The Vampyre Incident - Intro

 Note: This is a draft copy.

The Standish twins, Charles, and Henry had talked the wives into going to town to do some shopping while the boys headed to the blue waters of the Mediterranean to do some snorkeling along the rugged coast of southern France. The weather was warm and the water was clear as glass. It was perfect for a boy's day out.

“Hey, look at this,” Charles said pointing to what looked like a crevice in the face of a cliff along the water. They swam up to the crevice and peered inside. Rocks and dirt were piled in the water at the bottom of the crevice. It looked like a small rockfall had recently uncovered what appeared to be a cave entrance.

“I think we could fit through this crevice,” Charles said. “What to check it out?”

Henry looked inside. “It looks big enough inside. Why not?”

Charles smiled and squeezed through the crevice. Henry followed him. It was a tight fit, but they made it through the crevice and stood at the entrance to a large, dark cave. It was very dark inside, as to be expected, and the boys stood for a moment to let their eyes adjust. Henry unclipped the diving torch he carried in his belt, flipped it on, and stepped into the darkness. Holding the torch aloft, he slowly swept the beam across the cave. It was a long cavern, with a rough ceiling several meters high, and when Henry swept the beam across the back of the cavern, something metallic flashed in the torchlight.

“Did you see that?” Henry asked.

“Yeah, something back there,” Charles said. “Let’s check it out. Not much chance of getting lost here. It appears to be one big cavern.” The brothers smiled at each other. This was shaping up to be a real adventure. 

They slowly headed toward the area where the torchlight was being reflected. The floor of the cavern was littered with rocks and dirt, and Charles noticed that in places there were black patches, as if the ground had been scorched. “Look at this,” Charles said, pointing to a scorched spot on the ground. “What could have caused that?”

Henry shrugged. “I don’t know. A fire of some sort I guess. Maybe there was a gas build-up that ignited.”

“Yeah, maybe,” said Charles. “Maybe this was an old mine back in the day.”

“Think we will find any hidden treasure?” Henry asked. They both laughed and slowly made their way amid the rocks and heaps of dirt to the back of the cavern. What the torch revealed in the darkness made both boys stop short. “What the hell are those?” Henry whispered.

The back wall of the cavern had collapsed and through the hole in the wall, the boys could see a metal chamber beyond. In the chamber were two metal tubes anchored to the metal floor of the chamber. The metal wall of the chamber had been torn open by some unknown cause, and the inside of the chamber had been badly damaged. Some sort of strange computer equipment on the far wall of the chamber had burned leaving twisted wires and molten glass or plastic hanging out of the cavity that had held the equipment. What appeared to be a metal door on the right side of the chamber was twisted in the frame. Through the gaps in the door frame, they could only see darkness.

The twins looked at each other in wonder and carefully entered the chamber through the jagged opening. “What do you think this is?” Charles asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Beats me,” Henry answered. “I wonder what is in these tubes?” He walked over to the nearest tube and examined it in the torchlight. It seemed to be a sealed tube, large enough for a person to climb inside. It was made out of some sort of dull metal. He rapped the side of the tube with the torch and it sounded as if it might be hollow. 

“I don’t see any openings or latches on the…” Henry suddenly trailed off and stood upright, dropping the torch. 

“Hey, what’s up?” Charles asked, picking up the torch and shining the light on his brother’s face. Henry seemed dazed as if sleepwalking. Henry suddenly pushed Charles aside and walked around to the top of the tube. He reached under the tube and tripped some sort of lever and then walked back around to the side of the tube and stood there. 

“What the hell?” Charles said. There was the popping sound of a seal breaking and the metal tube began to open. Charles grabbed Henry and tried to pull him away from the opening tube, but Henry shrugged off the attempt and stood beside the tube as if waiting for something. Charles turned the torch on the inside of the tube. Something lay in the tube, something with tentacles for arms and writhing tentacles sprouting from a horrific face. Charles screamed, dropped the torch, and turned to run, but he was grabbed from behind and lifted up in the air. 

