(This article contains major spoilers for the fifth episode of Marvel’s “WandaVision” on Disney+)
If you’re not the sort of person who obsesses over every detail of every piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and spend way too much of your time theorizing about what’s coming, you might have been totally caught off guard by what happened at the end of the fifth episode of “WandaVision.” You might not be entirely sure what just happened.
And that’s OK. We’re here to lay it all out for the folks who may not have realized they needed to watch Marvel movies from outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe to keep up.
So let’s cut to the chase. “WandaVision” just reintroduced Wanda’s brother, Pietro Maximoff, who we last saw dying during the climactic battle of “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Back then the character, nicknamed Quicksilver, was played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
But this Pietro is not that Pietro. What we saw on “WandaVision” is the version of Pietro from Fox’s “X-Men” movies, played by Evan Peters in “Days of Future Past,” “Apocalypse” and “Dark Phoenix.”
This is a big deal because ever since the Disney-Fox merger two years ago fans have been eagerly awaiting the introduction of Fox’s Marvel properties — mutants and the X-Men — into the MCU. We didn’t know if Disney would start fresh, recasting all the characters and giving them a new backstory — or if they might somehow bring the existing cast into the MCU via the multiverse.
Evan Peters showing up on “WandaVision” as Pietro Maximoff would seem to indicate that the latter is what’s happening. The reflexive thought for so many fans will be that Peters is simply the first of many who will crossover in the next few years.
But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves on this. There are still so many wild cards at play in “WandaVision,” including the fact that Wanda or an unknown third party has mind-controlled all the inhabitants of the town of Westview and forced them to play roles in this sitcom life Wanda and Vision have been living. It’s extremely possible that Peters is another example of that — just a random guy forced to pretend to be Wanda’s brother.
In that scenario, having Peter show up in the role would be a way for Marvel to mess with our heads and throw us off.
We just do not know, though, and since this big reveal happened at the midpoint of the series — there are four more episodes to go — and since they’ve been so cryptic thus far, anything could happen from here.
It’s important to remember, though, that Marvel boss Kevin Feige and co. knew exactly what kind of reaction they were going to draw by putting Evan Peters in “WandaVision,” and are likely to use our predictable responses against us by twisting this development into something we aren’t expecting. But it could be that they’re expecting us to think they’re taking it in a different direction and stick with the more obvious route.
You could tie your brain in knots thinking too hard about this, but really we just don’t have enough info to make any firm guesses. We can speculate, sure, but can’t really back our speculations up just yet.
That said, we’ve put together a more in-depth discussion of what having Evan Peters pop up as Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver could mean for the future of “WandaVision” and the MCU, which you can read here.