Don’t touch that dial when the WandaVision credits roll this week
This post discusses details of the latest episode of WandaVision, “Breaking The Fourth Wall.”
Among the many phosphors that make up the medium-blurring cathode-ray tube of Disney+’s WandaVision, there’s this: Every episode of the sitcom-history-riffing, trauma-plumbing extension of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has thus far ended with a lengthy, cinematic credits sequence. While making clever use of the series’ visual motifs and offering a regular reminder that Debra Jo Rupp was in the first few weeks of this thing, those credits have surely inflamed the itchy trigger fingers of viewers accustomed to hitting a skip button at the first sign of the words “Executive producer.”
Of course, Marvel Studios has been working to inhibit that impulse ever since Nick Fury first wandered into Tony Stark’s big screen life in 2008, though it wasn’t until this morning that WandaVision was able to get in on that particular MCU tradition. We’ll leave the finer details to Stephen Robinson and his recap of “Breaking The Fourth Wall,” so for now, let this serve as a programming bulletin: Stay tuned, film at 11. If you’re the type of viewer who’s waiting until every episode of the show has aired so you can watch them all in your own Wanda Wedensday Nick At Nite Summer Block Party marathon, make a note for yourself now.
And while we’re on the subject: Where are you off to in such a rush that you’re blazing past the credits on every TV show and movie that you watch? Yes, this is behavior encouraged by the streaming services in order to keep you gorging yourself at their digital troughs, but imagine for a second a beautiful world where we’ve all agreed to pay attention to the names and job titles of the people responsible for what we’re cramming into our eyeballs. Sure, it’s idealistic, and a little but naive—but if we can’t get idealistic while we’re talking about superheroes, what are we even doing here? At the very least, it’d be a pushback against the Disney+ default that squeezes the credits into a tiny box in favor of a screen-hogging recommendation—undoubtedly the rudest insult to end credits yet devised by any streamer.