I’ve been consuming Marvel stories - in comics, film, television, animation, games, podcasts, what have you - since I was in first grade. It’s entertaining and intriguing enough, but why are we watching? Is it mere escapism and familiarity? Or does the MCU have something substantive to say in 2021?Īs this is only the premiere episode, that remains to be seen, but before we go any further, please allow me to introduce myself: My name is Abraham Riesman, and I’m a recovering Marvelholic. Now with WandaVision, the drought finally ends. Fans clamored for a streaming release of Black Widow to no avail. Instead, that godforsaken year was the first in many with no releases of MCU narrative content (well, other than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which hasn’t really counted in the shared universe since its first season). Suffice it to say that the MCU’s hiatus was absolutely not supposed to be this long multiple movies and shows had been planned for 2020.
But a lot - too much - has happened in the intervening period, most of it far too horrifying and well known to bother recounting in a recap of a streaming series. It’s been a year and a half since the release of the last MCU story, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and it’s not as though everything was going swimmingly back then, either. But such mysteries are dwarfed by one urgent, overarching, implicit query: What is the place of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a world that seems to be falling apart? Yes, sure, we all want to know about the nature of the show’s reality, what all the Easter eggs add up to, who the mysterious supporting cast really is, and so on. The first episode of the Disney+ series WandaVision raises a lot of questions, most of them trivial in the grand scheme of life. Don’t have Disney+ yet? You can sign up here.