The creature slowly turned him around until he was facing the monster. Charles struggled against the tentacles wrapping around his body but he couldn’t break free. The torch on the ground cast a dim light in the chamber and he could see the tentacles on the creature’s face writhing as he was slowly pulled toward that terrible face. The tentacles gripped his head and forced it back and he felt the sting of fangs sink into his neck. He closed his eyes and heard a voice screaming as he felt his strength leave his body and flow into the sucking maw of the monster. 

***

Jason Blythe was the caretaker of a small graveyard that had no name out in the middle of nowhere in the countryside of England. The graveyard dated back to the 1700s and was named an official historical site by the United Nations, but few visitors visited the site. It was a peaceful job, but a little boring at times. There wasn’t much to do in the graveyard itself. That wasn’t his main job. Rather, he monitored a particular grave, a grave with an iron cage over the top. 

A grave that was wired to a deadly electrical current that would flow through the cage at his command. A grave that had three cameras on it at all times. A night vision camera, a thermal camera, and a normal camera. Jason’s real job was to keep an eye on that grave. Just in case.

His boring job suddenly became interesting on a Wednesday at midnight when the proximity alarm began beeping,  waking him up from a sound sleep. For a couple of seconds, he wondered what the sound was, but his mind cleared enough for the training to kick in. He jumped out of the bed and ran into the control room scanning the monitors. “Shit,” he said. On the night vision monitor, he saw two unnaturally tall men standing by the caged grave. One of the men was cutting away the iron cage with a laser cutter. 

On the desk was an old-style, black telephone with no dial. Jason picked up the receiver and heard a click on the other end. “Bravo delta omicron two nine nine,” he said into the receiver. “Breach confirmed.”

“Understood, “ a woman’s voice said. The line went dead. He replaced the receiver and stared at the monitor. There would be two fire teams heading this way at this very moment and his job was to stay in the control room and monitor the situation. He hit the button that would send several thousand volts of electricity coursing through the cage, but the jolt only momentarily slowed down the man with the cutter. He would be through the cage in a few minutes. There wasn't much else Jason could do except watch.

The man with the laser torch finally cut through the cage and both of them lifted the iron lattice and tossed it aside. The other man retrieved some sort of device that he pointed at the ground. Dirt began flying up in the air digging out the gravesite. 

“Where the hell are they?” Jason mumbled. The fireteam should be here. A few seconds later a spotlight from a whisper-quiet helicopter illuminated the gravesite. Jason had no audio from the video feed but he could hear the steady burping of automatic weapons coming in from the window of the control room. The tall men seemed to jerk with the impact of the bullets but the one digging up the grave didn’t stop. The other man looked around and suddenly was gone, sprinting out of the camera view.

Through the window, Jason heard screams and the gunfire slowly subsided. The man returned to the grave and looked up at the overhead helicopter, pulled some sort of weapon from his pocket, and pointed it at the helicopter. Jason didn’t see any flash from the weapon, but the light winked out and in the distance, Jason could hear an explosion. The whole team had been wiped out, quickly and efficiently. This was bad.

Jason picked up the phone receiver and waited for the click. “Fireteam down,” he said. “Condition Alpha.”

“Understood, “ the woman’s voice said. 

Jason replaced the receiver and stared at the video monitor. The men had exposed the casket and they were attaching some kind of mechanism to the metal casket. The mechanism glowed and the casket slowly rose out of the ground and hovered a meter above the ground. The two men grabbed the casket and pushed it out of sight of the cameras. Jason flipped a switch activating the GPS tracker on the casket.  That was all he could do. It was up to Control now. 

He sat down in his worn office chair and stared at the video monitors. The clean-up crew should be here any minute. In the span of about 30 minutes, twelve men had died and all the careful preparations had been for nothing. His assignment here would be over now, and he would be reassigned to some other strange place after debriefing. Assuming they all survived what was about to happen. 

***

Deep in the Cascade mountain range in the state of Oregon in the United States, under a blanket of forest growth, a spherical spaceship was slowly coming to life. In a metal chamber in the spaceship, a tube-like the two found in France hissed open and inside an alien slowly emerged. 

