Series / WandaVision

Spoilers for all Marvel Cinematic Universe works preceding it will be left unmarked.

A visionary new age of television.

Jimmy Woo: So you're saying the universe created a sitcom starring two Avengers?
Darcy Lewis: It's a working theory.

WandaVision is a miniseries of many genres^note romantic superhero Science Fiction/science fantasy mystery psychological/surreal horror action thriller dramedy with a sitcom pastiche theme, to be specific created by Jac Schaeffer, directed by Matt Shakman (himself a child actor from '80s sitcom Just the Ten of Us), and executive-produced by Kevin Feige, based on the Marvel Comics characters Scarlet Witch and The Vision. It is the 24^th official installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the first installment of Phase 4 and the Multiverse Saga, and the first TV series both set in the MCU and developed by Marvel Studios themselves for Disney+.

Set in the immediate aftermath of Avengers: Endgame, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) finds herself in an alternate reality in which her lover Vision (Paul Bettany) is inexplicably alive once more. The two are soon Happily Married as they adjust to a new life seemingly devoid of superheroics in the idyllic, sitcom-esque town of Westview, New Jersey... but something's not right. It quickly becomes apparent that things are not as they seem in their Stepford Suburbia, and as new problems arise while S.W.O.R.D. agents attempt to make their way into the neighborhood, the two eventually discover something disturbing at the heart of their new life....

The series is described as being a send-up of (or tribute to) classic TV sitcoms such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, Malcolm in the Middle, and Modern Family, with a bit of a Surreal Horror twist (Shakman compared it to Get Out; the works of David Lynch — particularly Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks — have also been brought up as a point of reference by quite a few critics). The storyline is also influenced by House of M, The Vision, and — naturally — The Vision and the Scarlet Witch. Recurring MCU figures who also appear in the series include Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), and Monica Rambeau (now an adult, portrayed by Teyonah Parris), while Kathryn Hahn appears as Wanda and Vision's "nosy neighbor", Agnes.

As mentioned above, WandaVision is one of the first live-action series created by Marvel Studios that will tie directly into the theatrical movies, affecting the MCU in greater ways than before, unlike the previous series produced by the now-defunct Marvel Television which only had minor influences, or were following after film events.

The show made its debut on Disney+ on January 15, 2021, airing for nine episodes total through March 5. WandaVision is regarded as the first part of an ongoing myth arc about the multiverse that segues into Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the latter of which features Wanda as a major character and continues her story from this series. The Marvels, which features Monica Rambeau in a co-leading role, also touches on events of the series.

In October 2021, it was reported that a spinoff series was in development, with Hahn and Schaeffer returning as lead actor and head writer/executive producer respectively; it was then confirmed by Disney the following month. The series, Agatha, is planned for release in 2024.

Previews: Official trailer, Official trailer 2, "Reality" Trailer

Beware of spoilers.

---

"What is a plot, if not tropes persevering?"

Tropes A–M

• Aborted Arc: An in-universe example. Much of the conflict in the early episodes is derived from Wanda and Vision having to hide their superpowers from the residents of Westview. However, as the series goes on, both characters use their powers in full view of these people, who don't seem to have any reaction. This is showing that the Show Within a Show is "losing the plot" while the reality of the situation becomes harder and harder to ignore.
• Accent Relapse: Wanda's accent is mostly Elizabeth Olsen's native California accent, fitting the sitcom presentation, but when she gets emotional, it slips into the Eastern European Sokovian accent she displayed in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Agatha even comments on this in episode 8.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Taken to an extreme level: the creation of the Hex only comes into existence because of Wanda's emotional outburst right outside her would-be home in Westview. When Agatha Harkness questions how she managed to create something so big and intricate without any training, Wanda flat-out admits that she doesn't know how she did it.
• Actor Allusion:
  • One occurs by accident when Wanda briefly fixates on the word "kickass" after one of her twin sons says it offhandedly in front of her to show that Fake Pietro / Ralph Bohner is having a bad influence on the children. The director said Wanda's reply was not scripted, he just liked the ad-libbed performance Elizabeth Olsen gave in that scene and kept it. The film Kick-Ass features both Bohner (Evan Peters) and the "real" MCU Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), which led to rampant speculation that the reference must be significant somehow, but the director confirms that it was just a happy coincidence.
  • Emma Caulfield revealed in an interview that she was cast in her role as Dottie in large part due to her role as Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Specifically, they were hoping that her previous role as a False Friend and demon with Reality Warper powers would lead people to speculate that there was more to her than it seemed, even though she was ultimately just a Red Herring meant to disguise the fact that Agatha Harkness filled that role.
• Adaptational Name Change: In the comics, S.W.O.R.D. stands for Sentient World Observation and Response Department, making them a space-oriented counterpart to S.H.I.E.L.D. In the MCU, S.W.O.R.D. stands for Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division, which would explain why they haven't shown up for other space adventures in the MCU but have appeared now that super-powered individuals are more prevalent (and causing problems). Specifically, they're interested in Vision, a sentient weapon created by the Avengers.
• Adaptational Villainy: Agatha Harkness is the final antagonist in the series, and much more malicious than her comic book counterpart, who was an ally, teacher and mentor to Wanda, as well as an ally and babysitter to the Fantastic Four.
• Adaptation Species Change: Sparky is changed from (a robot based on) a Scottish Terrier to a more generic terrier mix. However, it's worth noting that the show's version of Sparky does bear a passing resemblance to Zeke, the deceased dog that provided Sparky's brain patterns in the comics.
• Advanced Tech 2000: The ToastMate 2000, a toaster from Stark Industries advertised in-universe.
• Advertised Extra: Despite having a very minor role in all but the first episode, Debra Jo Rupp gets listed among the main stars in every episode she appears in.
• Aerith and Bob: As part of the general weirdness surrounding Westview, nobody comments on the fact Vision goes by that name.
• Affectionate Parody: The sitcom segments mock many of the tropes, contrivances, limitations, and Values Dissonance of classic shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, etc. However, it's clear the showrunners have a great deal of respect for those shows and their unique attributes, going through major efforts to recreate the programs' look and feel, down to actually staging Episode 1 for a live audience.
• Ambiguous Situation: WandaVision is listed as a mystery among other genres, so the entire series is an exercise in ambiguity as what's really happening at any moment is often shrouded behind layers of misdirection, meta-analysis, unreliable exposition, audience expectation and story explanations that are presented in one episode only to have deeper meanings revealed in later episodes that alter the initial interpretation. Even the first episode ends with a zoomout revealing somebody watching Wanda's show on an old monitor within an otherwise modern looking lab and taking notes. This is later revealed to be Dr. Lewis as part of the SWORD task force watching the show for intel. It's a lot less ominous and mysterious in tone with the broader context.
• Ambiguous Syntax: When Abilash/Norm begs Vision, "You have to stop her. She's in my head. Make her stop! Just make her stop!" By only using pronouns, it's not clear if he's talking about Wanda or possibly Agatha. The finale finally reveals that it is in fact Wanda, though she cast the spell unconsciously.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Each episode drops hints that some of the inhabitants of Westview are more aware of their surroundings than others, and they're not too happy about it. In episode five, Norm reveals that, under the façade, they're all aware that they're being puppeted and are miserable, and Monica adds to that that they're also all feeling Wanda's overwhelming grief at Vision's death. When the Hex is undone in the finale, every one of them is pissed at Wanda for what she did to them.
  • This is also how Wanda punishes Agatha Harkness after defeating and depowering her, forcing her to become "Agnes the Nosy Neighbor" for real. Given what Agatha saw Wanda do to the rest of Westview, she is horrified by her fate.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: The Villain Song ends by revealing the death of Sparky was no accident, followed by an Evil Laugh reminiscent of the wicked Trope Namer.
• Animated Credits Opening: The second episode has animated opening credits, showing Wanda and Vision's morning routine and daily life, as an homage to Bewitched. It also hints at ominous things.
• Anti-Villain: Wanda is responsible for the entire situation in Westview and is keeping the people of Westview hypnotized to serve out her fantasy of having a normal married life with Vision. However, given the sheer amount of trauma that she's been through, it's difficult not to sympathize with her. Once she is confronted with the fact that everyone is in an And I Must Scream situation (instead of merely brainwashed into better lives), she quickly takes down the Hex.
• Arc Symbol:
  • Hexagons are prominently featured, consistently appearing in the opening and closing credits, and within Westview itself. We ultimately learn that the energy barrier containing Westview is a Beehive Barrier and the area containing Westview is bounded by a hexagon. Darcy nicknames the entire anomaly "the Hex", a reference to Wanda's abilities in the comics.
  • We also get the recurring image of an upward pointing sword inside a circle (the emblem of S.W.O.R.D.). In this case, the symbol shows up on physical objects within the show rather than in a metatextual fashion (they don't show up in the credits or logos of the show-within-a-show). This is because they are found on objects S.W.O.R.D. sent into Westview transformed by the Hex.
  • Agnes always wears the same brooch regardless of the time period or sit-com styling. It originally belonged to Agatha's mother.
• Arc Words: "This is our home" is repeatedly uttered by Wanda throughout the series. At first, it seems like Wanda's reminding her husband that they live in a new town and have to do their best to make an impression on their neighbors. Over time, however, it seems like Wanda is saying this only to convince Vision—and even herself—that there's nothing strange about what's going on. The phrase takes a tragic twist in Episode 8, when it's shown that Wanda originally conjured their sitcom house on the piece of land that Vision was planning to build their future home on before everything went wrong for them.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Roughly Once an Episode, someone asks a question that disturbs the fake sitcom premise.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety:
  • In episode 5, when Wanda leaves the Hex to confront Hayward, both Monica and Hayward are standing a few feet ahead of the gathered troops with their rifles aimed at Wanda and ready. The troops even have laser sights to make it very clear that bullets would be whizzing dangerously close to Monica and Hayward's heads if a firefight breaks out.
  • At one point in episode 5, Monica grabs Jimmy's gun and unloads a few shots at some clothes pinned up. Taking someone's gun is bad enough, but shooting at something without confirming there's a proper backstop is worse; if the clothes hadn't been bulletproof, they would have gone through the tent and could have hit anyone.
• Art Shift: The series jumps forward to different TV eras in each episode. This is reflected in each episode's style across the board.
  • Styles: Black and White —> High Fidelity —> Broadcast Technicolor —> Cable Television
  • Clothes go from formal wear in the '50s to more comfortable '60s garden party fare, then '70s polyesters and '80s mom jeans until finally, more contemporary fashion.
  • Both Wanda and Vision sport different hairstyles.
    • Wanda starts with a '50s bob, then '60s curl, then long '70s straight (no Farrah Fawcett hair, though it does show up in that episode's commercial), to the '80s perm.
    • Vision goes from the sensible '50s cut to a little longer (but not "Communist long") in the '60s, then to a literature professor's shaggy mop and sideburns in the '70s and a sort of bowl cut in the '80s. In the 90's he stays in his Halloween costume, covering up his hair and in the 2000's, he remains in his Avengers outfit for the entire episode.
  • The house likewise shifts: while the overall house remains fixed, the interior design, furnishings and color scheme changes. First to mimic The Dick Van Dyke Show house in the '50s, then Bewitched's of the '60s, the boxy feel of The Brady Bunch for the' 70s with its bright colors and shag carpet, the Family Ties earth tones and dark wood stains of the '80s, neutral brown tones in the 90's, and distinct blues in the 2000's.
  • The commercial break for "Yo Magic" in Episode 6 is a lot more cartoony and uses claymation instead of live-action footage.
• Aside Glance:
  • In Episode 3, when asking his wife if everything is alright, Vision very quickly but pointedly stares directly into the camera with an expression of something like terror on his face. Immediately after he does so, the scene resets back to the beginning of their conversation with no explanation or editing whatsoever, almost like the viewer's TV malfunctioned.
  • He does so again at the end of Episode 4, when he and his wife are sitting down to watch TV after Wanda just ejected Monica Rambeau from Westview. They sit down on The Couch in the usual "sitcom character watching TV" shot, only Vision doesn't look at the TV, he looks directly into the camera.
  • A few characters do this in Episode 7, an intentional choice as people look at the documentary film crew for the Confession Cam.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: While reversing the snap in Avengers: Endgame is generally perceived as a good thing, the fourth episode shows that the actual reversal was a logistical nightmare to a world that had grown accustomed to having lost half of its population, especially when those people are returned to exactly where they were when they were dusted. The hospital that Monica returns to is very quickly reduced to chaos as it is overwhelmed by the sudden spike in capacity and filled with people unaware of what happened to them.
• Aspect Ratio Switch: The series uses various aspect ratios as a visual clue to signal what version of reality is being presented. Generally, when in the tv-sitcom inspired world of Westview, we see the standard TV aspect ratios from the eras each episode is set in. However, when leaving the Westview Hex to enter the "real world", it shifts to cinematic 2.35:1 (the standard for Marvel Studios material). At times, areas within Westview shift to 2.35:1 to subtly indicate places that are not under direct control of the Westview Hex.
• Ass Kicking Pose: Right before Wanda’s family is about to start their showdown fight with Agatha, White Vision, and Hayward's men. Just one way to show they are a Badass Family.
• Audience Surrogate: Darcy, Jimmy Woo, and the agents of S.W.O.R.D. take on this role when watching the titular sitcom in the fourth episode, asking some of the same questions the real-life audience asked (if Vision is alive, the significance of hexagons, why a sitcom, etc.). Though Darcy and Jimmy become the most emotionally invested in the series as it progresses.
  Jimmy: So you're saying the universe created a sitcom starring two Avengers?
• Back from the Dead:
  • Episode 4 begins with Monica being Blipped back into existence in great detail, then quickly pulls back to see the chaos caused by the mass resurrection.
  • Part of the overarching mystery of the show is about how Vision is somehow alive again. It initially looked like Wanda retrieved his remains from S.W.O.R.D. and somehow magically reanimated him. However, it's later revealed that Wanda actually formed a recreation of him from her own memories by accident, and the real Vision has been Dead All Along and his body was still in S.W.O.R.D.'s custody. At least until they reanimated the body to become White Vision, which is later infused with the original Vision's memories. By the end of the series, it remains unclear to what extent Vision is "dead".
  • Played with. In Episode 5, Pietro suddenly shows up at Wanda's doorstep... only he's not the Pietro who died in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Despite this, he apparently remembers being killed by Ultron, and Wanda briefly sees him as a zombie, complete with bullet holes in his chest. Agatha later confesses that it was someone entirely different, but in her grief, Wanda just accepted it.
• Bait-and-Switch: The Teaser for Episode 8 has Agatha being dragged out for a witch trial. Except instead of being on trial for being a witch, she's on trial by other witches for practicing forbidden magic.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Ultimately this series explores what this means for Wanda. She gets her idealized life of normal, peaceful, civilian marriage in America. The only problem is that she's unintentionally taken an entire town hostage in order to do so, and all of them are suffering from the grief and longing that created this fake idealization.
• Beam-O-War:
  • In later episodes, fights between witches seem to come down largely to battling beams of color-coded magical energy — with the twist that Agatha turns out to be capable of absorbing an opponent’s attack and even draining their power along the beam.
  • In the finale, the two Visions fight with lasers coming from the gems in their forehead.
• Berserk Button: Anything regarding Wanda's recent past that challenges her ideal "sitcom" life is met with violent retaliation. Monica and "Pietro" find this out the hard way.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The series has three antagonists. Agatha Harkness wants to discover how Wanda created the Hex, manipulating events and emotionally prodding her while posing as Agnes before trying to steal her magic. Meanwhile, Tyler Hayward holds a Knight Templar attitude towards Wanda and serves as an Obstructive Bureaucrat to Monica. Finally, Wanda herself has become so overwhelmed by her own grief that she created the Westview Hex, enslaving the entire community to play roles in her ideal sit-com life, and actively resists anything that challenges her created world.
• Bigot with a Badge: Tyler Hayward is the secondary antagonist and the director of SWORD. Initially appearing as a sympathetic and humble Reasonable Authority Figure, Hayward quickly jumps the rails when he ends up in the field and encounters Wanda, whom he promptly blames for everything going wrong and tries to murder against the advice of Monica, Jimmy and Darcy. It is later revealed that Hayward played a role in causing the crisis, as he refused to turn Vision's body over to Wanda for burial because he's experimenting on it (in violation of the Sokovia Accords and Vision's will), prompting Wanda to snap from her grief when she got to Westview. He's actively planning on killing Wanda and framing her for his crimes.
• Bittersweet Ending: Definitely heavier on the bitter, though not a total Downer Ending. Wanda has a cathartic release in getting to have a proper goodbye with Vision that helps her deal with her grief, White Vision may provide a way for Vision to remain in the MCU. Both of Wanda's antagonists, Agatha and Hayward, have been thwarted and imprisoned. The rest of the situation is in shambles. The residents of Westview suffered agony under Wanda's Hex and view her with disdain and anger, her children are seemingly gone, and Wanda's Vision is dead again. She then flees the authorities and goes into Self-Imposed Exile, where she is last seen reading the Darkhold—while seemingly hearing the voices of her children calling to her, which is the set-up for yet another Start of Darkness for her.
• Bizarrchitecture: As is usual in sitcoms, the exterior shots of Wanda and Vision's house don't match the—ever-changing—interior floor plans.
• Bridal Carry: Being newlyweds, Vision carries Wanda like this in the first episode's opening titles. He accidentally drops her when he phases through the door.
• Broken Smile: Despite seething with rage and almost on the verge of tears, Wanda smiles when expelling Monica from the Hex.
• Bullying a Dragon: Hayward states that Wanda is responsible for the Westview Anomaly, which means that she has become a Reality Warper. This is on top of being a veteran of The Avengers. He decides to try cheap-shoting her with a drone from the 1980s. Which just ends with Wanda coming out of the Hex and possessing his men to point their guns at him, then strengthening the Hex barrier upon reentering. Even Hayward's White Vision is relying on Wanda's unwillingness to think of Vision as a threat.
• Business of Generic Importance: Invoked in Episode 1, "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience"; Vision works at "Computational Services, Inc.", a 1950s big-city corporate desk-office company. Sometime during the episode, he asks what they actually do there. No answer is actually given.
• Butt-Monkey: Phil Jones regularly fills this role. First, he's fired after Mr. Hart didn't care for the five-course dinner his wife Dottie prepared (all because he wore a turtleneck at dinner); in the following episode, Wanda turns his grandmother's piano into a cardboard cutout (to disguise Vision's super strength); in episode 3, he is put in the no-win situation of being asked by his wife if her outfit makes her look fat.
• Call-Back:
  • "Now In Color" has one from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., where its commercial break calls back to Coulson's paranoia-fueled conspiracy theory about mind-controlling blue soap from the Agents of HYDRA arc.
  • In "We Interrupt This Program", Jimmy Woo introduces himself to Monica by pulling off the very same sleight-of-hand card trick that Scott used on him in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
  • Jimmy finally gets Darcy a cup of coffee in "On a Very Special Episode...".

