MarvelVision: WandaVision Episode 6 – “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!”

WandaVision - Episode 6

Westview celebrates Halloween in the creepiest way possible on WandaVision Episode 6 – “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!” Wanda and Vision are on the outs, after the revelations of the last episode — and the reappearance of Wanda’s dead brother Pietro (played by Evan Peters) isn’t helping things. While Vision heads to the outskirts of Westview to figure out what’s really going on, Wanda goes trick r’ treating with Billy and Teddy, leading to the twins figuring out what their powers are. And outside the Hex, Jimmy, Monica and Darcy get closer to figuring out what Hayward is really up to. From Yo-Magic to Cataract, let’s break down all the WandaVision Easter Eggs, Marvel Comics spoilers, and much more.

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Full Episode Transcript

Alex:                 Welcome to Marvel Vision, a podcast about Marvel, the MCU and WandaVision.

Justin:              WandaVision.

Alex:                 We’re going to be talking about WandaVision, Episode six, all new Halloween Spooktacular.

Justin:              Oh, fun title.

Alex:                 Fun title. I’m Alex.

Justin:              And I’m Justin.

Pete:                I’m Pete, Happy Halloween motherfuckers.

Justin:              Happy Halloweenie.

Alex:                 So, as mentioned, we’re going to be talking about Episode six, usual spoiler warning here, we’re probably going to jump pretty much right into it, so go watch the episode, come back here. We’re going to be talking about highlights, we’re going to be talking about Easter eggs, we’re going to be talking about theories-

Justin:              Low lights.

Alex:                 Low lights, absolutely, all that stuff. But first off, we’ve been waking up pretty early to do this, I’ve been really appreciating this wake and Wanda, you know what I’m talking about?

Pete:                Oh my God. Don’t.

Justin:              Yeah. Another day, wake and Wanda, man. I love it. Kicking off the weekend.

Pete:                So hardcore man.

Justin:              It is hardcore.

Pete:                Getting up early. Wanda.

Alex:                 Now Pete, it seems like, I don’t know if you want to talk about it this here, but it seems like you were very emotionally affected by this episode of WandaVision.

Pete:                Well, it’s just crazy, this idea of living in a bubble and when you go outside of the bubble, all this crazy stuff is going to happen, is just… with everything that is happening right now, it’s just weird how some friends seem to be bubble affected, others acting like there isn’t a bubble. I don’t-

Justin:              Oh, shit. Is this a Pete… are you having a PeteVision?

Pete:                Yeah. It’s just… the show is very crazy right now. It’s-

Justin:              Because I feel a little bit like Quicksilver.

Pete:                Yeah? You do?

Alex:                 You definitely have the hair.

Justin:              Exactly.

Pete:                Cool. Well, yeah. I wouldn’t say you’re the fastest of the group. You’re a quick guy. You won’t shut the fuck up.

Justin:              I can’t believe that landed in a compliment. Oh, there it is. Okay, great.

Pete:                Yeah, yeah. Wait. Pete.

Justin:              And Alex is the Agnes.

Alex:                 How was that? Good?

Justin:              It was good.

Alex:                 Actually, yeah.

Justin:              It was too good to have just done it randomly.

Alex:                 I’ve been practicing for weeks, at this point. Six weeks. So broad strokes about the episode, as you can tell from the title this is the Halloween episode. It is set in the 2000s. We were-

Justin:              Did not see that coming.

Alex:                 Well, we were a little off in our guesses in terms of what this was, because at least for the opening, very specifically Malcolm in the Middle.

Justin:              A hundred percent. And I was not ready for that. I guess what it was is, last episode we did the Full House and Family Ties. There was a double… and this just jumped forward past where we thought, and Malcolm in the Middle, wow. Strong choice.

Alex:                 Strong choice down to Billy and Teddy doing the narration directly to camera, which I thought was super fun. Also-

Justin:              Billy and Tommy?

Alex:                 Tommy? I keep doing that in my head.

Justin:              It’s okay. Names are hard. And I guess you’re just a comic fan like the rest of us.

Pete:                Yeah.

Alex:                 Oh, I’m sorry that I keep mistaking two members of the ARG Avengers who have very similar names.

Justin:              Don’t try to flex with more knowledge to make up for your mistake. It doesn’t work that way.

Alex:                 [inaudible 00:03:14]

Pete:                I’m having fun. This is great.

Justin:              Alex, I didn’t mean to do that. It’s the PeteVision. He made me do it. He made me do it. I would never correct you like that.

Alex:                 Pete. It’s all Pete. So Billy and Tommy doing the narration directly to the camera-

Pete:                Can you fucken move that wire that’s right in the middle of your fucken shot? It’s driving me nuts.

Alex:                 Who are you talking to?

Pete:                You, man. The wire that’s right running down the front of your fucken cameras. It’s driving me insane.

Alex:                 The wire?

Pete:                Yeah. There’s a… right there.

Alex:                 This is great for our audio podcast. This thing over there?

Pete:                Yeah. Yeah. What is that?

Alex:                 It’s a beam gorgeous light that is lighting me up, Pete.

Pete:                Oh, Jesus Christ.

Justin:              This is-

Alex:                 I cannot bend light the way that you can.

Justin:              See, we can’t do this, this early in the morning because nothing makes sense.

Alex:                 Lots going on this episode, just a broad [inaudible 00:04:03] what’s going on, Pietro is here now. It is evident who Pete is from the X-men series, a lot of mystery that we’ll talk about, I’m sure in a moment. He seems to know what’s going on in Westview. He is talking to Wanda about that throughout the episode, but he’s also acting as the cool brother-in-law, Uncle Dude hanging out with the kids, kids start to develop their powers, Vision tries to make his way outside of Westview, because very poorly, and as a result, Wanda expands the hex, capturing Darcy as well as most of the members of S.W.O.R.D. Hayward makes it out with two people, probably that we don’t 100% know, Jimmy Woo and Monica Rambeau manage to make it out, they’ve had a break with S.W.O.R.D. this episode, after they’re kicked out. They are going to need-

Justin:              We’re on a break. We’re on a break

Pete:                We’re on a break.

