WandaVision head writer Jac Schaeffer reveals the Marvel Studios series scripted, but ultimately cut, therapy scenes between Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and an on-site therapist. When S.W.O.R.D. Captain Rambeau blips back to life during the events of Avengers: Endgame, she learns her mother, USAF pilot Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), died from cancer during the five years Monica was snapped out of existence by Thanos (Josh Brolin). Another three weeks after Endgame, Monica becomes “Geraldine” when she’s sucked into the Hex — a reality created by a grieving Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) around the now-missing town of Westview, New Jersey — and later works with Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) and F.B.I. Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) to free the town from Wanda’s control.
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Like Wanda, who creates the WandaVision “sitcom” out of grief over the death of the Vision (Paul Bettany), Monica would have addressed her mental health after disappearing and reappearing — only to discover her mother died three years earlier.
“My pitch was mapped to the stages of grief, it ended up being kind of a reductive thing,” Schaeffer told Parris on EW‘s The Awardist podcast. “I don’t know if you know this or not, Teyonah, but [Monica] had a therapist in the base, the pop-up base. There were therapy scenes because we, in the [writers’] room, were very pro-therapy. We saw this show as being really, truly, about mental health.”
“We were like, ‘Well, we’ve got to have a therapist,’ and then realized that there’s not a lot of time in the pop-up base for Monica to be stepping into her sessions at all,” Schaeffer said about the command center set up just outside Westview.
As hinted at by the sitcom-interrupting commercials that aired in nearly every episode of WandaVision, the nine-episode series — and the television show created by Wanda in the runway to her becoming the Scarlet Witch — was about trauma.
“Wanda’s trauma is what the show is all about,” series director Matt Shakman previously told ComicBook.com. “It was hard to talk about in press early on when we are just talking about sitcom episodes, but it’s the through-line for the whole show. And it’s, I think, something that we all have experience with and this year more than ever as we mourn over 500,000 people having died just in this country alone in a pandemic. So I think it has extra resonance now, strangely, but this show is about how do you grieve? How do you come back from loss? Can you come back from loss?”
The Scarlet Witch will return in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, in theaters on March 25, 2022; the super-powered Monica Rambeau returns opposite Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) in Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, out November 11, 2022.
All episodes of WandaVision are now streaming on Disney+.
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