WandaVision

[Devonix]

Spoiler: My own take on Episode 5

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Agnes killed the dog to get a reaction.

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Possibly. Agnes seems to be one of the people there that are kinda fighting through the mind control. But still trapped by it. And as the story goes on more and more people are slipping out. But we know she's still under some control based off other things shown.

[theNater]

Someone needs to do a chain-of-custody on all these frickin’ stones, because they sure get around.

I'll take a crack at it. Starting where we first see them, ending when Thanos got them in Infinity War.

Power: Deserted planet Morag -> Star-Lord -> Ronan -> Star-Lord -> Nova Corps -> Thanos
Space: Norwegian church -> Red Skull -> Howard Stark -> Mar-Vell -> Goose -> Nick Fury -> Loki -> Avengers -> Odin's treasure vault -> Loki -> Thanos
Reality: Ruins of Svartalfheim -> Jane Foster -> Malekith -> Thor -> The Collector -> Thanos
Soul: Vormir -> Thanos
Time: Kamar-Taj -> Dr. Strange -> Thanos
Mind: Loki -> S.H.I.E.L.D -> Strucker -> Avengers -> Ultron -> Vision -> Thanos

One note on the mind stone: I don't think it's ever made explicit where Loki got it from. The implication is that Thanos gave it to Loki so he could get the Space Stone.

[Draconi Redfir]

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Possibly. Agnes seems to be one of the people there that are kinda fighting through the mind control. But still trapped by it. And as the story goes on more and more people are slipping out. But we know she's still under some control based off other things shown.

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on the topic of Agnes:

while I'm not a super fan of the theory that Agnes is somehow the mastermind behind all this. i do find it suspicious how she showed up exactly when wanda needed her in this episode. coming in knowing about crying kids, and bringing a dog house when they found the dog. she used the excuse of seeing / hearing them from outside, but i unno...

do hope that is actually the case though. I'm more invested in Wanda being the primary culprit then Agnes / some other entity. Barring my previous thought that she was being held in some kind of coma to be experimented on by hydra or something of course.

Spoiler: Infinity Stones + Wanda

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She has all the stone powers actually. She's a living Infinity Gauntlet. Mind and Reality are the most obvious, but we see her fall to the ground in AoU and trigger a disintegration wave like the Power Stone, she senses both Black Widow and Vision in the afterlife like the Soul stone, and she sees the future like Doctor Strange did when he used the Time Stone, etc.

We also see this hinted at in the show. Every "commercial" we've seen so far hints at one of the stones - the toaster in episode 1 has a light in the center positioned like Vision's Mind Stone, the Strucker watch is hinting at the Time stone, the Hydra Soak soap is a blue cube akin to the Tesseract, and the spilled red liquid in the Lagos commercial is reminiscent of the Aether.

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h'uh, wouldn't she have needed to be exposed to all six stones for this though? how would experimentation with just one stone cause her to gain the powers of all six?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Ramza00
Points to the same feat occuring in Endgame

The difference is time travel, which changes the game entirely. Kind of a trump card that the Kree don’t have.

Originally Posted by theNater
One note on the mind stone: I don't think it's ever made explicit where Loki got it from. The implication is that Thanos gave it to Loki so he could get the Space Stone.

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In Avengers, the freaky two-thumbed Herald of Thanos (or whoever he is; later killed in a snit by Ronan) tells Loki that “he” gave the scepter into Loki’s hands. Unless there’s someone else passing out Infinity Stones, this “he” is almost certainly Thanos.

But that does beg the question of how Thanos originally got it, and why—if he had it before 2012—it was such a big deal in Endgame when he located the Power Stone in 2014. “Father’s plan is finally in motion,” etc. The dialogue between Nebula and Gamora suggests this is the first one he found (“One stone isn’t six”) —but if it was, where did he get the Mindstone prior to 2012?