It was tall, two and a half meters tall, roughly humanoid with tentacles writhing around a fang-filled mouth and under four blood-red eyes that were equally spaced around the top of the skull. The alien didn’t have arms; a set of three tentacles sprouted from what would have been an arm for a human. Three tentacles on each side, with each tentacle ending in two smaller tentacles that were used for fine motor skills. The torso of the creature was a mottled gray color, stocky and thick, with a large bone patch covering the midsection. The alien’s brain was under the bone, well-protected. The alien was bipedal, with the two legs ending in what looked like large, prehensile hands that served as the creature’s feet. The alien didn’t wear any clothes and didn’t seem to have any sexual organs or any elimination organs either. The alien’s body was smooth and unbroken, except for the terrifying mouth and hideous eyes.

A reclining chair extruded itself from the metal wall and the alien slowly sat down on the chair and leaned back. An opening appeared in the wall and a metal arm popped out and quickly embedded a tube into the chest of the alien. A red fluid began to flow through the clear tube and slowly the gray color of the alien faded and its skin took on a reddish color.

The alien touched the side of the chair in a rapid sequence and the reclining chair changed shape and became an upright chair. A small screen slid up from the arm of the chair and an alien script began to scroll very rapidly across the screen. The alien stared at the screen intently as pictures, sounds and alien text flashed across the small screen. At one point, a video of the caged grave appeared on the screen and the alien froze the video feed. Tapping the screen with the tip of a tentacle, the picture zoomed in on the two very tall men at the grave. For long minutes he stared at the screen and then tapped the screen once again. The information continued to flow across the screen. 

Free Will in a Deterministic Universe

 I have noticed in quite a few videos on science that the speakers make reference to free will and claim that free will does not actually exist. This is especially true when the speaker is talking about various interpretations of quantum mechanics such as the Many Worlds interpretation [Many-worlds interpretation - Wikipedia] and especially in the Superdeterminism interpretation [Superdeterminism - Wikipedia]. The idea that free will doesn’t exist is wrong, even in a completely deterministic universe. 

Let’s start with a definition of free will. “The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion” Google Definition. Wikipedia has this definition: “Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded” [Free will - Wikipedia]. I like to define free will in a more technical sense: “Free will is the ability of an agent to choose from a minimum of two different options without any outside coercion while making the choice.” It is basically what the phrase implies; we are free to make a choice and that choice is entirely made by us. 

However, the determinists say we don’t have free will because the choice is irrelevant; the outcome is already determined. This is wrong and it is wrong for one very simple reason. Determinism tells us WHAT choice was made but it doesn’t inform us HOW that choice was made. Free will informs us on HOW a choice was made but doesn’t extend to WHAT choice was made. The two concepts are different in scope and only give us partial information about a choice. The difference here is subtle but significant. Look at the definition of free will again. “The ability to make a choice without coercion.” That right there informs us of the scope of free will. If I can make a choice without any outside force compelling me to make that choice, then I am exercising free will. The actual outcome of the choice isn’t relevant. Free will extends to the choice itself and no farther. 

Determinists want to take the outcome of free will and try to work backward to the choice to imply that free will doesn’t exist. However, you simply cannot do this because you don’t have the information to do this backward logic trace. Suppose I know that when I offer you an apple and orange I know for a fact that you will pick the apple. It is a predetermined outcome. What does this knowledge tell me? It only tells me WHAT your choice is going to be. There isn’t any information on HOW you make the choice. Remember the definition of free will? It is HOW you make a choice, not what the outcome of that choice is. You cannot backtrack from the outcome of a choice to the choice itself because you have no information on how that choice was made. You only know the WHAT not the HOW. I could know the outcome of every choice you make and have zero information on how those choices were made. You simply cannot determine how a choice was made by looking at the outcome of a choice. 

Free will informs us on HOW a choice is made and whether that choice was free. In the apple and orange example, even though the outcome is predetermined, as long as I (or some outside force) doesn’t force you to choose an apple, then you have exercised free will, even in a completely deterministic setting. There are some that say the universe itself is forcing the choice but, of course, they leave out the mechanism of this supposed manipulation of choice. There is no need to invoke this sort of metaphysical influence when in reality there is no conflict between free will and determinism.