• Canon Character All Along: Agnes, Wanda and Vision's nosy neighbor, is actually Agatha Harkness from the comics.
• Casting Gag:
  • Agnes, otherwise known as Agatha Harkness, is portrayed by Kathryn Hahn, who had previously portrayed Olivia Octavius/Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a seemingly unimportant character who turns out to be a villain.
  • Mrs. Hart is played by Debra Jo Rupp, whose most famous role was as Kitty Forman in That '70s Show.
  • The "recast" Pietro is Evan Peters, who played the other Live-Action Pietro from the X-Men Film Series. His appearance was intended to show that Wanda, in her grief, would initially accept someone as her brother who clearly did not look like Aaron Taylor-Johnson as well as a meta-play on sit-coms often recasting a character without explanation.
  • Emma Caulfield was deliberately cast as Dottie to evoke her role of the demon Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, fitting for a show that focuses on the suburban supernatural. It was ultimately a Red Herring as she was just another Westview citizen.
• Caught in the Ripple: The entire premise of the series is that Wanda Maximoff and the Vision are living out a domestic sitcom life in the town of Westview, New Jersey and getting into all sorts of wacky hijinx to hide their superpowered nature from their neighbours. Right from the start the audience is aware that something is very, very wrong with this picture despite none of the characters treating this situation as odd in any way. Aside from the confusing Genre Shift from the rest of the MCU, Vision is Back from the Dead without explanation. It's gradually revealed that Wanda is mind controlling an entire town into playing along with the life she wished she and Vision could have had. When people from outside the town who haven't been Caught in the Ripple try to interfere, things go from bad to worse.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) reference is made in the fifth episode, as Norm says, "Cowabunga, dude," while letting Vision sit down at his computer. The Turtles' most prominent antagonist, the Foot Clan, were based on the Hand, who have previously appeared in the MCU as villains in Daredevil and Iron Fist.
  • The movie theater in Westview is shown in episode 6 to be playing The Incredibles, which stars Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury) as Frozone.
  • In episode 9, the movie theater in Westview is shown to be playing Oz the Great and Powerful. Said movie was directed by Sam Raimi, who later directed Elizabeth Olsen's next appearance as Wanda in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Said movie also stars Rachel Weisz (Melina Vostokoff) as Evanora, the Wicked Witch of the East.
• Censored Child Death: Tommy and Billy, Wanda's children. Like Vision, they are direct creations of the Hex rather than the result of brainwashing — and like Vision, they are doomed to disappear when the Hex is taken down. It almost wasn't censored; when Wanda tries to destroy the Hex the first time while fighting Agatha, Tommy and Billy are visibly shown glitching out and breaking apart piece by piece just like Vision. When Wanda takes the Hex down for real, Tommy and Billy are sensibly tucked into bed and left offscreen so neither they nor the audience have to witness their end.
• Cerebus Syndrome: What starts as a goofy throwback to classic sitcoms of yesteryear featuring two superheroes in the starring roles, with occasional moments of Nightmare Fuel, slowly morphs into a somber and touching examination of how a lifetime of loss and crushing grief have affected Wanda.
• Chekhov's Gun: The unmanned aerial vehicle that was used on Wanda is trashed and dragged back out of the Hex, still sparking with Wanda's magical energy... just enough to power up White Vision.
• Chekhov's Lecture: "Runes. In a given space, only the witch who cast them can use her magic." Agatha traps Wanda in her basement with a circle of runes, while wondering how she doesn't know such basic witchcraft. During their climactic showdown, Wanda carves giant runes into the sides of the Hex to depower Agatha, then quotes her lesson back to her.
• CIA Evil, FBI Good: Over the course of the series, S.W.O.R.D. director Tyler Hayward and his personnel take on the role of the CIA becoming more and more antagonistic towards Wanda and anyone who might show sympathy towards her, culminating in him activating White Vision to destroy her. This is a sharp contrast to FBI agent Jimmy Woo, who wants to understand the whole situation before assigning wholesale blame and eventually works with Monica and Darcy to assist Wanda and thwart Hayward's actions. By the series finale, Jimmy ends up bringing in the rest of the FBI to arrest Hayward for his crimes and take control of the clean up.
• Clean, Pretty Childbirth: In keeping with the "family sit-com" aesthetic of Westview, apart from some screaming and contractions, Wanda's birth of the twins in episode three goes very cleanly. Both Billy and Tommy are clean and dry as soon as they're born, and Wanda doesn't even bother to change out of the dress she gave birth in, which seems untouched.
• Closed Circle: The magic of the Hex is revealed to prevent the townsfolk from thinking about leaving. If the "sitcom story" initially suggests that a character will leave (i.e. by going on vacation), circumstances will then contrive to prevent them from doing so, such as causing Dr. Nielsen's car to break down so he can't go to Bermuda.
• Colorblind Casting: Despite faithfully recreating many aspects of the sitcoms of the '50s and '60s, the "cast" is considerably more racially diverse than those shows were, because the series isn't set in the past and the "cast" of Westview are modern-day residents being forced to act out their parts.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: Wanda's magic appears, as it has in previous installments, as red bursts of light or smoke depending on the time period. Billy's powers are similar but he produces blue light instead. Agatha Harkness' magic is purple. Her original coven, as seen in a flashback, also had blue magic like Billy's powers. Blue seems to be the default colour of witchcraft, as Agatha's purple stems from her dark magic, and Wanda's red is a sign of the unique chaos magic that marks her as the Scarlet Witch.
• Color Motif: The color red has some significance, which makes sense given the series focuses on the Scarlet Witch. The few splashes of color we see in the black-and-white world (the helicopter, the toaster light, Dottie's blood) are red, Vision is offered a stick of Big Red-brand gum, and when the world shifts into color, it starts with Vision's head turning its usual deep red, and we see that Wanda's outfit, nails, and lipstick are red as well. In Episode 5, the buttons on Wanda's red-and-blue patterned blouse appear to look like red gemstones.
• The Comedy Drop: During the opening of the first episode (echoing the opening of The Dick Van Dyke Show), Vision carries Wanda to the front door of their new house. Instead of opening the door, Vision phases through it, dropping Wanda outside.
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: In the fifth episode, Jimmy Woo confirms that Wanda doesn't have an alias or nickname, lampshading the fact that she's never been referred to as "The Scarlet Witch" in-universe. Subverted in the ending of Episode 8 when Agatha identifies Wanda as "The Scarlet Witch", a mythical witch who controls Chaos Magic, in a way that suggests it's more of a magical title than a nickname.
  • While Wanda's brother Pietro is mentioned for the first time since his death in Avengers: Age of Ultron, he's never referred to as "Quicksilver."
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the commercials, we see traces of the wider Marvel Universe that Wanda and Vision have apparently left behind, like a Stark Industries toaster or a HYDRA wristwatch.
  • When the Stark toaster gets turned on, it makes a faint sound resembling one of Tony's repulsors engaging and it blinks with a red light like the Stark bomb that destroyed Wanda's home as a child.
  • Wanda is snapped out of her pretend world in Episode 3 when Monica brings up Pietro's death at the hands of Ultron during Avengers: Age of Ultron.
  • In Episode 4, Jimmy Woo introduces himself to Monica Rambeau performing the same sleight of hand trick Scott Lang showed him in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
  • In Episode 5, Darcy, Monica and Jimmy discuss how both Wanda and Captain Marvel almost managed to take down Thanos single-handedly during Avengers: Endgame.
  • Jimmy brings up that it's against the law under the Sokovia Accords to create artificial intelligences as a result of a blanket-ban on creating them, a clause mentioned in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as being drafted in response to the fracas with Ultron.
  • In Episode 8, we get a flashback of the bombing that killed Wanda's parents, which was mentioned back in Avengers: Age of Ultron as the motivation for her hatred of Tony Stark (whose company designed the weapons used in the attack). It is also suggested that the reason the second Stark missile that landed in the Maximoffs' apartment failed to explode was that Wanda unknowingly cast a probability-altering hex that kept it from detonating.
  • Wanda uses the exact same planting of memories spell on Agatha that she used on the Avengers in Age of Ultron. However, it doesn't go so well.
  • A Skrull disguised as an FBI agent contacts Monica. Monica had been friendly with Talos's daughter during Captain Marvel.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • The "outside the Hex" crew ends up being led by three people who all have prior ties to other Avengers: Darcy Lewis (Thor), Monica Rambeau (Carol Danvers), and Jimmy Woo (Scott Lang).
  • Played for laughs and drama in Episode 7, as Vision and Darcy are constantly delayed getting back to Westview by first a long red light on an empty road, then a work crew fixing the red light, and then a crossing guard stopping them as a horde of children cross the intersection in the middle of open farmland.
• Couch Gag: The end credits changes what clips are shown on the screens each episode, with the portion in the pixel world beginning with a close-up of Vision's eye. The clips are replaced with romantic moments between Wanda and Vision in episode 9, while the transition instead zooms in between a clip of the two looking at each other.
• Creative Closing Credits: Despite it being a TV series, it still retains this Marvel trademark. The credits zoom in from a "PLEASE STAND BY" message and footage of the episode until we are in a world of green, red, and blue pixels (the three colors of light from which all TV images are composed), which turn out to be pieces of the grief-induced magic powering the Hex itself. The pixels make patterns and outlines of things relevant to the show, like Wanda and Vision's comic-accurate costumes or their Westview house.
  • Episodes 8 and 9 did not have the "PLEASE STAND BY" message, as the sitcom stopped broadcasting.
  • Starting in Episode 7, there are mid-credit scenes teasing future events.
• Cringe Comedy: As is natural for a show based on sitcoms, much of the humor comes from the awkward attempts Wanda and Vision make to fit in with the neighborhood and hide their true natures.
• Curse Cut Short: Played with. Episode 6 ends with the Hex perimeter expanding. Darcy, who's been handcuffed to a car yells "Fuu—-" as the Hex engulfs her. At the beginning of the next episode, the opening recap of previous events extends the scene and we learn that Darcy actually yells "FUUUUUUUUUUUDDDDDGGGEEE!...".
• Darker and Edgier: Just when you think the MCU couldn't get any darker after the grand arc finale that was Endgame, we're given this extremely bleak and horrific show to essentially kick off the aftermath (and the beginning of seeing the ruins of the Universe post-snap, both in it and out).
• Deliberately Monochrome: The first two episodes are completely black and white, aside from a few splashes of color. By the end of the second episode, however, the show transforms into color... which Wanda and Vision notice.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • The "commercials" that play in the first two episodes are extremely sexist on purpose, reflecting the times in which the episodes take place.
    1950s: "Is your husband tired of you burning his toast? Try our new and improved ToastMate 2000. It's the go-to for clever housewives."
    1960s: "They say a man is never fully dressed without two important accessories: his special lady, and his Strücker [wristwatch]."
  • Mr. Hart won't break bread with Bolsheviks.
  • Once Vision figures out the neighborhood watch group is just a clique of men gossiping, he accuses Norm of being a communist. Everyone laughs at Vision for his hilarious joke, which is actually Foreshadowing the false reality of the Hex, as an accusation like that would be very serious during actual McCarthyism.
• Demoted to Extra: Darcy in the finale; she only appears to ram Hayward with a carnival truck, trapping him in the wreck and not showing up for the debriefing afterwards. This comes from Kat Dennings' unavailability to shoot more scenes for the series finale, and the ones she did ended up on the cutting floor.
• Departure Means Death: Wanda's family cannot exist outside the world she creates in Westview. When Vision tries to leave, he begins to disintegrate, and when Wanda finally ends her spell over Westview, her family disappears as well.
• Diagonal Billing: A variation. Elizabeth Olsen is billed first on odd-numbered episodes, while Paul Bettany is billed first on even-numbered episodes.
• Dinner with the Boss: The first episode's premise has Mr. Hart inviting himself and his wife to dinner in the Vision residence. Vision is rather worried since Mr. Hart has already fired Phil Jones for an inadequate dinner.
• Double Meaning: "Hex." As in "hexagon" or a witch's spell.
• Double-Meaning Title: The "WandaVision" title is actually open to many interpretations especially as the series unfolds and more information about the mystery is revealed which, in turn, suggests even more options.
  • The most obvious meaning is that it is a combination of the show's titular protagonists, Wanda and Vision.
  • The title is a word play on "Television," which makes sense given the sitcom homage premise. As a homophone to "WonderVision," it also sounds like a film format introduced around the time the initial style is set (like CinemaScope, Technicolor, or VistaVision).
  • The title also suggests that it's Wanda's vision of the world, implying that her Reality Warper powers are being explored. This is reinforced by Episode 7's opening credits which end with "WandaVision: Created by Wanda Maximoff".
  • The Vision we've been following is revealed to be a construct of Wanda's in episode 8. He's the "Wanda Vision".
• Driving Question: What is the Westview Anomaly and what is going to happen to it?
• Drunk on Milk: In the second episode, Vision accidentally swallows some chewing gum, causing his "gears" to literally get gummed up. This, unfortunately, causes him to act as though he's heavily intoxicated throughout the entire magic show until Wanda fixes him.
• Easily Forgiven: None other than Wanda at the end of the series. Despite having kidnapped an entire town and forced them to play roles in her weird meltdown, including not letting some of them see their children. After beating Agatha, Wanda simply leaves for a journey of self-discovery.
• Eldritch Location: The Hex turns Westview and all its inhabitants into a "missing town", a magical bubble to the point that people in the area are unable to recognize its existence — even if someone is standing in front of a sign that says "Welcome to Westview". And it gets worse. If you somehow manage to find a way past the barrier, your mind will be rewritten into a fake personality and you will be forced to play a role in Wanda's fantasies while your real self is crushed under her grief.
• Escapism: All throughout Wanda's life, she would watch various sitcoms to help her cope with the difficulties of her life, since no matter what would go wrong in those shows, everything would always turn out okay by the end of the episode. It goes back to her childhood in Sokovia, when her family would have a "TV night" to watch American sitcoms, practice their English, and forget about their poverty-stricken war-torn nation one half-hour at a time. This would eventually lead to the creation of the Hex, creating a sitcom world for her and Vision to live in to help her escape her grief of losing Vision.
• Establishing Series Moment: The first really stark indicator of the show's eeriness comes in the first episode when Mr. Hart repeatedly asks Wanda and Vision questions about where they came from and how they got to Westview. Suddenly, he starts choking on a piece of food, while the sitcom Laugh Track plays and his wife laughingly tells him "Oh, stop it" over and over again like he only told a rude joke, with a big smile on her face while her husband is choking to death. It's not until Vision saves him that things return to normal, but from that point onwards the "cheerful sitcom" mood of the show is permanently altered as it suggests that regardless of what's actually occurring, the various people in the show are not allowed to break character.
• Evil Laugh: In Episode 6, Agnes lets out a cackle befitting of her witch outfit after telling Vision that he's dead. In Episode 7, she gives a particularly chilling laugh after "It Was ____ All Along" reveals she killed Sparky.
• Evil Mentor: Despite Agatha Harkness's Adaptational Villainy, she still plays the role of mentor to Wanda that she originally had in the comics, helping Wanda recover her repressed memories, revealing to Wanda the true nature of her powers, and teaching her some of the "fundamentals" of magic like the use of runes. Wanda lampshades this by saying "thanks for the lesson!" during the final battle, and after Agatha comments that Wanda will need her help to understand her new powers, Wanda doesn't rule it out.
• Evil Plan:
  • Agatha Harkness infiltrated Wanda's Hex to investigate the power that created it, and then stirred up trouble so she could take that power for herself, because she feels that she is more deserving of it.
  • Wanda herself is responsible for all the trouble in the Hex because she unconsciously created it during a moment of overwhelming grief. Then she becomes invested in maintaining it. However, because she is not a villain, she drops it after learning how truly harmful it is.
• Evolving Credits: The opening credits don't evolve between episodes; they switch completely to match the sitcom style being pastiched. However, one element evolves subtly and crucially; Elizabeth Olsen supplies the standard voice-over line "Previously on WandaVision, but her tone becomes flatter and less perky with each episode as the series progresses and Wanda's state of mind crumbles.
• Exact Words: In Episode 5, Wanda dismisses Vision's accusations that she's controlling everyone in Westview, asking "Do you really think that I am controlling everything?! That I-I am somehow in charge of everybody in Westview? I'm walking their dogs, mowing their lawns, getting them to dentist appointments on time?!" Come Episode 6, we see what she meant: everyone far away from Wanda's immediate vicinity is waiting for their "cue", stuck to repeating their actions or just frozen outright. Wanda really does not control everything. Episode 7 shows that some events (such as "Pietro" showing up) were actually caused by Agatha Harkness.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The series finale is titled, "The Series Finale".
• Exactly What I Aimed At: In her final clash with Agatha in the sky above Westview, Wanda seems to miss with hex bolts an awful lot, despite appearing quite determined to either let Agatha absorb her power through them or blast her into oblivion. Turns out, the "misses" were actually her engraving runes on the walls of the Hex, rendering Agatha's magic inert.
• Expository Theme Tune:
  • Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez wrote and sang period-appropriate theme songs for each decade.
    Oooooh, a newlywed couple just moved to town!
    A regular husband and wife!
    Who left the big city to find a quiet life
    WandaVision
    