[Traab]

I wanted to throw my hat in the ring about the multi phd thing. Speaking as someone who doesnt know how phd programs work, it passes the fridge logic test at the very least. Here is my chain of logic, getting multiple phds should be much faster in related fields than in unrelated ones. So if I got a phd in ancient greek history, then wanted one in classical music theory, I would expect to spend a LOT of years in school due to a lack of overlap in class work. But if I got my first phd in chemistry, then wanted to get a second in biochemistry, i would expect the second to be a lot faster because of the sheer volume of overlap between the two subjects. Im not starting from scratch with an entirely new subject. If I then go for a third with nuclear chemistry, again, i would expect my previous schooling to cut down a lot of the classwork. I would expect my second or third phd course to take half to a third as long as my first. Now, if it actually could work that way, I have no idea, im just saying that it sounds legit to a guy who has no doctorate in anything, and considering the youngest phd holder in the real world was 13 when it happened, having 7 by the time you turn 30 isnt that outrageous for a super genius. And remember, these people were pretty much all described as super geniuses. Tony stark and his engineering from a young age, reed richards and his dimensional portal device invented for a high school science fair, lex luthor stealing 40 pies from a bakery, etc etc etc.

As a second point, the 7 phd thing? Its basically meant less as an accurate description of how education works, and more a shorthand way to justify why these people are able to solve every problem ever and invent literal sci fi technology. "Well of course they can do it! They started earning phds before they were allowed to date! These guys are so brilliant they are masters of every field of science when most of the real world famous smart people are only masters of one!" Its just a way to proclaim they are brilliant with some stats rather than just saying they are brilliant.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Traab
…getting multiple phds should be much faster in related fields than in unrelated ones.

The fastest Ph.D. I’ve heard of in present-day academia was two (2) years, and that is so insanely fast that it could hardly be believed. Essentially the student walked into a project that had already been custom-built for him, all funding in place, and apparently he had a long prior association with his faculty advisor and already had most of the coursework completed.

That is an anomaly, to say the least, and in most science programs you’re very lucky to finish in 4-5 years. I’ve known people who took 10-12 years, although in the longer cases there are usually significant personal distractions, such as careers going in a different direction, demanding full-time jobs, life crises, etc.

But as discussed above, there’s simply no point to getting more than two Ph.D.s, since you’ll be overqualified for pretty much any job on the planet, and made-up agencies like S.H.I.E.L.D. and S.W.O.R.D. aren’t as impressed with formal qualifications anyway. When you’re building quantum tunnels to other realms of existence, your number of first-author publications tends to matter less.

Originally Posted by Traab
As a second point, the 7 phd thing? Its basically meant less as an accurate description of how education works, and more a shorthand way to justify why these people are able to solve every problem ever and invent literal sci fi technology.

Well, remember that Tony Stark has 0.00 Ph.D.s (other than perhaps some honorary doctorates that haven’t been mentioned) but that hasn’t stopped him from being the most prolific inventor in the MCU. Even in the MCU, multiple Ph.D.s aren’t a very good predictor of problem-solving and invention, since the one character who supposedly has the most education tends to solve problems by punching them while green.

One more comment about multiple Ph.D.s in the real world: apart from the issues already mentioned, there would start to be real questions about the value of your career once you got past three or four. The point of the Ph.D. is to prepare you for a career in your chosen field; but if you keep bouncing from field to field, people will be less willing to take you on as a student, because you’ve demonstrated you may not stay in any one field for long. That means less scientific output in that field, less opportunities for collaboration with other specialists in that field, and less commitment to that field overall.

So the seven-Ph.D.s line, if it’s anything other than a throwaway joke, in all likelihood refers to 1-2 actual Ph.D.s and a stack of honorary doctorates. That's the only thing that really makes sense in the context of real-world academia.

[Devonix]

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h'uh, wouldn't she have needed to be exposed to all six stones for this though? how would experimentation with just one stone cause her to gain the powers of all six?

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She would have need to wouldn't she.
So yeah, 2 weeks before Wandavision Starts. She uses her powers on all of the stones at the same time. And is ground central for the destruction of the Mind Stone and the release of it's energy.

[Dire_Flumph]

Late to the party as usual. Don't have much to add other than the fact that it is both beautiful and terrifying that an entertainment company can get big enough to pull that kind of fannish "Wouldn't it be cool if XXXXX showed up" kind of meta-casting.

Spoiler: So does this mean.....

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Ok, I joked about this to my wife when WandaVision started, but it's now really not out of the bonds of possibility that "Agnes" could actually be Dr. Olivia Octavius. Or was she identified as someone else in the previous episode already?

