WandaVision "We Interrupt This Program" Details: Monica's Return, SWORD and a Theory About Hayward

WandaVision episode four steps outside the sitcom and shows the moment Monica Rambeau came back from the blip, then how SWORD, Jimmy Woo and Darcy Lewis came to be studying Westview from the outside. It's packed with small details: the real world Vision is dead, and I think Wanda is not doing this alone.

Monica Rambeau's blip return opens episode four in hospital chaos

The episode opens with what is now one of my favorite MCU sequences: a hospital panic, in the style of a Walking Dead opening scene, showing the exact moment of the blip return. Monica Rambeau, one of the snap victims, rematerializes at the same moment Hulk reverses the snap in Avengers: Endgame, and it's pure chaos. We did see a bit of this undusting in Spider-Man: Far From Home, when a tuba player got wrecked. This time it's an unlucky rematerialized man, with sound added for comedic effect.

The opening seconds are worth listening to closely. The last line is the voice of Carol Danvers, taken directly from the Captain Marvel film, calling Monica "lieutenant trouble." In the comics, Lieutenant Trouble was a nickname Captain Marvel used for a different character, but in the MCU it's the nickname for young Monica. The lines before that suggest Monica's mother, Maria Rambeau, callsign Photon, had to leave Monica behind to be raised by her grandmother at some point. It sounds like there was a space mission with Carol, maybe connected with the Skrulls or the origins of SWORD. Maybe it was something we would see in Captain Marvel 2, or maybe something that actually led to Maria's cancer later in her life.

The close up imagery of Monica's particles coming back together is gloriously rendered, dare I say even better looking than in Infinity War. One notable difference is that her pieces aren't desaturated. They're not ashes, just bits of her. This evokes Joe Quesada's amazing art of Wanda in the House of M comics, which we think this whole show is based on. Amid the chaos, one man rematerializes beside a hospital bed, and assuming he dusted five years earlier, he would be a total stranger to the woman in it. Another patient reappears in a hospital bed. I love it. It's all as horrifying as it would be, despite the Russos saying it was just a peaceful return on the other side of Hulk's snap.

SWORD's base and Monica's necklace hint at her history and future

Next comes SWORD, the Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division. It's headquartered on a coastal base that looks a lot like the Cape Canaveral shuttle launch pads, and that big hangar is massive compared to the nearby office building. This could be where SWORD built pieces of the space station where Nick Fury might have been in the Far From Home post credit scene. Since WandaVision is apparently set three weeks after Endgame, this would be around November 2023, and Far From Home is set in summer 2024, giving half a year or so to get that station operational if it wasn't already.

The lobby is laid out similarly to SHIELD's old Triskelion in DC. SWORD might have grown as an offshoot sister organization under Maria Rambeau's leadership throughout the 90s and 2000s while Fury was running SHIELD. On the screens, news comes from WHIH, the in universe MCU news service seen in promos for Ant-Man. There's also a Spectrum news channel. Spectrum is one of the superhero names Monica takes on as an Avenger in the comics, and Darcy later tracks Monica with a spectrum analyzer, so we may be seeing Spectrum's origin story as a future MCU Avenger.

Monica wears a necklace that looks like a small golden sword pendant. This might be what turns into her necklace in Westview. I think it's this more than the new lanyard ID badge she gets, because it sounds like SWORD is her home. It's really her last connection to her mother, the pendant represents that, and Westview is kind of expressing that history through a sword necklace she can't separate herself from.

I'm beginning to think Tyler Hayward could have set this all up

Monica is met by acting SWORD director Tyler Hayward, and I'm calling it now on this guy. He easily could have activated her ID, but instead he made her feel like an outsider so he could swoop in as a white knight and escort her in. He clearly feels threatened by her return; he thought she would never come back. He's kind of like Brad against Peter Parker. He knows the status he has should belong to her, and now he's apparently throwing her at this assignment, hoping, I think, that she'll be erased from this world.