Alex:                 They’re going to need Monica’s contact outside of Westview, so we’ll probably pick up on that and I’m sure have some theories there, so outside of Westview, where things are getting real bad, inside of Westview, things getting even worse and it’s still up in the air exactly who is behind this? Who is controlling this? Who is in charge? What is causing this, as we go through the episode.

Justin:              We’re going to speculate. Yeah. This episode was interesting. It started to… the format starting to really fall apart. The way this episode ended, I was like, “Oh, that’s not an ending place.”

Pete:                Yeah. It was a very interesting ending, where I was like, “Wait, what?” And then I was like, “Is there something pass the credits or something, because it feels like there should be a button of some kind.”

Justin:              I always watch all the credits, including the Dutch ones, because maybe that’s where it’s buried.

Pete:                Oh, nice.

Alex:                 You’ve got to read all of them. That’s the important part.

Justin:              Duh. I got to learn so many languages.

Alex:                 It somewhere in there.

Justin:              Yeah, exactly.

Alex:                 I agree with you, but we’ve talked about the structure of the season and we’re not going to fully know how it lands obviously, until the final episode, but I do feel like here, we’re kind of getting the end of the second act of the series, but also we’re just kicking into high gear, into the MCU movie. To my mind it feels like this episode, the last three episodes, that’s the MCU movie, the rest of it, there’s no slagging off at all, but the rest of it was set up that was the setting up the House of Cards, so that everything can start tumbling down this episode. And I think that’s what we’re going to see happening.

Justin:              Yeah. And it is interesting we talked about how the different eras of television bends to more realistic storytelling. And then but we didn’t say, and it makes total sense, to make the jump into full movie storytelling, I think it is to your point, what’s happening here. But it makes for… it’s not TV. It’s fully-

Alex:                 It’s for HBO.

Justin:              Exactly. Wow. How dare you. You’re about to get hexed in a major way from the Disney Corporation. But it does… it makes for a whole other way of telling the story. We’re just going to get little chunks of a movie basically, I think, going forward.

Pete:                Yay. Movie chunks.

Justin:              Yeah.

Alex:                 So what [inaudible 00:07:01].

Justin:              Love [inaudible 00:07:03]

Alex:                 In the episode, what was something that you thought was particularly interesting or dramatically or plot wise?

Justin:              Pete, what cars did you like?

Pete:                I really identified with the crying lady who was putting up just frozen in a one move thing, where she was trying to put up Halloween decorations.

Justin:              You identified with her?

Pete:                Yeah, because I feel like because… time is weird right now, so it’s like, “Oh,-

Alex:                 Are you okay?

Justin:              Yeah, Pete’s [crosstalk 00:07:29]

Pete:                We’re all in this loop that we can’t stop and it’s just so weird and what are days anymore? I really identified with her and her single tear.

Justin:              Wow. That was the most haunting moment of the episode. I think they did a good job of making it actually scary. I don’t think this is a purposeful connection, but it felt very Stranger Things to me. The vision sections here, because it was just like the Halloween connection and the way that they just went from very normal look/feeling and looking things into a very unsettling imagery by just freezing people. Unfreezing them when you don’t expect it.

Pete:                Yeah, that was really… just seeing people frozen, that was very unsettling.

Alex:                 And I like how it hasn’t exactly been a slow progression, but the progression through the episodes where they’ve let things fall apart, where we start to get hints that things weren’t right, the reality was breaking down into little bits for the first couple of episodes and then it felt like the lid got popped off there in that last episode, where it’s with that moment where Agnes says, “Hey, do you want me to take it again?” Where now we know there are people who are aware, they know they’re in a sitcom, we get that from whatever’s going on with Pietro this episode, we get it from Agnes, we also get it from [Hugh 00:08:48], I believe that’s the name of the character which I thought that was interesting.

Alex:                 We got a little bit of that when he was trimming the hedges a couple of episodes back, but he seems to be on maybe the same kind of level of awareness as Agnes, in terms of the sitcom world. But also, like you’re saying, with Vision walking out of Westview, seeing outside of wherever Wanda is, things are frozen and people are just trapped. And that’s it. And that’s terrifying.

Justin:              And while we’re talking about this, maybe it makes sense to talk about the commercial, the Go [Group 00:09:23] commercial, because that was ominous as well, where you have some Claymation characters, he’s just hungry, the kid on the island and he gets a YoMagic yogurt thing and just we watch slowly die.

Pete:                Do you know how hard it is to peel off those things, especially when you’re on a deserted island.

Justin:              Exactly. I was like, “If there’s a character Pete’s going to identify with, it’s going to be the kid who can’t open the yogurt.”

Pete:                Oh, my God. Yeah. I feel like I’m that kid waiting for Black Widow to come out. It’s just… I’m going to slowly turn into a skeleton.

Justin:              And Pete, I’ll be down to your apartment to open your yogurts. Obviously from outside your front door.

Pete:                Well, make sure you open them and then leave them. There’s no point in [crosstalk 00:10:02], Jesus Christ. That would be… kids of the neighborhood walking by, “Oh, there’s the guy with the bunch of open yogurts.” Crazy old Pete.

Justin:              “What’s your main form of income?” “I open a friend of mine’s yogurts and leave them on his welcome mat.”

Alex:                 You know it will a fun surprise Justin, just to wrap it all together, fill one of those yogurt with a bunch of actual black widows. So it’ll be, “Oh, [crosstalk 00:10:25].

Justin:              It’s a tie in. It’s a product tie in.

Pete:                I walk with that together.

