In this most recent episode of WandaVision, titled “Previously On,” Wanda embarks on a troubling journey through her traumatic past offering insight into her present and future and how she came to be where she is at.
In the previous episode, we learned that Agatha Harkness, a witch, was responsible for a lot of different and weird things that have been happening in Westview. But she isn’t the cause of it. It turns out that she was just using her powers to try and get information from Wanda, find out who she is and the kind of power that she wields. Agatha wants to know how she created the barrier around Westfield.
Once Wanda is in her creepy basement, Agatha takes Wanda on a journey through her past find the answers to her questions, and once she gets them, things go to another level. Agatha learns that Wanda is wielding, what she calls “chaos magic” and that she is capable of “spontaneous creation,” and “that makes you the Scarlet Witch.”
This is the first time that name is uttered in the MCU! This is the moment that fans have been waiting for. Agatha isn’t happy about this newfound information, and in the final scene, she is holding Billy and Tommy around their necks with her own magical abilities in front of Wanda. All of these characters are feeling all kinds of crazy and confusing mixed emotions at this moment.
There are two ways this can go, either Agatha wants this power for herself, or she wants to wipe this power from the face of the earth. We learn Agatha’s backstory that she comes from Salem, Massachusetts, in 1693, where Agatha’s coven accused her of tapping into forbidden dark magic.
In the flashback, the coven is led by Agatha’s mother, Evanora, and the coven tries to destroy her, but Agatha turns their power back against them, sucking the life out of them. Agatha pleads that she can be good, but her mom says she can’t and doubles down on trying to destroy her daughter. It doesn’t work and in the end, Agatha kills her mom and all of the witches.
Agatha ends up taking her mom’s brooch, which we’ve seen her wearing in most of the previous episodes. The fact that she pleads with her mom that she can be good makes me think that maybe Agatha does really want to be good and do the right thing by wiping Wanda power from the planet, but we’ll see.
We still don’t really know what is going on with Pietro. Agatha says fake Pietro, or Fietro, wasn’t “literally” her, she was just possessing him. She also notes that it wasn’t necromancy, so Pietro isn’t the original MCU Pietro’s body with a new face. This is a whole new person, so there’s still a chance that this could be Quicksilver from another universe. Wanda’s status as a Nexus Being does mean that she can tap into other realities.
As the journey through Wanda’s past, it starts off with Wanda and Pietro’s Sokovian childhood home. We also meet her parents, Iryna and Olek. This is set in 199 and as they are enjoying The Dick Van Dyke Show, there’s a huge explosion that kills her parents. This incident is referenced in Avengers: Age of Ultron. We see young Wanda and Peitro trapped under the rubble starring at a Stark Industries shell that didn’t explode. The young Wanda mutters about it being a “bad dream” and reaches out. Agatha says that she used a probability hex to stop the detonation, which may have been Wanda’s first use of magic.
In another moment, we see Wanda being used as a test subject for Hydra, and enters a room containing Loki’s scepter, which contains the Mind Stone. In this scene, Wanda has a vision of herself in her classic Scarlet Witch costume. This could mean a few different things, is this a vision of herself, or is she seeing her comic book counterpart? Another version of her? Again, as a Nexus being, Wanda could reach out to another version of herself from an alternate reality.
It was previously believed that the Mind Stone gave her and Pietro their powers, but Agatha believes that it actually supercharged the abilities she already had.
I also just want to point out that when the Hydra scientists go to play back the security footage to see what happened when Wanda touched the stone, they find that moment missing. It was wiped out in the same way that sections of the Westview broadcast were wiped out.
The next moment that Wanda jumps to is set in the Avengers compound after the events of Age of Ultron. Wanda is mourning Pietro’s death and Vision comes in and acknowledges that he’s never felt loss like she has but reveals the depth of his empathy, saying, “But what is grief, if not love persevering?”
We then learn the truth about how Wanda’s Westview was created. We initially thought that Wanda broke into SWORD headquarters, stole Vision’s body, and defied his wishes by resurrecting him. In this flashback, we see that Hayward purposefully exposed Wanda to the shocking sight of Vision being dismantled. He also suggested to her that she could bring him back to life, but she refused and ended up leaving, alone, without Vision.
After she leaves the SWORD facility, Wanda is driving through the town of Westview. This is the first time we are seeing the town in its normal state before Wanda took it over. And make no mistake, Wanda is the one behind it all! But she was pushed to it by Hayward.
Wanda finds herself at a plot of land with the foundations of a house that had once been there. She also has a deed that reveals she and Vision planned to start a life together here. There’s a note from Vision that reads, “To grow old in.” Wanda is overcome with grief and despair, and it’s in this state that she rebuilds the town as a ’50s sitcom and Vision is reborn from her powerful energy. This is something that Hayward was obviously hoping for all along.
There’s also an end credits sequence that was thrown into this one showing us what Hayward has been up to. It’s revealed that SWORD had Vision’s body all this time and they were looking for a way to reactivate it! The way he did this was by using a drone to absorb Wanda’s chaos energy surrounding Westview. You see, since that energy was derived from the Mind Stone that originally brought Vision to life, this energy manages to bring Vision’s actual body back online, and that can’t be good.
This was such a wonderful episode. Not only was it filled with lots of cool stuff and information, but it was also filled with emotion. It was heartbreaking to see Wanda’s tragic life bring her to such rock bottom grief.
As for the Mephisto theory, I’m totally convinced that he has nothing to do with anything here in this story. I also want to point out that this is the first episode that didn’t have a “Please Stand By” message in the end credits.