FULL SPOILERS AHEAD

It’s the penultimate episode of the series and we spent most of it with flashbacks. Not saying that’s a bad thing–we definitely learned a lot–but really it just feels like this episode was teasing us, giving a few answers but raising even more questions in anticipation of the finale. So let’s talk about all that we’ve learned!

We open with a flashback to Salem 1693, showing Agatha being accused of crimes against her witch coven. Alright, so in addition to whatever we call Dr. Strange and Wong, we also have sorceresses chanting Latin. Good to know! Agatha overpowers and kills the coven, then we cut back to the present where she’s very confused about Wanda. How does someone with so much magical power have no training? Wait, is Wanda a witch and not someone empowered by an Infinity Stone? It’s left intentionally vague with Wanda insisting she was normal and Agatha implying that can’t be true. We then see key moments in Wanda’s life starting with her childhood, watching sitcom reruns with her family. But nearby fighting kills her parents and traps her and Pietro under a bed while a Starktech missile fails to explode. Wanda says it was a dud while Agatha asks if it was Wanda casting a probability hex–a reference to her original powerset back in 1960’s. We then cut to the day she got her powers in a Hydra facility. Wanda approaches Loki’s staff and the gem flies to her, revealing itself to be an Infinity Stone and then showing her a vision of a mysterious woman wearing the signature headpiece and costume Scarlet Witch wears in the comic. Is this herself? Someone else? More on that later.

Up next is a vision of Vision! It’s a flashback to shortly after Pietro died–the real one, not the fake one Agatha’s been using because the real Pietro’s body is too far away for necromancy–where Vision tries to console the grieving Wanda. While the hurt is still there, the two start to bond in a touching moment. The next flashback is to Wanda storming into the SWORD facility holding Vision and… she gets let in? And yeah, freaks out a bit, but doesn’t steal Vision’s body? Hey, that means Hayward was lying back in episode 5! In fact he seems to goad her into resurrecting Vision, which she can’t do. She then travels to Westview and the plot of land she and Vision were planning to move to after everything settled down. Wracked with grief she creates the Hex, trapping everyone in the city–turns out Agatha wasn’t involved in the Hex’s creation and came upon it sometime after the fact. But Wanda does manage to bring Vision back! More or less! This backs up the idea that he’s more “her memories made manifest” than “actually him,” so that’s still rough. Having seen enough, Wanda confronts Agatha who is holding the Tommy and Billy hostage. Agatha reveals that Wanda’s powers of spontaneous creation come from Chaos Magic, making her… the fabled Scarlet Witch! Dun dun dunn! Then in a mid-credit scene we see that Hayward’s real plan was indeed trying to resurrect Vision, but nothing had previously worked. Using some of Wanda’s leftover power he unveils a newly revived Vision, dressed in all white. Vision wearing that has ties to Wanda, Agatha, and the twins, so let’s talk about these implications!

The MCU version of Wanda finally has her superhero name! In the comics the Scarlet Witch is a title passed to Wanda from her birth mother, Natalya Maximoff–but her mom first appeared in Scarlet Witch #3 (2016) so this is a change to Wanda’s backstory that is still pretty new. Previously she was a mutant with probability control who wore red, then revealed to be an actual sorceress, and now… look, to be honest I’m not sure what her current state is after it was revealed (clumsily) that she was never actually a mutant, but it’s a whole thing. Back to the episode, I’m of the mindset the Scarlet Witch that Wanda sees in the Mind Stone vision is not her, but the previous sorceress with the title. Perhaps she was dying at that exact moment and the Mind Stone connected them, or something stranger, or I could be completely wrong–my husband believes that Wanda saw a vision of her future self. Let the speculations run wild! But then the question comes up, was Wanda always a spellcaster? Was Agatha right that she stopped the bomb from killing her and her brother? Does that suggest that the woman who raised Wanda either was a secret witch or perhaps not her biological mother? Or did things just line up perfectly as they often do in comics and it was all a bunch of coincidences?

As for white Vision, that is straight from a dark time in the comics for Wanda. After he was disassembled by the US government, Vision was rebuilt by Hank Pym in West Coast Avengers #45 (1989) with all the memories he had before, but none of the emotional connections. He was a cold and emotionless robot, which obviously created tensions with his wife, Wanda, and their kids. This was quickly followed by the revelation that their twins weren’t real–I went over this while talking about episode 3–and the only thing that kept Wanda from having a complete breakdown was Agatha Harkness wiping her memory of ever having children. The comic version of Agatha isn’t quite the villain she is here, but she’s not very heroic, either. Since the dismantling of Vision was also an image straight from West Coast Avengers, it’s likely that this white Vision is going to make an already bad situation much, much worse. Then again, with the powers Wanda has at her disposal–whether they be magic or not–maybe she could place the mind of the Vision she created from her memories into the new body. Maybe she’ll get a happy ending with her synthezoid boyfriend and their children! Or maybe she’ll have to watch as Agatha reveals the twins were never truly real, destroying them. And maybe Monica, Darcy, Jimmy, Wanda’s Vision, and fake Pietro–all Sirs Not-Appearing-In-This-Episode–will have something to do with the climax. I guess we’ll all find out next week!

Previous: Breaking the Fourth Wall
Next: The Series Finale

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