WandaVision showrunner and director explain why the finale wasn’t what we all hoped it would be

So… Wandavision has been and gone and, as good as it was (and it was), it left us here at FTN Towers feeling that something was missing.

And it’s not because we have theories about Mephisto or Magneto (we did)  – we’ve been fans of shows like this for years, if these things ruined our enjoyment, we’d enjoy nothing, so if that’s your theory, I can assure you you’re waaaaaay off base.

It just felt… unfinished. What happened Senor Scratchy? Who was The Engineer? Darcy just left? Really, THAT was the Quicksilver pay-off? And was Agatha – who was amazing – really meant to be the main villain or was there more planned? And what about Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) – was that all there was to her story?

Well, it seems that our feeling something was amiss in the finale wasn’t misjudged as several things were left unresolved, mostly due to that damned virus.

In a new interview with Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin on the Fatman on Batman podcast, director Matt Shakman talked about what was meant to be and what was left on the cutting room floor, as they say.

On the role of Monica Rambeau in the story, Shakman says it was an ever-changing landscape: “We built and rebuilt so many different versions of how [Monica] would function in the finale.. She had in some versions a much bigger role to play in the larger fight that was happening.”

In fact, one of the biggest problems many seemed to have with the finale was that there was no ‘big bad’ villain to defeat other than Agatha and many believed her rabbit, Senor Scratchy, was to be be revealed as having a bigger role to play, with many believing the name may allude to Mr Scratch, another name for the devil – and yes, that may have been the plan and it would have given Kat Dennings’ Darcy Lewis a better sign off than the ‘oh, she left’ that she got in the series: “We did have something planned for Senor Scratchy which we ultimately couldn’t do just because the finale had so many different chess pieces,” says Shakman.

“But we did have a whole sequence where Darcy, Monica, Ralph meet up with the kids, and they’re in Agatha’s house, and they think that maybe they should steal the Darkhold from the basement because the kids has seen it down there when they were being held hostage. And they go down to get the book, and as they reach out to get the book, the rabbit hops up in front of the book. And they’re like, “Oh it’s Senor Scratchy, he’s the best!” And they reach over the scratch him and he hisses and this whole American Werewolf in London transformation happens where rabbit turns into this big demon. And a Goonies set piece ensues where they try to escape from the rabbit.

“We shot it, but didn’t finish all the VFX for it. It was a great sequence, it was super fun and everyone was great in it, but we ended up moving it aside because it was a huge detour in the middle of everything going on.”

Now, previously I had thought this all had been derailed due to that damned virus, but it seems that no, that’s not the case: “We wrapped in Atlanta and the pandemic hit,” says Shakman, “and we ended up having several months off, so further changes happened during that.

“We were doing post-production, and then ideas would come up and little changes would happen.”

Shakman points out that, being on Disney+ didn’t mean the series was any different than any other: “Things were constantly changing and getting rewritten.

“There was a lot of experimentation going on and trying different things out…especially a lot of the real-world stuff in the finale. We also at one point had 10 episodes planned and we ended up collapsing a couple just to make the rhythm work better.”

But one of my biggest gripes for the whole series was the introduction of Evan Peters’ Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver in the series.

For those not in the know, Peters played the character in the X-Men movies over at Fox and when he was announced for this movie, fan expectations went through the roof, with fans believing that if he was Quicksilver then this was the beginning of Marvel’s journey into the multiverse… after all, we know that Wanda’s next appearance in the MCU will be in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, so this wasn’t too unreasonable a guess… and even if it wasn’t, surely Peters’ appearance MUST be something big, right?

Nope. Turns out that he’s just a guy living in Agatha Harkness’ house who she granted super powers to to mess with Wanda. Oh, and his name is basically a penis joke. And that’s it.

That’s a serious bit of subverting fan expectation the likes of which I’ve not seen since Rian Johnston almost derailed Star Wars.

Showrunner Jac Schaeffer said: “The idea is that Agatha came to town and took over the neighbour’s house in order to sort of be undercover, and there happened to be a young man named Ralph Bohner who was already living in Westview.”

Throughout the series Agatha kept referring to ‘her Ralph’ and many assumed Ralph was likely to be Mephisto – who she works for in the comics – but no. Schaefer goes on: “In the writers’ room, we enjoyed writing Agatha’s sense of humor, and so the idea that she would actually be talking about her hostage through the entirety of the series really tickled us.”

“We loved the idea of [bringing Evan back]. And then we were like, how in the world are we going to make this make logical sense? Like, how do we justify this? Because that’s the thing, you can hatch a million great ideas, but to make them land, to make them be grounded, to make them feel organic to the larger story.

“This show is such a mind scramble, and because it’s working on so many levels, and there’s so many notions of what’s real and what’s not, and performance, and casting, and audience, and fandom, and all of that, we just thought it would be the biggest thrill to bring Evan over to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

As for the star himself, Schaeffer says: “Evan was always up for it — like, always, always, always. He is a comic book fan, and a Marvel fan. He is always up for the absolute weirdest option. And he’s a pleasure — truly a pleasure to work with.”

Mind you, she also said Kevin Feige insisted they had a good reason for bringing him back, so…

But what about the fact that, as we say above, Harkness works for Mephisto in the comics… was that ever the plan?

“We didn’t think this series needed a big bad,” she said. “I mean, the big bad is grief, you know, and that’s the story that we were telling, and then we got a bonus baddie in the form of Agatha Harkness who ended up facilitating Wanda’s therapy, so yeah, I think we feel pretty good about that.”

So, there you have it… it seems that because of one thing or another, the final product of WandaVision was a bit rushed… remember that it was actually The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that was meant to kick off the Disney+ TV line-up but then, due to the pandemic, filming on that show was delayed and WandaVision became the debut MCU show and, as such, the final episodes, as Shakman says, was still being worked on two weeks before it was due to air.

But ultimately, Schaeffer had this to say: “This is essentially what we envisioned from the very beginning. This was always going to be a story about grief and we took that seriously, and it’s a little bit reductive, but we used the stages of grief to map out the arc of the season and we knew that we wanted to take it to a place of acceptance.

“It is acceptance in two ways, it’s ultimately Wanda’s acceptance of the mantle of the Scarlet Witch, and then secondly and perhaps more importantly it is acceptance of her grief and of the fact that she has to let Vision and the boys go. So, you know, things changed along the way and there were discoveries and enhancements and all the sort of ins and outs of the finale specifically was kind of ever-shifting, but the actual goodbye scene was written fairly early on and we were all united behind it.”

So, there you have it. Episodes lost, rushed finale, storylines cut; WandaVision, while good, was likely not how it was meant to be in the end and, sorry, but I felt like this was the case as I watched.

But look, they can blame that damned virus… but we all know what really happened…

It was her all along 🐇 The seventh episode of Marvel Studios’ #WandaVision is now streaming on #DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/ThCKlYCfeR

— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) February 22, 2021

Sources: Marvel, NYT and Deadline