The more entries we get in the MCU, the more complicated the web of connections between them all is going to become. After a certain point, Kevin Feige is going to resemble that famous Charlie Day meme, being the only one able to make sense of a wall full of images and pieces of pinned string spread out across all of them.
With the introduction of the Multiverse, it had the potential to explain away some potential plot holes in some of the MCU - we were certainly left asking some questions at the end of No Way Home - but if anything, it has only made things even more confusing.
Leaving aside the muddled mess involving Venom and Vulture following the ending(s) of Morbius (which, to be fair, might still be sufficiently explained), the ending of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has only added to this now-very-tall-and-wobbling-a-bit tower of plot holes.
First of all, did anybody else notice that the entire central plot of the movie was borrowed in its entirety from Fringe? Spoilers for a show that ended 10 years ago and you've no inclination to watch, but it involved a parent travelling across parallel dimensions to be reunited with their child that died in their own world. Sound familiar?
Then there is the arrival of Reed Richards (played here by John Krasinski) of the Fantastic Four. So, that now means this super-heroic foursome exists somewhere within the MCU. Okay, that's fine, but remember back to No Way Home, which told us that alternate versions of Peter Parker (played by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) also now exist within the MCU.
So, following that logic, an alternate version of the Fantastic Four must also exist. Which means that both Chris Evans and Michael B. Jordan's version of Johnny Storm exist, which is a problem, since Evans and Jordan have also played other famous characters within the MCU! That mind starts to fold in on itself if you think too long about it...
But really, and the central conflict at the heart of the Strange sequel's biggest issue... well, we need to talk about Wanda.
Before we get to the crux of it, we need to put aside some stuff.
Put aside the fact that Wanda gets utterly fucked over by her character arc in this movie, which completely undoes all of the good that WandaVision had done. Over the course of that show - and during some of her appearances in some of the movies - we see that Wanda might actually be the most tragic of the MCU characters.
Her parents were killed in front of her by a Stark missile. She was tested on by Hydra for years before being sent into the field as a weapon, where her brother was brutally killed. She fell in love with Vision, only to have to be the one to kill him as part of an ultimately failed attempt to stop Thanos. And then, in an explosive outburst of grief, she used her powers to conjure up a perfect sitcom life with Vision back at her side, as well as two kids, only to have to destroy all of that herself, too.
Wanda has endured all of these horrors, and having trained herself between the end of that show and the beginning of this movie to become, arguably, the single most powerful entity in the Multiverse, she wants to put all that power into... having a family.
Not to belittle that goal, but Marvel has a habit of making that the overall endgame of their strongest female protagonists. See also – Black Widow's poorly revealed and subsequently heavily criticised backstory during Age of Ultron.
So, that is all the stuff we have to put aside.
The biggest problem with Wanda here is that she is so all-powerful, so uniquely gifted, we're often told that she has the power to bend reality to whatever she wants it to be. That is, after all, how she ended up with those kids in WandaVision in the first place. Thus, if she is this all powerful being, capable of creating and destroying... then why bother travelling across the Multiverse at all to snatch some other Wanda's children? Why not... create the kids again from scratch like she did the first time?
No to belittle the loss Wanda felt, but she literally created them out of thin air last time, so why can't she just do that again?
And this is to say nothing of the fact that she seems so singularly focused on these kids, with not one single fuck given to Vision, the love of her life, who is both (A) super dead, and (B) also super not dead, but living as a vanilla-fashioned version of himself somewhere out there.
Perhaps there is some explanation as to why she couldn't just conjure her kids back into existence - is that what all of the other Wandas did, too? Or are they all still living within their own versions of Westview? And where are the Visions in all of these versions? - but if there is, this movie didn't explain it to us.
And quite frankly, regardless of what the answer is, Wanda deserved better.
