With any Marvel Cinematic Universe project, the details are important. Often it’s those details that reveal clues to the story or connections to other entries in the ever-growing MCU or even just Easter Eggs from the comics. However, in the case of WandaVision, some are noticing a few details between the series’ most recent episode, “Previously On”, and 2016’s Captain America: Civil War — specifically Wanda’s bedroom in the Avengers compound — and those details are just enough that it may present a slight continuity error between the two offerings.
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In “Previously On”, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) takes Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) through significant moments from her life in an attempt to figure out exactly what Wanda is and how she’s able to use magic the way she’s doing it. At one point, they end up in Wanda’s room at the Avengers compound with Wanda sitting on the bed, sadly watching television as she grieves the death of her brother, Pietro. It is a touching scene, with Vision (Paul Bettany) coming to sit with her and the pair begin to bond over the sitcoms she’s watching as a source of comfort. However, while the room she’s in during this memory is very similar to her bedroom as seen in Civil War, there are some big differences, including furniture, decor, and even the windows (via The Direct).
Now, there are some possible explanations for these differences, the first being timing. We don’t actually know exactly where each scene takes place in the greater MCU timeline, though the clues indicate that there’s at least some space between the scene in WandaVision and when we see the room in Civil War. The WandaVision moment appears to come in closer to the events of Age of Ultron as it is her grief over the death of Pietro that is the central focus of things while the Civil War scene comes a bit later, with Wanda accidentally killing innocent people during a mission gone wrong in Lagos. While not a lot of time passes between the two moments, it’s possible that in that time the changes in her room were made to help distract her a bit as she settled in — and perhaps even Vision, who she had begun to bond with, helped.
There is also the distinct possibility that the version of the room seen in WandaVision is just a basic version constructed from Wanda’s memory. As has been beautifully illustrated in WandaVision, the woman has been through an incredible amount of trauma. A hallmark of the effects of trauma can be issues with memory. Given everything that Wanda has been through and that the memory comes with a great deal of pain, the details of the space as we see it through her eyes in WandaVision may not be accurate to how it happened in reality. Even taking trauma out of the equation, memory is faulty. It’s, in part, why research has found that eyewitness testimony can be very unreliable as perception and memory aren’t always exact. In the case of this scene, Wanda has clearly retained the important elements — her bonding with Vision over the sitcom as she begins to trust him with her grief — while the decor and other details were simply not stored. There’s also the idea that Wanda is going through these moments under duress as Agatha is forcing her to confront them so that could be playing a role with the details as well.
Continuity error or not, it’s interesting to see WandaVision revisit some of these important moments in Wanda’s life, further fleshing out elements of the MCU in a way that shows just how interconnected it all is.
The first eight episodes of WandaVision are now streaming on Disney+.