Otherwise, I am now fully invested in where this is going. Very enjoyable episode.

[Argis13]

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She would have need to wouldn't she.
So yeah, 2 weeks before Wandavision Starts. She uses her powers on all of the stones at the same time. And is ground central for the destruction of the Mind Stone and the release of it's energy.

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Wasn't that undone via time stone?

...But the timestone seems to be able to selectively move subjects back and forward along their timeline, so Wanda's exposure to that blast may not have been undone, despite the fact it "never happened."

Also, I think that was more like 5 years ago, in real time, due to the Endgame time skip- unless you're talking about her subjective experience of time, in which case, that's closer- doesn't really matter for your argument, she hasn't really had an opportunity to show off her powers since that point.

However, I don't think that "zapping all the infinity stones at once" is what expanded her powers, it wouldn't serve a narrative purpose. That's an origin story, not a dramatic reveal. The Mind Stone gave her brother superspeed; tell me how that makes sense. The Infinity stones just have vague, broad powers that don't really need to be consistent to tell a good story. The new extent of her powers is either

A: She's just accessing more of her powers due to the trauma she's trying to escape.

B: Some villain is manipulating her, feeding her energy while/to subtly control(ling) her or whatnot.

or

C: Why not both?

[Hopeless]

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Wasn't that undone via time stone?

...But the timestone seems to be able to selectively move subjects back and forward along their timeline, so Wanda's exposure to that blast may not have been undone, despite the fact it "never happened."

Also, I think that was more like 5 years ago, in real time, due to the Endgame time skip- unless you're talking about her subjective experience of time, in which case, that's closer- doesn't really matter for your argument, she hasn't really had an opportunity to show off her powers since that point.

However, I don't think that "zapping all the infinity stones at once" is what expanded her powers, it wouldn't serve a narrative purpose. That's an origin story, not a dramatic reveal. The Mind Stone gave her brother superspeed; tell me how that makes sense. The Infinity stones just have vague, broad powers that don't really need to be consistent to tell a good story. The new extent of her powers is either

A: She's just accessing more of her powers due to the trauma she's trying to escape.

B: Some villain is manipulating her, feeding her energy while/to subtly control(ling) her or whatnot.

or

C: Why not both?

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Wasn't the Mind Stone supposed to be holding some kind of advanced AI that was eventually turned into Ultron?

Maybe using the Mind Stone allowed them to activate latent dna they already possessed?
Wanda's mind was enhanced enough to begin developing those powers and Pietro simply developed in a different way though you'd think he'd be almost as powerful as his twin sister...

What if the twins aren't the only successful test subjects?

They're merely the ones Strucker knew about and were present at that facility so the others remained undiscovered?

Yes maybe the infinity stones recognizing Thanos was going to destroy them once he no longer needed them infused Wanda when the Avengers time trip gave them the chance when the Hulk snapped them all back?

[GloatingSwine]

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Wasn't the Mind Stone supposed to be holding some kind of advanced AI that was eventually turned into Ultron?

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Yeah, there was something latent in the Mind Stone that was waiting to come out. Note how just being in the presence of it used to warp people's behaviour and drive conflict, let alone being poked with the sceptre, but that stopped happening after Ultron was created.

Spoiler: General series

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It's pretty clear that Wanda's powers are getting turbocharged, and she's getting up to the point where she can rewrite reality like her upper levels of power in the comics and she's not quite in control of that, a lot of it is happening subconsciously and some of it is starting to be explicitly out of her control.

That, of course, never ends well.

Buckle in because we could be going full House of M by the end of this series.


Wild speculation: This is setup for the Phase 4 Big Bad. Which will be Mephisto.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

One more comment about multiple Ph.D.s in the real world: apart from the issues already mentioned, there would start to be real questions about the value of your career once you got past three or four. The point of the Ph.D. is to prepare you for a career in your chosen field; but if you keep bouncing from field to field, people will be less willing to take you on as a student, because you’ve demonstrated you may not stay in any one field for long. That means less scientific output in that field, less opportunities for collaboration with other specialists in that field, and less commitment to that field overall.

Dr. Banner was on the run for a while though, dodging the military. Might he have gotten some of those under an assumed identity?

Spoiler: General series

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Wild speculation: This is setup for the Phase 4 Big Bad. Which will be Mephisto.