    She's a magical gal in a small town locale!
    He's a hubby who's part machine!
    How will this duo fit in and pull through?
    Oh, by sharing a love like you've never seen
    WandaVisioooooon!
  • And in Episode 7, Agnes's reveal of her true identity and malevolent nature is immediately followed by her own Expository Theme Tune, "It Was ____ All Along".
• Fisher Kingdom: Whenever something enters the Westview Hex barrier, if it doesn't "fit" into the sitcom styling or time period currently underway, it is transformed into the nearest "appropriate" shape at the moment of entry. A modern drone is turned into a toy helicopter and a hazmat suit changes into a beekeeper's outfit. We learn that the raw material of the object is rewoven during the transformation as Monica's Kevlar vest becomes a bulletproof 1970s pantsuit. Once the town shifts into the 1980s, technology from that time period can enter the Hex without transformation—a first-generation drone manages to make it through unchanged.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • In the first episode, after Wanda kicks Agnes out of the kitchen before she uses her powers, Agnes can be seen lurking behind the window above the kitchen sink.
  • Watch the background toward the end of Episode 4. Vision's face is already grey before Wanda turns around.
  • At the end of Episode 5 a shot of the back of the head reveals that the Pietro who appears is not the one from Age of Ultron because of the color of his hair — Aaron Taylor-Johnson's version is platinum blond, Evan Peters' is more of a silver color.
  • In Episode 6, Wanda and Pietro walk by a theater that's playing The Incredibles on the matinee. Bob and Helen Parr's son Dash has Super-Speed. Tommy is shown to have inherited his uncle's own super-speed seconds later.
• Five Stages of Grief: The series follows this structure with each pair of episodes:
  • Denial is represented in the 1950s and 1960s eras by the start of Wanda's delusion that everything is fine in spite of appearances to the contrary.
  • Anger is represented in the 1970s era by Wanda lashing out and expelling Monica from Westview after being confronted by the reality that her brother is dead.
  • Bargaining is represented in the 1980s and 1990s eras by Wanda trying to assuage Vision's concerns as he begins to recognize something is wrong in Westview and by threatening the S.W.O.R.D. forces to leave her alone or face her wrath.
  • Depression is represented by Wanda's mental health deteriorating as the reality of the situation sinks in for her in the 2000s era and in the various flashbacks to her life earlier in the setting.
  • Acceptance. The series ends with Wanda having a cathartic release by having the time to profess her love and have a proper goodbye with Vision which allows her to withdraw the Westview Hex and face the world as The Scarlet Witch. However, the writers have said the stages are a guideline not an absolute and Wanda is last seen reading the Darkhold and hears her children calling to her, and she backslides in a major way in her very next appearance.
• Foreshadowing:
  • We can speak generally about the kinds of foreshadowing we see.
    • Naturally, the entire focus of the show are on Wanda and Vision and things repeatedly going wrong with their attempt to live in Westview.
    • First, we get repeated, small Glamour Failures that show whoever is doing this isn't in complete control.
    • Several of Wanda's and Vision's neighbors stand out as different from the rest of the town, in the opening credits of episodes they appear in and in their behavior, Geraldine and Agatha.
    • A repeated image motif is of hexagons.
    • There are lots of hints about something satanic about one of the townsfolk.
  • Starting with the first episode, we get a hint that Vision is a creation of Wanda's, and reflects her grief over his death in Infinity War and Pietro's death in Age of Ultron, because he not only retains the powers he had in the movies, but also Super-Speed, something he hadn't had there.
  • In episode 3, Wanda straight up rewrites one of Vision's lines when he goes off-script, a telltale sign that he's not the real Vision.
  • In episode 5, as Monica is describing feeling Wanda's grief, someone watching frame by frame will notice a brief flash of the outburst Wanda had when she created the Hex, as will be seen in detail in episode 8.
  • In episode 5, when Wanda comes out of the Hex to confront the S.W.O.R.D. agents after Hayward fires a missile at her, she not only already knows who Hayward is (as she addresses him as "Director") but harbors a lot of personal hatred for him. She sneers at him when she speaks to him, and the whole exchange ends with her possessing his tactical unit to all point their guns at him as she reenters the Hex. This is because Hayward is experimenting on the real Vision's remains and refused to let Wanda take them so she could give him a proper burial.
  • In episode 5, Vision chides Wanda for using her magic in front of Agnes by creating a dog tag for Sparky, and Wanda counters that Agnes didn't notice when Billy and Tommy aged themselves up to five year olds.
  • In episode 6, Monica, Darcy and Jimmy discover files for Project Cataract. Anyone who knows what cataracts are will understand what Hayward is doing with White Vision.
  • The "Yo-Magic" ad in episode 6 has a shark telling a starving castaway that he used to be hungry like him until he got a snack of Yo-Magic, which sounds suspiciously similar to "your magic". The kid is also wearing a red T-shirt. This foreshadows the Power Parasite nature of Agatha Harkness and her intentions of seizing Wanda's magic for herself.
  • In Episode 4, Darcy Lewis says "We got the full clown car" while heading to the S.W.O.R.D. base. At the end of Episode 6, Wanda expands the Hex, turning the base into a circus and the agents into literal clowns.
  • Hayward's angry speech to Monica in Episode 6 — "You people who left, still have the luxury of optimism. You have no idea what it was like. What it took to keep the lights on!" — hints at a growing rift between the Blipped and the un-Blipped, the greater ramifications of which will be shown in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. (This wasn't intended as foreshadowing, as TFATWS was originally meant to be released before WandaVision, but that's how it turned out.)
  • On a Phase 4-wide story-telling note, the hilarious idea of Jimmy Woo and Darcy slowly but surely becoming invested in Wanda and Vision's idyllic happiness via watching the Hex broadcast gains greater significance and weight later when another character goes through virtually the same process—the character being Uatu the Watcher, the omniscient Narrator of What If…? (2021). Like Jimmy and Darcy, Uatu (despite his own Alien Non-Interference Clause) would eventually grow to care more directly for the people of The Multiverse, even eventually guiding events and the actions of people to prevent a great threat.
• Forgot About His Powers:
  • Vision's "drunken" antics in the second episode could have been avoided if he remembered that he could use his powers to make his hand go intangible and remove the gum from his inner workings... But then again, he wasn't thinking clearly. Amusingly, he does use his intangibility powers when he "pulls a hat out of himself".
  • In Episode 7, Vision and Darcy are constantly delayed when trying to return to Westview in the funnel cake van. Subverted when Vision has a moment of clarity that allows him to throw off the effects of the Westview Hex and remembers that he can fly. He promptly takes off, phasing through the roof of the van leaving the contrived traffic problems behind. It can be viewed as a little subverted, however, since he might have been staying with Darcy to get back to date with "outside" world as much as possible.
  • For most of the series, when Wanda breaks out of her sitcom character and acts as herself (usually indicated by an Accent Relapse), she doesn't use any of the new powers she displayed in creating and maintaining the Hex, but only the telekinetic and telepathic powers she had in previous movies.
  • Averted, however, with Wanda's mind-control powers, which return in this series after never being used or mentioned in the movies after Age of Ultron. It turns out the residents of Westview are being mind-controlled to act out roles in Wanda's sitcom fantasies.
• From Bad to Worse: At the end of Episode 6, the Vision forces his way outside of the Hex boundary and begins to fall apart. To save him, Wanda expands the Hex which assimilates the S.W.O.R.D. field base, its agents and staffers, including Darcy.
• Fun with Homophones: When Herb offers Vision a stick of gum.
  Vision: My understanding is that [gum] is purely for mastication.
  Herb: [nervous] Oh, no. I don't do that...
• Funny Background Event: While Billy's talking to the camera in Episode 6 Malcolm in the Middle-style, Pietro looks at Tommy next to him◊, perhaps wondering who Billy's talking to and if Tommy is also seeing this. Tommy doesn't respond.
• Funny Foreigner:
  • To cover up a gaffe with Mr. Hart (after Wanda tries to creep up on him thinking she's surprising Vision for a romantic evening), Vision and Wanda claim it's a Sokovian "greeting of hospitality".
    Wanda: "Oh, is that my host behind me?"
    Vision: "It certainly is."
    Wanda: [shakes his hand] "Lovely to make your acquaintance!"
    Vision: [to Mr. and Mrs. Hart] See, I forgot to tell you my wife is from Europe.
  • A fake flashback to Wanda's childhood Halloween in Sokovia is filled with Balkan stereotypes: visiting a house covered in decaying Soviet posters and a flaming barrel on the lawn, where a brown-toothed old babushka presents a single dead fish as a Halloween treat "to share", all while two guys strip a car for parts in the background to the sound of distant gunfire.
    Wanda: That's not exactly how I remember it.
    "Pietro": You probably suppressed a lot of the trauma.
• Gaslighting:
  • Wanda starts engaging in this with Vision and her kids in order to keep things together. It goes beyond simply telling them that nothing is wrong, and they are not seeing anything unusual. Time-manipulation is involved. It doesn't work for very long.
  • Agnes/Agatha Harkness isolates Wanda by getting close to her and causing conflict between her and Vision. She takes advantage of Wanda's grief and self-doubt to have Ralph Bohner pose as her brother, despite possessing someone with a completely different appearance. And while she didn't mean to drive Wanda to the brink, she takes advantage of it by taking her kids and trapping her. All this while she is pretending to be an innocent bystander.
  • Director Hayward tries to cast Monica as a liability for the mission, even throwing her mother's death in her face, in order to take over the operation. He also flat-out lies about Wanda breaking in to steal Vision's body in order to paint her as the villain, when in reality it never left the S.W.O.R.D. compound. Defied, since Monica sees right through the manipulation and never sees Wanda as the villain.
• Genre-Busting: WandaVision is an expectation-defying installment from the MCU. It avoids the standard MCU narrative format for several of its episodes. The series zigzags between period-piece situational comedy, drama, psychological horror, surreal horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, and action over the course of a nine-episode run, and often several times in the same episode. The Trapped in TV Land concept is also very unlike the typical conflict presented in the superhero genre, as is the lack of clear motives and moral alignments for the titular characters.
• Genre Shift: Every MCU production thus far, despite varying in tone and setting, has been an outright Action Genre production about a virtuous superhero or group of superheroes facing off against a sinister villain, even the Darker and Edgier Netflix shows. This show is an outright Psychological Horror story about the seemingly perfect titular couple slowly discovering that something is very wrong in their perfect Stepford Suburbia.
• Genre Throwback: Almost every episode is a throwback to a different era of television sitcom, starting with the 50s and progressing onwards from that point. Each episode is also a loose homage to a different specific television show from that era.
  • Episode 1 parodies classic 1950s "husband and wife" comedies like I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
  • Episode 2 moves into the 1960s with a focus on Bewitched, with the twist that the husband in this case is also supernatural.
  • Episode 3 is similar to The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family in the 1970s setting and tone.
  • Episode 4 isn't a sitcom parody, and instead explains much of what's going on in the series up to that point.
  • Episode 5 imitates glurge-tastic sitcoms of the 80s, especially Family Ties and Full House.
  • Episode 6 advances to the 1990s and almost directly imitates Malcolm in the Middle (despite that show actually coming out in the mid-2000s), with Billy and Tommy frequently addressing the audience directly.
  • Episode 7 is portrayed as a mockumentary of the kind that became popular in the 2000s and 2010s, particularly The Office (US) and Modern Family.
  • Episodes 8 and 9 abandons the sitcom framing approach entirely, since Wanda comes to accept the unreality of her Westview sitcom life. They instead take on the style of a contemporary Marvel movie.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The Hex forces everyone to act happy. When Wanda first realizes what she's done, she is able to accept it because everyone's lives really are better (especially as the timeline advances to the modern era), compared to before she came when the town was almost dead post-Blip. She briefly defends herself on these grounds when Agatha wakes everyone up. However, when she realizes that the people aren't merely forced to be happier but actively aware while crushed by Wanda's grief, she immediately takes down the Hex and lets everyone go.
• George Jetson Job Security: Parodied in the first episode, where it's made clear that Mr. Hart will fire Vision if he fails to impress him with dinner. He already fired Phil Jones for this.
• The Ghost: Agnes is constantly cracking jokes about her husband Ralph, who's seemingly the stereotypical fat slob sitcom husband, but he's yet to appear onscreen. The series finale makes this Unseen No More by revealing that he is in fact Ralph Bohner, the fake "Pietro" that Agatha controlled to do her bidding.
• Glitch Episode: The second episode sees Vision start acting drunk when a piece of gum gets stuck in his gears.
• Gorgeous Period Dress: Even in the earlier, "older" episodes with their period-appropriate video quality, it's clear the costume department worked hard putting together period-appropriate clothes that are visually stunning, and seamlessly beautiful.
• Gossipy Hens: In Episode 2, Vision finds out that the neighborhood watch isn't about security. It's just an opportunity for a clique to get together and gossip about their neighbors over donuts.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality:
  • Wanda has suffered a tremendous amount of grief in her life. From her perspective, she has only had three weeks to deal with Vision's traumatic double-death in front of her. When standing on the home-site that Vision intended for them to "grow old together", she has a moment of emotional trauma and unleashes a hex that creates a safe, supportive sitcom reality around her in which Vision is still alive. At first, Wanda falls into its comforting embrace whole-heartedly, but as the story unfolds, cracks in her "perfect world" begin to appear and there are hints of the unpleasant cost that the Hex is placing on the inhabitants. However, Wanda, in grief's denial, becomes more authoritarian in imposing her happiness over the bits of unwanted reality she is being forced to encounter more and more frequently.
  • Monica is trying to solve the mystery of the Westview Hex and when it's revealed that Wanda is the prime cause, she genuinely wants to help her. Having found out her own mother Maria died while she was dusted, Monica can sympathize with Wanda's loss, but it's clear that she is becoming reckless and obsessive in her desire to save Wanda, to the point where she seems more focused on Wanda than the trapped citizens of Westview and how each day in the Hex adds to their pain. Unfortunately, despite Monica's noble intentions, by the end of the story none of her actions really end up helping Wanda.
