'WandaVision' Episode 6 Recap: Season of the Witch

This whole time, WandaVision has felt like it's been building up to something big. Given the short episode lengths and mystery-style storytelling, the show doles out information only a little bit at a time week by week. Ahead of the sixth episode ("All-New Halloween Spooktacular!"), we still don't REALLY know what's going on, apart from what was more or less apparent at the start: Wanda Maximoff, overcome with grief at the loss of her brother and husband, has remade a small American town in her image, creating a suburban idyll based on the Western sitcoms of her childhood and forcing everyone else to play along. We've learned that she's managed to create life out of thin air, as she did for her twin sons, and that she can raise the dead, as she's done in the case of Peter Maximoff (who died in Avengers: Age of Ultron) and Vision (who died in (Avengers: Infinity War). The big revelation in Episode 6—whose intro and look riffs on Malcolm and the Middle—is that Wanda herself has no idea how she did it.

On Halloween, Wanda and Peter are keeping an eye on Billy and Tommy while Vision is supposedly on patrol with the Neighborhood Watch. Dressed as a "Sokovian fortune-teller," a reference to her life as a child living with her Romani parents (while the costume itself is modeled after her iconic look in the comics), Wanda has a couple of heartfelt conversations with her troublemaker brother. She asks him how he got there, and he tells her he doesn't exactly know. "Details are fuzzy, man," says Peter, alluding to his death scene in Age of Ultron. "I got shot like a chump in the street for no reason at all, and the next thing I know I heard you calling me. I know you needed me."

They talk about whether or not it's okay for Wanda to be doing what she's doing without really talking about it, Peter saying that, far from being horrified, he's impressed, and that, "I think Mom and Dad would have loved it." The only time Wanda seems really perturbed is when he asks her where all the children came from. There haven't been any kids on the show besides Billy and Tommy this entire time, and suddenly the whole town is overrun with them. (It's interesting that we haven't seen Dottie Jones, the neighborhood matriarch, played by Emma Caulfield Ford, whose edicts were always followed by the phrase, "For the children," since Episode 2.) 

Most tellingly, when Peter asks Wanda how exactly she managed to take over an entire town with her hex, she replies that she has no idea. "I only remember feeling completely alone," she says. "Empty. Just endless nothingness." She's working with a lot of power here—as Peter says, "It's a pretty big leap from giving people nightmares and shooting red wiggly-woos out of your hands." Sounds sinister! It also sounds like she's borrowing power from something—or someone—else. Plus, this pocket universe can't help but remind her, Peter and Vision that both Peter and Vision are dead, dead, dead!

Aside from that, it sounds like we'll be getting a few more superheroes by the end of this. In the comic books, twins Billy and Tommy are better known by their superhero names, Wiccan and Speed. Billy is showing an aptitude for magic like his mother and Tommy has gained speed superpowers like his uncle. Not only that, Darcy Lewis tips off Monica Rambeau to the fact that the Hex has "rewritten your cells on a molecular level twice" after Monica went in and out of the barrier. Monica Rambeau, the daughter of Captain Marvel's friend Maria Rambeau, eventually gets energy powers in the comics, able to transform herself into any type of electromagnetic wave. Looks like that's already started to happen, and the new Avengers roster is already getting a little crowded.

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