For the Love of Writing

This is more my own ideas than spoilers, but I have seen the whole show and have heard a bit about the comics it’s based on, which may creep in, so read at your own risk.

• I loved the sitcom part of the show, not just for the at times creepy ontological mystery, but for the surprisingly entertaining sitcom episodes themselves - and I’m generally lukewarm about sitcoms. So, I say keep them. In fact, have even more sitcom! It took it slow through the 50’s and 60’s and then bolted through the rest, I say take it slow all the way to the present. We can wait, and it’ll give plenty of opportunity to build that mystery.

• Now for that mystery: we start, as before, in the 50’s, with Wanda and Vision blissfully unaware that they’re anything more than the protagonists of your average sitcom. But over time (decades, in fact) our newlyweds-turned-parents gradually discover that something is amiss, that this is not in fact all they’ve ever known, and that they and their fellow residents are trapped and must find a way out.

• Given the set-up, this must, at its heart, be a story about grief; about Wanda coming to terms with the loss of Vision. However, that’s at odds with the revolving door that death is in comics, and it would be a shame to lose Vision just as he’s becoming more interesting. So, to compromise, I suggest that they gradually discover that this is not in fact the Vision that Wanda knows; his body has been repaired, his circuits rewired, but in the process, something essential has been lost, and that, in the end, Wanda must let him go and acknowledge that he is in fact a different person than the Vision she loved.

• And now we get to the resolution. All signs point to Wanda being behind it all, and that could certainly work with the arc of it, but I propose a few alternatives to up the mystery and add a bit of tension. And there are some small suggestions that she’s not behind it; why would the Sakovian Wanda make a world based on American sitcoms? Instead, what if this world is being used to contain Wanda, hence the slow, peaceful sitcom set-up, but that Wanda exerts some influence over it - possibly including fixing Vision - which only grows with time.

• Why contain Wanda, you ask? I happen to really like the idea of Marvel taking a multiverse route for this next phase of the movies (make the fun Pietro real!), so I would center it around that. Wanda and her ill-defined powers are at the heart of a tear in the multiverse (possibly caused in part by the whole to-do with the infinity stones), made worse by her anguish at the death of Vision. To prevent it from getting worse she has been contained. I propose two possible candidates for who’s behind it:
  • Dr. Strange is the obvious choice; this is the sort of thing he’d be expected to be aware of as the sorcerer supreme, the sitcom theme would then be for a lack of anything else (maybe he was stuck watching a bunch after his accident), and then this creates some tension for when Wanda costars with him in Multiverse of Madness
  • Alternatively, it could be Agatha Harkness, but not the one from the show; I would make her a strange, sitcom obsessed witch, who upon discovering that Wanda is at the heart of this tear in the multiverse, decides its time to teach her to use her powers, and puts her in a sitcom to do so, so that she can’t make anything worse. Is it an unorthodox approach, yes, but what do you expect from a kooky old witch?
• In either case, most of the conflict would come from inside the bubble, both from Wanda and Vision’s dawning realizations (even if Wanda isn’t really behind it all, he would still have every reason to suspect her, and she is still exerting a lot of influence) as well as possibly the townspeople eventually turning on Wanda for taking over their lives. I also got serious creepy child vibes at a few points from their a little bit too powerful children, and I’d like that to go somewhere. Maybe they age up and become full on antagonists when they realize their world isn’t real, in a desperate bid to preserve it, or maybe it just becomes a teachable moment.

• Of course, eventually, Wanda comes to terms with her loss and returns to reality. She and the newly restored Vision go their separate ways. Unlike Vision, the children aren’t real and dissipate with the town, but to set up for future trouble, they were real enough to continue to haunt Wanda (literally as well as metaphorically) and make things worse as the tear in the multiverse deepens and Wanda’s powers grow, eventually possibly getting their own bodies when Wanda inevitably rewrites reality to combine the multiverse into one.