Warning: Contains spoilers for WandaVision episode 5
Despite being one of the youngest Avengers, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has been through a lot of trauma. She has survived when her parents, brother, and partner, Vision (Paul Bettany), have all died. Now, the latest WandaVision episode, “On a Very Special Episode…” insinuates that she’s created a perfect world for herself to shut out the pain and grief of dealing with those losses. Yet each episode’s retro advertisement is intent on leaking her traumatic experiences into her TV-world.
The Stark Industries Toast Mate 2000 commercial alluded to her parents’ death. The Strücker watch ad called back to the man who experimented on her and her twin, Pietro. Even the latest ad, a seemingly innocent paper towel commercial, is a reference to something Wanda might rather forget. The clip mimics a scene everyone has watched on their TV at some point: a spilled drink and comparison of two brands of paper towels cleaning it up. The Lagos brand paper towel is the superior, the voiceover remarks, finishing with a rather on-the-nose tagline, “Lagos: For when you make a mess you didn’t mean to.” Of course, Lagos, Nigeria, is exactly where Wanda made a mess she didn’t mean to.
Although Wanda started as an antagonist to the Avengers, she defected to their side once she realized the harm that Ultron would bring to innocent people. Saving people has always been important to her, so when she inadvertently killed several civilians, she took it hard. The accident happened in Captain America: Civil War, when the Avengers traveled to Lagos to take down an ex-HYDRA terrorist attacking the Institute for Infectious Diseases. The mission was one of Wanda’s first with the Avengers, so she was still in training. However, she proved her immense usefulness to them when she used her powers to contain a suicide bomber explosion that was seconds away from killing Captain America (Chris Evans) and everyone nearby.
The success was short-lived, of course, until she lifted the explosion into the sky and unintentionally hit it into an apartment building, destroying a few floors and killing people within. The rest of the film showed her coping with the guilt over this mistake and it became a key point to the creation of the Sokovia Accords, a United Nations resolution meant to hold the Avengers accountable that inadvertently sparked their titular civil war. Although Wanda joined Steve’s rebellious side, she obviously still carries the guilt from those deaths in Lagos.
So how did Lagos find its way into the commercial? Well, WandaVision has gone full meta by showing S.W.O.R.D. agents watching the same sitcom episodes fans have, but it’s still unclear where the advertisements are coming from. One theory suggests that the man and woman in them are actually Wanda’s parents, which doesn’t seem too crazy now that Wanda’s brother Pietro has reappeared — with a new(ish) face.
Wanda’s mistake in Lagos was partially responsible for the Sokovia Accords