Alex:                 What do I think is going on there? Because I feel like a lot of the other commercials, if a [inaudible 00:10:36], and this is the popular interim theory as we’re sort of progressing through Wanda’s history with all of these commercials, all the traumatic events she’s dealt with, what are you doing? What is this thumb?

Pete:                There’s this-

Justin:              The light.

Pete:                … beam of light streaking down your thing and it is… I don’t know what to do with it, and it’s just…

Justin:              I will say, Alex, did you shoot a gun into the sky recently? It looks like a bullet hole.

Pete:                [inaudible 00:11:00] 77. It’s just like Pete have WandaVision this morning-

Alex:                 I was just so excited about this episode about WandaVision, I was like, “Oh, darn it. Living rabbits.”

Pete:                Dude, when you were looking for places to live, do you have a single beam of light that will come down into my basement?

Alex:                 I’m sorry, when you looked for your apartment, you asked about the breathing calls, right?

Pete:                Yes, of course. That’s smart.

Justin:              It’s suffocating in here.

Alex:                 I’m going announce to get air if there are no holes in my apartment.

Justin:              That’s great. If we can move past the shaft of light. I imagine it’s shining down on a button that says upload or something like that, or don’t download.

Alex:                 Can we get back to YoMagic? What’s going on there?

Justin:              So I don’t know. This one is confusing me a little bit, because I didn’t know if it was a way of showing that the town’s people are slowly dying because they’re not eating, because the magic is killing them, which I thought was interesting and ties into the Vision being like, “You have to help these people,” when he gets past the bubble. And maybe that’s where it will turn and the Scarlet Witch will be like, “I have to stop doing this. I’m killing this town of people.” Either that, or maybe the magic is killing the Scarlet Witch. And that’s maybe about a reference to her past or something. And we’re going to find out that it’s related to her powering up in this show.

Pete:                It was just weird how the shark was like, “I remember hunger.” He’s always full. What is that about? That doesn’t make any sense.

Alex:                 Whatever is going on there, I thought it was great to get in a Claymation commercial. I thought that was really a fun thing.

Pete:                Do you think it’s a tease for a full Claymation episode?

Alex:                 Oh, that will be great. I didn’t see [inaudible 00:12:58]

Justin:              Oh yes, definitely.

Alex:                 Well what we’re… if we’re moving to the 2000s and the 2010s as we all know the majority of the sitcoms in the 2010s were Claymation. That was the popular form.

Justin:              That’s true. It started with the California Raisins, if you don’t what that is, I guess Google it or don’t. Just guess.

Pete:                Don’t Google it.

Justin:              Or guess what it is.

Pete:                Don’t Google.

Alex:                 It actually also ended with the California Raisins.

Justin:              That’s absolutely right.

Alex:                 That’s a little sitcom history for you all.

Justin:              Do you think that they are going to push into 2010 sitcoms or are we done with it?

Alex:                 Yeah, I think next episode is going to be The Office style episode with confessionals and things. We’ve seen… there’s been footage in the trailers of Wanda talking directly to camera, so I do think we’re going to get that, but that’s going to be the final iteration of sitcom.

Pete:                You mean we’re going to skip past Friends, like no Central Perk, nothing?

Justin:              Well, let me just say it-

Alex:                 What is different about Friends that any of… I don’t know.

Justin:              What an indictment of Friends from Aflix. He hates friends.

Pete:                The guy hates Friends.

Justin:              You didn’t watch all of Friends?

Alex:                 I didn’t.

Justin:              Wow. Maybe I don’t know who you are-

Pete:                Did you even get Justin’s reference from them before?

Alex:                 Could it be any more obvious?

Pete:                Oh, wow. How could you do that? How did you do that? You’ve never even seen the show.

Justin:              He can’t sit. He can’t sit.

Alex:                 Listen. I’ve watched two shows. Friends, just the first season, and California Raisins and that’s it. But I think I get a sense of what’s going on here.

Justin:              Yeah. You understand television. Let me ask you this. Are we going to get a Two Broke Girls reference?

Alex:                 That… I know we’re a little off on the end of the episode, towards the beginning of this podcast here, but I love the ending here. I thought Wanda expanding the hex, really amped up the danger. I thought seeing everybody turn into a carnival, that’s something that we haven’t seen on the show yet. What happens when the hex wall comes over people, I thought that sequence was awesomely done. And having everybody switch over to just doing the miming and everything, it was great. And getting to see Pete. I feel like you asked for this the last episode, you were bummed that we weren’t going to see Kat Dennings in [inaudible 00:15:07] land. It was a very obvious way to set it up there by having her handcuffed to the truck and left and everything. But it’s still fun. It’s a good setup and getting her thrown in there is delightful.

Pete:                The “Oh, fudge,” comment was hysterical. Where she goes, “Oh,” and then goes, “Fudge.” Because she was being… that was really fun.

Justin:              And Kat Dennings I feel like, for whatever it is, she exists outside of all realms, because she had to some hacking lines, she was doing a lot of talking to herself like, “I got you now, Hayward”. It sounds like that very melodramatic stuff that usually are like, “This is lame.” But for whatever reason, her line delivery somehow works.

Pete:                It really does. It’s great. It’s also very funny because she was on Kimmel talking about how she didn’t even about that brother reveal until the last second, they had them covered in a shroud and then moved down to set, so-

Justin:              A shroud?

Pete:                Yeah. So very interesting how we’re in the dark, the actors are in the dark until the last second. It’s scary.

Justin:              Pete, speaking about scary and unsettled. Did you do some research for this podcast? Because you watched another thing about it. And provided that information for the rest of us to know something.

Pete:                Yeah, things are weird, man. It’s a new world.

Justin:              The hex. The Pete hex.

