WandaVision: All-New Halloween Spooktacular! Review

WandaVision "All-New Halloween Spooktacular!"

There is no leaving the town of Storybrooke from Once Upon a Time (another Disney-owned show), and so it is with WandaVision's Westview. So does that cast Wanda in the role of the Evil Queen, the imperious woman solely aware of the true nature of the town's reality...?

Stage-managing from that role, Wanda has created a town that runs on TV tropes, and the latest one embraced by WandaVision is the seasonal special. But while Halloween is right there in the title, tricking and treating is merely a launching pad for an askew escalation in Westview. Plot threads continue ticking on: Vision's suspicions about his reality; the S.W.O.R.D. agenda; the hostage townspeople; leading to a finale where Wanda expands Westview's borders even more, encompassing the S.W.O.R.D. operation and Darcy.

The latest meta touch in the show is Wanda, Vision, and Pietro wearing Halloween costumes that reference their iconic costumes from the comics. (Interestingly, the Vision Halloween costume is red makeup on Paul Bettany's normal face, as opposed to using Vision's purple face.) If these characters appeared in an 80s TV movie adaptation of the comics, these are not far from the costumes they likely would've worn.

But in a new twist, that meta quality extends to someone within Westview. Evan Peters' Pietro calls out the formulaic goals of his character in the context of a TV show, and comments on the sudden proliferation of kids. Unlike everyone else in the town, he is self-aware. And even as the show plays with the subtle differences in his and Wanda's memories of childhood (complete with cutaway to Wanda and Pietro as the Gretel and Hansel of Sokovia), it appears that this version of Pietro recalls dying in the very manner of the Aaron Taylor-Johnson Pietro.

Elsewhere, Maximoff kids Tommy and Billy develop powers (Pietro-like super-speed, and Wanda-like mind abilities), and Vision investigates hostage townspeople who appear to be glitching the closer to the outside world they are. He comes across one neighborhood where residents are stopped in their tracks, My Fair Lady style.

The moment where Vision ascends into the sky to observe the town is reminiscent of his birth in Avengers: Age of Ultron. High in Avengers Tower, he quietly contemplated the cityscape, making a silent connection with the mayfly members of humanity. As he said, "It's a pleasure to be among them", but does that pleasure extend to humans whose personalities have been suppressed? Vision risks his life to warn of the townsfolk's plight, but finds himself back in Wanda's reality-altering bubble, capping an episode of consistently intriguing intertextuality and supernatural unease. 7/10.

Stray observations:

- The 80s setting apparently does not retro-fy the video games Pietro plays with the kids, nor their Dance Dance Revolution setup. Speaking of video games, did I spot a kid in a Mortal Kombat Sub Zero costume?

- The local theater is called the Coronet, possibly an allusion to the theater in San Francisco that was one of the fewer than 40 to carry Star Wars the weekend of May 25, 1977. Playing are two Disney-owned films, The Incredibles and The Parent Trap (Original or remake? Unknown.). The former (co-starring Nick Fury himself, Samuel L. Jackson) features Dash Parr, a child with super-speed. The latter revolves around twins.

- Is that Night of the Living Dead being shown to (the newly materialized) kids?