Warning: This post contains WandaVision spoilers for episodes 1 and 2.
Though WandaVision was, on the surface, a comedy-led homage to American sitcom history, there was something darker lurking under the surface. That underlying darkness is very much linked to Scarlet Witch's entire traumatic MCU arc, but most poignantly, the events at the end of Avengers: Infinity War that saw Vision die twice. Though there is no overt recap of what led to WandaVision's strange circumstances - which is actually the point, of course - there is a gag in the first episode that grimly recalls Vision's death indirectly, and it actually hides an even more heartbreaking revelation.
WandaVision feels almost like a collection of the ghosts of sitcoms past, framing Wanda and Vision's idyllic life together in a way that makes sense to what Scarlet Witch sees as perfect happiness. While the precise revelations of the show remain guarded for now, the end of the second episode confirmed that the weird world of Westview is very much linked to her powers. She is able to change that reality, whether entirely consciously or not, based on the need to protect that happy ending and to hide from the reality that Vision is dead after Infinity War as the latest step on Wanda's unfathomably sad personal story.
The joke comes early, as Vision and Wanda share their domestic bliss and happiness to show off their powers behind closed doors and Wanda accidentally smashes some crockery off Vizh's head. "My wife and her flying saucers," he quips jovially. "My husband and his indestructible head," Wanda replies, happily. But there's more to that exchange than just a joke, there's more to it even than the subtle call-back to the fact that Vision's head was in fact far from indestructible when both Wanda herself and Thanos killed him. What's worse is that the fact that Wanda jokes about it and moves on past the trauma without so much as a flicker. Because that's exactly what she was asked to do throughout her life up to this point. Wanda's gag is about her own emotional suppression of everything she's been through, and how it's led her to this point.
Apart from when she and her brother Pietro used their rage to volunteer as HYDRA experiments to get revenge on Tony Stark, Wanda has repeatedly been asked to mask her emotions and the true limit of her powers. The fact that her powers seem to become more pronounced when she is emotional - whether through pain, grief or anger - is no accident and the Avengers knew that to be the case. They knew her to be volatile, locking her away in the wake of the Civil War disaster in Africa. She was treated with kid gloves, limited in her role as a secondary Avenger until Endgame for the most part or used in such a way that her emotions would prove to be useful. Throughout all of that, her trauma was pushed to the side, partly because she was in the company of others with difficult pasts.
But the idea of her having to suppress her trauma to such a degree that the polar opposite of her actual experience manifests - which is what this strange sitcom world in WandaVision feels like - and her only references to her soul mate's death is a loaded joke is all the more disturbing. The trauma is still in there, but it's now malformed and shaped by that suppression and while it's currently being used to shape an entire reality around Wanda and Vision, that stability can only last so long. And worryingly, as soon as WandaVision reveals its true secrets and Scarlet Witch is encouraged to accept her trauma again, the emotional response could be stunning.
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