Alex:                 A couple of other things outside of the hex, just to wrap up that area before we move back inside, because there’s lots of comic book stuff we can talk through there that we’ve already touched on, but we don’t find out who Monica’s contact is, but I do feel more confident after this episode that we’re actually going to see whoever it is. So, any further feelings on that? I feel like the Reed Witcher thing has definitely gained speed on the internet, but I don’t know how likely that necessarily is.

Justin:              No, I don’t-

Pete:                Because-

Justin:              Go ahead.

Pete:                For Reed, you can just show a bendy arm-

Justin:              Just an arm reaching on camera?

Pete:                … holding your cellphone. Be like, “Hey, don’t worry, I’ll be right here.” Yeah, yeah. Real easy to do.

Justin:              No I don’t think it can be a heavy hitter. We are going to get a new heavy hitter. I think it’s going to be a callback to somebody else. And I think it is going to be, I don’t know which one, but it’s a character from the MCU that we’ve already met, is what I think. And it’s going to be someone that helps her out in some way, but doesn’t go fight with her.

Alex:                 Yeah, I think it’s going to be a quick show-up. I felt a little more confident this episode on it being Talos, Ben Mendelssohn’s character from Captain Marvel, because they keep dropping Captain Marvel references-

Pete:                They sure do.

Alex:                 … and it certainly could be a aerospace engineer and she had a good relationship with him as a child in Captain Marvel in the movie.

Pete:                That Duchy guy was like, “Hey, Rambo, I’ve seen Captain Marvel.”

Justin:              Even the movie.

Alex:                 Well, yeah. That’s the thing. If you’re in the MCU world, you’ve got to go see all the movies, what everybody’s talking about.

Justin:              In the theater. Opening weekend, so. And you have to buy the big popcorn, if you live in the MCU.

Alex:                 Right. And now it’s even worse in the MCU. They’ve got to wake up at 3:00 AM and watch their own show, otherwise they’re going to spoiled on Twitter later on that day.

Justin:              No one would do that. That’s crazy. But, what was I going to say-

Pete:                Something about water balloons?

Justin:              Yeah. I was going to like, “I got to get my water balloons filled with shaving cream.” Going right now.

Pete:                Yeah, you’ve got to be ready for Halloween, yeah.

Justin:              You don’t think it’s going to be actual Captain Marvel? You think Talos isn’t more-

Alex:                 I still think it feels like Monica has something weird about Captain Marvel. There is another mention there, there’s that showdown with Hayward that she has, right before they kicked out of S.W.O.R.D. where Hayward just drops, “I’m glad your mother died,” or whatever that line is.

Justin:              I’m glad you weren’t here.

Pete:                Yeah, y’all. That was messed up. How could nobody punch him?

Justin:              I’m glad you weren’t here.

Pete:                A room full of people, nobody punches him in the face for saying that?

Alex:                 But he mentions Captain Marvel and they cut to Monica and there is a little micro expression that she has. So again, I think there is some bad blood there or something like that and we don’t know exactly what it is yet. A couple of other quick little things to throw out, Cataract. So when Darcy is searching, she finds the secret file, it’s called Cataract. She sends it to Jimmy Woo. I did a big search while she’s putting in the email, she sees James D. Gold, James J. Alexander and James X. [Sackler 00:19:45]-MD show up when she’s searching for Jimmy Woo. It’s a email address-

Pete:                I think this is smart.

Alex:                 Hold on. Hold on. Hold on, let me actually finish this thought. When she’s searching for Jimmy Woo’s address, she sends him the file on Cataract, so presumably next episode, since they’re outside the hex, probably they’re going to get that. James J. Alexander is a VFX producer for Marvel, so I think that’s the only real Easter egg there. But what do you think Cataract is? What’s going on?

Pete:                Well, I think this is a smart way to have shows talk about cataracts, because it affects so many people, and if we’re not talking about it, you might have the symptoms and not even realize it, so I like this. It’s like a nod to the old G.I. Joe lesson at the end of the episode.

Justin:              Oh, PSA.

Pete:                Yeah, yeah. I think it was seamlessly introduced and I really… I think it’s important to make sure people are aware.

Justin:              Well, let me throw this out to you. Cataract, obviously an eye… something that afflicts your eye. In the flashback to Sokovia, where Quicksilver had an eye patch at the beginning of the episode. I feel like Quicksilver, we’ll talk about this in a little bit, I feel like Quicksilver is maybe the villain in disguise as her brother. Is there a one eyed villain is somehow maybe at play here?

Alex:                 Can I throw something else out at you with that flashback?

Justin:              Yes.

Alex:                 So, first of all, love that. Just classic sitcom flashback, really well done. Do think they were dressed up as Black Widow and Nick Fury? I think that’s what was going on there.

Justin:              That’s what I thought, yeah.

Alex:                 Yeah. So I think that’s what was going on. She has even antennae and some sort of weird bug thing and she had the Natasha hair. So I think that’s what’s going on there. I think if anything, the eye can refer to the fact that every single credit sequence so far has zoomed into Vision’s eye. We’ve had that. That is a repeated riff right at the end of the episode, in the credits, we go directly into a shot of Vision from the episode into his eye. Clearly Hayward is very interested in Vision, he’s tracking him, inside of the Hex, who he seems to be potentially experimenting on his body back at S.W.O.R.D. So, if anything, I think Cataract probably has something to do with Vision, not necessarily anything else.

Pete:                Well, I want to talk about in that flashback. That lady was giving away full size fish, not the small fish. That was full size fish she was giving away. That’s [crosstalk 00:22:12].

Justin:              I always hated going trick or treating and just getting a bunch of minnows. You always got to go to the house with the big fish. The full fish.

Alex:                 I’ll tell you what, one of the weirdest Halloween experiences I ever had with my kids was, we went to a house that was giving away celery and they loved it. They kept asking for celery.

Justin:              Your kids loved it?

