'WandaVision' Episode 4 Recap: "Who's Doing This To You, Wanda?"

So finally: some answers. In fact, the answer to pretty much every question dangling over WandaVision with a wraparound narrative filling in the blanks. And it turns out that they were pretty much exactly what every WandaVision thread on Reddit said they would be: Geraldine wasn't really Geraldine! Wanda's created this alternate reality herself! The helicopter was a drone! And Vision really is still dead!

We start in widescreen for the first time, with Monica Rambeau – who you'll recall meeting in Captain Marvel – coming to in a hospital having been un-snapped. It's a far more dramatic and believably chaotic rendering of the end of 'the blip' than we saw in Spiderman: Far From Home, and probably the episode's high point. The disorientation feels very real, and hearing a doctor shouting about how they don't have capacity for all these patients feels, well, very now.

Soon enough Rambeau's back at work for SWORD – which, as we anticipated, stands for Sentient Weapons Observation Response Division – to chaperone a drone to a case somewhere out in the sticks. Meeting her there is Ant-Man's FBI agent Jimmy Woo, who's spent the last five years mourning Scott Lang by learning sleight of hand magic tricks, adorably enough. They soon realise they're looking at some kind of forcefield that's making people forget the real Westview exists, and in comes a gigantic task force to work out what the hell's going on.

Among them is Thor's Darcy Lewis to complete the triumvirate of MCU side-characters leading the charge, and she works out that there's a TV broadcast coming from Westview, tunes in and starts getting quite attached to Wanda, Vision and the babies. Meanwhile, attempts to get through to Wanda by shouting through a radio and sending in a bloke in a hazmat suit prove fruitless, though they do explain who interrupted the Beach Boys and why there was suddenly a beekeeper knocking about in episode two.

Gradually, SWORD works out more. Agent Woo's turned his whiteboard into a very low-tech r/MarvelStudios thread of unanswered questions – what's with all the hexagons? – and started up a missing persons case which shows that the extras and recurring characters in Westview are people who lived there and just got sucked up into Wanda's fantasy.

Plus, Monica bringing up Ultron and getting blasted back out of there to SWORD shows there's still something of Monica there underneath the sitcom exterior that's trying to get to the bottom of the case.

Most tellingly, though, we also glimpse of Vision's real, grey, caved-in, very dead cranium when Wanda's still rattled from Monica/Geraldine's mention of Ultron and the reality outside of her sitcom bubble. That's the first indication that Wanda's grip on Westview can be shaken from the outside, and that she knows, deep down, what she's doing doesn't change what's been.

Some other thoughts:

To be honest, I probably preferred the stilted Fifties sitcom dialogue to some of the chewy Agents of Shield-isms flying around here. You know, the ones where someone starts explaining something, then someone else...
Cuts in and explains it very abruptly?
Exactly.
Very little to report on Paul Bettany's hair this time around. Disappointing.
Monica's question – "Who's doing this to you Wanda?" – might be the central mystery of the whole season. Keep an eye on that one.