TBH I’m hoping it won’t be, because that’s been speculated so much it won’t be surprising at this point.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
Dr. Banner was on the run for a while though, dodging the military. Might he have gotten some of those under an assumed identity?

In terms of mainstream academia, there would be zero point to that, and it would be strongly counterproductive. If it turned out that Dr. Alastair Fellows was actually Dr. Bruce Banner, no one would hire him under either identity. Academia is extremely unforgiving of that sort of thing.

And even if he maintained the cover identity, he'd only get credit in his new career for the papers published by Dr. Fellows, which means he'd be abandoning all the work under his real name--in the sense that it wouldn't support the professional reputation of his new identity. He'd be crippling himself for the dubious pleasure of working as a much more junior faculty member.

On the other hand, if he's not working in academia, there's no point to getting another Ph.D., since the primary purpose is to prepare you to work as a professional scholar in academia. Possibly he might try to work at an NGO in a different field, but the risks of discovery would remain as great.

[Devonix]

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Yeah, there was something latent in the Mind Stone that was waiting to come out. Note how just being in the presence of it used to warp people's behaviour and drive conflict, let alone being poked with the sceptre, but that stopped happening after Ultron was created.

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That wasn't the mind stone doing it on it's own That was Loki using the Scepter at a distance, he was controlling it. He could even tell what was going on in the room where they were.

Spoiler: General series

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It's pretty clear that Wanda's powers are getting turbocharged, and she's getting up to the point where she can rewrite reality like her upper levels of power in the comics and she's not quite in control of that, a lot of it is happening subconsciously and some of it is starting to be explicitly out of her control.

That, of course, never ends well.

Buckle in because we could be going full House of M by the end of this series.


Wild speculation: This is setup for the Phase 4 Big Bad. Which will be Mephisto.

Spoiler: villan speculation

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Very much doubting it's Mephisto. They're not gonna make the villain for their Family TV show the Devil

[Mordar]

TBH I’m hoping it won’t be, because that’s been speculated so much it won’t be surprising at this point.

That would have plenty of huge optics issues. Plus, he should be a Defenders (the real ones, not the street level Netflix version) villain.

- M

[Kareeah_Indaga]

In terms of mainstream academia, there would be zero point to that, and it would be strongly counterproductive. If it turned out that Dr. Alastair Fellows was actually Dr. Bruce Banner, no one would hire him under either identity. Academia is extremely unforgiving of that sort of thing.

And even if he maintained the cover identity, he'd only get credit in his new career for the papers published by Dr. Fellows, which means he'd be abandoning all the work under his real name--in the sense that it wouldn't support the professional reputation of his new identity. He'd be crippling himself for the dubious pleasure of working as a much more junior faculty member.

On the other hand, if he's not working in academia, there's no point to getting another Ph.D., since the primary purpose is to prepare you to work as a professional scholar in academia. Possibly he might try to work at an NGO in a different field, but the risks of discovery would remain as great.

But you’re overlooking something pretty basic here, namely that Bruce Banner has no reason to care about academia or getting a job with any of those Ph.Ds. He has a big, green, angry problem he needs to ‘fix’ and getting extra education in different fields would be a logical step to take to accomplish that. So there is very much a potential use for them, and any blows to his reputation are meaningless: he can’t get a job anyway, with the military after him and a non-zero chance of spontaneously quadrupling in size and wrecking everything nearby. And we’ve seen him pull some cloak-and-dagger stuff on screen what with the pretending to be a pizza guy and the ‘Mr. Green’ secrecy to ‘fix’ himself, so plainly it’s something he was willing to do. Unless I have my Hulk movies switched around.

[theNater]

Spoiler: For the Children?

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Are there any theories out there about where Westview's kids are? For reference, a town of that size would be expected to have somewhere between 800 and 1000 people under the age of 18.

[GloatingSwine]

Spoiler: villan speculation

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Very much doubting it's Mephisto. They're not gonna make the villain for their Family TV show the Devil

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I don't think he'll be in this series, I think he'll be a phase 4 overall villain that this series is planting the first seeds for.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Spoiler: For the Children?

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Are there any theories out there about where Westview's kids are? For reference, a town of that size would be expected to have somewhere between 800 and 1000 people under the age of 18.

