of movie only fans. Like, someone who already knows who Agatha is can still enjoy the mystery if it's written well; knowing the twist doesn't ruin the story, if that were the case we'd never rewatch anything. But writing poorly just to throw people off who already know everything ruins it for everyone!
Ok, but when are you writing the Murder Mystery about the Cyborg Cat from the Future?
you can do the "same mystery from the outside and the inside" thing well, my favorite piece of fiction of all time, umineko when they cry does exactly this. it sets up a mystery with 18 people on an island who all die, showing multiple seperate interpretations of how the story could possibly go from an internal perspective, and also shows the perspective of someone from the outside, 12 years later, as ange, the sole surviving member of the family (due to being sick during the family conference where everyone died) tries to figure out what really happened the day her whole family died. it's an incredibly phenomenal story and i highly reccomend everyone reads it.
Sounds fun. I might check it out
Mon ami! Hercule Poirot himself in the thumbnail. Have a cookie! :3
I wish Marvel treated their media more like adaptations and stopped trying to full the comic-reading audience. Just like book readers already know the ending, they aren't going to the movie to be shocked or surprised, they (we) just want to the story come to life. The fact that WandaVision was already based on a comic story should have warned them that comic-readers would know. A mystery is still satisfying if you already know the answer because you get to more clearly see the pieces on the way. In fact, I would argue that a good mystery is even more satisfying the second or even third time around. I love rereading Miss Marple's Thirteen Problems not because of the characters or plot, because there isn't much of either, but because I discover new details that point to the solutions or red herrings all along the way.
Shoutout Arrival. One of those rare sci-fi blockbusters that doesn’t have planet lasers or alien armies, we just get people cracking codes.
6:43 I was taught that this was meant as, If a foreigner with customs that a reader is unlikely to be familiar with appears in the story, either, said customs aren't important (then why make it a foreigner), or said customs are important (then you're basing an important part of your story on something that the reader is unfamiliar with and will take a great deal of time to explain, and if you take a great deal of time to explain, there's an expectancy that that person must be quite important to the story)
This harkens back to hit 4th point
It's unfair for the detective to say something like, "Oh, the word 'thing' is actually supposed to be a word in another language that means 'girl', so this sign was actually the victim telling us that the girl was the killer" in the big reveal, for instance.
Though I was also taught that these rules... are more like suggestions
I've had a similar thought about an episode of doctor who and a marvel movie.
Doctor Strange ends with him spending what I think was intended to feel like an eternity of him being killed by Dormammu but they dwell on it for 2 minutes before Dormammu just gives up.
In the episode Heaven Sent of doctor who, they do so much better at communicating an eternity gone by and the sacrifices the doctor is willing to make.
I was SO surprised to see Legion mentioned here - an absolutely great example to use for comparison that I don't often seen brought up in discussion about superhero media in general. I think it also is important within this discussion about mysteries because it refutes the idea that a comic book series can't keep mysteries from hardcore fans - the way in which the series weaved and interpreted storylines (Especially in season 1) kept it fresh for non-comic readers and X-men fans alike.
Edit: Also noticed you defended s2/s3 , really cool seeing that - I agree Legion sometimes gets too over its head for its own good (especially in season 3) but I honestly think the philosophical concepts structure of season 2 and the way that affects the story going forward is brilliant and deserves more credit.
The fact that I saw this video title and went "Wait, it was supposed to have a mystery to it?" says a lot
You put so much work into these videos, I hope more people start subscribing and supporting you!
When this video started I screamed "there better be some poirot in this!" and i was not disappointed ♥ such a good video and such good points! I enjoyed WandaVision a lot but I have to agree with what you're saying. You have articulated a lot of things that felt off about the series. Great job!
Poirot? 🤔🤣
James, I discovered your channel some weeks ago and watched your Devil wears Prada video (and it's amazing!). I clicked this video thinking "HEY but I liked Wandavision so much even though I'm not a Marvel Fan", but I loved this video. Like you said, it's a change on Marvel narrative but still, could be improved. Great analysis! I learn a lot with your videos :)
I wasnt near my phone, just listening via bluetooth, and suddenly I hear my favorite doctor saying "The library!" a line from one of my favorite episodes, out of nowhere. Well done in making this whovian stop everything she's doing and smile 😊😊😎
Oh wow, I discover your channel only yesterday, and here's a whole new video! ^.^
I never really considered WandaVision to be a "mystery show", even though there were a lot questions posed. It never really has any of the aesthetic trappings of a mystery and I didn't expect a mystery going in, so really these unanswered questions not having their clues onscreen never bothered me.
