WandaVision Director Confirms Popular Fan Theory
This huge WandaVision fan theory has officially been confirmed. Spoilers for WandaVision's entire first season ahead!
During the first season of Marvel's first big television venture, Disney+'s WandaVision, rumors swirled that the genre-bending love story of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) had a dark side: specifically, that Wanda was experiencing the "five stages of grief" popularized by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. As it turns out, this theory was spot on, according to series director Matt Shakman during an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
After watching Wanda and Vision jump through different eras and genres of television for most of the season, Wanda's gambit was clearly revealed when audiences learned that the couple's sweet suburban home of Westview was actually a horrifying hostage situation crafted by Wanda's grief. Since Marvel Cinematic Universe fans already knew that Vision had died during the events of the 2018 installment Avengers: Infinity War, his presence was definitely confusing; however, it eventually turned out that Vision was simply a fabrication of Wanda's powers and mind, as well as her intense grief for her fallen love. In the end, fans were exactly right about the show's connection to a psychological theory — here's what Matt Shakman had to say about this WandaVision fan theory, and how fans were proven correct.
Wanda's journey takes the character through all five stages of grief
Regarding the finale — which watches Wanda leave her husband, Vision, and their children behind by destroying the false reality of Westview — Shakman said that not only was it inevitable, but followed Kübler-Ross' model exactly. "I think it was pretty clear from the beginning that that's where it needed to go," Shakman said. "It was loosely structured on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, all of that. We knew we were heading toward acceptance, so whatever that meant — acceptance of the fact that she cannot keep this fantasy that she's created, acceptance that she must say goodbye to Vision, something that she has tried with all of her might not to do up to that point, and acceptance of who she is now in this world, and that there is a different destiny out there for her."
"Acceptance of this new role as the Scarlet Witch and what that means and where she's going with that power," the director continued. So that's why I said I thought it would feel inevitable to people who were watching it, because we were always telling the same story, which is a relatively simple story. It does have some surprises along the way, but for all of the wonderful theories that were out there and all of the surprise villains who might have showed up, the one villain we always knew we had was grief. That was the big bad of the show. There were other villains [...] and all sorts of people who are up to no good — but it was a relatively simple story. I think the best ones are."
Matt Shakman on the finale's most memorable scene
In that vein, Wanda's devastating acceptance of her grief — which forces her to part ways with Vision and their imagined children in a heartbreaking moment during the finale — is one of the most unforgettable scenes within the MCU to date. Apparently, Shakman agrees; when asked about the episode's most memorable scene, he mentioned it right awasy.
"The most memorable, of course, is the goodbye scene between Wanda and Vision," Shakman told EWi. "It's where the show has been leading the entire time. It's the inevitable acceptance of Vision's loss, saying goodbye to him for the last time. It's a beautiful scene: It's beautifully written, it's beautifully acted, and we had a wonderful time shooting it. It's also a complicated one because we go back through the decades, and we travel around them as he slowly dissolves, and then we're left in that empty lot where she was going to build her future with Vision. So that for me is the emotional highlight. It's a beautiful scene, and this was always a story about grief and how this amazing character was going to try to come to terms with the loss that she's felt and the trauma she's experienced."
WandaVision's entire emotionally charged first season is available to stream on Disney+ now.