“Now In Color” Review

We leap forward to the happy, clappy, “Now In Color” seventies in this week’s Westview wackiness but while the style may have changed – hello “The Brady Bunch” and the decade turned, we pick up exactly where we left off last week with Wanda newly(ish) pregnant and with the nesting instinct in full swing.

While Wanda is excitedly with her expectant condition, Vision is more puzzled by the rapidity of the progress – and with good reason because nine months seem to pass in the blink on nine minutes for our unknowingly trapped twosome.

The series’ ongoing full-blooded commitment to its sitcom stylings brings an added air of uneasiness to this third episode, giving power to the dark undercurrent that counterbalances the saturated and sunny technicolour visuals – an undercurrent which by the end of the show threatens to become a riptide. Both Olson and Bettany are clearly having a ball hamming it up and while their performances are superficially mannered and hokey, they both demonstrate their real skill as they switch back and forth between their sitcom personas and the heroes we’ve come to know and love as suspicions and ‘reality’ start to break through with increasing regularity.

There are big steps in making the “Twilight Zone”-style wrongness of Westview more overt, not just in the big showy moments but seeping in throughout the episodes. It’s clear things are breaking down and Wanda’s powers seem to be becoming more eratic for reasons beyond her pregnancy and we get the clearest indication yet that a number of the other residents have differing levels of awareness of their surroundings and some even have definite knowledge that all is not well.

There are even hints which start to offer the first morsels of an explanation for Vision’s miraculous return from being the only person in “Avengers: Infinity War” to die twice and by the end of the episode, while Wanda and Vision’s family bliss has increased, so have the number of red flags littering this quaint, quiet suburb.

“Now In Color” is a turning point for the series, one from which there’s likely no turning back. It places Wanda firmly at the centre of a mystery box and starts to shade in some of the sides of that enigmatic container as well. How much awareness and control Wanda has over the situation is still very much the key question. Is Westview a prison or a sanctuary? Are SWORD there to extricate or enforce the lockdown? The final moments of this week’s episode are ripe for speculation both inside and outside the happy TV bubble. As Vision matetextually observes: ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’, but who, pray tell, is wielding the quill and parchment for this phantasmagorical folio? That is the question.