WandaVision's Jac Schaeffer Insists Mephisto Red Herrings Were Unintentional

WandaVision's series finale aired last week, with the aptly titled episode "The Series Finale," and head writer/executive producer Jac Schaeffer (Captain Marvel, Black Widow) has spoken in a new interview about how the unusual show came together. Speaking with Mashable, Schaeffer discusses the show's teasing deceptions both intentional and unintentional, and about the challenges WandaVision presented in the writing.

As Schaeffer explains, she feels a lot of the scrutiny and avalanche of fan theories the series has received about where it was heading plot-wise was "directly tied to the year-long gap in Marvel content and the fact that everybody is house-bound." For example, Schaeffer had said in another interview that she "naively" didn't expect fans to have a huge reaction to Pietro, Wanda's dead brother, making an appearance. As she said in an interview with Variety, "We didn't anticipate that the show would drop after a full year of MCU drought in the middle of a pandemic."

But Schaeffer maintained to Mashable that, "There was never any conscious intention on my part to create any Mephisto red herrings, because I didn't know who Mephisto was until I started doing press." Instead, she dismissed fan theories connecting dots to the contrary because the show talked about the devil so much as "a real coincidence… [Mephisto] wasn't ever part of our storytelling conversations. We were very clear that the big bad is grief."

Fans can decide for themselves, but as the final episode's title makes abundantly clear: There will be plenty of time to continue to theorize because, at least for now, there will be no more WandaVision--that we know of. But in the meantime, as of March 12, fans can get a peek behind the curtain with the newly launched Disney+ series Assembled, a new documentary series of specials that goes behind the scenes of Marvel Cinematic Universe television shows and movies. Assembled kicks off with a deep dive on WandaVision, one of the MCU's more unusual offerings bursting with homages to sitcoms.