(This article contains major spoilers for “Previously On,” the eighth episode of the Marvel series “WandaVision”)
Well, that sure was a doozie. For the next-to-last episode of “WandaVision” on Disney+, we got a bit of a lore dump as Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) took a trip through Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) past. One of the biggest things we learned was that, actually, Wanda did NOT steal Vision’s body from S.W.O.R.D.
S.W.O.R.D. director Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg), it turns out, lied to Monica about that to paint Wanda as a villain — he showed her video of Wanda breaking the glass in the lab and descending into the bay, and used those to weave a fake story.
So it certainly looks a lot like Hayward himself is the real villain here. Especially after that bonus scene we got during the end credits.
In that bonus scene, we see that S.W.O.R.D. has specific plans for Vision’s corpse, which they’ve reassembled without the Mind Stone in his head. He’s now totally colorless — not just washed out like his corpse was, but completely absent of color.
And it looks like they’ve brought him back to life, using energy they had collected from Wanda using a drone. What exactly Hayward plans to do with it is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t seem like he’s got peaceful intentions.
The big question now surrounds what this new white Vision will be like. And the Marvel comics — specifically a run of “West Coast Avengers” from the 1980s — do give us a pretty solid indication of what we can expect.
So in the comics, Vision’s mind is constructed from the brain patterns of a guy named Simon Williams, better known by his superhero alias Wonder Man (I know, I know). In West Coast Avengers, some rogue government agents acting at the behest of villain from the future, Immortus, capture Vision and take him apart.
But then the Avengers get him back, and Hank Pym rebuilds him. But Williams didn’t want his brain to be copied again. So when Pym reactivated Vision — colorless because of damage to his outer shell — he lacked any of the emotion that made Vision who he was.
From there, things get really convoluted, in a way that almost certainly won’t happen on “WandaVision” now that we’ve only got one episode remaining. But this Vision does eventually regain his personality. And then he is forced to swap bodies with Anti-Vision — basically an alternate universe version of Vision. So our Vision ended up in another universe while Anti-Vision was on Earth in the white Vision body.
Eventually they fight, of course, and the real Vision wins.
It’s tempting to point out the multiverse possibilities here with Anti-Vision and Immortus. Especially since Immortus is better known by another name: Kang the Conquerer, who will be played by Jonathan Majors in the next “Ant-Man and the Wasp” movie.
But “WandaVision” has just refused to get into multiverse stuff so far. That doesn’t mean we won’t get some big reveal about that in next week’s finale, but it would be unreasonable to expect Marvel to get super deep into all that at the same time that they’re making the multiverse official. It would just be too many new things for the audience to deal with.
Plus, the MCU traditionally is more about taking inspiration and aesthetic stuff from the comics than it is about adapting storylines. So in that vein I expect that the white Vision will simply be Vision without the humanity. An actual robot who approaches things very clinically and doesn’t really have morals.
And I think Wanda, when she meets this new Vision, will (after they fight) imbue him with his old personality somehow. Meaning Vision will be back, though he won’t be quite the same without the Mind Stone. And he might be more like a Vision Jr, in the sense that he would be a recreation of Vision rather than a revival of the old Vision. It’ll just depend on how much of him is in the body and how much was in the Stone, as they discussed in Wakanda back in “Avengers: Infinity War.”
Seriously, though, I wouldn’t look to these comics to help you guess what will happen in the “WandaVision” finale beyond those more surface elements. They might tease Kang’s involvement or something, but this show simply has not laid any groundwork for crazy Multiverse stuff.
So if we do finally get a Multiverse reveal in the “WandaVision” finale, I wouldn’t expect it to go too deep right off the bat.