Alan Jacobs


franchise service

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I loved WandaVision right up to the last episode, which except for a few wonderfully moving moments – the ones in which Wanda says goodbye to the world she had made – I disliked intensely. The last episode did not offer fan service, but rather franchise service: all that had gone before, all the weird juxtapositions of visual and narrative style that had made the series so fascinating, disappeared and we ended up with boss fights and the laying of groundwork for future movies and TV shows. It felt incredibly cynical, and cynical in a way that I’ve come to expect in the productions of the MCU. But I was more disappointed in this case than I would have been in others because the first few episodes had convinced me that here the MCU was doing something significantly different than it had ever done before. But nope, that was just a ruse. In the end they were what I thought they were.