  • Tyler Hayward, as the director of S.W.O.R.D., is also trying to deal with the Westview Hex. When it becomes apparent that Wanda is the cause, he connects it with her history of HYDRA affiliation, responds to the situation as a threat and is completely willing to take Wanda out if the opportunity presents itself. It doesn't help that he has a means to scan for Vision's vibranium decay which convinces him that she can reanimate The Vision despite her denials and sees her as a liar as well as a terrorist (the latter of which Monica and Woo state is not accurate). However, we also learn that Hayward has his own machinations underway to try to reanimate the original Vision himself and is using the events surrounding Westview to enact his own plans and shift the blame onto Wanda.
• Heel Realization: Wanda finally has one in the final episode when Agatha breaks Wanda’s spell over the townspeople, and they all tell her how horrifying it has been living under her control in the sitcom reality. Wanda previously tried to delude herself into believing she had improved their lives beyond the sad town she first arrived in. But they make clear to her how much worse she has made their lives.
• Hero Antagonist: Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis are the actual heroes of this story. They are the only ones outside of the Hex who are concerned with the people of Westview and take action to save them from Wanda, without demonizing Wanda in the process and actively try to negotiate with her. They deal with Hayward, while Wanda fights Agatha and Hex Vision fights White Vision.
• Hide Your Children: Westview has the creepy reality that besides Tommy and Billy, children only appear when needed by a storyline. There's no sign of a single Westview child for the first five episodes until Vision brings it up, at which point Wanda rolls them all out for the Halloween Spooktacular in Episode 6, after which they all disappear again until one scene in Episode 7 when they are needed as an endless school crossing line to delay Vision and Darcy out in the countryside.
• High-Tech Hexagons: As S.W.O.R.D. is tracking the hexagon-shaped Westview Anomaly, it is displayed on a map in an advanced computer interface.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Agatha shows Wanda a runic array when boasting about how they are used to bind Wanda's powers. This new knowledge allows Wanda to use runes against them later in the story.
• Hostile Show Takeover: When Agatha finally reveals herself, it's instantly followed by a new 'opening' for a show called "It Was ____ All Along" with her as the Villain Protagonist.
• How We Got Here:
  • Episode 4, covers Monica's back-story which shows how Monica got into Westview and became Geraldine as well as the events that have been occurring outside the town since the first episode.
  • Episode 8 finally reveals how the Westview Anomaly was created as Agatha forces Wanda to confront her repressed memories of what happened.
• Hugh Mann: Wanda and Vision both insist that Vision is a completely normal carbon-based lifeform made out of organic matter.
• Human Disguise: Like in Infinity War, Vision changes his appearance to look like a regular human when he goes out in public.
• Horror Comedy: The series pinballs between a loving, humorous sitcom homage and uneasy Psychological Horror without missing a beat.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Both main characters want to hide their powers and lead a peaceful suburban life in Westview.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The series episodes are named after television Stock Phrases that are evocative of the episode.
• Idiot Ball: Tyler Hayward is a Jerkass who is shown to be manipulative, deceptive, and unforgiving in pursuit of his objective to protect his country as Director of S.W.O.R.D.. As a government organization, it isn't established how much of S.W.O.R.D.'s activities were completely illegal vs. being morally ambivalent but sanctioned in service of the greater good. Until Episode 9, his actions walked the line of Grey-and-Gray Morality, but when losing the fight with Wanda, Vision and their kids he suddenly takes a handgun and opens fire on Billy and Tommy. It is an action that offers no tactical or strategic advantage and has no obvious beneficial outcome. Of course, by that point in time, he was also about to be arrested as Jimmy had already called his superiors to inform them he had evidence Hayward had committed abuses of authority.
• Inconsistent Episode Lengths: The episodes range from around 20 minutes to around 40 minutes— the shorter episodes are styled as a faux half-hour sitcom, while the more dramatic later episodes are longer.
• Internal Homage: While most episodes are Homages to past decades of sitcoms, the final episode is an homage to the MCU itself, with the inclusion of many of its most famous tropes and motifs.
  • Both Wanda and Vision have Final Battles with Evil Counterparts: Wanda with Agatha, and Vision with his Evil Doppelgänger.
  • Both Wanda and Vision do a Three-Point Landing during their battles.
  • Wanda uses a sky beam when she opens up the Hex.
  • The Maximoff family does an Ass Kicking Pose when surrounded by the Big Bad Ensemble of Agatha, White Vision, and the S.W.O.R.D. military forces.
  • The townspeople have a What the Hell, Hero? attitude. This is typically because the Avengers are Destructive Saviours, but in this case it’s because Wanda is truly the villain in their story.
  • The hero heads off to an undisclosed location.
  • There are two stingers: one in the mid-credits and one at the end credits.
• In the Dreaming Stage of Grief: We get a flashback to the night Wanda and Pietro's parents were killed in a bombing. The family was watching an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show that had an All Just a Dream ending at the time, leading the young Wanda to hope that her current situation would end just like the episode did.
• Intoxication Ensues: For Vision, getting a piece of gum stuck inside his body has a similar effect to alcohol.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Zigzagged. Director Hayward can't seem to go five minutes before insecurely lashing out at Monica or Jimmy. However, he is correct that Wanda is a former terrorist (with a high body count) who is holding thousands of people hostage, depriving them of their free will and Mind Raping them into compliance. Furthermore, the brief moments of freedom the citizens experience have them saying just how horrifying it is being controlled. As such, he's completely justified in disregarding the fact she was an Avenger. Where it zags is his motivation isn't so much about saving people, but covering up his violations of the Sokovia Accords.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Mysterious breaks in the sitcom story hint at more sinister forces at play.
• Joisey: In Episode 4, Westview is later revealed to be located in New Jersey (though anyone familiar with area codes figured out this out right away in the first episode from the phone number on the real estate sign for Wanda and Vision's house, or even a bit of the gossip at the "neighborhood watch"). The Evan Peters version of Pietro even has a thick Jersey accent to match the setting.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Tyler Hayward goes from a Jerkass with justifiable motivations in trying to neutralize the Hex to straight up villainous once it's revealed he's trying to cover up his illegal experiment of reanimating Vision. Unfortunately his actions slip into bad, comic-book villainy when he shoots at Tommy and Billy even though it provides no advantage to do so, then jumps into a car and tries to escape.
• Jumpscare:
  • A brief but nasty one occurs at the end of Episode 4. After Monica disappears, Wanda turns around to find Vision now has the appearance of his own corpse.
  • One happens in Episode 6, when Evan Peters as Pietro is shown as a corpse riddled with bullets.
  • Episode 8 has a flashback where the Maximoffs are peacefully watching TV together in their home in Sokovia and a missile suddenly blows up the apartment.
• Lampshade Hanging: At the end of episode 7, immediately after Agnes reveals herself as Agatha Harkness, the theme song and opening credits for It Was ____ All Along start and reveal how she has manipulated events behind the scenes from the first episode, complete with knowing winks towards the camera. At the end, she looks straight into the camera while confessing that she even killed Sparky the dog before cackling maniacally.
• Last Note Nightmare: The final post credit scene shows Wanda in an astral version of her Scarlet Witch form reading the Darkhold while Doctor Strange's theme plays in a slow, minor key. As the camera pans toward Wanda, the distorted voices of Billy and Tommy can be heard calling their mom for help. As Wanda looks toward the camera with glowing red eyes, the music begins to crescendo then is abruptly cut off as the entire screen flashes red and the series ends.
• Laugh Track: In keeping with the old-fashioned sitcom theme, the show utilizes canned laughter (except in the first episode, which had an actual studio audience). Sometimes at incredibly disturbing moments. The laugh track is abandoned as of episode 6, which is justified by the choice of the single-camera Malcolm in the Middle as the inspiration, as well as the characters' increasing inability to commit to the traditional sitcom format.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: All over the place, as part of the Meta Fiction nature of the Show Within a Show.
  • Episode 1, "Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience," was filmed before an actual Studio Audience.
  • Perhaps the cleverest example comes at the end of Episode 5, in a very clever nod to the tendency of sitcoms to invokedrecast major characters without explanation, where a version of Wanda's brother, Pietro (played by the actor who plays him in X-Men Film Series), and a baffled Darcy asks "She recast Pietro?" This is continued in Episode 6, where even Wanda comments on Pietro having the wrong face for some reason.
• Logic Bomb: In the finale, Hex Vision gets White Vision to declare that his objective is "to kill the Vision". Hex Vision then uses the Theseus' Ship Paradox to have his opponent question who is his actual target. This results in White Vision having a conflict between his newfound identity and his programming and he flies off into the sky.
• Logo Joke:
  • The first episode warps the Marvel Studios logo into 4:3 and decolorizes to appear as though it's on a black and white television, and even shifts the music to mono.
  • The eighth episode has the background turn purple (the color of Agatha's magic) followed by a smoky transition to the opening scene.
• Loophole Abuse: It's illegal to try to revive the dead Vision, however, when Hayward successfully revives White Vision, he plans on blaming the reanimation on Wanda, leaving him with the White Vision under his control.
• Magic Harms Technology: Downplayed. Wanda's magical hex on Westview allows technology, but only to the level appropriate for the sitcom-style "show" being depicted. Any outside technology that doesn't fit into Wanda's world, whether because it's too modern or it's being utilized to harm her, gets transformed by her magic to fit in (i.e. a SWORD drone becomes a toy helicopter, a military tank becomes a truck). Monica tried to get around this in Episode 5 using a drone contemporary to The '80s, the era for the episode, which worked... until Wanda saw it and threw it out herself.
• Magic Misfire: Episode 8 shows the intense amount of grief Wanda is holding onto. In addition to the loss of her parents and brother, the events of Infinity War occurred barely a month ago from her perspective where she had to kill Vision, then watch Thanos kill him again. She tries to claim Vision's body from Hayward for burial, which is denied and her brief encounter with his corpse serves to drive home that he is gone. She then drives to Westview to stand in the abandoned house lot Vision had bought for them to grow old in. In this moment, she suffers a breakdown where her grief explodes out to cast a Hex corrupted by her emotional pain that forges a happy sitcom world like the shows she watched as a child, creates a simulacrum of Vision from her memories, and enslaves the people of Westview to become her supporting cast.
• Magic Must Defeat Magic: S.W.O.R.D. tries and fails to take down Wanda Maximoff multiple times using their tech and resources, but all it does is piss her off. The only character who manages to make any headway is Agatha Harkness, who successfully binds her with magical runes and sucks up every magical attack sent her way. Of course Wanda turns the tables on her by using her own runes against her, stripping her of her magic before turning her into Agnes as an ironic punishment.
• Marquee Alter Ego: In the sitcom reality, Vision sometimes transforms his red, metallic face into Paul Bettany's own face to make him more presentable for their neighbors.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The show's title is, of course, a combination of "Wanda" + "Vision", but the further the series advances, the more its alternative meanings become apparent:
    • It's a classic way of naming a TV channel, as in [channel name]-vision (like Univision); hence, it's Wanda's Television.
    • It's Wanda's warped "vision" of a happy life, since she's controlling the show.
  • "Agnes". An amalgamation of her real name Agatha Harkness.
  • Project CATARACT. Cataract + blurry vision = White Vision.
• Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication:
  • Genderflipped, as it's Wanda and Agatha that have the big battle in the sky, and while the two Visions do fight, they end up discussing the Ship Of Theseus to bring their confrontation to a peaceful end.
  • It's played straight in the differing methods Hayward and Monica use to handle the situation in Westview. Hayward views Wanda as a terrorist threat that needs to be taken out at the first opportunity because he doesn't want his abuses of power coming to light, while Monica tries to reason with her.
• Meta Casting: Elizabeth Olsen's acting career hasn't revolved around sitcoms, but she grew up as the sister to the twins who played Michelle Tanner. And she made a short appearance in Full House in 1995.
• Mind Screw: While Wanda herself is the driving force behind the Westview hex, the show drops a lot of subtle hints for dedicated comic fans and not so subtle hints for the average viewer that there may be something else going on or someone else controlling things.
• Mirror Match: In the series finale, the Westview Vision arrives just in time to rescue Wanda from the Cataract Vision reactivated by S.W.O.R.D. The two of them subsequently start fighting each other, using their intangibility and Energy Weapon attacks, before slowing down and conversing with each other instead.
• Mismatched Atomic Expressionism: "Don't Touch That Dial" replicates the style of sitcoms with artisticly-flat animated intros from the 1950s and 1960s.
• Missing Episode: In-universe, the "episode" taking place in the 2000s was not picked up by S.W.O.R.D.'s TVs. Hayward interprets it as Wanda cancelling the series.
• Mood Whiplash: The series switches from sitcom-style cheesy comedy to Surreal Horror and back again without missing a beat. The first episode provides a prime example: after an extended sequence of standard sitcom humor where Wanda and Vision attempt to prepare dinner for the latter's boss while concealing their powers, things take an uncomfortable turn once they sit down: Mr. Hart repeatedly demands to know "Why did you come here?" before suddenly choking. His wife then simply stares at Wanda with a twisted expression somewhere between terror and a goofy smile at her husband's "antics", repeating "Oh, stop it! Stop it!" instead of attempting to help him, during which time the multi-camera setup is abandoned in favor of tight push-in reaction frames. Vision clears his airway and things snap back to sitcommy humor as if nothing happened.
• Moving Beyond Bereavement: The crux of the series; Wanda succumbs to her grief and inadvertently creates a pocket reality modeled after her favorite sitcoms; here, Vision is alive again and raising a family with her, but the pocket reality unfortunately enslaves the residents of a very real small town into serving as background characters in Wanda's fantasy. After several episodes of being called out on this by Vision, Monica, the Big Bad, and even the townsfolk themselves, Wanda finally dissolves the false reality she's made, bidding Vision and their children goodbye as they vanish; she then leaves town, still sad but finally able to move on.
• Mundane Utility: Wanda and Vision use their powers for housework, regular work, and to assist with unexpected situational comedy.
  Agatha Harkness: You have no idea how dangerous you are. You’re supposed to be a myth. A being capable of spontaneous creation, and here you are, using it to make breakfast for dinner.
• Mundane Solution: After all of S.W.O.R.D. can't make sense of the anomaly and the cosmic radiation coming out of it, Darcy manages to decode it by receiving the signal with an old CRT-TV.
• Mythology Gag: See here.