Determinism may give us the information to predict every choice every creature in the universe will make, but it tells us nothing about how those choices were made. It gives us the WHAT but not the HOW. Free will tells us HOW a choice is made, whether it is free or not, but doesn’t care WHAT choice is made. To confuse the two is an attempt to make an apple into an orange. Knowing the outcome of a choice is only part of the story. The most important part, how that choice was made, can only be determined by examining the choice itself. 

How Star Wars Connects to the MCU

Star Wars takes place a "long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." This idea of "a long time ago" is taken from Akira Kurosawa's samurai films, such as Seven Samurai (one of the greatest samurai films of all time) where the Jedi are inspired by samurai and other ancient military orders. Of course the "galaxy far, far away" implies far, far away from Earth, in another galaxy entirely. This is where the strangeness occurs.

There is one question I have always had about Star Wars and this idea of a galaxy far, far away: why are the main characters so human? Setting aside the obvious technical reasons of film-making and staying in-universe, it is almost inconceivable that human beings would evolve in parallel in two different galaxies. The human form does have some advantages, mainly thumbs and a big brain. However, we are weaker, slower, almost blind, and deaf compared to other life forms on Earth. The idea of parallel evolution, while possible of course, is extremely unlikely. There is a possibility that the human form on Earth comes from this galaxy far, far away. They had faster-than-light (FTL) capability, so it is possible a colony ship from that galaxy using an FTL drive could have colonized this galaxy but there is one big problem. The distance between galaxies is unbelievably huge. The closest galaxy, Canis Major, is 25, 000 light-years away or 236,000,000,000,000,000 km (146,643,601,368,010,816 miles). Even traveling through hyperspace at maximum speed would require a generation ship to reach our galaxy from Canis Major assuming Star Wars takes place in this dwarf galaxy, which seems unlikely. The other major problem with the colony hypothesis is the apparent maturity of the Star Wars universe. Star Wars would have had to take place billions of years in the past in order for a colony ship to arrive on Earth in our past, so we would expect the Star Wars universe to be quite young. It isn't though. A young universe would have much fewer stars than the Star Wars universe has. The number of apparent stars and star systems in Star Wars seems on par with our universe and closer to our time than in the past. So we have a bit of a problem. Or do we? In Loki, we saw that the multiverse has existed time and again in a cyclic manner, presumably for all eternity (at least up until this point). Humans are peculiar to Earth and of course to parallel Earths. Think about the samurai orders and an expanding multiverse. The multiverse expands at a geometric rate, which each universe slightly different from the last. You could think of the multiverse in terms of distance. Travel from timeline to timeline, and you get "farther" away from the starting universe. The farther you travel, the universes become much different than the starting universe. Yet, there are going to be things that remain the same though, such as humans and the age of the universe. The Samarai Age ran from 1185 to 1868 Earth time. Traveling across the multiverse during this time, you would see various forms of the samurai, slightly different in each universe, but with some elements remaining the same. Since the multiverse is infinite, at some you will reach a timeline where the samurai are called Jedi and the universe, while the same age as our own, is already a space-faring society in the 1100s. That is certainly possible if in the Star Wars timeline humans evolved much earlier than in our own. It is quite possible that when you reach this timeline, you have found a "galaxy far, far away" in the multiverse and "a long time ago" in the Samurai Age. I think Star Wars is an alternate universe, quite a distance from our own, taking place during the Age of the Samurai.

Freewill and the Sacred Timeline (Loki Analysis)

 Free will is a subject I have examined for years and I have found that most people have no idea what free will actually is and how it works. The common idea is that free will is not possible in a deterministic universe. In fact, free will is always possible regardless of determinism or not. So, what is free will? Free will is the ability to freely choose from at least two alternatives without any coercion from an outside force on the agent in the making of the choice. As long as an agent isn't forced into a choice, even if that choice is predetermined by a higher power, the agent has expressed free will.