I don't consider WandaVision to be "bad at mysteries", because why would I even expect it to be "good at" them in the first place?
It took me this long to find the time to watch the video and OMFG, it was great! I don't do the MCU (though I love 90s X-Men and the FOX movies - well, the good ones), but this video having media criticism, Poirot, Doctor Who AND a 'do better' attitude... *I think I'm in love* :D
My favorite new channel! Easily.
I haven’t watched the video yet, so there’s a good chance you will bring this up. I feel that they played their hand way too soon. In episode 3 or 4 when the woman wakes up after getting expelled from Wanda’s world they explain nearly everything and pivot into an action show. I feel the mystery would have worked better if the reveal happend two episodes later and if some of the cameos happened sooner, like the woman from the thor movie. These changes would have added more to speculate and scratch our head over, but also make the mystery feel like it was actually important and not ham fisted to have a sitcom romp for 3 episodes
I love all of your video essays, this one is finishing off my binging of them! I hope you continue, these are all great!
(If I may posit one criticism; during the grainy film-reel sequences in this, there's a subtle but present and steady high-pitched tone that's a big trigger for tinnitus/auditory issues!)
I can only explain this with the hindsight of having seen knives out, but at the time I was watching, wandavision stopped being a mystery and started being about following the thriller of how will Vision escape, or How Sword will save the people. The mystery elements became extra flair on top of the other genre of fiction I was watching. There are still criticisms to be made in how this genre flip, it's not a perfect show by any stretch, but it worked well enough when I was watching
Thank you for this comment! I think it's odd that people would assume this show was just failing at being a mystery... like Y'ALL. The point of the show wasn't the mystery, but the exploration of what grief can do to people and how Wanda has gone through so much loss and how it's finally broken her but also led her to her power.
15:15 This greatly bothered me on my initial viewing of WandaVision. I was new in the mcu, had just watched all the movies and shows. My brain was running on all the logic of all those previous shows, with no comic book knowledge. So when the Agatha reveal happened... I was super confused. (The scene with Agatha being strapped to the pole). I was wondering if Wanda had suddenly changed the genre of the show, if this was a new trick. Massive confusion all around. I felt like I was watching a different show or maybe I had missed an episode.
*Then* I realised the show was serious, witchcraft is a thing in this world. Magic that was different from Dr. Strange exists. And Agatha is a witch, an antagonist.
It was so out of left field, it knocked all my immersion away and I had trouble getting back into it during the whole finale.
It would've been really cool if Agatha was sort of a twisted hero of sorts, someone who knew all of what Wanda was capable of but instead of stealing her power wanted to contain it. So, she followed her, befriended her, and pushed her grief past the breaking point so she would create this fantasy sitcom to keep her busy and make Wanda keep her own powers dormant in the pursuit of a domestic life. That would explain why she was always trying to keep the truth away from Wanda and Vision and make her a much better antagonist.
Me, knowing full well I'm stupider than Watson: ....Uh oh.
Also those Poirot sketches were hilarious. The entire video was very well formulated and put together, and your logic was well formed and presented. I remember thinking while you explained the mystery rubric that clearly the BBC Sherlock showrunners could have used a good dose of that, instead of throwing it out the window like they were, seemingly, too smart for it. Thank you! Good stuff.
I love Legion. Glad you brought it up!
I thought it was only supposed to be a superhero comedy action show. Did not knew it was supposed to be a whole mystery thing.
When you said "this style of supernatural mystery has worked before" I honestly thought you were talk about the Madoka Magica movie
Marvel ripping apart WandaVision of all of it's personality is the most disappointing thing I've ever seen, it had potential to be a very good mystery show with tints of horror.
