For the first five episodes of WandaVision, most of what audiences have seen of Westview has been centered on a very small area of the town and just a handful of residents. We’ve seen the town square as a prominent location outside of Wanda and Vision’s home, and we’ve been acquainted with residents such as Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), Dottie (Emma Caulfield), Norm (Asif Ali), Herb (David Payton), and others. However, what the rest of Westview looks like was a mystery until last week’s “All-New Halloween Spooktacular” which revealed a truly disturbing truth about Wanda’s sitcom world and opened up yet another mystery.
As Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and the residents of Westview enjoy the town’s big Halloween celebration on the town square, Vision (Paul Bettany) claims to be on neighborhood watch duties. What he is actually up to is he’s doing a bit of snooping and explores Westview further and further away from the town’s center. As he does, he discovers residents who are semi-frozen in place while those who are moving are doing so in slow, repetitive motions. One woman is even repeatedly trying to hang some sort of Halloween decoration, a tear running down her cheek as she does so over and over, suggesting she’s in pain. It’s in this part of WestView, right along “Ellis Ave” which happens to be just at the boundary of Wanda’s energy field, that Vision even discovers Agnes also mostly frozen in place and confused about how to get to the town square.
It’s a pretty disturbing situation. Those who are close to the town square seem to be going about their day to day lives, albeit lives controlled by Wanda, with general freedom of motion but those who are near the edges seem to be either frozen or trapped in a very tight loop of motion. The obvious question is why. The series hasn’t really offered any explanation for that just yet, but there are a few theories out there. The first is that Wanda doesn’t have the power to keep up a full-scale illusion that far from the town’s center — though we can probably debunk that one a bit as the end of the episode saw Wanda expanding her bubble to bring Vision back inside her world while, at the same time, also bringing SWORD in as well — and turning them into literal clowns. We see those agents-turned-clowns moving around at normal speed so it’s probably a safe bet that Wanda can extend things pretty far.
If Wanda can hold her illusion over distance, then it is possible that while she’s taken the entire town, the people who are in the town’s center and are the closest to her — thus being able to move “freely” within her manipulated world — hold some sort of significance. We’ve theorized that it’s grief that connects the primary residents in Westview, but it is also possible that they are there for other reasons. If Wanda is indeed being manipulated by a darker force, perhaps those in Westview are somehow connected to that darker force, even as victims as well. It’s also possible that they are somehow connected to Wanda in ways we don’t yet know.
The only thing that is clear at this point regarding the residents of Westview is that they are suffering due to Wanda’s manipulations. While that appeared to be mental and emotional initially, it now appears to be physical as well. Now that Wanda has brought even more people into her world — including Darcy (Kat Dennings) who was handcuffed to a SWORD vehicle and unable to escape — it will be interesting to see how they fare as the series heads into its final three episodes.
The first six episodes of WandaVision are now streaming on Disney+.