WandaVision: Why Agnes' Plant Is So Significant
Minor spoilers for WandaVision episode 2
It's been a year and a half since Spider-Man: Far from Home, the last entry in the MCU, was released, so it's perfectly understandable if the old picking-apart-potential-comic-book-minutiae muscles need a good stretch during the opening volley of WandaVision episodes. Let's start out simple: In one of the show's opening scenes, Miss Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) makes the acquaintance of her chatty suburbanite neighbor, Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), who brings her a potted plant as a housewarming gift. That's simple enough, right? What could the plant mean?
Only everything, that's what, and there's half a century of backstory to corroborate it. Keep in mind that at this stage of the game, all we have is speculation, but here goes.
One of the wildest fan theories about WandaVision that's been making the rounds since the show's first trailer dropped is that the untold truth of Agnes is that she's actually Agatha Harkness, the accomplished witch from the comics who taught Wanda how to use magic and has, for good or ill, been popping up since the 1970s. There have been a couple of oblique references to Harkness in the show already. Her familiar, a shapeshifting cat named Ebony, gets a nod in a background ad for "Auntie A's Kitty Litter," and her son, Nicholas Scratch, has an awfully similar name to Agnes' rabbit Señor Scratchy.
So let's say that Agnes really is the Dumbledore to Wanda's Harry Potter. How would that make the gift of a houseplant an important detail?
Is WandaVision's houseplant more than a houseplant?
On the surface, WandaVision only has a few broad-strokes similarities to Tom King's The Vision miniseries from the mid-2010s. Both stories juxtapose superheroic Avengers against a milquetoast suburban fantasy life, with ill-advised attempts at building (sometimes literally) a family thrown in the mix. At the beginning of The Vision, readers are given a tour of the synthezoid's residence and shown their prized possessions: a floating vase from the Silver Surfer, Captain America's old flip lighter, and — presciently — a potted plant, described as "a clipped everbloom plucked from the side of Mt. Wundagore, a gift from the witch."
The everbloom, it turns out, is an exceedingly rare plant, gifted from Agnes to her student, Wanda, as a gift on the occasion of her marriage to Vision. Sound familiar? It should, and it doesn't bode well for the happy couple. What makes the everbloom special in the comics is its ability to grant visions into the future, with some especially gruesome caveats. In order to work properly, the flowers of the everbloom have to be eaten twice — "once after hunger, once after murder." In other words, the magical blossoms have to be consumed, then the person who consumed them has to be killed and their stomach contents removed and eaten a second time.
All of this begs the question: Just how weird is WandaVision going to get?