As far as mysteries go, in my opinion Westworld season 1 and 2 is absolutely legendary. Not to spoil anything too much but these guys were showing us two different time periods/timelines and we didn’t even realize it until the end. Many others will agree but it’s honestly so unique and creative that even those same writers and producers couldn’t duplicate it (season 3 and 4 are…unfortunate?) I’d love to see the notes written down while they were figuring it all out, lol that must be like reading a schizophrenics journal
I liked your film analysis
Spoilers for anyone below- who hasn’t seen Wanda vision or watched this video.
When Agatha was revealed to be the big bad. I kept getting hocus pocus and Halloweentown vibes.
I mean burning at the stake the evil book had to be a reference from hocus pocus and there seemed to be a lot of Halloween town references.
Agatha outfit looks similar to Calabar from Halloweentown, the chanting in Latin, the being the friendly next door neighbor (he was the mayor but he also the grandmas next door neighbor and the mothers ex boyfriend in the movie I think)
Even her standing on a billboard confronting Wanda is similar to him confronting the kids at the ending of Halloween town.
Not only that but Wanda kids have visions similar to the youngest daughter in Halloween town which is how they were able to defeat him in the first place.
And Calabar was also aging people in the movie theater similar to what Agatha was doing and in the sequel Calabar was turning them into black in white and “normal”.
Not only that but in the movie the kids find out their “witches” very similar to what Wanda was told. She’s a witch. The scarlet witch.
At the end of the movie the oldest daughter Marine is allowed to come to or stay in Halloween town and continue her training.
And something very similar happens to one of the characters on wandavision- Rambeau in the movie theater is told by someone at the end that she will be able to go into space and by her mothers authority no less or because of her mother. (I even think she’s still in Wanda “hex” when she’s told this) (and earlier was told she couldn’t fly into space because of her mother’s orders)
Now we see Wanda keeps transitioning people and herself into different tv shows of the decade and in later American television (I think) I remember there being a resurgence of “witchcraft” shows but with more or less storyline involved.
Both for adults and kids shows. (Charmed and W.I.T.C.H.)
So I thought Agatha wasn’t going to be a witch but a person casted by Wanda subconscious to play the antagonist of her tv show.
So I thought Agatha wasn’t going to be a villain but Wanda own subconscious was ironically playing into her own television show.
I see a lot of your points, and I agree that the show would probably have been stronger if it was more of a mystery. I didn't go into it expecting much of a mystery personally, but I can see how making it one would have been compelling.
There is just one point I'll contest you on. When you mention Agatha playing her role too well, specifically in the scene where Vision "wakes her up". When I watched that scene, personally, it immediately told me that the fan theories were true and that Agnes was lying about who she was. Because compare her waking up to Norm. Norm gasps and looks around, asks Vision what day it is and where he is, panics, talks about needing to get in touch with his sister about his sick father. Agnes? She immediately starts talking in this really hammy awe-struck tone that just sounds so fake to me, which I feel was most likely on purpose for this exact reason.
I mean think about her reaction. The first thing she does is realize that she's talking to The Vision and ask if he's there to save them, then does the overly dramatic "You're dead!" shout over and over again before laughing and saying all is lost. It's so corny, I immediately bought into the idea that it was Agatha putting on a show, partly for the fun of it and partly to see if she could get any more hints of information from Vision.
Sorry to ramble on about that, I just love that detail of that scene, and sometimes it feels like I'm the only one who sees it since I've seen no one else bring it up, everyone seems to take that scene at face value.
I find it fascinating, that the Sherlock Holmes stories break many if not most of those rules. 😂 The reader is mostly clueless until Sherlock explains everything and in many stories the solution is something exotic that no normal reader could ever know about. Plus, he constantly finds clues, while the reader is kept in the dark until the great reveal. But the stories are still wildly beloved. But then again, the Sherlock Holmes stories are older than these rules, so that's that, i guess.
An example of a mystery told from different sides- one of my family’s new favorite shows is Yellowjackets. The story follows a girls soccer team who’s plane crashed in the canadian wilderness and whom, presumably, resorted to cannibalism. It follows them in the wilderness and them as adults 20 years later. But the whole time you are trying to figure out what happened in the forest: who died, how did they live, who got eaten, how did they get rescued. And youre falling further and further into the question as you see them devolve in the wilderness and see more of them as adults: are they bad people?