Alex:                 They kept asking for celery for weeks afterwards. It was the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me.

Justin:              That’s real?

Alex:                 This is a 100% real story.

Pete:                Why would you eat celery from a stranger’s house, man. That seems so creepy.

Alex:                 I don’t know. It wasn’t this past Halloween.

Justin:              That’s fine.

Alex:                 We just went around in COVID times, we were like, “Give us celery.”

Justin:              Yeah. Now I think you’re the one that’s having a psychotic break, not Pete. Were they handing-

Pete:                Waking Wanda, man. Waking Wanda.

Justin:              … naked stalks of celery?

Alex:                 Yeah, that was it.

Pete:                No peanut butter, ants on a log, nothing?

Alex:                 No peanut butter, ants on a log, nothing.

Justin:              Not prepackaged?

Pete:                And your kids liked it?

Alex:                 No, it wasn’t prepackaged celery. What are you talking about?

Justin:              Like the ones that go in the bloody Mary’s.

Pete:                Just loose celery?

Alex:                 Single serving you pick up at a deli like, “Hey, give me a pack of smokes and one of them a single serve celeries, please?

Justin:              Yeah, like the product I started, which is like Goger, but for celery? Speed is called speedlery?

Pete:                I can’t believe your kids liked it.

Alex:                 Pete, you always have that problem with opening up the celery package, right? So you’ve got to love that.

Pete:                Oh, it’s so hard. It’s so hard.

Alex:                 Can we get inside of the hex because there’s so much stuff to talk about and we’ve-

Justin:              Oh, just real quick, I have to make a note to myself when I open Pete’s yogurts to make sure I pre-open the celery and slice it up so that he can eat it.

Pete:                Dip it.

Justin:              He can eat it.

Pete:                Celery dip [inaudible 00:23:44].

Justin:              Celery and yogurt. My favorite.

Pete:                Who’s excited about celery? What is wrong with your children? What are you doing to your kids where they’re excited about celery?

Alex:                 I mean, they don’t have breeding holes in their rooms.

Justin:              They’ve never tasted anything quite so interesting as in one stalk of celery.

Alex:                 Lots of stuff going on here. Love the dynamic with the whole family. I thought this was super fun. Also, as we talked about in the last episode, people aren’t being very secretive with their powers anymore. If you’re going to talk about the lid popping off, Speed, Wiccan, for those who don’t know, for those who are new to the comics, Billy and Tommy are Wiccan and Speed, I got that right?

Pete:                Don’t flex because you remembered it, right?

Alex:                 No, I have it written down here, so I actually don’t forget.

Justin:              When you advance into older age, remembering anything is a flex.

Alex:                 Here’s the problem. In the comics there’s Tommy and there’s Teddy. And Teddy and Billy are boyfriends and I constantly confuse the names. Teddy and Tommy and I’m sorry. They are the same first letter and the same last letter and the same number of letters. Also eyeballed.

Pete:                Sounds like a whole lot of excuses, you know what I mean?

Alex:                 So, in the comics there are two parts of the Arg Avengers we talked about this a little bit last week as well. As we saw on the show, Tommy gets his speed powers, they’re very like Quicksilver, they can move fast. He also has a very similar costume, though not exactly the same costume as Quicksilver, and Billy has kind of undefined powers. In the comics he basically has to repeat things a bunch of times and he can warp reality like how Wanda can do in the comics, we get things that I think are a little more in line with her MCU nature here, where he has seemingly a little bit of telepathy. He can definitely move things, we see blue come out of his hands instead of red like his mom, but I like this. I’m excited that they’re pulling off their powers already.

Justin:              Yeah, it’s exciting because this is the thing for sure now. Eventually we’re going to get… we talked about this. I think we’re going to get the Young Avengers. I don’t know what capacity they will be in.

Pete:                I’m really worried about if they leave the bubble, if the kids can leave and they do leave, what that does to them, because in this episode they’re talking about how people’s cell structure changes if you go in and out, but if you’re born in there, what does that mean for you, trying to get anything into the outside world.

Alex:                 I do think there’s something to be said for the fact that they seem to be aware and able to control the narrative in a very similar way to how [Nawanda 00:26:20] is. I think that’s the purpose of them doing the direct to camera throughout this episode, it’s not just the sitcom [inaudible 00:26:25], it’s also the fact that, like we see Billy can see outside the dome. He sees what’s going on with Vision, not dome, Hex. He see’s what’s going on with Vision, he understands there, so yeah, I think that’s the question, I think they need to get to a certain age where they can venture outside the Hex, because that’s probably the whole point of this, as they told us from the very beginning.

Justin:              Exactly.

Pete:                What?

Alex:                 Yeah.

Pete:                I don’t remember the beginning of the show where they said, “Listen, the whole point of this thing is we’ve got age some kids, so they’ll be okay to live outside of this bubble.

Alex:                 For the children. For the children. For the children. It’s all for the children. They told us that in the third episode, where they also said, “You got to tell people what the magic trick is.”

Justin:              Now in light of it, because we speculated that Agnes was the one driving a lot of this taking care of the kids stuff, and then in this episode, we see Agnes and she is fully under the hex, she… Vision breaks her out of it briefly, and she’s acting like just another scared person. Do you think… my theory is that she was doing that to try to push Vision even harder. So that was a little bit of play acting there.

Alex:                 Yeah, I’m back on the Agnes Speed as of this episode, because versus the creepy lady that Pete calls out earlier, everybody else seems to be frozen in a very specific way, where they really cannot move. The lady is crying and she’s not moving. But when we cut in on Agnes in the car, it’s such a little thing, but she’s breathing.

Justin:              And then we saw there’s a little movement that I thought was like, “That’s a purposeful thing.”

