The following contains spoilers for WandaVision Episode 7, "Breaking the Fourth Wall."
At this point it seems like everybody loves WandaVision. The show is original and creative and fun, but it also is giving fans that Marvel Cinematic Universe fix that so many have been craving for so long. Every week there are questions answered, which is incredibly satisfying, while new questions are created. But there's one question that I have that I haven't seen anybody else ask. How does the general public know so many specific details about what's going on with The Avengers and the various other superheroes in the world?
I mean, I understand that the public would be aware of a lot of the general goings on. There was a big battle in this place, at this time, some superheroes showed up, there was a fight, and this was the outcome. I'm sure all that is on the nightly news. But characters like Darcy Lewis, Jimmy Woo and even Monica Rambeau seem to have very specific knowledge about key events that happen in the middle of superhero battles and even about the heroes themselves. Some of it seems like it would be strange information for them to have.
Wanda's Actions In Avengers: Endgame
The first time I felt this way was in WandaVision's "Very Special Episode." There's a conversation between Darcy, Monica, and Jimmy, where it's mentioned that, if Wanda is the source of the "hex," then it shows that Wanda has significantly more power than she has previously exhibited. Monica responds by bringing up the fact that Wanda very nearly defeated Thanos by herself, and it was only Thanos' decision to "call in a blitz," or "rain fire" as Thanos put it in Avengers: Endgame, that prevented him from being defeated right there.
How exactly does Monica know this? This one brief interaction between two people, one of whom ends up dead, on a battlefield of hundreds. Most everybody else is pretty busy with their own fighting while in battle, so it's unclear if they'd be paying a great deal of attention to what Wanda was up to. In the MCU timeline, the battle with Thanos is incredibly recent. It basically just happened. If somebody is writing a book about the fight, it hasn't been published yet. And Monica has five years of history to catch up on, yet she knows the specifics of this particular interaction in the middle of a battlefield. Did Wanda give an interview to CNN in between Tony's funeral and stealing Vision's body?
In the same conversation, Jimmy Woo mentions that he thinks Captain Marvel was also a major player in the battle, as somebody else who came close to defeating Thanos. Again, how does he know this? Even if Monica, being part of S.W.O.R.D, or Jimmy, being in the FBI, had access to special reports about the events, those reports would have to include these specific details, and how could they?
Things go one step further when Darcy Lewis mentions that she knows that Captain Marvel's power come from an Infinity Stone. This sort of information seems dangerous. Does Carol Danvers really want people to be aware of where her powers came from? Seems like this is just the sort of information a supervillain would love to have. Darcy is an astrophysicist. She's had more experience with the superpowered lot than most, but does the fact that she knows Thor give her access to special info on heroes? Darcy is, for all intents and purposes, a "normal person," and yet she knows where Captain Marvel's powers come from and nothing she's told by Monica or Jimmy is apparently news to her.
Vision Dies Twice
This issue came back with the newest episode of WandaVision, "Breaking the Fourth Wall" where Darcy seems to give Vision a crash course in his own existence. She knows that Vision came about through the melding of Tony Stark's AI Jarvis and a Vibranium Ultron bot. She knows not only that Thanos killed Vision, but that he only did so after reversing time after Wanda had already done the horrible deed herself.
If you go back and watch the sequence in Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos fights his way through several heroes as he works his way through to Wanda and Vision. It's difficult to tell where all the defeated heroes are in relation to Wanda when all this goes down, but it's a wooded area with plenty of trees, bushes, and rocks, that might obscure view and certainly nobody else is in the frame but the three main players, so it's possible nobody else actually sees what happens here except Wanda, and she gets snapped out of existence only a few moments later.
It would be one thing if we were talking about events that happened in New York City, where maybe a news chopper was in the air getting footage (though even that seems insanely risky and I don't believe we see any such thing in the film) but both the battles with Thanos' forces happened in remote locations, meaning it was unlikely there were outside observers. Even if those in the battle did try to give a blow-by-blow account of what happened, these people were under tremendous stress. It's unlikely they'd remember everything or that accounts would even match up. Yet, these three seem certain about what happened exactly. It's not presented as the version they've heard or the rumor that's been going around, this Thanos stuff is presented as fact.
MCU Infodumps Are Getting Awkward
In the end, none of this is that big of a deal; it all just sounds really weird. There's no real reason for these particular characters to have this specific information, and so the fact they do makes it all sound like exactly what it really is: an infodump for the audience in order to help remind everybody of the details they might have forgotten regarding previous films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Somebody needs to make sure the viewer is up to speed in case they missed a movie or just haven't kept tabs.
That's not a bad thing. For every hardcore MCU fans who has watched the movies all several times, there's another who enjoys them, but has maybe only seen everything once, or may not have seen everything at all. In order to get this information across, the powers that be strangely give a lot of details to characters that really shouldn't have it. Unless, of course, they have seen all the movies.
