WandaVision: Deciphering the first teaser trailer
By Mike McNulty
“This is our home now. I want us to fit in.”
Like any other comic book adaptation, WandaVision has to find it’s inspiration from the original comics. And from what we can tell in this teaser, there’s at least five different comic book stories being adapted and mixed together.
The first appears to take inspiration from Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s short-lived but critically-acclaimed comic book, The Vision. In that series, Vision created for himself a wife based off of Wanda’s brain patterns, along with a daughter, a son, and a dog. Then the Visions moved into the suburbs so they could try and live their lives as an ordinary, nuclear family. Aside from being creepy, things go wrong almost from the very start. While WandaVision isn’t following this scenario to the letter, it does seem that Vision and Wanda’s attempt at domestic bliss will definitely go haywire.
Another relatively recent comic book story arc WandaVision appears to be taking cues from might be Avengers: Standoff. This involved a super villain prison created by S.H.I.E.L.D. made to look like an ordinary small town which they called “Pleasant Hill” (an obvious riff on Pleasantville which, interestingly enough, also took place in a black-and-white TV sitcom universe). Through the use of a Cosmic Cube, S.H.I.E.L.D. “rehabilitated” the prisoners by changing their memories to make them believe they had always lived in this quaint, small town.
By contrast, this series appears to involve S.H.I.E.L.D.’s replacement, S.W.O.R.D., and it seems they’re as much in the dark as we are. It does appear, however, that Vision, Wanda, and perhaps dozens of ordinary people, are imprisoned and made to believe they’re in an idealized, sitcom-inspired version of small-town America. That would also account for why Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is wearing 1970s fashion, and appears to be forcibly thrown out of some pocket dimension in front of S.W.O.R.D. agents. Perhaps she, along with S.W.O.R.D. are attempting to rescue whoever is trapped inside Wanda and Vision’s personal family sitcom.
Moreover, it looks as though where ever this place is, it may have been created… by Wanda herself. If so, that would fit in with another comic book story WandaVision appears to be taking inspiration from.