You can verify this hypothesis by looking at the result of the choice. If determinism forced a choice, that is the agent was in fact coerced into making a choice by the fact that determinism exists, then it would be evident in the result. The Time Lizards exist outside of time since they are the ones controlling the timeline (if they actually exist). They would know that Joe would go left at an intersection because they can see the whole timeline, and see the result of every choice. Joe reaches the intersection and goes left. Can we determine that he was coerced into doing so by looking at the result? The answer is no. We see the result, but not the mechanism of the choice that determined the result. That is the problem. Determinism says he will go left, but it doesn't give us any clue on how that choice was made. The Sacred Timeline is deterministic if it is a fixed timeline (and that really is the question that needs an answer). Fixed timelines cannot be changed, no matter how you may try to change the timeline. A fixed timeline is deterministic because the result of every choice has already been made throughout the whole timeline. That is the definition of a fixed timeline. Everything that can happen has already happened and cannot be changed. However, that says nothing about the mechanism of the choices and therefore cannot speak to how those choices were made and whether an agent was free in making those choices. As long as there is freedom of choice, even if the result of every choice is predetermined, then free will has been expressed. To most people, this seems like a contradiction, however, it is the nature of choice. How far does choice extend? Does choice end at the act of choosing or does it extend to the results of the choice? That is the key point to understand. As I have already shown, choice does not extend to the result of the choice of the agent. Choice, and therefore free will, only extends to the act of choosing and no farther. When Joe reaches the intersection, he can go left or right. We already know he goes left since that is predetermined. However, when we examine the actual choice we see that Joe is not under any coercion to choose left over right, he simply chooses left and his free will has been expressed. Even in a fully deterministic universe, as long as the agents are not forced into making choices, they have free will. Even in the Sacred Timeline, there is free will. The Time Lizards know this which is why they have pushed this Big Brother agenda so hard. The Sacred Timeline is by nature, unstable, otherwise, there wouldn't be a TVA in the first place. The Sacred Timeline itself cannot be changed as it fixed (supposedly), but this instability creates the many timelines that naturally branch from the Scared Timeline. This instability is inherent in the Sacred Timeline because the Time Lizards cannot actually control free will in the timeline.

The multiverse is the natural state of the universe because of free will, and they are trying to impose an artificial restraint on the universe that the universe itself is trying to break free from. It isn't just the variants that want to be free of the Time Lizards' manipulation; the universe itself is trying to get back to its natural state. Like Thanos, the multiverse is inevitable.

Why Time Travel is a Problem

 There is nothing in science that prevents time travel explicitly, but time travel poses a real problem to science and it isn't the problem you may think. The problem with time travel is the possibility of a paradox, and the common one most people think of is the Grandfather Paradox.  You travel back in time and kill your Grandfather. Since you killed your Grandfather, you would not exist to go back in time to kill your Grandfather--hence the paradox.

There is a more subtle one as well. On a dark and stormy night, you hear a knock at the door. When you open the door a man in a strange suit hands you a worn book. The man looks strangely familiar, but you can't quite place him. He says to you, "In twenty years, the technology will be available to build the machine in the book. Build it, go back in time, and give yourself the book." The man then turns and walks away. You look through the book and discover it is the plan for building a time machine. This paradox is actually worse than the Grandfather paradox, although t doesn't seem so at first glance.  Think about it for a moment and ask yourself the question: who originally wrote the book? Where did it come from?

The problem is the same in both of these paradoxes, in fact in every paradox. Paradoxes violate the Law of Conservation of Information. In the Grandfather paradox, information is being erased from the universe. In the second paradox, information has been added to the universe and both violate the Law of Conservation of Information.

Conservation of information is a corollary of the Law of Conservation of Energy and is a consequence of Einstein's famous E = MC^2 formula. The formula states that mass and energy are equivalent, they are just different forms of the same thing. The Conservation of Energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change its form. 

Mass is energy, but it is energy with information attached to it. In fact, all energy is a form of information since mass and energy describe the universe around us. An atom has some information associated with it, and when you split that atom, that information must be conserved the same as energy is conserved.  The information of the two components equals the information of the original component.