Isn't it suspicious that FBI agent Jimmy Woo lost someone in federal witness protection, someone whose past associates suddenly claim not to know them, and now Hayward is throwing his all star agent Monica at this? I'm beginning to think Hayward could have set all this up. He might have made a deal with a devil: the mystery missing person Jimmy Woo was looking for, who I think could be Agnes or Ralph. In that theory, Hayward did it to raise his status at SWORD while helping that figure slip through the cracks and hijack an unstable, Infinity Stone irradiated Avenger, who could then create a pocket reality to resurrect her dead partner and have babies, before that devil figure drains her of her power. Now it has blown up in Hayward's face and he doesn't know what to do.

I'm just saying, Hayward seems to know quite a bit about ancient cosmic radiation. And not to go too hex crazy on him, but the diplomas on his wall are arranged in a ring of six.

SWORD's sentient weapons talk hints at Fantastic Four, mutants and a Kree Skrull war

As the two catch up, the numbers for the astronaut training program are described as dismal: half the personnel were lost in the blip, and half of those remaining lost their nerve. SWORD test pilots sound like a possible setup for the Fantastic Four, who we knew were coming to the MCU. Hayward says SWORD "shifted away from manned missions and we focused on robotics, nanotech, AI." Sentient weapons, like it says on the door. But the door also says observation and response, not creation. SWORD creating sentient weapons definitely evokes some notes of Weapon X, or some way for mutants to join the MCU.

Monica is told the world isn't the same as she left it and that space is now full of unexpected threats. She answers that it was always full of threats and allies, and her allies sound like her Skrull friends. Then comes the line that maybe not everyone will see us as allies. We know from Far From Home that things looked set to skew into a Kree Skrull war.

Monica then meets Jimmy Woo, FBI, who does a close up magic trick he learned from Scott Lang's close up magic class in Ant-Man and the Wasp. The Eastview cops deny Westview even exists, but my question is whether Eastview exists. Were these cops expelled from Westview, their minds warped and brainwashed so that Westview would have no law enforcement and be more vulnerable to a hostile takeover?

Number details, Darcy Lewis and the big bang connection

There are some possible number details here. Monica's SUV is numbered 8512, maybe for the 1985, 12 issue comic run some believe WandaVision is based on. Her drone is numbered 57, maybe for Avengers issue 57, the debut of the Vision. Some are pointing out that the helicopter has the same color scheme as Captain Marvel, but I think those are also just kind of generic colors.

Dr. Darcy Lewis returns from the Thor movies, now contracted by SWORD alongside experts in other fields, including artificial intelligence, one of the new SWORD disciplines Hayward highlighted earlier. Darcy scans the radiation coming from Westview and finds "a colossal amount of CMBR." CMBR is the oldest electromagnetic radiation in the universe, dating back to the big bang, and it's the same kind of radiation that creates TV static, hence the staticky border membrane around the town.

The big bang connection is key, because as Wong told us in Infinity War, that's how we got the six elemental crystals, the Infinity Stones. Wanda's powers were activated by one of those stones, the Mind Stone, and this universe had just gone through four shock waves of that same kind of cosmic radiation, which could all be connected to this new anomaly.

The hexagon perimeter suggests Westview may be a hex

Hayward sends Agent Franklin to find Monica via the sewers, showing how we got our beekeeper. Woo doesn't like the plan: "there's no reason to suspect the perimeter doesn't extend subterraneously." The reply is that there's no reason to suspect it does. Woo is saying the pocket reality extends beneath the surface, another sign that this hellmouth might be coming from below.

The town perimeter is the shape of a hexagon, confirming our paranoid suspicion about all the hexagonal imagery. It really may just be that this whole town is a hex, a spell. Darcy cues up the sitcom feed, confirming she was the note taker at the end of episode one. The SWORD agent behind them is loving this sitcom, and forget the Jimmy Woo parallels with me, I would totally be that guy.

Jimmy Woo's board names the residents and lists Skrulls as suspects

The SWORD operatives identify the Hearts as Todd and Sharon Davis. Sharon Davis is actually the name of an art director on WandaVision, and Herb is John Collins, the name of another art director on the show. Later, the 70s credits list a producer who is a post production supervisor on the show. It's fun that the names come from actual crew working for Marvel.

