WandaVision premiered earlier this week on Disney+ and has delighted fans with its take on classic sitcoms.
The first two episodes of the Marvel Studios television show are currently available for streaming and hearken back to the golden age of television.
Shot in black and white with a live studio audience, the installments remind many viewers of classic episodes of ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘Bewitched’.
Given the troubled state of the world, audiences will be pleased to turn to WandaVision to remember simpler times when the biggest difficulties were the mundanities of everyday life.
The series stars Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as Vision, two Avengers who thus far have played second fiddle to bigger characters like Captain America and Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
As with any Marvel property, WandaVision starts out with the same title cards of every entry in the MCU.
Without explanation, the screen then turns black and white and we are greeted with the newly married Wanda and Vision traveling to their new home in the idyllic community of Westview.
Unlike past MCU installments, WandaVision mostly takes place not on a battlefield or in outer space, but in Wanda and Vision’s living room.
While the alteration might take some fans by surprise, the MCU has never shied away from trying new things.
2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, is a space opera that has more in common with Star Wars than a run of the mill comic book movie.
Likewise, Captain America: The Winter Soldier follows the tone of spy thrillers like Mission: Impossible or any of the entries in the Jason Bourne series.
The first two installments of the series follow plots that one might expect to see in sitcoms from the 50s and 60s.
In the first episode, Wanda struggles to craft the perfect dinner to impress Vision’s new boss despite her less than stellar culinary skills.
Meanwhile, episode two features the couple putting on a magic act at their neighborhood talent show to prove to their nosy neighbors that they are just a regular, nondescript family.
Lurking underneath Wanda and Vision’s facade of normalcy is the uneasy feeling that things are not what they seem in Westview.Â
Viewers might be reminded of Pleasantville upon moments when the real world interferes with Wanda and Vision’s peaceful existence. Those familiar with Marvel Comics are already theorizing on what is happening to the two-second string Avengers.
A cursory knowledge of Wanda’s powers reveals that she has reality transforming abilities, suggesting that Wanda herself might be the cause of the show’s strange happenings.
The theory itself holds water given the fact that Vision died at the hands of Thanos in Infinity War and was not resurrected in the events of Endgame.
In this line of thinking, Vision could have been willed back into existence by the grief-stricken Wanda. Given these facts, WandaVisionn serves as an allegory to our times.
Just as Wanda would rather retreat into the world of a sitcom to avoid the pain of losing Vision, so too can viewers immerse themselves in the world of WandaVision to ignore the more serious issues plaguing our world today.Â
