“I’m sorry … I’m just so tired … It’s just like this wave washing over me again and again. It knocks me down, and when I try to stand up, it just comes for me again … It’s just gonna drown me.”

WandaVision is a show about grief. It’s never pretended to be about anything else, and “Previously On” made it clear that even now—with only one episode left before the end of this story—it’s going to bravely and boldly stay true to what it is: a story of a woman’s journey through depression, trauma, and grief that’s so strong her body literally cannot contain it.

As such, the most important moment in this episode wasn’t the mid-credits teaser or Agatha’s long-awaited delivery of Wanda’s superhero name or even the moment Wanda created Vision and the entire new reality that took over the town of Westview.

All of those moments mattered—because every moment of Wanda’s journey has mattered. However, the moment that encapsulated the whole series in all its character-centric, emotionally-driven glory came when Wanda revisits a quiet moment between her and Vision in the Avengers compound soon after she came to America following the death of her brother.

In this moment, Wanda looks small and lonely and achingly human—sitting cross-legged on her bed, watching Malcolm in the Middle because sitcoms have given her comfort in some of her life’s worst moments. She’s not a superhero here. And she’s not a villain either. She’s a woman.

And she’s exhausted.

Grief is exhausting. And the way Elizabeth Olsen plays that bone-deep exhaustion as she explains to Vision what it feels like to live a life defined by loss—a life where you constantly fear the next wave that you know is coming—is so uncomfortably real that it feels difficult to watch because not a single adult alive hasn’t felt that at some point. To be human is to know loss. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, the loss of a place that mattered to us, the loss of a relationship, or the loss of a version of ourselves we’d finally learned to love—we’ve all known grief in some form.

Because we’ve all known love in some form.

And as Vision says, “But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

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WandaVision is a marvel (pun obviously intended). It’s a thrill-a-minute mystery, a possible (probable?) key to opening the Marvel Multiverse, an homage to classic sitcoms, and the wildest and weirdest ride on television right now.

But it’s also a story about grief.

It’s a story about the way we try to escape grief in other realities (especially happy, televised ones). It’s a story about control and the desperate ways we try to reclaim control by holding on to things long past when we should let them go. It’s a story about the anger that naturally comes along with the grieving process and what carrying that anger around does to us and those around us.

And even more specifically, it’s about how all of those things are seen through a different lens when it’s a woman experiencing them.

Female grief. Female rage.

That’s what Wanda represents. She’s the embodiment of the rage that burns inside women who’ve lived through trauma and loss. And she’s the embodiment of the way the world doesn’t know what to do with the women who wear their rage on their sleeve—who grieve in a way that’s not pretty or soft or quiet.

Wanda is an angry woman—and when you look at her life, you see that she has every reason to be. Even if she’s handling it poorly, even if she’s doing the wrong things—the motivation behind them is clear, understandable, and relatable.

She’s not a hero. But she’s not a villain, either.

She’s a woman in pain.

And the only other character who’s able to see that is another woman who’s in pain.

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