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Maybe children are immune to the sitcom magic mind control and they all left/got kicked out?

If Agnes is in fact in on this somehow, maybe the ‘kids, you can’t control them’ line wasn’t just directed at Wanda re: her own children.

[GloatingSwine]

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Maybe children are immune to the sitcom magic mind control and they all left/got kicked out?

If Agnes is in fact in on this somehow, maybe the ‘kids, you can’t control them’ line wasn’t just directed at Wanda re: her own children.

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Also they wouldn't fit the sitcom milieu. Most sitcoms that aren't mainly about kids don't have many, if any at all. (Saves the extra hassle and expense complying with rules for working with child actors, after all.)

[Clertar]

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I don't think he'll be in this series, I think he'll be a phase 4 overall villain that this series is planting the first seeds for.

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I doubt that this phase will have a big bad mirroring Thanos. Probably the antagonist will be a big conflict rather than an enemy, e.g. Secret Invasion for half of the MCU and fixing the multiverse for the other half.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
He has a big, green, angry problem he needs to ‘fix’ and getting extra education in different fields would be a logical step to take to accomplish that.

If his only concern is to deal with The Other Guy, then he has no reason to pursue any additional formal degrees. He can do all the reading he wants without needing to deal with the university bureaucracy.

Earning a Ph.D. is an intensive process, but coursework isn’t a major component when compared to conducting and publishing research. If all Bruce wants is to learn more about different fields, a Ph.D. is an extremely inefficient way to go about it. Much easier for him to just get papers from the internet and read up on what he needs. There’s no degree plan for fixing a tendency to gain mass and punch tanks, so there’s no real incentive to spend time dealing with everything a Ph.D. entails.

Originally Posted by theNater

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Are there any theories out there about where Westview's kids are?

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If Wanda is creating people in town, it does seem strange she hasn’t created ordinary families to fill it out.

But if something else is populating the town, and using Wanda to control the adults involved, it may be that kids simply aren’t necessary for the project and/or Wanda’s delusion. When she’s submerged, she’s able to take everything at face value without asking questions, so she’s able to sustain her pseudo-life without wondering why her kids don’t have friends their age—or for that matter, why they don’t seem to go to school.

[Clertar]

Earning a Ph.D. is an intensive process, but coursework isn’t a major component when compared to conducting and publishing research. If all Bruce wants is to learn more about different fields, a Ph.D. is an extremely inefficient way to go about it. Much easier for him to just get papers from the internet and read up on what he needs. There’s no degree plan for fixing a tendency to gain mass and punch tanks, so there’s no real incentive to spend time dealing with everything a Ph.D. entails.

Except that he would most likely need access to scientific equipment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. On his own he can read up, but eventually he would have to run tests on himself. That's an entire range of data that published papers in his field would not be able to provide. As a PhD student in physics, working on a dissertation on gamma radiation, he has the perfect excuse to spend time at the lab. During weekends or late hours, when his lab colleagues are not around, he can do additional more conspicuous tests.
(Also, given how much of a genius he is, he would have no problems getting a nice doctoral scholarship, so a PhD would also take care of getting him a monthly legal salary to cover basic needs. And probably also additional legitimacy for his undercover identity, under the umbrella of an academic institution where he is studying/employed.)

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Clertar
As a PhD student in physics, working on a dissertation on gamma radiation, he has the perfect excuse to spend time at the lab.

Access to equipment is probably the one major benefit which pursuing another Ph.D. might provide. But if he’s on the run from the military, as Kareeah mentioned, then he’s going to be at risk every second he stays in a busy university.

You can’t just show up to the first day of classes in a Ph.D. program. You need transcripts and the full application process, and while theoretically those can be faked, that’s a lot of effort for a high risk of discovery. And partial data won’t be much use if he has to run on a moment’s notice—and what he leaves behind might end up giving the military more clues in their pursuit.

Fact is, unless Bruce Banner has a foolproof disguise for face-to-face encounters, he will probably be recognized and outed very quickly. As a student, he will be spending time with his faculty advisor, graduate committee, and office staff in his department and all over campus. If he's working in a department related to his previous studies, it's more than likely that people will know people who knew him, and sooner or later he'll be recognized--and that's without the military actively hunting him down. A Ph.D. program just isn’t an especially useful cover.