Great show!! Super fun to speculate on id suggest it for any mystery thriller fans
I’m so glad you brought up Doctor Who! When I first saw the trailer for WandaVision I immediately thought of the Silence in the Library episode and how well done and heartbreaking it was
Finally someone talking about Legion.
It is my favorite show and as I once said;
the best we'll never get again.
Thank you.
Legion is one of the best shows I've ever seen and is one of the best examples of doing surrealism without making it completely incomprehensible or too blunt and obvious. It hit such a good sweet spot where you still feel disoriented, but you feel grounded somehow in the dream of it all
It’s a crime you only have four videos up. I’d love to see you deconstruct Cruella, Mulholland Dr, Robert Altman, 2046, Spike Lee, and what the hell happened to Ang Lee’s career.
When I watched this as it was coming out with my roommates, they watched episode 4 without me. I was there for the rest of it, but I hadn't even noticed when we watched ep 5 that I had missed anything. It was a good few episodes until we started seeing sword agents acting like we should know these people, that I was like "what is happening right now?"
I’m very shocked he didn’t mention Harry Potter, mysteries with magical rules
I definitely considered it, but these days mentioning Harry Potter comes with some baggage.
@@JamesWoodall haha true good point ☺️
It's not that good anyways. The bad guy of the first book was some rando teacher nobody cares about. JK Rowling is a mediocre writer who got lucky.
@@UltraVioletKnight ....clearly you’ve never read the books lol but I won’t stop your bandwagon, she’s an awful person that deserves everything being thrown at her today 🤮
@@UltraVioletKnight i mean it didn't get so incredibly famous for no reason - jk is probably ideologically beyond saving at this point, but the books are fun and engaging even if they're not outstanding
How on earth do you only have 42.8 K subscribers? Your content is amazing!! Keep it up
I remember thinking Agnes was Agnes Harkness and only remembered the characters name was Agatha when it was revealed on the show… the only thing spoiled was my misremembering her name
I feel like it was most likely a great concept ruined by studio interference. They didn’t trust audiences to keep watching the slow burn the first few episodes promised. We need cameos, quips, fight scenes, and an unambiguously evil villain.
I KNEW it was the cyborg cat from the future. It was obvious
My whole beef was that WandaVision led us into thinking Mephisto or someone (Dr. Strange?) commanded by Mephisto was setting everything up for Wanda with Aggie playing the quirky Drop-In Character because Mephisto's watching Wanda play around in the world and using/puppeteering her power the longer she's in it, only for Monica to catch on and try to rescue her but Wanda is too consumed by grief to want to leave/so sucked into the "sitcom" that she tries to stop her, thinking that it's her "time to have fun."
Instead, nope. The sitcom was *all her fault.* The commercials weren't Dr. Strange at all, *nope.*
Also, your mystery is bad if by the 4th episode where SWORD pops in it immediately hijacks the rest of the show to the point where you forget it originally began as a sitcom pastiche.
For me, the problem with WandaVision is that its mystery is… Just not that interesting. Wanda created the Hex and, well, that’s it. And I think the writers knew that and, thus, decided to cover it up with misdirection after misdirection (allowed to do that with the serial formula), but as said in this video, that’s simply not fair, and all clues end up being incoherent and downright contradictory in hindsight.
One of the worst scenes of the show for me is the Agatha All Along section, because the whole song and the ending reveal of the episode it’s a part of, make it seem like this is the huge twist, that Agatha orchestrated it all but… She didn’t. Hell, the very next episode reveals that no, it wasn’t actually Agatha, but Wanda herself who started and kept up the Hex’s façade for her own personal reasons, and Agatha was just a player in Wanda’s playfield. Pietro is another good example, merely ending up as a misdirection to the lack of a substantial mystery. But if we were to go along with how it’s revealed and the implications it brought, then it would seem this new revelation was huge to the story’s mystery, that it means something. But it didn’t. It was just a dick joke.
And thus, the clustered nature of the “mystery” the writers came up with is revealed. I just think the concept got too big for the writers initial idea, and just ended up playing catch-up on a game they set themselves up to lose.
