The biggest problem with WandaVision: The ending lets Wanda off the hook

Wanda Maximoff does some seriously troubling things in WandaVision, but the show doesn’t seem interested in holding her accountable.

WandaVision, the first of many Marvel TV shows coming to Disney+, wrapped up last week, and while I thought it was a fun deviation for the standard MCU movie, it has its issues. Namely, I was a bit disappointed when the series finale turned out to be one big action sequence when the show had been so bold about playing with form throughout its run, and that Wanda was let off the hook for what she did to the residents of Westview.

To recap, after the events of Avengers: Endgame, a grief-stricken Wanda creates a force field known as the Hex around the town of Westview in New Jersey. Wanda can control anyone inside the Hex, and ends up forcing them to play roles in her new sitcom-inspired fantasy life. From what we’re told, Wanda didn’t know what she was doing at first, but eventually she caught on, which means she was controlling these people against their will.

And we are shown how that effects them. When Vision removes one of his coworkers from Wanda’s spell, he says he’s in constant pain and begs Vision to make her stop. This is bad.

Wanda does eventually take down the Hex, but only after Agatha makes her confront what she’s done. So Wanda learned her lesson and will make things right with Westview, right? No, she flies away after everything is “resolved.”

When it was revealed that Wanda was the cause of this incident and had no intention of fixing it, since that would mean giving up her life with Vision and the twins, I was shocked but invested. I was interested to see how the show would deal with Wanda’s heinous acts and how the world would react to them. In the scene where the people of Westview are freed from her control, they beg her to free or even kill them, and reveal that they share Wanda’s trauma. At that point, I was thinking they were going to go all-in with this concept.

But then, it goes nowhere. After Wanda turns Westview back to normal, she walks through the town square. The citizens angrily glare at her, and rightly so! Wanda held them captive for a couple of weeks. Then, Monica approaches her and says, “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them.” Are we supposed to sympathize with Wanda’s sacrifice now after she kept them under her thrall and only reluctantly let them go?

WandaVision wanted to portray the grief and trauma of Wanda Maximoff, which it did very well. Elizabeth Olsen is a terrific actor that was able to completely sell Wanda’s inner turmoil. The show did a great job making me invested in a character that I wasn’t a huge fan of in the Marvel movies.

But I felt as bad for the Westview residents as I did for Wanda. By the end of the show, I sympathized more with them than I did with the main character. As much as it tried, the show cannot have it both ways.

It’s possible that Wanda is being set up for a larger over-arching story. She seemed pretty okay with being the villain, and her darker side could be explored in future movies and shows. Maybe this will establish more distrust for superheroes and continue the Thunderbolt Ross storyline from Captain America: Civil War, or set up a future X-Men plot. It seems lazy to leave a thread hanging and depend on other projects to wrap it up, but it would be better than nothing.

But is Marvel even interested in doing that? Wanda reportedly has a big part in the upcoming Doctor Strange movie, but that film will be focused of the mysteries of the multiverse, which will likely leave little time to explore her culpability for what she did in WandaVision.

Overall, the WandaVision series finale seemed more interested in the big CGI action scenes than its characters or its themes, but I’m still interested in seeing what Marvel does with the Scarlet Witch now. Will she become more villainous? Is there redemption for her? Only time will tell. I still feel terrible for the people of Westview, though.

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