(Spoilers from Marvel Studios and Disney+’s WandaVision will be found below.)
After last week’s cryptic and surprisingly dark Yo-Magic commercial in Episode 6 (We still don’t even know what it means!), the newest WandaVision “commercial” for Nexus anti-depressant pills is not only jarringly straight-forward, but perhaps the biggest Easter Egg yet. Following in the pattern of the show’s previous commercials, the Nexus spot matches the time period, which in this case is the present day thanks to Episode 7’s Modern Family aesthetic. More notably, the ad ties directly into the events of the episode as the show opens with Wanda needing a mental health day as she grapples with expanding the Hex the night before and literally losing her grip on the reality she’s created as objects around her zip in and out of different time periods.
While the Nexus ad mimics modern day pharmaceutical commercials, it includes telling clues about Wanda’s current predicament by dropping lines like, “A unique anti-depressant that works to anchor you back to your reality. Or the reality of your choice,” along with an interesting set of side effects: “feeling your feelings, confronting your truth, seizing your destiny, and possible more depression.” As for the tagline, let’s just say subtlety went out the window: “Nexus: Because the world doesn’t revolve around you. Or does it?” More importantly, this is the first time we’ve actually seen Wanda use one of the products from the WandaVision commercials.
But the biggest revelation in the Nexus commercial is its name. In the Marvel comics, Wanda has been established as a Nexus Being, which are individuals who have “the ability to affect probability and thus the future, thereby altering the flow of the Universal Time Stream” and act as a “keystone” to — wait for it — the Multiverse. In other words, as we’ve seen in the show, Wanda has the power to change reality, and it’s clearly stronger than even she realizes, which may be causing her to pull in people from other realities. For example, her brother Pietro who somehow looks like Evan Peters from the X-Men movies, if that’s who he even is. (There’s also the pretty significant fact that Wanda will play a central role in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s all right there in the name.)
On a final note, as Disney+ gets ready to drop more Marvel shows, it’s probably not a fluke that Nexus Beings are often regulated by the Time Variance Authority, who will be giving Loki trouble when his series arrives. If there’s one thing the MCU knows how to do, it’s plant seeds for future stories, and all this Nexus talk is a pretty big one.