Monica Rambeau Originally Had a Much Bigger Role in the ‘WandaVision’ Finale
The following post contains SPOILERS for the WandaVision finale:
For three episodes, WandaVision was an impressively convincing recreation of vintage sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched, with just the slightest bit of superhero stuff creeping around the edges. It wasn’t until Episode 4 that the show begin to resemble the more traditional Marvel Cinematic Universe in explaining the story of Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), a S.W.O.R.D. agent who stumbles upon Wanda’s sitcom town of Westview.
Over the course of the next five episodes, Monica gets powers of her own, but after fighting her way back inside the “hex” around Westview in order to protect Wanda from S.W.O.R.D., Monica’s role in the final episode was surprisingly minimal. She’s kidnapped, she escapes, she shows up in the town square while Wanda and Agatha Harkness are fighting, she witnesses the final battle, she tells Wanda it was okay that she kidnapped and brainwashed an entire town because she misses her own mother and would have done the same thing in her shoes. (Uh, okay.) She nearly kills herself to help Wanda and Vision and then ... basically becomes a passive observer in the final battle?
It’s not too surprising, then, to learn that Monica originally played a much larger role in the WandaVision finale. Director Matt Shakman told Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin on the Fatman Beyond podcast that they originally shot an extended subplot in the finale “where Darcy, Monica, and Ralph meet up with [Wanda’s] kids in Agatha's house, and they think they should steal the Darkhold from the basement because the kids had seen it when they were down there being held hostage by Agatha.” While trying to steal the Darkhold, they would have squared off with Agatha’s familiar, Senor Scratchy, who would have undergone “an American Werewolf in London transmutation” into a demon creature. That would have precipitated a “Goonies set-piece styled chase” for all the characters.
Although the scene was shot, it was never finished; Shakman and the creative team ultimately decided it was a “huge detour” for a show that is essentially about Wanda and Vision. And that’s fair. Still, it did kind of end up feeling like Monica Rambeau was only in WandaVision to get some of her backstory out of the way before Captain Marvel 2 shows up in a year or two. You can watch the full conversation with Matt Shakman below:
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