#WandaVision . We're at the midpoint of the series, so here's a few thoughts on where we are. 15 tweets about WandaVision, a comicbook adaptation masquerading as a TV spinoff about side characters about a TV spinoff about side characters...1/15

One theme per tweet. First, the pandemic - a community under quarantine, infected with supressed grief and forced to pretend things are normal; television becoming a support system; multiagency response trying/failing to comprehend & contain. 2/15

Cultural imperialism - growing up in Eastern Europe with US sitcoms; waiting to be killed in the wreckage of your home by US unexploded ordinance; learning the US accent from Russian spy and code-switching; monochrome synthezoid & witchy European passing in US suburbia. 3/15

Parallel trash cultures - recreating decades of sitcom conventions since the 50s via the same timeline as the history of Atlas > Marvel comics, as well as years of parallel MCU and X-Men movies. Bridging Fox/MCU continuities via a Becky from Roseanne recasting joke. 4/15

Audience displacement - playing several 4th walls off against each other; the writer observing the audience & constructing an audience-within-the show as investigators; the weekly format anticipating & incorporating its reception; the TV show that watches its audience. 5/15

Metanarrative - episodic standalones vs serialised continuity, a story about the MCU method; a personal biography of Feige & Marvel Studios, interweaving his love of sitcoms, his work on the X-Men movies, the growth of the MCU, the Fox/Disney deal & the move to TV via D+. 6/15

Gnosticism - won't dwell on this because it's the last refuge of the forum goon & Sophia/Demiurge stuff tends to be everywhere anyway. Maybe a more interesting comparison is the omake-becomes-the-text gnostic sleight-of-hand of the Haruhi Suzumiya stories (not my pic!). 7/15

The sight gags are ultra-compressed. Rambeau is literally cast out of reality through four walls; Vision's "indestructible head" comes back as a haunting; Woo grows as a character from incompetence to competence through a single magic trick. 8/15

The script is labyrinthine, with seemingly simple exchanges holding multiple meanings. "Your're not at all worried that the audience might just see through this little charade?" "Well, that's the whole point. In a real magic act, everything is fake." 9/15

It's not all meta-games. The series is heart-on-sleeve sincere, much more emotionally raw than the average Marvel adaptation. It manages tonal shifts between the sinister and tragicomic extraordinarily well and doesn't shy from cognitive dissonance. 10/15

The performances are outstanding, from Olsen's virtuoso deployment of everything she's said she wanted to do since the Ultron interviews to Bettany's one-man tour of British comedy actors, incorporating Rick Mayall, Hughs Grant & Laurie and John Cleese. 11/15

So it's a Lynchian seige comedy about grief & loss, a superhero omake as fluent in the history of TV and comics as it is about decades of movie studio financial chicanery. Next: three speculative tweets about what's to come… (also: Mephisto?) 12/15

Eerie Americana - Given Wanda's history, the likely appearance of Agatha Harkness & the disappeared New Jersey community, will we delve into the Mount Holly witch trials and the abandoned villages of the Pine Barrens? Maybe in the trailed Halloween episode? 13/15

Inverse adaptation - Wanda is a kind of bookend, from first appearing in X-Men #4 in 1964 to "No more Mutants" in House of M; guessing that will reversed here, coming after the end of the Fox X-Men with a likely command of "Let there be Mutants." 14/15

Twin siblings, twin universes. If the woman who repeatedly lost her family realises an extended genetic inheritance that let her survive the Hydra experiments, there's a realistic possibility that she's the Mother of Mutantkind and may even earn the line "To me, my X-Men." 15/15