Friday, January 29, 2021

Pay No Attention to the People Behind the Tube

One of the least interesting characters in the MCU seeks the daughter of one of the dumbest characters in last night's lame new episode of WandaVision. The first truly bad episode of the series, it featured the kind of starchy editing and smarmy exposition I associate with Agents of SHIELD, one of the big reasons I stopped watching that show.

Devoid of good performances, the episode begins with Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) waking up in a hospital after the "blip", when half the population "died" for five years. She wonders where her mother is--it's eventually revealed her mother was in hospital for cancer treatment and she died in Monica's absence. From this point on, characters refer to Monica as "Rambeau"--pronounced like "Rambo"--which invariably caused me to picture Sylvester Stallone. Is that my age speaking? Is that brand no longer widely recognised?

I bet Disney thinks this is a nice clever way of creating Monica's brand, giving her this setup on WandaVision. I feel bad for any innocent person who loses their mother but Teyonah Parris, while pretty, lacks any kind of charm or creativity in her performance and her lines are exclusively exposition. She meets up with the current director of SWORD, a beefy blond guy (Josh Stamberg) who smirks sympathetically while explaining the situation to her.

He laments taking over he organisation from the more worthy senior Rambo, I mean Rambeau, commenting that there just wasn't anyone else available. Poor schmuck, no-one cares.

"No-one cares," is a line we get from Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), Jane Foster's snarky friend from the first Thor movie who's called in here to investigate the phenomenon trapping people of a small American town within a pixelised perimeter. She asks the other scientists in the car with her for their fields of expertise despite the fact that--as one points out--they're not allowed to talk to each other. They tell her their jobs anyway and when the last guy gives his credential she looks out the window, settling into her snark like a cosy blanket, and says, "No-one cares." Boom! You totally got him, girl, for answering the question you asked! Zing!

She manages to pick up the transmissions of Wanda's (Elisabeth Olsen) and Vision's (Paul Bettany) TV shows. The teams of experts monitor and analyse but for some reason no-one comments on the Hydra commercials.

So, it's bad, but at least it's short, I guess I can tune in next time for Olsen and Bettany. This episode did have one good moment where Olsen briefly glimpsed a creepy dead Vision. Those two do have chemistry.

WandaVision is available on Disney+.

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