Tropes N–Z

• No Endor Holocaust: Subverted. Monica is introduced through the pandemonium that erupts within just a single hospital in the immediate aftermath of reversing Thanos's snap and forces the viewer to consider the pure chaos that did engulf the world because of actions taken in Avengers: Endgame.
• No Indoor Voice:
  • Befitting a sitcom filmed on a set, the characters speak as if they're trying to project to the back rows of the Studio Audience, with gestures to match.
  • When visiting Wanda's childhood memories in Sokovia, Agatha Harkness takes notice of how a young Pietro tends to shout everything he says despite his parents and sister being within earshot of him.
• Not Me This Time: When Monica gets back into the Hex and tracks down Wanda, Wanda refuses to hear her out, blaming her and Hayward for the various drones that have been sent into the Hex, the missile in episode 5, and Fake Pietro. Monica insists that Fake Pietro wasn't their doing. It turns out he was actually Agatha's work.
• "Not So Different" Remark: When Hayward shows up with armed men to confront Wanda, the immortal Agatha comments that, no matter how much time passes, there will always be "torches and pitchforks" for women like them, making the point that regardless of whether you're an evil witch or a good witch, normal people will fear you.
• Nuclear Family: Invoked. Wanda is a Genre Savvy sitcom fan. Broken by a string of personal losses, she warps an entire town into a world where she, her beloved husband Vision, and their (magically created) twin sons live a happy suburban life.
• Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation: Parodied and lampshaded in the first episode. Vision is exceptionally good at his job even though he doesn't know what Computational Services, Inc. does and every question he asks of Norm and of Mr. Hart is neatly brushed aside. We know they don't make, buy, or sell anything. Their productivity has gone up 300% since Vision started working for them. They produce "output", but what for is also unclear.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Played with. For the majority of Wanda's film appearances, Elizabeth Olsen adopted an Eastern European accent. Since the false reality of the Hex is based on the American sitcoms that Wanda watched as a child, she spends most of the show speaking in Olsen's normal accent. However, whenever Wanda gets emotional, the Sokovian accent does come back.
  Agatha Harkness: [in a bad Russian accent] "Where are my children?" Whoo! That accent really comes and goes, doesn't it?
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Darcy has strong shades of this from the start — an astrophysics Ph.D. with expertise in everything from particle physics to abnormal cell biology. It gets reinforced once she reveals her unexplained hacking skills that enable her to quickly defeat S.W.O.R.D. cybersecurity.
• Once per Episode: In Universe, Darcy mentions that Wanda washes the dishes once an episode. We never see her wash the dishes in the series, and it only comes up because Darcy needs Wanda to be near a radio (which she apparently is in every dish-washing scene) for Jimmy to try contacting her.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The fourth episode starts chronologically before the first episode of the series and shows us the same events from the perspective of S.W.O.R.D.; a few of the scenes from the previous episodes are shown again with a little more clarity. We see the beekeeper coming out of the sewer in episode 2 is actually a S.W.O.R.D. agent wearing a hazmat suit which was transformed into a beekeeper uniform upon entering Westview. We see the scene in which a man tries to contact Wanda through a radio, revealing it was actually Jimmy Woo. The stinger from episode one is shown again, but with the stranger watching the television revealed to be Darcy.
  • The seventh episode ends with a montage of several scenes from the previous episodes from the perspective of Agnes, who is really a powerful witch named Agatha Harkness. Where did Pietro come from? Agatha conjured him. Why have the neighbors been "breaking character" without Wanda or Vision's intervention? Agatha made them. And what happened to Sparky? Agatha killed him!
  • The eighth episode reveals that Hayward was lying about Wanda breaking into S.W.O.R.D. headquarters to steal Vision's body. Hayward invited her in, hoping she could reactivate Vision's body, and she left calmly (if still grieving). The footage Hayward showed Monica was deliberately edited to paint Wanda in a bad light.
• One Degree of Separation: One thing that Monica, Darcy, and Jimmy have in common is that they each have worked with an Avenger in the past and are now looking into two more.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations:
  • In the first episode, Vision has a phone conversation with Wanda, saying that if things don't go well tonight, "this could be the end." He's saying that his job may depend on the success of their dinner with Mr. Hart. At the same time, Wanda thinks he's saying that their marriage may collapse if they don't have a romantic evening together. He says they need to please the wife, she the husband. He thinks they're talking about making sure Mr. and Mrs. Hart are happy, she thinks they're talking about having sex.
  • A character quirk for Jimmy Woo. Darcy and Jimmy are discussing Wanda having kids, and Darcy asks offhand if he "want[s] any". He goes into a brief tangent about how he's thought about having kids, but Darcy was just offering him a chip. He also earlier confused Monica's question of "What about you?" to be asking about himself, instead of why the both of them know about Westview when no-one else seems to.
  • In episode 5, when Wanda leaves the Hex to confront Hayward after he fires a missile at her, Monica asks Wanda what she wants, and Wanda replies, "I have what I want. And no-one will ever take it from me, again." Monica thinks Wanda is referring to the sitcom reality she's created for herself in the Hex, when Wanda is actually addressing Hayward and saying she won't let him take her Hex recreation of Vision for the purposes of his Project Cataract.
• Only Sane Man: In Episode 5, Vision is the only person to voice any concerns about the odd behavior of Westview's residents because almost everybody else in the town is under the influence of Wanda's Hex while Wanda, blatantly Gaslights him by pretending not to notice what he's talking about.
• Ontological Mystery: Wanda and Vision find themselves in idyllic Westview but don't seem to mind or care, that they don't remember when they got married or when they moved in. Meanwhile it's those outside of Westview who are desperately trying to figure out what is happening.
• Origins Episode:
  • Episode 7 shows Monica forcing her way through the Hex barrier and how that alters her cellular structure once again, giving her powers and heralding the origin of Photon/Spectrum in the MCU.
  • Episode 8 shows us the various stages of Wanda coming into her powers and how the Hex was created.
• The Other Darrin: invoked In-universe: Pietro appears in Episode 5. However, instead of actor Aaron Taylor Johnson (who played him in Age of Ultron), it is Evan Peters (who portrayed him in Fox's X-Men films). This is lampshaded by Darcy.
• Outdated Outfit: Wanda and Vision wear their classic, very campy-looking outfits in Episode 6 as their Halloween costumes. Wanda explains it away by saying she's dressed as a "Sokovian fortune teller"; Vision goes with "Mexican luchador". Billy wears his Wiccan costume with a red cape and headband. "Pietro" / Bohner also dresses himself and Tommy up in the old Quicksilver outfit, complete with lightning-bolt tunic and Flock of Seagulls hair.
• Painting the Medium:
  • When the Visions and the Harts sit down for dinner in the first episode, and Mr. Hart begins questioning the couple's history, the camera starts getting uncomfortably close — using more complicated angles and tight push-ins that wouldn't be possible in a '50s sitcom without physically wheeling the camera onto the set — as Wanda and Vision begin to doubt themselves, realizing they don't know anything about this world or their place in it.^note In the trailer version of this scene, the aspect ratio also changes from a classic 4:3 to a more modern widescreen.
  • In the second episode, the show completely changes from black and white to color... and Wanda and Vision notice.
  • At the end of the third episode, when Monica is forcibly ejected from Westview, the frame slowly transitions from 4:3 to 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen, illustrating the shift between the "show" and the "real world" of the MCU Films.
  • Around the climax of Episode 5, Vision and Wanda argue about her forcing him (and the rest of the people in Westview) to act out her perfect sitcom world against their will. While they're arguing, the In-Universe credits for the sitcom keep scrolling past in front of them. When they move to another room, the credits are gone, implying they were a physical display that was appearing in front of Wanda and Vision in the other room.
• Parody Commercial: Every sitcom has a spoof commercial that alludes in some form to a traumatic event from Wanda's life.
  • The first episode's is a Stark Industries-brand toaster. However, its blinking red light is the only color in the entire episode, the toaster makes the sound of one of Tony Stark's repulsors charging up, and the scene follows the toasting process a little too long to be comfortable. This alludes to the Stark Industries missile that killed her parents.
  • The second's is a fancy watch, specifically a Strücker brand watch with the HYDRA logo. Strücker was the Hydra scientist whose experiments on Loki's scepter gave Wanda and Pietro their powers before Avengers: Age of Ultron.
    "Strücker. He'll make time for you!"
  • The third episode's is for a bath soap called Hydra-Soak ("Find the goddess within!"). This foreshadows Episode 8, which reveals how HYDRA's experiments ending up greatly amplifying her magical powers, essentially setting her on the path to becoming the mythical Scarlet Witch.
  • The fourth episode, breaking the sitcom pattern, didn't have one, but the fifth returned to form with Lagos paper towels, the most absorbent paper towel available, complete with a voiceover by Grey DeLisle. This alludes to the incident in Lagos where Wanda accidentally killed several people, including Wakandan humanitarian workers, in the course of trying to relocate an exploding Crossbones. The resulting backlash was the last straw which brought down the Sokovia Accords onto the Avengers, kicking off the eponymous conflict of Captain America: Civil War.
    "Lagos. For when you make a mess you didn't mean to!"
  • The sixth episode has a claymation shark saying it used to always be hungry before it started feeding on Yo-Magic! yogurt... followed by a red-headed castaway withering away to a skeleton. This foreshadows the reveal of Agatha as a magic consuming predator who drains witches and leaves behind an emaciated husk.
    "Yo-Magic! The snack for survivors!"
  • The seventh episode has a commercial for an anti-depressant called Nexus that "works to anchor you to your reality. Or the reality of your choice." Side Effects Include... "feeling your feelings, confronting your truth, seizing your destiny, and possibly more depression." This commercial basically serves a summation of what Wanda does and goes through in this series.
    "Nexus. Because the world doesn't revolve around you. Or does it?"
• Perception Filter: Episode 4 reveals that everyone in the area surrounding Westview no longer remember it and specifically deny its existence even when standing right outside the town limits, anyone associated with people living there has forgotten them, and anyone getting too close to the field surrounding the town is overwhelmed with the desire to not enter. The fact that S.W.O.R.D. and everyone else investigating the town somehow do remember is lampshaded.
• Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: While joking with the men of the library in Episode 2, Vision accidentally swallows a piece of chewing gum after Norm slaps him on the back, causing his gears to get all stuck in place. Somehow, this causes Vision to start acting heavily intoxicated, which he does throughout his entire magic act at the Westview talent show until Wanda removes the gum from his system.
• Played for Horror: The show works its way through a checklist of Sitcom Tropes — any of which can turn dark in an instant as the weirdness of the situation intrudes.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • The sitcom premise of the first episode is this. The date is marked by a heart on the calendar, but neither Wanda nor Vision recall why and neither one is willing to straight up admit it, leading to the sitcom shenanigans of the episode as Wanda thinks it's meant to mark a romantic evening when it's actually an abbreviation for them having dinner with Mr. Hart and his wife.
    Wanda Maximoff: You move at the speed of sound and I can make a pen float through the air. Who needs to abbreviate?
  • Deliberately invoked in episode 5 by Agatha, who sends her fake Pietro to show up at the Visions' door just as Vision is trying to convince Wanda that what she's doing is wrong, and before he's had a chance to tell her everything he's found out.
• Prequel: The fourth episode establishes that the main events of the show begin about three weeks after Avengers: Endgame, making it this to Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is set eight months after Endgame.
• Previously on…: Played with. With every episode, Wanda's voiceover delivery of the line "Previously on WandaVision..." sounds less enthusiastic and more depressed. Also the title of Episode 8, which is largely composed of Agatha walking her way through several important moments in Wanda's life.
• Product Placement:
  • Among the items in Wanda's fridge in Episode 7 are a carton of Florida's Natural Orange Juice, a jug of Great Value apple juice, and a tin of Maxwell House instant coffee.
  • In Episode 8, Wanda drives her used Buick from S.W.O.R.D. HQ to Westview. Later on, in a twist on both this trope and Destroy the Product Placement, when Wanda's creation of the Hex is shown, one shot focuses on one of the S.W.O.R.D. Chevrolets being transformed into a Chevy model from the '50s. Presumably the same fate befell her Buick, which may have become the car in which she and Vision arrived in town in the opening of Episode 1.
