‘WandaVision’ episode eight: a dark past and a darker future

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Episode eight introduced the witches of Salem in 1962, who attempted to execute Agatha Harkness for meddling with dark magic unfit of her position. Agatha’s mother declared her a traitor to the coven and showed no mercy as the witches used their magic to destroy Agatha, but the plan, much like Wanda’s in the future, did not work. Agatha overpowered and killed every witch around her demonstrating the advanced levels of magic that allowed her to subdue Wanda in Westview. This flashback was of great importance as it proved the existence of witches in the MCU and gave the audience a slight origin story of Agatha Harkness, but it is still unclear how powerful she is and how she obtained those powers.

In the present, with Wanda completely powerless because of Agatha’s spells, audiences learned that the surge of magic created by the Hex was what drew Agatha towards Westview. She was never under Wanda’s spell, but played along with the illusion just so she could get close enough and discover how Wanda accomplished such complex magic. Despite Agatha’s advanced training and knowledge in magic, she couldn’t understand how Wanda was able to produce such a powerful and complex spell like the one inside the Hex. 

So why is Wanda so powerful? 

Agatha took Wanda and the viewers in a twisted trip down memory lane, showing unseen scenes of Wanda’s past, starting with her childhood in Sokovia. The Maximoffs were avid fans of sitcoms from different eras and watched them on a regular basis, Wanda being the greatest fan, and that explained why the illusion in Westview assumed the sitcom format for the first episodes. The sudden impact that broke the sweetness of the flashback was caused by a Stark Industries missile, which killed Wanda’s parents, leaving her alone with Pietro while the missile remained next to them without exploding. We knew this from “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” but Agatha suggested that Wanda was the one who kept the missile from exploding, instead of sheer luck, meaning that she had some sort of abilities from a young age.

The next flashback was from Wanda’s time inside a Hydra facility, and in her very first interaction with the Mind Stone, it reacted to her presence in a way that we hadn’t seen before. Agatha theorized that the stone augmented the powers already inside of Wanda, which were feeding on absolute grief before, but obtained a greater source of power after their interaction. 

Grief and loneliness were the main themes of the episode, both present in different moments of Wanda’s life, and she talked about this with Vision during the final flashback, which took place after the events of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’. There, Wanda turned to sitcoms as a coping mechanism, and then her conversation with Vision made her feel less lonely, as our favorite synthezoid opened up about his own feelings of incomparable loneliness. They found comfort in each other and Wanda believed she would get the chance to be happy.  

Then Thanos arrived, killed Vision, and grief washed over Wanda yet again. Her only hope after that was to bury the person (or android) she loved, but S.W.O.R.D. considered Vision a sentient weapon and therefore government property that had to be dismantled with hopes of reanimating it. Wanda never broke into the facility and attacked agents as Hayward told Monica Rambeau, because Wanda left for Westview right after that, and drove past the place where Vision wanted them to build a home.  

That was the peak of Wanda’s sorrow, too overwhelming for her to bear alone, and so her magic responded and became the outlet of her emotions. She created the Hex, the illusion where all the sorrow would be but a memory, and the Vision we saw in the other episodes was just a product of that magic, and not the re-animated corpse of Vision. That was described as chaos magic by Agatha Harkness, something mythical and unprecedented, but dangerous. It’s what makes Wanda the Scarlet Witch. 

The post-credits scene was even more sinister than the flashback of Salem, as we saw a ghoulish version of Vision, reassembled like some experiment from Victor Frankenstein. The android seemed to be in Hayward’s control, and will be his secret weapon to defeat the Scarlet Witch in the next two episode. Wanda will have to fight the corpse of her lover, Agatha’s wicked intentions, and the agents of S.W.O.R.D. who still think her the villain.