I remember being so disappointed by the finale of this series, not only for its shallow writing and downgrade into yet another CGI battle that the story didn’t need at all, but also because all the clues and build up created throughout all the weeks the show ran, didn’t lead to anything of substance. I don’t think the concept was bad, quite the contrary, I think it could have been quite a good story and mystery, but the writers clear lack of experience in creating and sustaining an interesting mystery, along with Marvel’s incessant need to make everything a big, over the top battle, along with subpar performances from the secondary cast and a shallow, by the books script, kept it from being anywhere close to being great and, for me, made it one of the worst Marvel projects of their filmography.
I actually enjoyed the show, but I was a Marvel Comics fan, so it was not a mystery to me. However you make good points on how it could have been improved.
Thanks for confirming my own experience that the Agatha All Along thing made no sense to me either.
i feel like you could maybe do inside out and outside in both in one story, but you'd have to do it simultaneously. you could even do interesting things with each perspective giving different sets of information, some of which may conflict, forcing the audience to come to their own conclusions about which information is more likely to be accurate
This video is fantastic and deserves sooo many views. Come on algorithm!!
This show gave Truman Show vibes bc we know the answer to the mystery (for the most part) but we still like seeing how the characters interact with the world around them
Excellent analysis. Of course what you didn’t realize at the time was that WandaVision was just set-up content for The Marvels content and for the next Doctor Strange content, and probably not worth anyone’s time or engagement
As someone who did not exactly watch the Marvel movies, I genuinely enjoyed the mystery, because I didn’t know anything about Wanda and Vision. So I suppose this series is for someone like me, who is yet not very familiar with the Marvel universe. I believe that’s why they actually explain what happened in the movies through the series.
I love the editing in your videos its so cool
Really good video, thanks. I love the idea of "playing fair", as an escape game designer I always try to use it in my puzzles. I often say that if it's a good puzzle, players want to kick themselves after solving it, but if it's a bad puzzle, players want to kick the person who created it.
Episode 4 pissed me off so much because just giving us a 20 second shot of the outside world and then going RIGHT back to the fake TV world would have been such a great hook. Instead, we get an entire episode dedicated to unraveling everything before putting us back in.
I wish they didn't flash to outside the hex so much and let slowly reveal that it wasn't real within the show
Liked this allot. I, too, didn't care for the show, and while I have some of my own thoughts on the matter, I was glad to see a 'Wandavision's not good" video that wasn't an angry, reactionary cry for help.
wandavision's 'mystery' angle was so bad i genuinly didnt even think they were going for that. i thought it was just a cash grab fluff show. though i did like it
This was a masterful examination. Earned a new sub with this.
And the 1st season of Legion WAS amazing. Too bad the remaining seasons never reached that level.
I can agree the first season is the strongest, but seasons two and three are by no means weak. Season two is a bit obtuse, and I didn’t feel I’d fully appreciated it until my second watch, but it builds to a stunning conclusion. And while season three is perhaps a bit too goofy, it’s playing with some fantastic ideas. The time eaters are terrifying!
I wonder if you could re edit the show to fix some of the detective story conventions? Or would it require a full rewrite?
It was never supposed to be a mystery. It's horror with a superhero veneer and some dark comedy. The monster was chased away, but wasn't properly dealt with in the end, a standard horror trope. The only mystery is how people thought there was a mystery to solve.
MCU has a problem with introducing new concepts as if they were always there. Not only are these literally different from the comics, but they don't make any sense in the MCU before the reveals
This is a great video and also nicely articulates the issue I had with Sherlock. None of the mysteries in that are remotely fair which is why it was always so infuriating.
OH MY GODDD I absolutely LOVE Legion, I screamed when you showed it!!!!
Eh, I loved Agatha as a villain. You can’t really complain that she acted for the audience's benefit because, well, there literally was an audience watching Wanda’s sitcom within the show. And I think her demonstrating all the ways she failed to nudge Wanda awake was to emphasize just how deep in denial Wanda really was.
My only complaint about Agatha is that she felt like a performer after she revealed herself. As in, I felt like she was purposefully making herself out to be worse than she really was for whatever reason. But I guess that’s just a testament to her acting skills, lol.
