If you’ve not seen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (firstly, how?) and you don’t like spoilers, then avert your eyes, my dudes, because spoilers are coming.Wanda Maximoff came into the MCU as a volunteer for HYDRA experimentation, with a thirst for revenge against Tony Stark. Her allegiance turns, she ends up training to be an Avenger, and becomes romantically attached to Vision. She destroys the Mind Stone, killing him in the process in Infinity War, only to have Thanos rewind time and take the stone for his gauntlet, killing Vision in front of her.
She is part of the group that dies in The Snap. When she is brought back to life at the end of Endgame, Wanda’s grief over Vision dying twice in front of her is very much at the forefront which you may see when she fights Thanos. In Wandavision, we see her lose control of her powers in a heartbreaking moment that results in her accidentally imprisoning the citizens of Westview when she creates a sitcom-like version of a life with Vision and their twin boys. Wanda’s confrontation with Agatha Harkness reveals the Darkhold to her, and she learns that she’s the Scarlet Witch; a being stronger than the Sorcerer Supreme.
Comic book fans know that she’s one of the strongest beings in Marvel and the strongest in the MCU so far. Watching her realize she’s even more powerful than she knows made many of us—yours truly included—excited to see what she would do next. The Scarlet Witch in the comics switched over to the dark side, but let’s not forget that she was also Magneto’s daughter in the comics, so since the MCU had already changed her story, the showrunners could very easily have kept running with this good version of Wanda.
Unfortunately, they decided that Wanda would become evil via corruption, which messed up her character arc. We’ve already seen a ‘bad Wanda’ when she was officially introduced to the MCU in Avengers: Age of Ultron even if she wasn’t really evil; she was the instrument of evil. When she realizes that Ultron wants to destroy humanity, Wanda stops helping Ultron and sides with Tony Stark, teaming up with the Avengers in order to save the innocents in Sokovia as well as humanity.
As soon as Wanda let go of her anger, she immediately helps save people after a quick peptalk from Hawkeye. She feels guilty over a botched mission she was on where innocents are hurt or killed from her mistake. She refuses to use her powers and help, fearing she’s seen as a monster who hurt civilians. If she were truly evil, the way they try to make her seem in Multiverse of Madness, her character would’ve shown that before this film.
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While she’s in hiding, Wanda studies the Darkhold which slowly corrupts her already fragile and grief-stricken mind. In Multiverse of Madness, Wanda is determined to find another universe in which her twin boys are alive, so she can be a mother again. However, the Darkhold’s poison stops her from realizing that what she’s doing is wrong, turning her into an irrational monster. She only breaks through the Darkhold’s possession when she realizes that the boys she was trying to take back are terrified of her. Realizing just how dangerous the Darkhold is, she destroys all copies of it throughout the multiverse before destroying the Darkhold Castle with herself inside it. Since then, there hasn’t been a mention of her or any bonus scene content with her in it.
Why, out of all the stories they could’ve done with the multiverse exploding, did the MCU choose to make Wanda go all ‘Daenerys in the last season of Game of Thrones’? They could’ve had Strange panicking about messing up the spell for Spider-Man, then asking for help from Wanda to harness her magic powers, before having a villain attack them like how different villains came after Spider-Man. Maybe even the new Loki from the show could’ve come through the multiverse to help since he’s also magic? There were options for Wanda, is my point, and no need for the character devolution she was given.
At the end of Multiverse of Madness, the red flash of Wanda’s powers as the crumbling castle fell has some fans convinced that she’s still alive. I hope she is, and if Wanda makes it back onto the screen, that we’re able to see her redemption. I want to see her make amends with the remaining sorcerers at Kamar-Taj, helping them rebuild and strengthening their defenses with her own magic, and perhaps even learning more about magic that doesn’t corrupt her.
This would also be a great time for a Vision reunion. The original Vision came back in the last episode of Wandavision and battled it out with the Vision Wanda had created before his memories came back and he left. Did Wanda forget the original Vision has been reanimated? Where did he go and why hasn’t he been mentioned since?
Vision coming back to her to help Wanda through her grief and Wanda helping him fill in any missing memories could repair their bond and help her find her way back to herself sans corruption. It would bring back two powerful beings on team Avengers, and they could be ready to help with whatever new big bad comes through the multiverse. Wanda lost her parents, her twin, the love of her life twice in the span of seconds, as well as the new family she had created in Westview, and deserves a better ending than simply ‘going evil’ from corruption. It reduces a complex character to something basic and binary, where she ends up mercilessly killing people that are trying to stop her from doing what Agatha Harkness tried to do to her. Whether it’s a hero’s death or a happy ending alongside the revived Vision, Wanda should be brought back around for a finale worthy of one of the MCU’s most underappreciated superheroes.
