After seven painfully short episodes of Marvel’s WandaVision, we’re still none the wiser about how exactly the Westview anomaly was created, and how Vision was brought back to life. We’ve just been introduced to one potential villain in the form of nosy neighbor Agnes – unveiled as powerful Marvel Comics witch Agatha Harkness – and we’ve seen that Wanda is still far from a malevolent force. She has threatened people who’ve encroached on The Hex, but she hasn’t killed any of them, and we don’t know how aware she is about the true ramifications of her control over the town’s residents. Meanwhile, we have some lingering Westview mysteries to uncover, and the true identity of “Pietro Maximoff” to contend with.

The 10th Episode

Ah, it’s time to address the mythical tenth episode of WandaVision! We’ve avoided covering this for a while, because it has honestly felt like an additional instalment thrown in at the end of the nine-episode project would probably be consigned to the “unlikely” column, but let’s take a look at it now in the wake of some recent information from Marvel Studios. Certain sites have noted that a few WandaVision actors have been listed to appear in ten episodes of the series and not nine, but this is easily explainable when you factor in the surprise announcement of Assembled, a new documentary run that will go behind the scenes of various Marvel Disney+ shows. It begins with The Making of WandaVision, which will begin streaming after this first MCU spinoff has concluded. We think this is all there is to the various rumors of a tenth episode, but fans are still theorizing that it could happen. Ultimately, none of us will be proved right or wrong until WandaVision has finished, so this theory will probably keep doing the rounds for another couple of weeks. Pinches of Paprika Out of 10: 9

The Parentals

There are still a lot of theories surrounding the nature of WandaVision’s commercials, but the idea that they’re somehow being created from Wanda’s overwhelming grief holds water. They do often seem to address various moments of Wanda’s traumatic past, including the incident in Lagos and her experimental history with Strucker. Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 7

Testing, Testing

At the climax of episode 7, we found out that iconic Marvel Comics witch Agatha Harkness was responsible for a lot of meddling throughout many of the sitcom scenes in WandaVision. The reveal came complete with an earworm to end all earworms, ‘Agatha All Along’, but there’s a fascinating theory wafting about online that the TV signal itself wasn’t created by either Agatha or Wanda, but Doctor Strange, who was using it via a spell to monitor what was going on inside the Hex anomaly when he found himself unable to penetrate it. Going further, some fans posit that the commercials are warnings that Strange has attempted to sew inside the broadcast to warn Wanda about the nefarious magicks being used against her inside The Hex by the likes of Agatha. They haven’t managed to get through to Wanda, but have instead played out as skewed variations on his attempt at contacting her through her subconscious. Is Strange trying to pull Wanda back to reality by telling her what might happen if she doesn’t break the spell? Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 7 If we go back to the episode where Agatha revealed Sparky’s death to Wanda and the twins, you might remember that she seemed genuinely unnerved when Billy and Tommy asked their mom to change the family dog’s grim fate. “You can do that?” she asked Wanda, and appeared lost in thought. Was this the actual moment she knew that Wanda had managed to bring Vision back from the dead inside the confines of The Hex, and that he wasn’t just another illusion? The main theory surrounding the nature of Agatha’s powers is linked to her ability to plop the X-Men universe’s version of Pietro Maximoff into Westview at a crucial moment, as we saw during her catchy flashback montage. Wanda definitely knows this incarnation isn’t Pietro, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t really Evan Peters’ beloved Peter Maximoff, does it? Perhaps Agatha is impressed by Wanda’s rumored resurrection powers because she herself isn’t able to bring people back from the dead. Instead of presenting Wanda with the real Pietro, she had to pull another variation in from the multiverse using The Hex’s rumored Nexus power. Maybe Agatha is revealing herself to Wanda now because she wants Wanda to bring someone else back to life. Could it be someone who was once close to Agatha, or a villainous presence who will go on to make waves in the MCU? And if this does indeed turn out to be the X-Men version of Peter Maximoff, will he be able to break Agatha’s control over him and continue to be part of the MCU beyond WandaVision? Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 4 Yes, many fans sensed that Vision wasn’t likely to make past the final (final) credits of WandaVision since the show began, but there’s also some pretty solid MCU-based reasoning behind the theory if you take a small step back to the very beginning of Phase 4’s story.
During Spider-Man: Far From Home’s In Memoriam video, hilariously set to the strains of Whitney Houston’s power ballad ‘I Will Always Love You’, Vision is pictured as one of those Avengers who are “gone, but not forgotten” in a “touching tribute” to our fallen heroes. According to public record, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, Vision and Cap (who is probably keeping a very low profile in his Old Cap guise) are all very much dead in the Peter Parker-centric blockbuster – which takes place some time after the events of WandaVision. Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly, etc, Vision will not spring back to life if and when The Hex breaks down. So, should we just go ahead and assume we’re in for yet another Paul Bettany death scene? Maybe, but let’s not forget that Bettany has been part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe since its inception in 2008, and he’s already been nixed three times. First as the voice of Tony’s AI, JARVIS, then twice at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Are they really going to cut him loose for good? The actor clearly LOVES being part of the MCU. While we may well see the last of Vision in WandaVision, we reckon it’s time for Bettany to undergo another Marvel reincarnation. Pinches of Paprika Out of 10: 3

You Don’t Have the Stones

We’ve yet to see a few moments that crop up in WandaVision’s previous trailers, and the most important of these appear to show Wanda in a prison or hospital outfit witnessing the recreation of at least one of the Infinity Stones. There are plenty of theories that tackle whether Wanda herself is pulling the stone/s back from the atomic level that Thanos reduced them to at the start of Avengers: Endgame, or whether the Mind Stone is specifically is drawn to her since the stone was originally key to unlocking or enhancing her superpowers, but it’s hard to gauge the sequence of events that led to its re-emergence without defining where and when these moments play out in the MCU timeline. Since WandaVision takes place pretty soon after Endgame, do these images depict Wanda, bruised and exhausted from battling Thanos, in a holding room awaiting treatment? It doesn’t exactly seem like she’s a prisoner here as these aren’t the kind of power-controlling restraints she was subjected to on The Raft in Captain America: Civil War. The potentially mind-blowing reason we can’t wait to find out how Wanda comes to be in the presence of a reformed Infinity Stone is because her darker hair, ravaged look and outfit here almost exactly match her very first appearance inside a cell in Strucker’s lab at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Pinches of Paprika Out of Ten: 1