• Psychoactive Powers: As Wanda's power set expands, the control she has over them seems to be heavily tied to her emotional state. She created the Hex without conscious intent during an emotional breakdown after a long day of dealing with her grief over Vision's death. The final episode shows that when the townspeople press on her to release them, her panicked cry to "stop" acts on its own to choke the people around her. This could also tie back to the first episode when "Mr. Hart" began choking when he kept pressing Wanda and Vision with questions they couldn't answer.
• Reality Warper: Wanda, originally only able to create illusions and mess with people's perception of reality, can now alter and shift reality itself to her whim. Episode 8 reveals that she was born with Chaos Magic, allowing her to wield "spontaneous creation" due to her role as the mythical Scarlet Witch.
  • In the second episode, after Wanda and Vision hear a noise and go outside to see someone in a beekeeper costume come out of a manhole, Wanda says, "No" and then rewinds the tape back to the previous scene where she reveals that she's pregnant. This time, instead of hearing the noise, they kiss, the audience goes "awww" as the music swells and the episode changes from black and white to color, completely distracting from the previous encounter. It's never made clear if the beekeeper disappeared or if he emerged as before but wandered off into the night since Wanda and Vision never saw him.
  • In the third episode, when Vision expresses his concern to Wanda about how something doesn't seem quite right about Westview, the scene suddenly blinks back to a few seconds ago, and Vision instead gushes about their future child. This is the first big hint that he's not the real Vision.
  • The eighth episode reveals that Wanda did indeed create the Hex over Westview in a fit of grief and heartbreak when she learned that Vision had bought them a property to settle down in before he died. Agatha remarks how it's several layers of spells overlapping one another, which is something that would require a ritual to do, only for Wanda to do it using willpower alone.
• Red Herring: As usual with MCU productions, both the fandom and dedicated websites analyzed every episode, trailer, line, production detail, interview, etc to the utmost detail seeking clues for future plots. This was aggravated in WandaVision because it was a mystery told in a episodic structure at fixed intervals and the creators embedded intentional red herrings that they knew would receive overinflated importance.
  • Mephisto, who had not appeared in the MCU so far, was the villain of one the comic book stories that served as inspiration for the show, and thus a likely character for fans to expect to appear. The frequent discussions about characters being "Mephisto in disguise" were fueled by several casual mentions of words related to hell or the devil. Paul Bettany even said in an interview during the show's run that he was not allowed to discuss Mephisto (as there was nothing to discuss). As it turns out, he did not appear in the series in any capacity.
  • As the story deals with Wanda's grief, the story utilizes Pietro by having him appear in Westview as a person, but the character was not played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as in Age of Ultron, but rather by Evan Peters from the X-Men series. As Disney had recently purchased Fox and acquired the rights to the X-Men Film Series, the internet exploded in theories that the series might foreshadow the introduction of the team and/or mutants into the MCU. However, it turns out that Evan Peters was an intentional Casting Gag. He's actually Ralph Bohner, a local citizen enchanted by Agatha Harkness to play the role of Pietro and mess with Wanda.
  • At one point, Monica texts a contact of hers, a "guy" aerospace engineer and references this person at least twice, while building up to the meeting. As the Fantastic Four were also acquired in the recent Fox purchase, speculation ran high that he could possibly be shown or, at least name-dropped, to be Reed Richards. But it turns out to be a female fellow service-woman loyal to Monica and her mother.
  • The show includes a number of hints that Dottie might be another witch like Agatha and Wanda, including a shot that focuses on the yellow flowers in her garden, after showing that Agatha and Wanda both have flowers that match the color of their magic. It turns out that Dottie is just another Westview resident pulled into Wanda's sitcom like everyone else. The character's real last name, Proctor, lampshades this as a Shout-Out to the name of the protagonist of The Crucible, a play about people falsely accused of witchcraft. Having her played by Emma Caulfield, best known as the reality-warping demon Anya from Buffy, was a deliberate Casting Gag to fuel such speculation.
• Red Scare: In the first episode, Mr. Hart says he doesn't usually associate with Bolsheviks when he is told Wanda is from Europe. In the second episode, Vision is desperate for some "hot gossip" to impress his neighbors and accuses Norm of being a Communist (fortunately for Norm, everyone takes it as a joke and laughs). These double as nods to the fact that Wanda, the Scarlet Witch is at the core of this show's mysteries.
• Recurring Riff: There is a 4-note motif usually represented as A, A, D#, E ^note (The first two "A" notes are played an octave apart going from high to low) that, while varying in tempo and key as needed, appears in every theme song in the series, including "It Was _____ All Along". Composer Robert Lopez intentionally put a tritone interval in this riff to give it a harsh, off-putting, discordant sound. Ironically, it is known in classical composition as the "Devil in Music".
  Dottie: The devil's in the details, Bev.
  Agnes: That's not the only place he is.
• Refreshingly Normal Life-Choice: Played for Drama and Horror. Before the events of Captain America: Civil War, Wanda and Vision started a kinship that develops into a romantic relationship, Vision secretly buying them a suburban house in New Jersey as a gift so that they could spend their life together. After his death in Avengers: Infinity War, Wanda reaches the Despair Event Horizon, unlocking her Reality Warper abilities and trapping everyone in Westview in what can only be described as a Pocket Dimension where the world is like a sitcom, everyone in it acting as bit characters while Wanda plays out a domestic fantasy with a recreation of Vision. Unfortunately, everyone under her control suffering under the weight of her grief as her unwilling slaves, and her lack of control over this new power causes it to behave unpredictably, leaving her less able to ignore the reality of what's happening as time goes on.
• Refuge in Audacity: Wanda's unsettling exploration of the dark, creepy, rune-covered basement in Agnes' home and the reveal that she's actually Agatha Harkness is followed immediately by the boldly upbeat It Was ____ All Along opening credits sequence that ends with "And I killed Sparky too!" followed by maniacal cackling.
• Remember the New Guy?: S.W.O.R.D. apparently exists alongside and has as much resources as S.H.I.E.L.D., yet aside from The Stinger of Spider-Man: Far From Home have never made an appearance. This is made more egregious by the fact that S.W.O.R.D. founder Maria Rambeau and S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury are acquaintances, and their mutual friend Captain Marvel did appear during the fight against Thanos.
• Reset Button: The creators have explained that the reason the sit-com styles kept changing was that each style eventually contains some "failure" that causes Wanda to consciously or subconsciously write-off the current "sit-com" and seek out another one to live in that would be more stable and happy. Thus Episode 1 is ruined by the creepy boss dinner and his incessant questioning. Episode 2 by the "beekeeper". Episode 3 & 4 by Geraldine's eviction. Episode 5 by her fight with Vision^note ironically, one of the catalysts for the fight is that Vision has caught on to the resets and wants Wanda to stop doing them and the unexpected guest. Episode 6 with the fight with Pietro and the Hex expansion. Such that by Episode 7, it's just not working anymore.
• Resurrected Romance: The lynchpin of the plot is that Vision has been resurrected somehow, and he and Wanda have been able to get married and continue their relationship in a sitcom setting.
• Retraux: The various sitcom eras that are explored on the show use different aspect ratios and filters to make them appear as the shows of each respective era that they're spoofing did, complete with a Laugh Track and deliberately dated visual effects. Conversely, scenes set in the "real" world, or scenes showcasing that reality is being messed with somehow, have the same sort of visual flair to them that you'd expect from a typical Marvel production. Even image resolution is affected: the black-and-white sitcom scenes have a blurry, below-HD quality as if you're watching them on an old CRT television set, while the non-sitcom parts are shown in standard high definition.
• The Reveal:
  • Episode four, "We Interrupt This Program", marks the change in format from episodes that are full sitcom episodes and provides more context to the events seen in Episodes 1 - 3 that went otherwise unexplained.
  • Episode seven, "Breaking the Fourth Wall" reveals that a character in the series is not whom they seem to be and is much more aware of what's going on in Westview.
  • Episode eight, "Previously On", Wanda relives some of her memories and winds up answering many unanswered questions from even outside the show's events and sets up the players who will converge on Westview for the finale.
  • Episode nine, "The Series Finale", reveals the truth behind Agnes' previously unseen husband Ralph.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • In episode 1, the Stark Industries toaster in the ad break makes the same beeping noise as the Stark made bomb that young Wanda and Pietro are trapped with for two days in episode 8.
  • In episode 2, before Señor Scratchy escapes from the hat, a closeup of a discouraged Wanda is shown. This hides the fact that Agnes was making Señor Scratchy escape.
  • In episode 3, Agnes acts afraid of Vision finding out the truth when, in reality, she's the one manipulating things.
  • In episode 4, Darcy refers to the vehicle she's in as a "clown car". This serves as Foreshadowing to what happens to the S.W.O.R.D. base in Episode 6.
  • In episode 5, when Wanda exits the Hex, she addresses Hayward as "Director" and sneers at him in doing so, because he refused to let her take Vision's body from him for burial. And when she says, "I have what I want, and no one will ever take it from me again", she's referring more to Hayward's use of the original Vision's body for Project Cataract than to the sitcom reality of the Hex.
  • In episode 6, the entire Agnes scene becomes this with the revelation in the next episode that she's Agatha Harkness and has been manipulating things behind the scenes the whole time. Instead of just a victim, she's faking her "anguish" at being controlled while continuing to discourage Vision from communicating with Wanda, all to further her own plans.
• Robosexual: Wanda and Vision's relationship has been a thing for some time in the MCU, but this is the first time we've seen them consummate it (or disappear under the covers of their bed together, at least).
• Rule of Symbolism: The in-universe commercials that play all symbolize aspects relevant to Wanda's past.
  • The ToastMate 2000 in the first episode represents the undetonated weapon that nearly killed her brother and herself — with the beeping matching the beeping of a Stark Industries bomb that blows up in Tony Stark's face in Iron Man.
  • The Strücker watch in the second episode represents Wolfgang von Strucker, the HYDRA scientist who experimented on Wanda and Pietro with the Mind Stone and gave them their powers (or in Wanda's case, tapped into her existing powers).
  • The slogan for Hydra Soak soap is "Find the Goddess within!", referring to how HYDRA gave Wanda her powers. There's also a bit where the announcer says "escape to a world all your own, where your problems float away", the phrasing bringing to mind both what happened to Sokovia and the current situation in Westview.
  • The slogan for Lagos-brand paper towels is "For when you make a mess you didn't mean to." Wanda's actions in Lagos (accidentally redirecting Crossbones' exploding body into an occupied building) made a huge mess: it was a major catalyst for the advance of the Sokovia Accords and pretty much set the Civil War in motion.
  • If the commercials being clues about the history of the situation is true, then the claymation shark eating "Yo-Magic" yogurt cups while a red-headed castaway withers to a skeleton may be the first real hint as to what's actually going on here. On a surface level, watching a kid starve to death and the "Yo-Magic" tagline ("the snack for survivors!") also ties back to Wanda's childhood, as a hungry orphan in a failed state.
    • The child withering away also resembles the witches of Agatha's coven decaying into husks as she drains their life forces.
  • The commercial for the anti-depressant Nexus has a few:
    • It claims that Nexus can "anchor you to your reality. Or the reality of your choice," and concludes with the slogan "Because the world doesn't revolve around you. Or does it?" These lines refer to Wanda's growing reality-warping abilities and how she used them to take over an entire town to enact a sitcom for her happiness/coping mechanism.
    • The commercial opens with the lines "Feeling depressed? Like the world goes on without you? Do you just want to be left alone?" While the other surviving Avengers have moved on from the Blip, Wanda is left to grieve for Vision by herself. Later, she created the Westview bubble, where she just wants to be left alone by S.W.O.R.D. and others to live her sitcom life with Vision in peace, unaware that Agatha is taking advantage of her.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Wanda's reaction to seeing the S.W.O.R.D. beekeeper infiltrate the Hex through the sewer is to reverse time and pretend he isn't there instead of using her powers to fight him.
• Sequel Hook: There are three of them. First, The White Vision leaves, with his memories restored. Secondly, a Skrull sent by Nick Fury offers Monica a job in space. Thirdly, Wanda has taken Agatha's copy of the Darkhold, and she hears her boys calling for help as she reads it. Two of these have since been followed up on, while the third, White Vision, is still out there somewhere in the MCU.
