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WandaVision Episode 8 recap: MCU series delivers its most emotional episode yet (SPOILERS)

The eighth episode of WandaVision has provided the audience with a lot of answers we have been seeking for a long time. There is still a denouement remaining, of course, which we will see in the ninth and final episode. The episode is a moving meditation on grief and dealing with a loved one’s loss. Quite simply, it is the best WandaVision episode yet.

As a child, Wanda learns how nothing ever really goes wrong in sitcoms, and even if characters fall off a building and suffer injuries that should be lethal, they emerge unscathed. Her love for sitcoms was the reason the false reality she built in Westview was modelled on popular sitcoms across the decades.

We see Wanda radicalised by Hydra, along with her brother. Coming into contact with the Mind Stone greatly improves her latent magical powers.

The time moves on, and we see Vision comforting Wanda, who is grieving her brother’s death, in the Avengers compound. They fall in love. We see how Wanda has been dealt with blows after blows — her parents die, then her brother and then her lover. “What is grief, if not love persevering,” says Vision poignantly, as he underlines how important it is to grieve and deal with the loss and not avoiding it as Wanda has done.



https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/web-series/wandavision-episode-8-recap-mcu-series-delivers-its-best-most-emotional-episode-yet-7205969/

WandaVision Episode 9 Promo Disney+

US Park Police names first Black female chief in 230-year history

Pamela A. Smith has been named as the first Black woman to lead the U.S. Park Police in the agency's 230-year history.

Smith, a 23-year veteran of the Park Police, officially takes over on Sunday.

The appointment comes as the nation has seen a racial reckoning unfold over the past year and massive protests decrying racism and police brutality against people of color.

"I have dedicated my career to the professionalism of law enforcement, and it is my highest honor and privilege to serve as Chief of Police," Smith said in a statement. "Today's officers face many challenges, and I firmly believe challenges present opportunities. I look forward to leading this exemplary team as we carry out our mission with honesty and integrity."



https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-park-police-names-black-female-chief-230/story?id=76140068

TEXAS LT. GOVERNOR DAN PATRICK BLAMES CONSTITUENTS FOR GIANT ELECTRIC BILLS: "READ THE FINE PRINT"

As millions of Texans went days without heat or electricity last week, the few that somehow didn’t lose power no doubt counted themselves extremely lucky. That is, until they looked at their energy bills and saw eye-popping, five-figure numbers nearly a hundred times bigger than what they typically owed. “My savings is gone,” Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who found himself on the receiving end of a $16,752 bill, told The New York Times. “It’s been 43 degrees in the house since Monday, and I still have a $5,000 bill,” Karen Cosby told the Dallas News. “How in the world can anyone pay that,” Ty Williams wondered aloud to WFAA ABC, after noting that his electric bill was more than $17,000 for the month.

Texans hit with astronomical bills—even if they did everything they could to conserve energy—have plans whose electricity prices are not fixed and instead tied to variable wholesale prices. Obviously, that means that when demand increases, their bills rise, with the goal, according to architects of the system, being to “balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and power suppliers to create more electricity.” But when the Texas power crisis hit, the state’s Public Utilities Commission raised the cap on electricity prices to $9 per kilowatt-hour, leaving many people with completely insane bills to pay. And all of this happened because Texas, which is the only state in the contiguous U.S. not on the national power grid, and which has been under Republican control for two decades, decided to ignore a warning from federal regulators issued 10 years ago that its power plants needed to be upgraded or they would not be able to churn out electricity in extremely cold conditions—the kind the state saw last week. In other words, people like Greg Abbott and Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are the ones to blame for constituents’ gigantic bills, though if you ask Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Texans who’ve had to deplete their life’s savings should spend less time writing angry letters to elected officials and more time taking a long, hard look in the mirror.

In an interview with Fox News, Patrick told host Harris Faulkner, “I saw the story about the high bills. Let me explain that. We have in Texas, you can choose your energy plan and most people have a fixed rate. If they had a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour, their rates aren’t going up…. But the people who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low rate…going forward, people need to read the fine print in those kinds of bills.”

Sure, Patrick added that the “folks” who received $2,000 and $3,000 and $17,000 bills should “not panic” and that the government is “going to figure that out,” but he also said that he’s going to get to the bottom of why Texas‘s power grid failed in such a spectacular fashion when, again, the state was warned a decade ago that it needed to winterize its power plants. So it doesn’t really seem like Patrick is great at figuring things out.




https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/dan-patrick-texas-electricity-bills

Prosecutor Investigating Russia Probe Resigns

John Durham, the federal prosecutor who Attorney General William Barr assigned to investigate possible criminal wrongdoing in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, announced he was resigning.


https://politicalwire.com/2021/02/26/prosecutor-investigating-russia-probe-resigns/

South Dakota AG Was Reading Joe Biden Conspiracy Stories When He Hit Man

According to his cell phone records and police interview, South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg (R) was reading Joe Biden conspiracy theories at John Solomon’s Just The News website while driving when he slammed into a man and killed him.

Meanwhile, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports a state judge blocked Gov. Kristi Noem (R) from releasing additional documents and video in the investigation.




https://politicalwire.com/2021/02/26/south-dakota-attorney-general-was-reading-when-he-hit-man/

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WandaVision's January Numbers Reportedly Beat Netflix's Bridgerton

Despite releasing only four of its nine episodes in January, Marvel Studios' debut Disney+ series WandaVision reportedly dominated the American streaming scene last month, with viewership numbers topping even those of Netflix's record-breaking series Bridgerton.

Per Variety's Variety Intelligence Platform, data provided by the television analytics provider TVision finds that across all measured platforms for January 2021, Disney+'s WandaVision Season 1 had the highest viewership numbers, with Netflix's Bridgerton Season 1 coming in at second place. This is of note, as in the four weeks following its full-season premiere on Dec. 25, 2020, Bridgerton became Netflix's biggest series ever, being watched in 82 million households as of Jan. 27.

Vision keeps track of all major SVODs and AVOD's, determining viewership numbers by counting viewers who have watched a given show or movie "for at least two minutes within a session of watching content for at least five minutes." With that in mind, WandaVision came in with an indexed audience-size figure of 8,127 for the month of January. Meanwhile, Bridgerton had a figure of 6,808.

In January, the Disney+ movie Soul came in at third place (6,537), followed by Netflix's Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer Season 1 (4,954), Netflix's History of Swear Words Season 1 (3,012), Netflix's Cobra Kai Season 3 (2,997), Disney+'s Frozen 2 (2,899), HBO Max's Wonder Woman 1984 (2,883), Netflix's Lupin Season 1 (2,630) and Netflix's Cocomelon Season 1 (2,172).




https://www.cbr.com/wandavision-january-numbers-beat-bridgerton/