Time paradoxes violate this information conservation. In the case of the Grandfather paradox, information is being removed from the universe. Information cannot be removed from the universe, you can only change its form. In the second paradox, you are adding information to the universe, information that doesn't have a source. Both of these conditions violate information conservation but are possible if time travel is true. The paradox is that the Law of Conservation of Information is violated, something that simply you cannot do under science as we know it. If the conservation of information were possible, then physics is wrong and the whole scientific framework that we use to understand the universe just crashes. However, the laws of science have been proven over and over so it is the paradox that cannot happen not that the laws of science fail.

It is strange that nothing in science prevents time travel, probably because the notion of time in science is actually quite vague. It is really hard to define exactly what time is and if it actually exists. Yes, we have space-time, but that concerns the passage of time in a frame of reference as indicated by a clock. Clocks actually don't measure time. Clocks are simply chronometers that operate at an agreed-upon frequency that help us measure the world around us and synchronize activities around the solar system. Clocks are just fancy metronomes, that tick at a certain constant rate (in a perfectly flat portion of space-time not influenced by any measurable gravity). The agreed-upon rate is dictated by super-accurate atomic clocks--which also don't measure time.

Time paradoxes probably indicate that time travel isn't possible, given that the possibility of a paradox, even if that possibility is very rare. Maybe you can't change the past at all. For example, it may be impossible to kill your Grandfather even if you tried. The second paradox may not be possible either, but we simply don't know, and that is a problem. The very possibility, as improbable as it may be, may indicate that time travel will forever remain in the realms of science fiction.

WandaVision: What is Going On?

 Note: The following contains spoilers for the TV show WandaVision airing on Disney+.

The newest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a new TV show called WandaVision. Wanda Maximoff, aka The Scarlet Witch and Vision, are the two main Marvel characters in the show. The show takes place in this strange alternate reality where Wanda and Vision are married and are living in a series of TV sitcoms starting with the 1950s and moving forward through the decades. The format is quite odd but I believe that the show actually explains what is happening. This essay is my theory on what is going on in WandaVision.

The main motif in the show is the classic television sitcom. This is more than just a gimmick. It is integral to what is happening in this strange alternate world. To understand we need to look at the show trailers for two important clues. The first is the Monkees song Daydream Believer that is used in the first trailer. The idea of “dreaming” is prominent in the trailers and Daydream Believer is a song about suburban life and the strange tone life takes after the wedding day. The next clue is in the last trailer where the narrator says “dreaming starts Friday”. The narrator uses the word dreaming instead of streaming. It is clear from these two clues that the show is composed of a dream world. We know from the comics books that Wanda is capable of altering reality so it appears that this world of WandaVision is a dream world that Wanda is creating for some reason. Wanda has to be creating this since this takes place after the events of the war with Thanos and Vision is dead.

This is confirmed by Agnes, the nosy neighbor (probably Agatha Harkness from the comics) where she sees Wanda looking at the red toy helicopter and says “the star of the show!” This reference clearly indicates that Wanda is the one that is in this dream state and is creating this alternate reality.

The episodes are in black and white but we find that certain objects in the show appear in the color red. We have the toy helicopter, the light on the toaster in the fake commercial, blood on the hand of the lady at the meeting after the strange radio signal. Red is a color closely tied with the Scarlet Witch and I think the color red represents reality or the real world. At the ending of episode 2, we have Vision turning red, his natural color, and Wanda's dress turning red, the color of the Scarlet Witch. The color red represents reality and the real world.

We have another important clue at the end of episode 1 where we see that Wanda is being monitored by what appears to be the organization called Sword. Sword is an acronym that means Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division. It is an organization like Shield that handles threats of an extraterrestrial nature. The Weapon part of the acronym implies individuals with superpowers that have become weaponized. In the case of Wanda, this may refer to her ability to alter reality, a power we haven't yet seen in the MCU but is probably now being revealed in WandVision. Since Sword is monitoring the dream state of Wanda, is clear that they have her in a facility where this monitoring can take place. This brings us to the toaster commercial which I believe is the explanation of what is going on in WandaVison.