• Series Continuity Error: A very, very minor discrepancy when depicting Wanda's backstory in "Previously On" - Pietro recounts to Ultron in Age of Ultron that the Maximoff family was having dinner when the bombings hit. When shown the episode itself, the family is having a TV night, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show together, but clearly not eating dinner while doing so. Wanda's mother is even washing dishes when the scene begins, implying dinner was already over by then. Then again, Wanda probably suppressed a lot of the trauma.
• Sigil Spam: S.W.O.R.D. is watching Wanda and Vision in this other reality. Their symbol is on the folder at the end of episode one, on the strange red helicopter toy Wanda finds in her rose bushes, on the back of the beekeeper who emerges from the sewers, and "Geraldine"'s necklace.
• Sleeping Single: Wanda and Vision are seen in separate beds in the cold open for Episode 2, fitting the period setting (as network censorship indicated that married couples could not sleep in the same bed). After Wanda uses her powers to pull their beds together and combine them, they decide they prefer it that way.
  Vision: Wanda, darling.
  Wanda: Yes, dear?
  Vision: Get the light.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first episode uses the same set design as The Dick Van Dyke Show, complete with the opening kitchen, the second homages the Bewitched theme, and the third homages The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. The fifth episode's opening credits pay homage to Family Ties (the family portrait being painted), Growing Pains (old photographs of the cast) and Full House (running and frolicking in a park). The doll Vision practices diaper changes with in the third episode is Kitty Karry-all, Cindy Brady's doll.
  • The episode taking place in The '90s / The 2000s is done in the style of Malcolm in the Middle, shot single-camera style and complete with the twins Tommy and Billy making Aside Comments to the camera.
  • The episode set in The New '10s takes obvious cues from faux-documentary-interview formatted sitcoms like Modern Family, with its title sequence being a combined pastiche of Modern Family, The Office, and Happy Endings. The It Was Agatha All Along outro is inspired by The Munsters and The Addams Family.
  • A marquee shown in episodes 8 and 9 is showing a movie apparently called Tannhäuser Gate, a reference to Blade Runner. Fitting for a series with a self-aware android.
  • In Episode 6, The Incredibles appears on the movie marquee in town and that nod continues in Episode 9, when Wanda, Vision and the children strike a battle ready pose very similar to one taken by the Parr family on Syndrome's island in as seen here◊.
• Show Within a Show: The commercials that air Once per Episode (aside from Episode 4), promoting fictional products. The end of the first episode also reveals that WandaVision itself is a show that's being observed by S.W.O.R.D., who are trying to find a way into Westview. Then Episode 7 showcases a different show entitled It Was ____ All Along, which Agatha Harkness showcases directly to Wanda after entrancing her.
• Shown Their Work: There is plenty of detail that was put into making each of the episodes fit the sitcoms they're parodying to the point that you could genuinely believe that they were actually from those specific eras. For example, Dick Van Dyke was consulted extensively for the production of the first episode that was patterned after his show.
• Sleight of Handiness: Jimmy Woo's sleight of hand and escapism skills come in handy when he needs to escape from some handcuffs in the series finale.
• Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome: Done In-Universe to unsettling effect. From the moment Wanda is noticeably pregnant, she increases in size, then gives birth the same day. After being born, the twins go from babies to 5-year-olds to 10-year-olds all in the same day. It's disconcerting.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • "Twilight Time," by The Platters, is played at the beginning of the first trailer, setting up Wanda and Vision's idyllic, fifties-esque life. The song continues playing even while the trailer clarifies that their lovely suburb life isn't what it seems.
  • The second trailer uses a remixed version of "Daydream Believer" by The Monkees. Like the example above, the happy-go-lucky lyrics can be heard throughout the trailer's entirety, even as it becomes obvious that whatever life Wanda and Vision have now, it certainly isn't something to revel in. The song plays in the show itself at the very end of episode 3 after "Geraldine"/Monica gets ejected out of Westview by Wanda, playing as S.W.O.R.D. finds her, and continuing into the first half of the closing credits.
  • Episode 7 gives us some upbeat percussive music over a Cutaway Gag of footage from the previous episode of SWORD agents being assimilated into the Hex.
• Splash of Color: The first two episodes are Deliberate Monochrome except for a few things:
  • The first episode's commercial for the Toastmate 2000 has the red blinking light.
  • The second episode has Wanda find a toy helicopter in the bushes, which is red. As well, when Dottie cuts her palm, the blood itself is red.
  • At the end of the second episode, everything transforms into color, commencing the transition into the next decade.
  • Episode 5 has another case, as a drone sent by S.W.O.R.D. ends up transmitting only in black and white, but it somehow still picks up Wanda's eyes turning red as she hijacks it.
  • Episode 7 briefly revisits the monochrome time periods and showcases Agatha Harkness using purple magic in the second one.
  • Episode 8 has Wanda wearing modern clothes briefly remaining in color after creating the Hex. Upon seeing Vision she immediately turns black-and-white and changes her outfit to fit the 1950s setting.
• Standardized Sitcom Housing: As part of its Pastiche of various classic sitcoms, Wanda and Vision's home has a very familiar sitcom feel to it. The style of the house drastically changes each episode to reflect a new decade, but the general layout stays the same. The front door is stage right, with stairs right next to it and a hallway leading off behind the stairs. In front of that is the living room, a dining area further stage left, and then the kitchen furthest left, where the back door is. The set for the first episode was built to accommodate a real studio audience, and all other sets for the house were based on that (even though they had no audience present).
• Stealth Pun:
  • Westview's doctor is named Dr. Nielsen. The Nielsen ratings are a well-known media evaluation rating system, and he shows up for Wanda's pregnancy storyline in episode 3, the kind of major storyline used by TV sitcoms as a ratings bump.
  • When Monica is expelled from the Hex, she crashes through two walls and a fence before breaking through the barrier and entering the real world. In other words, she breaks the fourth wall.
  • Hayward's secret project is called Cataract, a medical condition that clouds the eyes and turns them white, resulting in vision loss. The revived Vision is completely white and has no memory and/or fondness for Wanda, so it was a Vision loss!
• Stepford Smiler: We get two varieties. Within the WandaVision and without.
  • The show effectively showcases Wanda and Vision's lives as happy and smiley, but something is definitely off about the whole thing, and Wanda occasionally lets slip that she knows more or feels more than she's letting on. Meanwhile, Vision is confused by the oddities but willing to accept them as part of his reality... for the most part.
  • As for a few outside the household, Episode 3 reveals everyone in town is one. They're trapped in Westview, and they're completely terrified of Wanda. Some have more freedom to act, but all are trapped in an And I Must Scream. Nevertheless, they try to slip hints to Vision...
• Stepford Suburbia: Westview seems like a mostly idyllic small-town, but something is very clearly wrong or at least off about it.
• The Stinger:
  • In Episode 7, Monica investigates Agnes' house and finds her basement, only to get caught by Pietro who shows up for the first time in this episode.
  • In Episode 8, Hayward uses the Chaos magic lingering on the 80s drone to revive Vision, whose body is completely white after it was previously dismembered and put back together
  • Episode 9 has two:
    • In the mid-credits scene, the FBI has arrived in Westview to arrest Hayward and conduct their investigation. While Monica and Jimmy are chatting, an FBI agent asks Monica to come to the theatre. Once inside, the agent reveals herself to be a Skrull sent by "a friend of her mother" and invites Monica to venture up to space.
    • The post-credits scene shows Wanda enjoying a cup of tea on the porch of her isolated cabin in the mountains. Then we see her astral form in the bedroom studying the Darkhold. Suddenly, she hears her supposedly non-existent sons call out to her for help.
• Stop Trick: Frequently done in the first episode, as per the Stylistic Suck of the '50s era. Notably, Wanda uses it for an instant dress change and makes rings appear on her and Vision's fingers. In the latter, you can even see their fingers jolt a bit during the jump cut.
• Studio Audience: To reflect the sitcom aspect, the first episode was filmed in front of a live studio audience.
• Stylistic Suck: Each episode is shown in film quality appropriate to the era it's homaging.
  • Some of the visual effects in the black-and-white sequences are deliberately shoddy and dated-looking to correspond with the various sitcom eras the show is spoofing, such as Vision transforming from his android to human forms with a cheap "sparkle-swirl" effect straight out of Bewitched over his face, Wanda levitating a bottle of wine and a newspaper that are clearly being manipulated by wires, and a shattered plate repairing itself by simply playing footage of a shattering plate backwards. Wanda and Vision getting wedding rings is accomplished via a less-than-seamless Jump Cut.
  • When Vision publicly uses his powers, Wanda 'disguises' them as cheap magic tricks. Interestingly, her power use does not use bad special effects, with one part being seamless.
  • In Episode 5, while the childhood photos of Wanda are real pictures of Elizabeth Olsen with Sokovian flags photoshopped in, the "childhood photos" of Vision are obviously photos of completely unrelated children and babies with his red skin and cybernetic components terribly photoshopped on.
  • In episode 6, Vision and "Pietro"'s Halloween costumes look intentionally shoddy (for example, the 'diamond' on Vis' head is off-center).
• Subverted Sitcom: The show begins homaging early sitcoms, with newlyweds Wanda and Vision moving to a small suburban town and getting to know the neighbors. However, because this continues off from Avengers: Endgame and the viewer is aware both are superheroes (and Vision is dead), there is always the nagging feeling that something is not quite right. Indeed, a couple of moments early on imply some surreal horror is going on behind the scenes. It is later revealed that a grieving Wanda converted the entire town into her personal sitcom as a coping mechanism, and S.W.O.R.D. tries to snap her out of it.
• Superhero Horror: At first glance, it looks like Marvel Studios is doing their own take of an old-time sitcom. Then it's revealed that something is wrong with this scenario since Westview residents (barring Wanda and Geraldine/Monica) don't know how they even got into this world, along with a government organization trying to burst into this bubble.
• Superhero Movie Villains Die: Subverted. Hayward is well enough to walk after his car gets rammed, but he's walking straight to jail. Agatha Harkness gets a Fate Worse than Death, losing her powers and condemned to live the life of nosy neighbor Agnes for as long as Wanda lets her.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: Wanda's creation of the Hex was such powerful magic that it caught the attention of Agatha Harkness, but apparently not the attention of Doctor Strange, who monitors the world for magical threats and knew the instant Loki set foot on Earth back in Thor: Ragnarok. Word of God says that Doctor Strange was originally planned to appear, and the fake commercials were actually Wanda's subconscious reaching out to Strange. Those plans were scrapped because they didn't want to take focus away from Wanda, especially when Wanda would be appearing as co-lead of Strange's next solo movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
• Surprise Multiple Birth: In Episode 3, Wanda has just given birth to Tommy, and Vision leans in for a congratulatory kiss, only for Wanda to start screaming as contractions start up again for her to give birth to Billy.
• Talent Contest: The second episode revolves around Vision and Wanda doing a magic act in a local talent competition.
• That Didn't Happen:
  • Upon seeing the incredibly creepy beekeeper emerge from the manhole, Wanda promptly rewinds time itself to the moment she and Vision discover she is pregnant and takes things in a different direction to avoid seeing him again.
  • In Episode 3, when Vision tells Wanda that something's not right with Westview, the film seemingly "jumps" backward to the beginning of the conversation, which then occurs differently with Vision referencing the impending birth of their baby instead.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Inside the Hex, this trope is all but explicitly invoked, as Episode 6 reveals that anyone not in Wanda's immediate viewing area is frozen in place, stuck on an endless loop of repetitive motions. Outside the perimeter, not a single person at S.W.O.R.D.'s base aside from Hayward, Darcy, Woo, or Monica has displayed any sustained drive to do much of anything besides moving random crates of equipment in the background. There's a palpable sense that if those four characters take a week off, the entire operation would grind to a halt.
• Thematic Theme Tune: The theme tunes of Episodes 3 and 5 taking place in the '70s and '80s, reflect the common form of theme tune from those eras while foreshadowing the themes of their respective episodes:
  • Episode 3's "We Got Something Cooking" makes allusions to Wanda's Mystical Pregnancy, which is the main focus of the episode and hints at the birth of the twins:
    [...] Together, one plus one is family.
  • Episode 5's "Making It Up As We Go Along" alludes to the increasing lack of control Wanda has over the situation, as well as her need to keep her family together:
    Forces may try to pull us apart
