Main cast: Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff), Paul Bettany (Vision), Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau), Randall Park (Jimmy Woo), Kat Dennings (Darcy Lewis), and Josh Stamberg (Director Hayward)
Director: Matt Shakman
We take a break from Wanda’s flailing sitcom in We Interrupt This Program to put the spotlight on Geraldine, whom we last saw got punted out from “Westview” by an angry Wanda after she suspected that something was amiss with Geraldine. Well, it turns out that Geraldine is Monica Rambeau, the daughter of Captain Marvel’s sidekick pilot now grown up. She was snapped out of existence by Thanos, but Maria wasn’t, so when Monica was snapped back into existence, she assumes that she has just woken up from a short nap while waiting for her mother in a hospital ward.
Oops, Maria is dead—cancer. Monica is a member of the Sentient Weapon Operation Response Division, which her mother helped set up, and thanks to the protocol laid down by her own mother, she is now grounded, as part of the SOP on people who came back after the end of Avengers: Endgame. Well, with nothing else better to do, she accepts Director Hayward’s assignment to aid the FBI in seeking a person in their Witness Protection Program that has gone missing. Hey, Ant-Man crossover—the FBI agent she is working with is Jimmy Woo. They discover that they aren’t actually missing a person; they are missing a town.
That’s right. Someone has set up shop in Westview, and proceed to collectively wipe the memory of that place in the minds of people that live outside of and around Westview, as well as to create some kind of mental barrier that has the outside folks like Jimmy and Monica feeling reluctant to enter the town. Nonetheless, Monica approaches the town, discovers that there is a barely visible energy field set up around the place, touches it, and gets sucked in. That’s how she ended up playing the token black lady in Wanda’s personal sitcom.
SWORD soon sets up camp around Westview, wanting to investigate what is going on, and hey, Thor crossover, as Darcy Lewis is the astrophysicist brought in to help with the investigation. Because she is the only sassy spunky lady with inappropriately timed one-liners here, she gets to immediately discover a more subtle kind of waves emanating from Westview, something that all the other experts here can’t, and these waves turn out to be the sitcom that Wanda and Vision are starring in.
So, in this episode, we get basically all the answers to the questions posed by the last three episodes.
- Monica threw the plane that Wanda found among her roses, as a test to see what is beyond the Westview barrier.
- The mysterious figure coming out from the manhole is a SWORD agent trying to get into Westview to find out what happened to Monica.
- The weird voices heard over the radio is actually that of Jimmy, with the help of Darcy, trying to get to Wanda.
- The person watching the sitcom from a TV set turns out to be Darcy.
- Everything is a set-up by Wanda to give herself a life with Vision.
So while I may be wrong about all of this happening in Wanda’s head, I am more or less right after all about the rest of my initial assumption, so yay to me.
Now that I have the answers, I suppose the rest of the season will be these people trying to get through to Wanda and make her release the people of Westview from her personal role-playing game. I have mixed feelings about this. The episodes up to this point, by themselves, are actually far less interesting than the mystery it is trying to sell, and now that the mystery is sold out, so to speak, what else is there? The writing of the episodes by themselves has been average and even below average thus far, so this show has better find a new gimmick to distract me from its gaping flaws quick!