21:13 See, at the time, I *did not believe* the solution in Episode 4. I wasnʼt convinced it was wrong but I didnʼt take her word for it either. Because there was still evidence against it at that point, still some mysteries that didnʼt add up with that explanation. And some of those are explained by it being Agatha All Along and some of those really were Wanda despite the evidence we had to the contrary.
was about to watch Legion but then i realized its not even available
If this was marketed as a mystery, I missed it. I went in knowing all the twists, and viewing it as a character study. And for that, I got a lot of satisfaction. Maybe the ending could have been less action-heavy, but hey, Marvel's gotta Marvel.
I rarely watch mystery shows or movies, but regularly I read similar mystery/detective books. Only once have I actually been surprised by the reveal of a killer. In hindsight, it was obvious who it was, but I'd managed to miss all the clues for once. Loved that book. It gave me all the clues, but I was just too tired or whatever to miss it. Didn't want to see the clues, almost. Simply didn't want to believe that the character in question was the one. Wish more media in general could be like that.
to give wandavision credit where it is due, this show's concept was such a bonkers new direction for the mcu that I think they were trying to work with what they could. Most of their previous works didn't delve into the sureal weirdness and meta narratives that wandavision did (and it took them a while to actually try it again imo)
I can imagine wandavision being held back a bit by some higher ups being unsure if they're willing to put this kinda risk on this project. They also weren't expecting it to be the leading show in their line-up (That was supposed to be Captain and the winter soldier, which was designed to be a much more "mcu-like" 6-hour-movie that they split into parts). Covid caught everyone by surprise and shook up the schedules. So a third in line movie got bumped up to the main spotlight.
I didn’t even realize there was a mystery
I think Rule 5 is useful if you think of it from a modern perspective. Translate it to ‘ensure none of your characters are glaring negative stereotypes or simple caricatures, because it’ll muddle up the mystery and reflect poorly on you as a person’…
We have absolutely seen here use mind control on multiple people at once. She does it in Age of Ultron.
For a film that actually uses this premise well, please watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion Story
also, peak mystery fiction, inspired by the golden age: visual novel Umineko no Naku Koro Ni
Better witches in that, too
The mystery falls flat because the crucial details and character identities are already clear to us. We're aware of Agatha's true nature as a witch and sense something sinister about her from the start. However, the show excelled in playing with our expectations. Initially, it cleverly led us to believe that Wanda might be a pawn in Agatha's or Hydra's scheme, only to pull the rug out from under us with the twist that Wanda was orchestrating everything from the beginning.
Well...if Wandavision didn't work as a mystery....maybe Loki can redeem Marvel given that it was billed as their first murder mystery
You know what could have been fun? If the inside and outside were two different shows. So we have Wandavision, this sitcom parody where we the audience alongside Vision learn that something's wrong, and we start to uncover the clues. Meanwhile, we have an entirely different show, let's call it S.W.O.R.D. for simplicity, about this division handling anomalous threat, and around the same episode where Vision learns in Wandavision that something's wrong, the division in S.W.O.R.D. learn of an anomalous town that does not exist and they begin to investigate it. And as both shows progresses, they become more and more interconnected, without ever completely giving away that they're the events from two different perspectives. Do stuff like, have the voice on the radio in Wandavision be played by one of the characters in S.W.O.R.D. and have them mention at one point that they tried to send a message into the anomaly, but received no response.
Also, if they wanna pull the Agatha twist, have Agatha be the missing person that the one agent remembers, and have her be like, his aunt or something. That way the audience knows there's a something special about Agatha that might also extend to her relatives, allowing them to bypass Wanda's magic. Again, have the characters in S.W.O.R.D. discuss this missing person with a picture of her, but with different clothes and hair so that, while it's no secret they're played by the same actress as Agatha, viewers might not clue in immediately that they are the same person. Then, I would say in the third or second to last episode on each show, the connection is revealed (ideally at this point, there should have been enough clues for the audience to think that makes sense), and announce a short hiatus of maybe a month, before the last episodes. Thus viewers who didn't spot the connection are able to catch up on the other show, viewers who did can watch both shows with new eyes, and people can put the clues together to figure out the final twist, which the episode after the hiatus showcases, with these episodes being the same on both shows; that Agatha was behind it all along.