by Don Hall

Granted, as of this writing, only six episodes have been aired. Likewise granted, given my immense love for all things Marvel, I’m loving every second.

One of the big questions of the chattering class is Who is the Big Bad?

There are whiffs that it will be Mephisto (Marvel’s version of Satan) but my buddy in Chicago warns against this resolution. This is, after all, Disney and he’s pretty certain Disney is not going to include a version of Satan in it’s canon. The company has gone into unnatural yoga poses with disclaimers of past racial transgression, animal cruelty, and misogyny for everything from Peter Pan to The Aristocats to Dumbo so the idea that they’d allow a representation of Satan does seem a stretch.

I read a response to the question “Can’t grief be the bad guy? Isn’t that enough?” and, sure enough, grief does seem to be the central issue at play.

SPOILERS

Following Avengers: Endgame Wanda finds herself first with the knowledge that Vision is dead. Dead dead. Done. Deceased. She second was snapped so when she returns after five years, her grief is still immediately fresh.

It looks like she has created a bubble existence in Westview, NJ where she has created a phantom version of Vision and has brainwashed the inhabitants to play out a sitcom suburban world for him. We see them in the 1950’s version, the 1960’s, the 1970’s, the 1980’s, and latest is a Malcolm in the Middle 1990’s existence.

She has no coping mechanism to deal effectively with the grief of her lost soulmate and so she has erased anything that might trigger her pain by pretending it isn’t there. In her determination, she has not only shut out the rest of the world (a world filled with people who had to grapple with the grief of losing half the population for five years) she has also taken the lives of the residents of Westview and made them the equivalent of SIMS characters including those fringe bodies out of sight who are either frozen in place or acting out loops of behavior.

We know that these people are in pain and want out of this but are unable to escape because Wanda’s grip on them is unassailable. When Monica Rambeau says something that she doesn’t want to hear, Wanda simply cancels her. When S.W.O.R.D. sends in a missilized drone, she destroys it, yells at them, and later expands the bubble to keep Vision from disintegrating.

I think the parallels to the Great Awokening are obvious.

The only difference between Wanda Maximoff and Ibram Kendi is that Kendi gets tons of cash for speaking engagements.

Me? I’m hoping for Mephisto because, as we can all see in non-fictional society, the Woke are simply too powerful to defeat.