My first impression after watching “We Interrupt This Program,” the fourth episode of Marvel’s live-action drama collection Wandavision, was a wierd mixture of melancholy and déjà vu. The revelation that Wanda Maximoff (a.okay.a. Scarlet Witch) and her husband Imaginative and prescient’s misadventures as suburban newlyweds was all in actual fact an elaborate fantasy conjured into being by Wanda’s personal powers was an efficient twist, however the implied motivations behind Wanda’s hoax are what struck me so deeply.

I felt sympathetic to her unwillingness to dwell in a Publish-Blip world with out anybody left in her life to speak in confidence to or depend on, and I used to be horrified by the implications of what her powers had been doing to the minds of all 3,892 of Westview’s hapless denizens. However one other thought crossed my thoughts: There was undoubtedly an episode of the Justice League cartoon that did this very same factor.

And sure there was. In “Legends,” a season 1 episode of the 2001 animated Justice League collection, John Stewart, Hawkgirl, J’onn J’onzz aka The Martian Manhunter, and the Flash are caught within the reactor explosion of a large Evangelion-esque robotic. They awake to search out themselves in Seaboard Metropolis, a Fifties-esque city à la Pleasantville, that exists in an alternate dimension from their very own. J’onn is distrubed by photos of a nuclear blast when he makes an attempt to telepathically contact Batman and Superman, however that’s swiftly forgotten because the League inadvertently clashes and subsequently groups up with the Justice Guild of America, the city’s resident superheroes.

The superheroes are acquainted faces: They’re all John’s Stewart’s favourite childhood comedian ebook characters, along with the Guild’s plucky younger mascot and honorary member Ray Thompson. Every of the members are a pastiche patterned after DC Comics’ personal traditional model of the Justice League, the Justice Society of America. Tom Turbine stands in for the Atom, the Streak for Jay Garrick/the Flash, Cat Man for Wildcat, Black Siren for Black Canary, and Inexperienced Guardsman for, in fact, the Golden Age model of Inexperienced Lantern.

However beneath the placid campy exterior and low-stakes encounters with pun-obsessed cornball “supervillains” is one thing extra sinister. Hawkgirl and Inexperienced Lantern uncover a cemetery with gravestones for the Justice Guild. The city library is stuffed with books with nothing however clean pages, there’s a solitary ice cream truck whose driver refuses to cease for concern of some horrible unknown drive, and a 40-year previous newspaper referencing an impending warfare lies buried beneath the ruins of an deserted subway station.

Pictures: Warner Bros. Animation

John and Hawkgirl confront the Guild and their teammates with these discoveries, whereby J’onn reveals what he has suspected since they arrived right here. This “actuality” is just not actual in any respect, however an phantasm created by none apart from Ray, the Justice Guild’s child sidekick. J’onn telepathically dispels Ray’s disguise, revealing his true type as a mutant psychic who, disfigured and empowered by the irradiated blast that decimated his world practically half a century in the past, has warped the nuclear ruins of his former hometown right into a portrait of Rockwellian idyllicism to retreat from the horrors of the actual world. The “residents” of Seaboard are survivors slave to his whims and psychic projections of the heroes he worshiped in his youth. The Justice Guild had been blissfully unaware that their heroics had been all in useless, and that their real-life counterparts, and a lot of the world, died a very long time in the past.

Whereas at first, WandaVision and “Legends” may seem radically completely different of their comparable scale and stakes, each Ray and Wanda are immensely gifted psychics who, slightly than confront the ache of their respective traumas of their current, isolate themselves in self-made fantasy worlds. They’ve each original their alternate realities after the aesthetics of post-war America, and have wrapped all these round them up of their effort to dissociate.

Ray survived the nuclear fallout that decimated human civilization and was granted immense psychic powers by means of publicity to nuclear radiation, however was rendered horrifically disfigured for the expertise. Wanda misplaced not solely her brother Pietro through the Battle of Sokovia in Avengers: Age of Ultron, however was later confronted with the burden of destroying the Thoughts Stone, and basically killing her personal lover, as a way to thwart Thanos’ plot to kill off half of all life within the universe. After following by means of on that horrible alternative, she was compelled to look at helplessly because it was rendered moot. Thanos merely used the Time Stone to resurrect Imaginative and prescient and pluck the Thoughts Stone from his brow, killing him in entrance of her a second time. That’s all on high of the trauma of getting been snapped and subsequently resurrected through the climax of Avengers: Endgame.

Picture: Marvel Studios

It’s affordable that each characters regressed additional into the comfy assurance of their powers, into the protection of an in-grown fantasy the place they’re the self-appointed godheads of an idealized previous. Whereas the origins behind Ray’s powers are made clear by the top of “Legends,” it’s but recognized what (or even perhaps who) is accountable for Wanda’s heretofore untapped wellspring of psychic powers, not to mention what drew her particularly to the city of Westview.

One other essential level of comparability is that, whereas Ray is the (albeit sympathetic) antagonist and villain of “Legends,” Wanda is certainly considered one of, if not the protagonist of Wandavision. Ray’s look as a one-off character in “Legends” made his villain reveal really feel believable but inexplicable, whereas the equal of that revelation in Wandavision is arguably extra stunning for the truth that we had already spent 4 episodes alongside her as a personality. It begs the query: If Wanda was suppressing the reality behind her and Imaginative and prescient’s life from each her husband and the “viewers” (each Darcy Lewis and Agent Woo and ourselves), what else may she be withholding — or slightly repressing — from herself? Is Wanda the true “villain” of this story, or is there another but unseen drive shifting behind the scenes, subtly compelling Wanda to focus her energies on this explicit city? Simply what’s so particular about Westview, New Jersey?

In “Legends,” the members of the Justice Guild know that if they assist the Justice League defeat Ray, then Seaboard Metropolis as they understand it — together with themselves — will stop to exist. And so they do it anyway. “We died as soon as to save lots of this Earth, and we are able to do it once more,” The Streak tells his teammates as they cost to the League’s rescue. In WandaVision, it’s turn out to be clear that Imaginative and prescient’s dawning realization relating to the true nature of their lives in Westview is a brewing rigidity between him and Wanda. The pair appear headed for their very own explosive confrontation, one the place Imaginative and prescient himself might need to decide on as soon as once more to sacrifice his personal life for the sake of a future with out him.

Justice League is at present streaming on HBO Max

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