For eight episodes, WandaVision was comfortably one of the best shows on television, diving deep into the complex emotions that come with life, loss, grief, trauma and reality, even though it was a big budget Marvel Cinematic Universe series focused on the contrived and completely conjured marriage between a superhero and the consciousness of a dead synthezoid.
It was weird, wild, wonderful and hugely emotional, but a lot of fans felt like the finale didn’t quite stick the landing. After so much buildup, there was a sense that the ninth and concluding chapter in the story of WestView was rushing through the major plot points a little too quickly, while it had to bend over backwards in order to incorporate the standard spectacle and effects-driven action we’ve come to expect from the MCU.
“The Series Finale” tied everything up in a relatively neat bow, but it didn’t stop to catch its breath, and as a result several elements felt a little undercooked. It also wound up as the lowest-rated episode on Rotten Tomatoes, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that writer Jac Schaeffer admitted she struggled with sticking to the franchise’s formula when crafting the ending.
“The finale was the hardest because that’s the Marvel-iest part. It’s always tough to really nail down on the mythology. What does Agatha want and what does her power set look like? What does that mean for Wanda? How do we make that interesting? What’s the chess board where all the players give everybody a satisfying conclusion? It’s the third act of a Marvel movie. I’ve been around the block on some of those, and they’re so fun, but that’s always the hardest to land. The emotional part of the finale was always very clear to me: their goodbye and the goodbye to the children. That was the grounding force. All the pyrotechnics and making sure that Wanda’s win against Agatha at the end really sings, that’s [the] stuff that takes a long, long time.”
Don’t get us wrong, WandaVision was still an undoubtedly phenomenal achievement in television as 23 Emmy nominations have more than proven, but after such exquisite buildup folks were expecting great things from the finale. What we got was very good without a doubt, but there’s also the niggling feeling that it tried too hard to pack itself into the MCU box, when it should have continued breaking out of it.