Alex:                 So, whatever she is doing, she’s dressed as a witch, which just doubles down on the idea that she is Agatha Heartless in some form from the comics and is a witch, certainly that might turn into the YoMagic thing in some way potentially, because Scarlet Witch’s powers aren’t exactly magic, they’re science based.

Pete:                Well, I think… wait, back up for a second. First yogurt is magic, so that’s what that is.

Alex:                 How do they even make it? Nobody even knows.

Pete:                Exactly.

Justin:              It’s like milk, but hard.

Pete:                Yeah.

Justin:              And not too hard, but harder.

Alex:                 If you translate yogurt from the Native Socovian, it means hard milk. So yes, I agree with you Justin, I think Agnes was pushing Vision in some way. I think she was aware the entire time, even when he did the mind stone touch on her head. What her purpose is, what she’s trying to do, I’m not 100% sure, but it might just be what happens at the end of the episode. They set up a situation where the hex gets expanded.

Justin:              It feels like she’s been pushing Scarlet Witch to break through whatever this is. So I think she’s seeking some sort of end to the hex and maybe that’s to then take control of the children, but is she doing it for the children? Does she care about them or is she trying to use them as a weapon. I guess it goes to like, “Is she a good guy or a bad guy?” At the end of the day.

Alex:                 I don’t know. I wonder. Because the show has this complete raw speculation that I’m just thinking about right now, but given that the show is really doubling down on trauma and that it is the whole point here that Wanda dealt with the death of Vision and many, many other people throughout her life, that we’re getting that from Monica, who very explicitly says, “I know what Wanda through,” and is relating that there. It certainly seems like, I think we talked about this the last episode, that Agnes went through some trauma herself. She has… there’s the moment when Billy and Tommy… looking at my notes here, say, “Why don’t you just bring Sparky back to life?” And Agnes starts crying and says, “You can do that.”

Alex:                 I wonder if her kids died? I wonder if there was some sort of deal of she is manipulating Wanda, saying, “I can bring Vision back and in return I get these kids.” Whether Wanda knows that or not, whether she said that out loud, she’s trying to make new children for herself.

Justin:              That’s interesting. That goes Pietro mentions the kids when he’s talking to Wanda later in the episode like, “Where do all these kids come from?” These kids.

Pete:                Yeah so, well first off I wanted to say, I understand what you’re saying about Agnes but she was stuck on the edge of the town. So maybe she was trying to drive out like the doctor was before, and then they both, when they got to the edge of town, had this thing of, “Nobody escapes.” So I feel like she was trying to escape a little bit. Or you know those drives you take, where you just stop at a stop sign or a stop light and you just start crying and you just question your life and what’s going on and what are we all doing here? Are we in some fish tank of life, but I think that when the kids thing is, because all a sudden kids appeared in this episode and the Quicksilver sit down with Wanda, where he’s like, “Hey, I’m fuzzy on the details, but you know what’s going on, right? How did this all start?”

Pete:                And she’s like, “I’m not sure.” Yeah, it goes back and forth, because Quicksilver seems like he’s the fun Quicksilver we know, but then when we see him with a bullet holes and stuff, it really just-

Justin:              It’s less fun.

Pete:                Yeah, it’s very less fun and it’s also like which is this actually the Quicksilver in that scene.

Alex:                 This also might just be Evan Peter’s acting, but there’s much more of an edge to him than Aaron Taylor Johnson had in his performance. It feels like there’s something more going on there. I’m still not convinced this is Pietro from another universe or anything like that. I don’t know. They seem to strongly imply this episode, that this is Pietro’s re-animated body, but similar to others that we in the moment, where Vision doesn’t know that he was an Avenger, and there seems to be gaps in his memory, and he died, same as there’s gaps and things that are different and changed in Pietro’s memory. So, I guess what I’m saying is, I think it could go either way at this point.

Alex:                 It could I guess be Pietro from another universe, though I’m not convinced, it also could be something that was created out of thin air in a way, similar to how Vision’s body was reconstituted, but maybe his mind wasn’t exactly. I’m not 100% sure, but we’ll find out.

Justin:              These are all great points. Do you remember when Pete says he just goes for drives and cries himself out.

Alex:                 I’ll tell you what, I don’t know about you, but my mind immediately went to him sitting there, listening to Driver’s License by Olivia Rodrigo, yogurt just pouring down the front of his shirt, his trunk full of celery, stocked.

Justin:              Imagine if someone, a friend of yours was saying, “Oh, look at all this celery I bought.” You’ll be like, “This person’s lost it.” Because you don’t ever need more than one packet of celery.

Alex:                 [inaudible 00:33:24]

Justin:              That’s always… but [inaudible 00:33:29] bottom of my fridge?

Alex:                 How many chicken pot pies are you making?

Justin:              I’m having one bloody Mary and the rest goes straight in the trash. On the Pietro tip, I feel like he’s, if there is a villain in this show, I think he is the villain who is dressing up like Pietro. I think he’s working with the Agnes character. They’ve got Agnes’s job, up until this episode, was to be with Wanda and to watch her, push her, mind the kids. And then I think her job… because Pietro was there doing that. Agnes then switches to pushing Vision further through the story.

Pete:                He also didn’t answer the question, he just deflected it. She asked him a very specific question, and he was like, “You’re testing me.” And didn’t answer the question.

Justin:              She’s clearly suspicious of him. She’s asking him questions-

Pete:                Why wouldn’t she be?

Justin:              Yeah. So she knows subconsciously that this isn’t Quicksilver, but it’s playing on the same thing the trauma and the nostalgia factor that she’s… this caused her to create this hex anyway. Even in the beginning, she needs to see Vision. She wanted to have a family, she wants her brother to be there. So they’re taking advantage of what they know about her to serve their ends, whatever that is.

Alex:                 Yeah, I think that seems fair. What other things, there’s a bunch of different Easter eggs and little things that I wrote down, but were there any other big seams you guys wanted to talk about that jumped out at you?

