WandaVision Episode 4 Ending Explained

The fourth WandaVision episode opens with a flashback to the Avengers: Endgame moment when Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) snapped everyone back into existence — an event known as "the Blip" — from Monica Rambeau's perspective. She awakens in a hospital where her mom, Maria "Photon" Rambeau, received successful cancer treatment just before Thanos (Josh Brolin) eliminated half of all life in the universe. Frantic, Monica learns that five years have passed, and that her mother is long gone thanks to her cancer's return. Nevertheless, she presses on, returning to work at S.W.O.R.D. (an organization for which her mom served as director) in no time flat.

Monica's first assignment back takes her to Westview, New Jersey, where an FBI witness in the protection program went missing and has not returned. She arrives on the scene to meet with Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) of Ant-Man fame, and attempts to get a glimpse inside the town from a distance. Despite her best efforts, Monica soon finds herself sucked into its energy field and unwittingly adopts on the persona "Geraldine," as we've seen in previous episodes. 

By the time the credits roll, Wanda shoots Monica out of Westview (as she did at the end of WandaVision episode 3), but Monica appears to have all of her memories intact, thankfully. It'll be interesting to learn what she found in her time under Westview's influence, in addition to more details about her backstory in the coming episodes.

While this WandaVision episode largely focuses on S.W.O.R.D.'s involvement in Wanda's sitcom world, it also explains quite a bit about the town of Westview and its residents. As revealed by Jimmy Woo early on, the odd town is somehow very stringent about who enters and who leaves. Not to mention, everyone around it seems to have collective amnesia about its existence, with an Eastview police officer denying it's a real place while standing next to its welcome sign. Thanks to Darcy's input, it's discovered that Westview gives off a television broadcast frequency entwined with Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (apparently a Big-Bang-like byproduct of the new pocket reality's creation), allowing them to observe it on an antique TV as if it's a classic television series.

In a startling revelation, it's deduced that some of the program's mainstays — Mr. Hart (Fred Melamed), Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp), Norm (Asif Ali), Phil Jones (David Lengel), Beverly (Jolene Purdy), and Herb (David Payton), to name a few — are living beings trapped inside this simulated reality. They all — except, apparently, for Agnes, which you can see in the image above — have true identities and lives away from Westview, details of which S.W.O.R.D. are able to uncover with relative ease. Whether or not they're aware of it or if they're under some kind of spell that makes them act accordingly remains to be unveiled, but one can only hope they'll make it out of Westview alive sooner rather than later.

Additionally, in the closing moments of the episode, we get a glimpse at what seems to be Vision's true form, and it's absolutely horrifying. He appears not as the vibrant, lively synthezoid we've seen him as previously, but rather as the colorless, Mind Stone-less husk Thanos reduced him to in Avengers: Infinity War. This seems to indicate that he's still very much deceased, with someone apparently puppeteering his body and altering his appearance to ease Wanda's heartbreak over his demise. It's cruel, twisted, and heartbreaking, but what would WandaVision be without such qualities?

By now, we've gotten more than a few glimpses behind the curtain — and Monica's explanation that "it's all Wanda" definitely fits with what we've seen. She's the one who rewound time when she saw the beekeeper in episode 2. She's the one who blasted Monica out of Westview. She seems to be the one who changes Vision's appearance at the end of episode 4, after we catch sight of his dead eyed face and gem-less forehead. After all, one of the most famous Marvel Comics storylines involving Wanda was House of M, in which she creates a new version of reality as a way of dealing with the trauma of her personal life — specifically in response to the lingering trauma of realizing her children, Tommy and Billy, aren't real, and they disappear from existence. And we've gotten other hints and references that seem to point to the House of M storyline, in the form of a wine bottle in episode 1 and the butterflies in episode 3.

It's not much of a stretch to surmise that she created Westview in a similar reaction to the trauma of losing Vision to Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. Her reaction to seeing his dead face in this episode seems to prove that she's aware of Vision's true form and is doing everything in her power to deny that reality — and that may include creating and controlling Westview. And the ending of episode 4 — where we see Wanda forcefully smashing Monica through walls to maintain her sitcom-reality's illusion — contrasts pretty hard with the ending of episode 3, in which it's merely implied that Wanda simply ejected Monica out of Westview.

However, with more than half of the nine-episode series left to go, there's a decent enough bet that there's even more going on underneath the surface. We're meant to infer that Wanda is in control, and being told that "it's all Wanda" is certainly a good way to reinforce that idea. But then why are Agnes and Dottie some of the only residents of Westview not to be identified with real-world counterparts? Is there more to them than meets the eye...or are we just finding clues wherever we can, trying to stay one step ahead of WandaVision's showrunners? We'll at least have to wait to see episode 5 next week to find out.