If you look closely at the notes on Norm's form, he expresses concern for his father and sister, information obtained when Vision awakened him, with a note asking whether Wanda is controlling the whole town and saying the physical safety of residents is now in question. When Vision restores him, he becomes Norm again. Hold on, when did Vision awaken him? Was this a lost episode? It kind of sounds like what Vision does to Agnes in a trailer, where she asks if she's dead. If this is based on House of M, Vision might be playing a kind of Wolverine role, awakening warped person after warped person within this alternate reality until the walls come crumbling down.

Agnes gets pinned to the board, but no New Jersey ID was found for her, suggesting she might not be a true Westview victim but someone working with darker forces to manipulate Wanda. Dottie's photo isn't on the wall at all, though this is a work in progress and they might not have printed it yet. A lot of people think she might also be key to Westview, and some are saying she's playing Clea.

Jimmy Woo's notes are clearly meta jokes about the questions we had literally been asking: hexagons, why sitcoms, whether Vision is alive. The board also mentions a five mile radius, which might explain why things outside Westview, like the Eastview cops and the highway sign, remain warped. Under possible perpetrators are Skrulls, confirming that Woo and these feds know Skrulls exist. That contradicts the friendly relationship Nick Fury and the Rambeaus have with them. While many Skrulls are friendly, it sounds like some authorities view parts of the Skrull race as a threat.

The sitcom feed skips moments, and Wanda breaks Monica through the fourth wall

SWORD tried to contact Wanda, so that's the radio on her kitchen counter, the next time she's washing dishes, which by my count happens about once an episode. There's also a little shout out to Stark's holographic projection tech, which I hope is not part of this. And how many episodes have they seen? Their shots of Monica from the 60s era suggest there are other lost episodes, so can we see them, please?

From Darcy's point of view, Dottie's shattered glass from episode two is totally skipped over, and the same happens later with Monica's expulsion. So who is editing this feed? I'm thinking it might be Wanda herself, based on the way she patches that hole in her house, but we know there are some elements of this reality Wanda can't control. We also see the beekeeper moment, when his cable turns into a jump rope, but we don't see what happens to him when Wanda rewinds. Some believe he might have been warped into the ice cream man from episode three, but that was a different actor. I just assumed he might have been reversed back out through the sewer tunnel.

The aspect ratio widens as Wanda ejects Monica, using her red chaos magic to smash her through the living room, the nursery, the outside fence and the whole Westview border. That's one, two, three, four: Wanda literally broke Monica through the fourth wall.

Vision is dead, and I think Wanda isn't doing this alone

Even more unsettling than the gray corpse Vision from Infinity War is the fact that he reverts to normal with a simple cut, like nothing happened, which means it can happen again any time. This tells us the version of Vision that exists in the real world is, as Darcy said, dead dead. He's a corpse that Wanda could be trying to reanimate with sorcery.

I don't think all these people are being ragdolled around with sitcom sleeves over them. It's more like once you're in the bubble, all of reality within it shifts as a whole, and your whole body rematerializes to be whatever Wanda imagines you to be, wherever she wants you, doing whatever she wants you to do. Vision is dead, and I think Westview's hexagonal shape tells us this is a hex spell over the whole town, all to try to resurrect Vision's corpse using the cosmic radiation from Wanda's Infinity Stone activated powers, maybe further enhanced by the recent shock waves of the same kind of radiation.

Despite Monica saying it's all Wanda, I think Jimmy Woo's missing person mystery being the start of all this tells us Wanda isn't doing it alone: at least Agnes, and someone else, maybe Ralph, want her to be doing this. Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child plays over the credits, a nod to the true witchcraft at play. But look at Vision's eyes in the final seconds. He nervously looks over at Wanda, then his head lowers but his eye line rises over the TV. He is looking at us, and he wants out.

Which of the clues on Jimmy Woo's board did you find most revealing?