Pete:                It’s just weird that in Socovia they said to their parents, “I want to dress up like Nick Fury in Black Widow.” The parents said to me like, “Who in what?”

Alex:                 That doesn’t make sense with this timeline?

Pete:                Yeah.

Alex:                 What are you doing?

Justin:              Her parents are very aware. Well, I went one Halloween, went as Lowell, from the TV show, Wings, so I can understand no one would know what that costume is.

Pete:                How old were you and what were parents saying.

Justin:              They were like, “This kid loves Wings.” Great show.

Alex:                 I’ll just run through a couple of things that I wrote down. We mentioned this earlier, but Pietro gets the classic Quicksilver costume down to the hair, which I thought was super fun.

Justin:              Very fun.

Alex:                 Really enjoyed that. Also, this was a weird thing, but just because I was still framing things and trying to find Easter eggs, there’s a brand in there, Maple Hill Milk, is what they’re using, which is actually a modern milk brand, so that was just a little anachronism thing, I don’t think it was a clue. I was like, “Maple Hill Marvel,” what is this in reference to?

Justin:              Way to keep your eye on the milks. Or as we call it, soft milk as opposed to yogurt, which is hard milk.

Alex:                 Another thing that was harder to catch in the opening credits, Vision is reading a newspaper and on the back page, it looks like there’s an ad that just says Westview. There’s an alien space ship, a classic flying saucer over there, and it seems to be, I don’t know, a tractor meaning a TV or something. It was a little hard to see, but that was a little bit of weirdness. I also… another thing that I don’t think means much of anything, but Pietro has a tattoo that says “mom” on one shoulder.

Justin:              I saw that.

Alex:                 A fun little, very meta reference, when they’re at the town square Halloween Scare Fest, Pietro says something to her, he runs away, he says, “Kick-Ass,” and she says, “Kick-Ass?” Which is a reference to the fact that both Evan Peters and Erin Taylor Johnson, were in Kick-Ass together.

Pete:                Oh, that’s nice.

Alex:                 So there you go.

Justin:              Interesting.

Alex:                 Another thing on the marquee, in the movie theater, the town is showing the Incredibles and The Parent Trap, both Disney movies, both from different time periods that don’t necessarily match the 2000s, but both of them make a lot of sense. Parent Trap, twins, Incredibles, super powered family. I think there was pretty much all that was going on there. And I think that was it. I wrote down the names of Ellis Avenue and Rolling Hill Drive, but I think those are just street names.

Justin:              Yeah. I was like, “Ooh, what’s that a clue for?” And I was just like, “Oh, it’s just what Wanda said one scene ago. Don’t go pass Ellis Avenue.”

Alex:                 I do love that though. I know there’s a lot of people that are like, “Stop looking into Easter eggs, stop talking to theories,” but think that’s fun to look at these things and figure them out, some of them mean things, some of them don’t, but that’s a credit to the show for just packing everything so tightly in there. Like celery in a trunk.

Justin:              Exactly.

Pete:                Perfectly packed.

Justin:              The beauty of Easter eggs is sometimes they’re about a deep reference to the original source material, and sometimes it’s an Easter egg for the story itself, also known as a plot.

Pete:                I did really like the line where she was like, “Hey, it’s the guy who was almost killed by his own murder squad.” I thought that was really a funny line.

Justin:              Yeah, they’re pretty nasty to Hayward in a way.

Pete:                He deserves it, okay?

Justin:              Of course, yes. But I’m saying then they fight their own soldiers. They’re going to get in trouble.

Alex:                 Yeah. They’re going to follow the rules.

Justin:              We didn’t talk about Monica’s blood work. She’s getting her photon powers, basically.

Alex:                 Yes. I guess the question is, is she going to get the powers now or does she have to go through the hex one more time for it to really seal the deal.

Justin:              I think one more time and my guess would be she’s going to do it purposefully and maybe be aware. Like that’s a great fight starter move, to step through the portal and be like, “[inaudible 00:38:44]”

Alex:                 Yeah. That will be fun.

Pete:                What I’m worried about is the next episode, there’s going to be a lot of mimes. I don’t want that. I don’t want a mime episode.

Justin:              Too many mimes. If you got pushed into the hex, who do you think you’d become? Obviously those soldiers all became clowns in mimes. A lot of the buildings became other buildings.

Alex:                 The shop became a funnel kick truck.

Pete:                Yeah, the car is-

Alex:                 Pete, do you think you would also become a funnel kick truck?

Pete:                Well, hang on a second. What was nice was it went from new cars to old timey cool cars in the used car lot, which I was like, “Oh wait, let’s just halt here and admire all these nice old cars here before we move on.”

Alex:                 Yeah. Everybody at Westview starts chanting, “For Pete, for Pete, for Pete, all for Pete.”

Justin:              More cars, more cars.

Alex:                 Before we start to wrap up here-

Pete:                Wait, wait.

Alex:                 Oh okay, yes, go ahead Pete.

Pete:                The line where Pietro was like, “Hey, what you worried about?” It’s not like he could get more dead. I was just like, “Oh, dude.” Like I know brothers and sisters fight and stuff but that was below the belt for sure.

Alex:                 I have two quick thoughts there. One is, I think that ties into what we were saying about Pietro, that there’s an edge to him, that he is pushing in Wanda in some way, he’s pushing the narratives in some way in a very aggressive nature, and in a very negative nature, but the other thing is that this really reminded me how caustic a lot of sitcoms of that time were, which frankly, I did not watch, because I was like, “I don’t like watching people be mean to each other. This is not fun.”

Justin:              They were mean to-

Pete:                That’s why you only went one season in Friends, because it got real mean [inaudible 00:40:28]?

Alex:                 I was like, “These people aren’t friends. What’s happening here?”