If he really just wants access to certain equipment, his best bet is to take a low-paying maintenance job and stick to the night shifts. I guarantee you that if he puts on grey overalls, 99% of the college students and professors will ignore him like he’s invisible. He won’t be able to spend much active time with major items, because the power draw will attract too much attention; but if he’s strategic about it, he can probably pull it off.

But again, that involves moonlighting as a maintenance tech and keeping out of sight. No need for the risk, hassle, delay and distraction of a graduate degree program.

[Cikomyr2]

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The children have all been banished in a subreality and caused mutants to be a thing there. That's where this Quicksilver comes.

[Dragonus45]

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Honestly, I am super not a fan of doing some convoluted plan to explain why mutants exist. It would be so much easier to just say "they were here all along" and be done with it.

[Cikomyr2]

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Honestly, I am super not a fan of doing some convoluted plan to explain why mutants exist. It would be so much easier to just say "they were here all along" and be done with it.

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well...

That's Wanda's power, isn't it? Somehow creating shard universes where something always has been?

She created the Hexverse where her and her brother are common things that didn't needed you being brainwashed by Hydra. It's the X-verse.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Cikomyr2

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That's Wanda's power, isn't it? Somehow creating shard universes where something always has been?

She created the Hexverse where her and her brother are common things that didn't needed you being brainwashed by Hydra. It's the X-verse.

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I'm not at all sure that's what's going on. The Hex isn't a separate plane or pocket universe; it's a town surrounded by an energy barrier, within which Wanda exerts varying degrees of control. The drones, the Beekeeper, even Monica went back and forth in a fairly straightforward manner. It's Wanda's own semi-private enclave, but it doesn't seem like a separate universe, and no reason to believe it's an "X-Verse" per se.

[Cikomyr2]

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I'm not at all sure that's what's going on. The Hex isn't a separate plane or pocket universe; it's a town surrounded by an energy barrier, within which Wanda exerts varying degrees of control. The drones, the Beekeeper, even Monica went back and forth in a fairly straightforward manner. It's Wanda's own semi-private enclave, but it doesn't seem like a separate universe, and no reason to believe it's an "X-Verse" per se.

Well...

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Darcy did find large quantity of cosmic background radiation in episode 4. So I suspect this means Westview is now its own private universe that exists conjoint to the MCU reality.

And the Hexverse can't just be a reshaping/reflavoring of reality by Wanda. Otherwise it makes no sense for her not to control 100% of what happens there, unless her psyche is genuinely split and part of her is actively outside of her conscious control.

And her brother. He isn't a reanimated body. He isn't a brainwashed hostage. There are things outside of Wanda's control, and I do believe she created a whole new universe that is slowly manifesting its own conscious will.

[Palanan]

In this show, anything’s possible.

However….

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Originally Posted by Cikomyr2
Darcy did find large quantity of cosmic background radiation in episode 4. So I suspect this means Westview is now its own private universe that exists conjoint to the MCU reality.

Cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is a residual echo of the energy of the Big Bang. If Westview is generating its own CMBR, that would argue there was a Big Bang in Westview, which I think we would’ve noticed.

Also, if Wanda created a copy of Westview in its own universe, where is the original Westview? “Vaporized” would be the easy answer, but that puts Wanda squarely in “morally horrendous supervillain territory,” which may be a little intense for a Disney show.

Not saying it’s not possible, just seems unlikely.

Originally Posted by Cikomyr2
Otherwise it makes no sense for her not to control 100% of what happens there, unless her psyche is genuinely split and part of her is actively outside of her conscious control.

I think this is very much the case. We’ve seen her fully submerged in her family fantasy; we’ve seen her temporarily jolted out of it; we’ve seen her deliberately return to that fantasy; and we’ve seen her at least partly aware of her actions and defending her retreat into the fantasy.

She is alternately rising and plunging through layers of awareness, and it seems clear that she’s suppressing her awareness of the real situation (Exhibit A: ZombieVision) and perhaps being manipulated by an outside force as well.

Originally Posted by Cikomyr2
And her brother. He isn't a reanimated body. He isn't a brainwashed hostage.

I think at this point we don’t know what he is. Wanda doesn’t, so we don’t have much to go on here.