Marvel's WandaVision is expected to be the first original Marvel series to air directly on Disney+. Here's the synopsis for this superhero horror-sitcom:
The series is a blend of classic television and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which Wanda Maximoff and Vision—two super-powered beings living idealized suburban lives—begin to suspect that everything is not as it seems.
If you've been following the Marvel Cinematic Universe this last decade, you'd know that the Vision is technically dead, which, well, makes a loving sitcom on the set of the Dick Van Dyke Show rather logistically difficult. But WandaVision supposedly takes its inspiration from a few different Marvel comic book sources, which help this bizarre premise make a bit more sense.
The 2015-2016 Vision limited series by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta is the first to come to mind. In this story, the android Vision moves to the suburbs of Washington, DC for a new job with the US government, and creates an entire synthetic family to bring along with him. This robot family's desperate attempts to play at normalcy end up leading (naturally) to horrible circumstances that hold a twisted mirror up to human society.
But that was after Scarlet Witch and the Vision got married in the early 80s, when they starred in their own miniseries together as well as in the West Coast Avengers (particularly the aptly-named and excellent "Vision Quest" and "Darker Than Scarlet" storylines). Whereas the movie version of Scarlet Witch has some general telekinesis-like powers, the comic book version of the character had even more ill-defined "hex" abilities, which at some point transformed into the power to alter probabilities and/or realities; and/or a biological mutant connection chaos magic. It's not really clear; and the fact that the specific details of her powers kept shifting turned out to be a central part of her story. Because it wasn't enough that she was a Romani mutant who also later learned that she was the daughter of Magneto (a retcon which was later re-un-retconned). But having fallen in love with a literal android, the Scarlet Witch eventually used her powers to alter reality and give birth to two half-android babies, using souls she stole from Hell (maybe). These babies were, of course, unnatural and impossible, and the Avengers made her "put them back," as it were, and made her forget they ever existed. This ultimately came back to bite them in the ass when Scarlet Witch learned that she'd been brainwashed to forget her magically aborted magic babies, and responded to the news by killing half of the Avengers, altering reality again, and then genociding 98 percent of the mutant population. Except it was all actually Doctor Doom's fault, and her fake-reality-warped babies are now alive and on the Young Avengers? It's not really clear, although the melodrama is undoubtedly gripping.
The point is: there is a precedent for the Scarlet Witch to do some wild (also arguably reductive/misogynistic) things in the name of love. And the upcoming WandaVision series looks like it might explore this idea in some stylistically freaky ways. I'm down for that.
WandaVision will be available on Disney+ in December 2020.