Justin:              It should be called Enemies. In Malcolm in the Middle, they were so mean to Bryan Cranston, that that’s why he became Breaking Bad.

Alex:                 There’s a whole theory about that.

Justin:              Yeah. Let’s dip into speculation. If Quicksilver is the villain, what villain are we looking at here? Because he was being so… to what you were talking about, so blunt. He was taking a hammer to Wanda to try to shatter her control of the hex, it felt like, by calling out how Vision is dead and all that. It was really ramped up in this episode. But he seems like a villain who is not smart, but doing a good job.

Pete:                It almost like a henchman rather than like a full on villain.

Alex:                 Yeah, that’s my take, I think. There’s been a lot of speculation about him being [Mafisto 00:41:23] who’s a devilish character-

Pete:                No, don’t you fucken say that, man.

Alex:                 … from the comic books. Hold on. This is an entirely different discussion. But I don’t think they’re going to go there. I don’t they’re going to reveal some surprise villain. I believe we were actually this in the Patreon Slack a little bit. Patreon.com/comicbookclub.

Pete:                Oh, Jesus Christ.

Alex:                 No, there’s been a lot of good theories in the Bible vision, remember, it’s been fun. But I think whoever the villain is, whatever they are, I feel like, at this point, it has to be something that was already introduced in the series, or mentioned in the series. We mentioned Hydra, we’ve mentioned S.W.O.R.D., we’ve mentioned Hayward, Agnes has been in the mix, now Pietro is in the mix, but I don’t think suddenly Pietro is going to be like, “And I am Mafisto,” because we haven’t had any setup for that.

Pete:                Yeah, but what about… because we had S.W.O.R.D. and Scrolls together, nobody’s talking about Scrolls right now.

Justin:              Nobody’s talking about Scrolls right now.

Alex:                 Scrolls like, “Why’s nobody talking about us? We’re pretty cool.” Hold that. All I was going to say is, I was going to agree with you Pete, that I do feel like we’ve got Agnes… my current theory is Agnes at the top, Pietro, Hugh as her lieutenants, everybody else trapped in this hex.

Justin:              But that to me feels like they are some sort of henchman like super villain group or… because, against your point of introducing a new villain, I agree with you they’re not going to introduce a big new villain, but they are going to have to explain who Agnes is at some point. And that’s going to be someone, who we assume is Agatha Harkness. I feel like Pietro might be Grim Reaper because it makes sense to introduce a low level villain that they don’t have to explain much about, that he’s just some bad villain who has a connection to Wanda.

Alex:                 Oh that guy? Oh, he’s just the Grim Reaper.

Pete:                No need to go into that more. Moving on.

Justin:              No question.

Alex:                 No. I think you’re right Justin, I can see a scenario where they reveal he was the guy in witness protection, his name is X, his alias was The Grim Reaper, and he gets brought back to life through this hex power or something like [inaudible 00:43:33].

Justin:              And he could be killed again without a lot of big ramifications and that may be what… because I think Wanda will eventually become a hero of some sort, but either she’ll become a hero and go back to some sort of status quo, or she will become the villain going forward into the movie [inaudible 00:43:49].

Pete:                Yes.

Alex:                 Do you think, just to throw it out, I think she could either die a hero or live long enough to see herself become a villain.

Pete:                Wow. Boo. Interesting.

Justin:              Wow. That’s really smart. I was raised in the darkness.

Pete:                I don’t know why you would need to say that part.

Alex:                 Do you feel like you’re in charge?

Pete:                I think what she’s going to do is, she’s going to have an army of mimes at her disposal and things are going to get real weird.

Justin:              An army of mimes you would never hear them coming.

Alex:                 Let’s wrap this up by saying what is on our vision board for the next episode. Justin, why don’t you go first. What’s on your vision board?

Justin:              For the next episode, we have to get a reveal in here. We have three episodes left, so I think we’re going to get a big one in this next episode, probably what Agnes and Pietro, if they are working together as some sort of team or group of villains, what they’re up to, what their goals are and who they are.

Alex:                 Pete.

Pete:                On my vision board, we’ve got to release the town people. The stuck people that are crying, “It’s too much to take.” We’ve got to release the people, okay? It’s too much.

Alex:                 Great. My main thing… this is such a small thing and it’s not really going to be that important, but I just want to find out who the aerospace engineer is next episode. I think that’s a fun easy mystery that they can solve, it will be a fun reveal. Whoever it is, whether it is somebody we already know or somebody new, and I’m excited to check that out.

Justin:              I think it’s Captain Marvel. I think it’s Captain Marvel.

Alex:                 You think it’s Capital Marvel?

Pete:                I think it’s Silver Surfer.

Justin:              Hmm. Definitely the Silver Surfer. Maybe Galactus, the clown from the first Fantastic Four.

Alex:                 He hates clowns.

Pete:                Maybe it’s Nick Nolte clown, from the angry Hulk movie.

Justin:              What if it’s two clowns and the clowns don’t like each other and the fight in a clown fight.

Alex:                 It’s my favorite thing.

Pete:                No offense to the clown but-

Justin:              Clowns fighting clowns, how would you know what was happening?

Alex:                 Wait. Did you say clouds or clowns?

Justin:              Clown clouds.

Pete:                Oh boy.

Justin:              Whether it’s clouds that look like clowns or clowns that look like clouds, each one is equally scary.

Alex:                 If you’d like to support our podcast, patreon.com/comicbookclub, also we do a live show every Tuesday night at 7:00 PM, to Chromecast and YouTube. Come hang out. We would love to talk to you about WandaVision. iTunes, Android and Spotify, Stitcher or the app of your choice, do subscribe and listen to the show, Marvel Vision Pod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Comicbooklive.com, for this podcast and many more. Until next time. Don’t forget to wake and Wanda.

Justin:              Honestly, I think I’m the one who’s losing it. I need to poke some air holes into my eyes.

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