Among the scenes that were ultimately cut from Marvel's WandaVision were a series of sessions between Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and her therapist.
"My pitch was mapped to the stages of grief, it ended up being kind of a reductive thing," said WandaVision head writer Jac Schaeffer, speaking to Parris on Entertainment Weekly's The Awardist podcast. "I don't know if you know this or not, Teyonah, but [Monica] had a therapist in the base, the pop-up base. There were therapy scenes because we, in the [writers'] room, were very pro-therapy."
With WandaVision being a show about the ways people grieve and deal with trauma, Schaeffer felt it was only natural to have a subplot focused on Monica's mental health after she disappeared during Thanos' Snap, only to reappear five years later via The Blip and discover her mother has died from cancer while she was gone. Ultimately, however, the storyline was dropped due to time constraints. "We were like, 'Well, we've got to have a therapist,' and then realized that there's not a lot of time in the pop-up [S.W.O.R.D.] base [outside Westview] for Monica to be stepping into her sessions at all," Schaeffer explained.
Of course, a very different scene featuring Monica, Darcy and Ralph was also cut from the WandaVision finale. The sequence in question would've pitted the trio against Agatha's rabbit, Señor Scratchy, as they try and steal the Darkhold from Agatha's cellar, only for the latter to transform into a giant demonic monster, revealing he's really Agatha's familiar. Describing it as a "Goonies [style] set piece," series director Matt Shakman confirmed the scene was shot but never finished in post-production and later abandoned when the show's creatives decided it was too big a detour from the episode's main action.
Parris will reprise her role as Monica in the Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, opposite Brie Larson as Carol Danvers and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel. "I do believe that we're going to get more into [Monica and Carol's] relationship and what's going on with those two" Parris said, when asked in a previous interview about the tension between her and Larson's characters that was alluded to on WandaVision.
Written by Jac Schaeffer and directed by Matt Shakman, WandaVision stars Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, Paul Bettany as Vision, Randall Park as Agent Jimmy Woo, Kat Dennings as Darcy Lewis, Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Kathryn Hahn as Agnes/Agatha Harkness. The series is available to stream on Disney+.
Source: Entertainment Weekly, via ComicBook.com