    But nothing can phase me If you're in my heart.
    Crossing our fingers, singing a song
    We're making it up as we go along.
  • Episode 6's "Let's Keep It Going" is much more cynical in tone and leans on the fourth wall, just as the episode itself (styled after Malcolm In The Middle) does:
    What if it's all illusion?
    Sit back, enjoy the show!
    Let's keep it going
    Let's keep it going
    Through each distorted day.
  • Episode 7's wordless theme song not only reflects the lack of lyrical themes in live-action sitcom shows of the modern era, but also hints at the in-universe episode's lack of an actual plot.
• There Are No Therapists:
  • Wanda never receives any form of psychological help after the events of Infinity War and Endgame. This means that when the realization of how much she's truly lost hits her in Westview, her unimaginable grief causes her powers to spiral out of control and create her sitcom reality. It isn't until Agatha cruelly but truthfully confronts her about her actions and forces her to come to terms with her trauma that Wanda is able to move on and lift the Hex.
  • Downplayed, but still present with Monica. The fact that she lost her mother so suddenly from her perspective has clearly affected her psyche, to the point that she makes increasingly daring decisions in what appears to be implied Death Seeker behavior. Because she heads straight back to her work as a S.W.O.R.D agent shortly after being blipped back, Monica presumably never works out any of the negative effects this has on her. Word of God states that they planned to have scenes of Monica going to therapy at some point in the series, only to have to cut it due to there being absolutely no room for it.
• Theseus' Ship Paradox: Probably the first time in the history of the superhero genre where discussion of the Ship of Theseus is used to end a big slugfest. Vision brings up the Ship of Theseus as a kind of Logic Bomb to get White Vision to stand down.
• Three-Point Landing:
  • Monica does one in Episode 7 when Wanda drops her to the ground. Monica's eyes glow blue as she lands, further confirming her superpower transition.
  • Both Wanda and Vision do these during the battles against Agatha and White Vision, respectively.
• Time Stands Still: On Halloween night, Vision finds himself mobile while the rest of the neighborhood seems to be catatonic. He then uses his powers to "wake up" Agnes. Though, being a witch herself, she was fully conscious and only pretending to be non-responsive.
• To Be Continued: Subverted. After each episode of the series is over, usually with a cliffhanger, a PLEASE STAND BY sign appears, in line with the television theme, before the credits start. The last two episodes forgo this sign, with a black screen appearing in its stead.
• Tragic Keepsake: It's revealed in Episode 8 that the town of Westview and house number 2800 remain consistent throughout the various sitcom stylings because Vision purchased that house lot in Westview with the intention of building a home where he and Wanda could grow old together.
• Training the Gift of Magic: It appears that witchcraft is an inborn gift that must be trained to work at all dramatically; Agatha apparently has inborn power, but first had to be trained by her mother's coven, and then surpassed them through self-teaching from books of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. She deduces that Wanda, on the other hand, was born with a small gift that would have faded through lack of training, but then had it unlocked and amplified by exposure to an Infinity Stone, eventually making her Unskilled, but Strong, the legendary "Scarlet Witch". Agatha seems to be simultaneously awestruck, jealous, and nervous of Wanda's ability to defy the trope, but has her own response to this.
• Trapped in TV Land: The citizens of Westview are literally trapped in a sitcom and unable to leave it, forced to play along.
• "Truman Show" Plot: Westview isn't all that different from Seahaven, the false reality built for Truman Burbank's benefit. And many plot beats are the same:
  • Episode 2: Wanda finds a helicopter with a SWORD logo on it. This is her first cue to the arrival of SWORD outside Westview, similar to how Truman began to notice signs his life was a lie thanks to a falling spotlight.
  • Episode 3: Dr. Nielsen's car conveniently breaks down right when he and his wife are prepared to go on a trip to Bermuda, to keep them from leaving the Hex.
  • Episode 5: Vision's whole confrontation with Wanda at the end where she gaslights him is eerily similar to Meryl's gaslighting of Truman who demands to know what she's doing when she does a product placement to no one in particular.
  • Episode 6: The appearance of Fake Pietro is clearly contrived by an outsider (Agatha), similar to how Christof staged a reunion between Truman and his "father".
  • Episode 7: Vision and Darcy get held up at a traffic light by spontaneous inconveniences (first a utility crew appearing out of nowhere to work on the light, then a crossing guard and kids appearing out of thin air).
• Two Girls and a Guy: Monica, Jimmy, and Darcy have effectively formed a team of three as of episode 5. They have tendencies to act as Speed, Smarts and Strength — Monica is a quick-thinking, sometimes impetuous field agent; Darcy is a very capable scientist with tech savvy; and Jimmy is the solid, dependable voice of conventional thinking.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: None of the agents at S.W.O.R.D. seem particularly weirded out at the idea of Wanda marrying and having children with an android. Though given all the other craziness happening around them, it's not surprising that their copulation isn't the first thing on their minds. This may be because, as Episode 5 reveals, that the agents thought Billy and Tommy were real kids from Westview who were cast as Wanda's kids, just as they thought everything on the show was just an illusion. Monica is the one who tells Woo that Wanda really gave birth and that everything in the Hex is real.
• Upgrade Artifact: The Mind Stone is retconned into one for Wanda. Unlike what was previously believed, HYDRA experimenting with Loki's Scepter on Wanda wasn't a full Super-Empowering event, but instead amplified considerably her latent witch powers. At least according to Agatha, who surmises that a younger Wanda had prevented the Stark Industries bomb from blowing up with probability manipulation magic; Wanda stays dubious of the story.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • Agatha is a power-hungry matricide who brainwashes people to get what she wants, but she's right about how Wanda treats the people of Westview, pointing out that heroes don't torture people. Wanda acknowledges that she has a point by dropping the Hex. Agatha also has a point in that Wanda's vast powers are far beyond her current control and she needs training in some form.
  • While Hayward is an antagonistic Jerkass and is attempting to use the Hex for his own gain, he's not wrong that Wanda has committed crimes by kidnapping and enslaving an entire town to serve as characters in her sitcom fantasy and that she needs to be stopped. His willingness to "take the shot" when the opportunity presented itself is a debatable decision but is consistent with his assessment of Wanda as a threat.
• Villain Song: One occurs at the end of Episode 7, called "It was ____ all along". In this song, the villain in question brags abut their evil deeds and how sneaky and devious they are.
• Visual Pun:
  • After Vision accidentally swallows a piece of gum, the episode cuts to an animated shot of it getting stuck in some gears, literally "gumming up the works".
  • Monica breaks through an interior wall, an exterior wall, and a fence before flying through the air to break through the Hex barrier and land in "real life".
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: With the exceptions of Episode 8 and 9, every Creative Closing Credits begins with a test pattern from the period and the message "Please Stand By" or "Technical Difficulties".
• Weirdness Censor: Aside from Vision slowly realizing that something is not right about Westview, nobody else in town seems to notice, or mind, the fact that they're phasing through various period piece Sitcom genres. At least not until the end of the third episode, in which Herb talks in a hushed voice to Agnes about how there is something deeply wrong with the world that he can't explain. And he and Agnes then try getting Vision to notice these things, too. This is actually addressed in the fifth episode. When Billy and Tommy instantly age up five years, Agnes' lack of a reaction is a major clue for Vision that something is very wrong.
• Wham Episode:
  • The fourth episode flips the series on its head by revealing the Framing Device. WandaVision is no longer a wacky sitcom about two Avengers but an investigation into the forced "disappearance" of an entire town by a dangerous, grieving Wanda.
  • The seventh episode has Monica gaining superpowers after passing into the Hex again. Furthermore, Agnes is revealed to be Agatha Harkness, and is responsible for summoning "Pietro", among other manipulations.
• Wham Line:
  • In the third episode, showing that a character knows more than she seems:
    Wanda: I'm a twin. I had a brother. His name was Pietro.
    "Geraldine": He was killed by Ultron, wasn't he?
  • In Episode 5, said by Vision as he confronts Wanda about everything that's been happening in an O.O.C. Is Serious Business moment.
    Vision: STOP LYING TO ME!
  • Episode 7 delivers The Reveal in this fashion after Wanda enters Agnes' basement to reveal a secret magical chamber:
    Agnes: Wanda, Wanda. You didn't think you were the only magical girl in town, did you? The name's Agatha Harkness. Lovely to finally meet you, dear!
  • Episode 8 has a significant reveal that impacts Wanda's powers and elevates her code name into a title that has considerable signficance in the world of magic..
    Agatha: Your children. And Vision, and this whole little life you've made. This is Chaos Magic, Wanda. And that makes you the Scarlet Witch.
• Wham Shot:
  • In the premiere, the episode seemingly ends, and the credits roll, only to zoom out into a fully-colored world where someone (who we later learn is Darcy) is watching the couple on a monitor. At the desk is a folder with the logo of S.W.O.R.D..
  • In the final minutes of the second episode, a mysterious person in a bee-keeper outfit (again with the same S.W.O.R.D. logo) emerges from the sewers. Wanda gives a Little "No" and magically rewinds time. She then uses her powers to bring color into the black-and-white world, establishing that Wanda herself has at least some power over the un-reality she's in.
  • In the third episode, Wanda ejects Monica (Geraldine) from the simulation/reality bubble, revealing that the town of Westview is an actual place whose inhabitants have been trapped by Wanda or whoever is controlling/manipulating her.
  • Episode five ends on a double whammy. Out of nowhere, Wanda's brother Pietro shows up at the front door to greet his sister. Plus it's NOT Aaron Taylor-Johnson from Avengers: Age of Ultron, but Evan Peters, who played Pietro in the X-Men Film Series.
  • In Episode 7, Wanda goes down into Agnes' basement and finds a chamber filled with occult objects and a glowing spellbook, revealing that her neighbor / 'best friend' is actually Agatha Harkness.
  • At the end of Episode 8, we learn Wanda constructed the Hex version of Vision entirely from her magic and didn't steal Vision's body... because Hayward has created a white copy of Vision to attack Westview.
  • Episode 9 has several:
    • In the mid-credits scene, Monica arrives at the theatre to see that it's empty. Then the FBI agent reveals herself to be a Skrull, bearing an invitation from Nick Fury to join him in space.
    • In the post-credits scene, we see Wanda living peacefully in a cabin in the mountains. The camera then moves past her to see her astral form studying the Darkhold.
• What, Exactly, Is His Job?: Vision is a competent worker at Computational Services, Inc., according to his coworkers. He has no idea what his company actually does, and neither Norm nor Mr. Hart can give him a straight answer.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • White Vision flies off from the library after his confrontation with Hex Vision. They do not appear again after this, nor does any character address their absence.
  • Jimmy Woo tells Monica he came to Westview looking for an FBI witness. We never find out who that witness is or what happened to them.
  • After episode 4 we never see the "beekeeper" infiltration agent again, and no one makes mention of him or asks about his whereabouts or wellbeing.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Episode 8 consists of Agatha forcing Wanda to recap various instances in her past in order to learn how she created The Hex. The Teaser also shows Agatha's origin in 1600s Salem.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Wanda’s immense grief causes her to create the sit-com world of Westview, in which its original residents are Trapped in TV Land with their true identities suppressed in a living nightmare.
• World of Ham: Everyone in the sitcom world appropriately overacts. Agnes is the standout, because not only is Agatha doubling the ham requirements, but she also knows the entire sitcom world is pretend and doesn't need to take it seriously.
• World-Wrecking Wave: More like a Town-Changing Wave, but Wanda's latent reality-warping abilities result in the entire town of Westview converting into a 1950s sitcom.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Played for Drama, Wanda doesn't seem to think she is harming anyone in Westview because she's transformed it into a sitcom and in a sitcom no one is ever permanently hurt or harmed because everything is played with laughs. As she says to Vision in flashback: "It's not that kind of show". Except everyone is genuinely traumatised to be forced to be Wanda's puppets.
• You Keep Using That Word: Hayward repeatedly refers to Wanda as a "terrorist", which Monica says is not accurate for several reasons. 1.) Wanda does not have a political agenda. 2.) She is not using terror as a means to attract attention for any message. On the contrary, she is doing everything she can to hide from everyone outside of Westview. 3.) She is not making any demands of anyone other than "leave me alone" after Hayward tries to kill her and her children with a missile. Calling Wanda a "criminal" or a "supervillain" would be more accurate.

---

Please Stand By.

---