The commercial starts with burnt toast and the narrator are addressing the woman in the audience, an obvious reference to Wanda. The burnt toast is bad. We don't want burnt toast. The answer to this bad situation is a toaster created by Stark Industries that will produce perfect toast when the red light blinks. In the commercial, the red light blinks, and the prop lady takes out the perfect toast and places them on a plate after giving a very odd look at the camera. In fact, the whole commercial is odd.

The prop lady doesn't act like a prop lady should in the commercial. If you have ever seen the Price is Right, you know what I mean. She is focused on the toaster and when the red light blinks she gives a look to the camera like she is saying “I told you.” We also have that red light. Red is the color of the real world, and since the toaster has a red light, it is connected to a real-world machine. The toaster is just a manifestation in the dream world of this real-world machine that is designed to correct a bad situation.

Let's look at the commercial again, but from a higher level. Something bad has occurred, some sort of disaster, represented by the burnt toast. The answer to fix the source of the disaster is a machine made by Stark Industries that is being monitored by doctors or scientists represented by the prop lady. We know that Wanda is being monitored by Sword, as she lives in this dream world, so it appears that the Stark toaster is actually a machine that Wanda is in where she is dreaming this alternate reality. Sword has her in a machine that allows Wanda to dream and because Wanda can alter reality, she is creating an alternate reality from this dream state. But why?

The dream is the key here. They have her in a dream state because mentally something is wrong with Wanda. The machine is designed to heal Wanda's mental state. Suppose after the battle with Thanos, Wanda has a mental break. After all, she watched Vision die twice. It is easy to see that if Wanda had a complete mental breakdown, her ability to alter reality would pose a serious threat to the world. I believe that the burnt toast indicates that Wanda was wreaking havoc in the world because of her mental breakdown and they were able somehow to put her into the dream state within the machine. I suspect Agnes, aka Agatha Harkness, a person closely connected to Wanda in the comics books, may have had something to do with getting Wanda in this dream state.

The sitcom motif of the show is a metaphor for Wanda's mental state. In the 1950s, sitcoms had little resemblance to the real world. They were these bubble worlds that existed in an almost different reality, far removed from the real world. The first episode sitcom setting is from that idealized world of Leave it to Beaver and the Dick Van Dyke show. This shows how far mentally Wanda is from reality, her deep mental break after the events with Thanos.

As the series continues we see the show sitcom motif change to shows from the 1960s and 1970s like Bewitched and Brady Bunch. The 1960s and 1970s sitcoms were closer to reality than previous shows. For example the two-bed bedroom of the 1950s sitcom became the one-bed bedroom in the late '60s and early '70s sitcoms. This indicates that Wanda is also moving closer to reality, that her mental state is improving. So the sitcom motif of the show is actually an indicator of Wanda's improving mental state while she is in the Stark machine.

There is a wrinkle in all of this though. In the scene where Wanda and Agnes are at the Rotary Club meeting, the leader says “the devil is in the details” and Agnes responds “that isn't the only place he is at”. In the comics, Wanda has ties to a major villain called Mephisto. Mephisto is portrayed as a “devil” character so it is clear that Agnes is referring to Mephisto. After the meeting, Wanda hears a message from the radio that sounds like it is saying “Wanda, what are they doing to you?” and immediately afterward, the lady who was running the meeting breaks a glass in her hand and the resulting blood is red, indicating a connection to the real world. I think this shows that WandaVision and Mephisto have a connection that will bring bloodshed in the real world. It may be that this alternate reality Wanda is creating is the vehicle that Mephisto uses to come into our world. There is quite a bit of speculation that Mephisto may be the main villain in the next phase of the MCU which is starting with WandaVision. I think this scene foreshadows the events we will see in the new MCU phase.

All of this is just a theory, but I think it fits the facts and is a reasonable interpretation of the clues given in the show. Time will tell if I am correct.

Township: Efficient Mining