The first three episodes of WandaVision didn’t do much for me. I don’t care about dated sitcoms, so accurately recreating them left me cold. Fortunately, though, the show has now gotten interesting, with Wanda becoming more overtly villainous and Vision realizing something is horribly wrong with his perfect domestic life. The series already fleshed out S.W.O.R.D. and showed us the world as Thanos’ Snap was reversed, but it really kicked into high gear in the final moments of episode 5.
Many had predicted that Wanda’s long-lost brother Pietro would turn up, but most expected Aaron Taylor-Johnson to reprise his role from Avengers: Age of Ultron. WandaVision completely confounded expectations, though, when the ‘wrong’ Quicksilver rang the doorbell, as it was Evan Peters from Fox’s X-Men movies.
Few thought that these two cinematic universes would cross over like this, and in an interview with Marvel.com, showrunner Jac Schaeffer explained how they made it happen, saying:
“We loved the idea of [bringing him back]. And then we were like, how in the world are we going to make this make logical sense? Like, how do we justify this? Because that’s the thing, you can hatch a million great ideas, but to make them land, to make them be grounded, to make them feel organic to the larger story… This show is such a mind scramble, and because it’s working on so many levels, and there’s so many notions of what’s real and what’s not, and performance, and casting, and audience, and fandom, and all of that, we just thought it would be the biggest thrill to bring Evan over to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
Schaeffer went on to reveal that Peters was very enthusiastic about jumping to the MCU and that Kevin Feige wasn’t hard to convince, explaining:
“We thought like, how do we give him this entrance, and then enjoy that, and then make it crazy? And we had long had the idea of the trope of the brother, or the relative, or whoever comes to town and like, stirs things up with the family – that sitcom trope… We were rooting for it for so long, and didn’t know if it would be possible. It was complicated to make happen. Evan was always up for it – like, always, always, always. He is a comic book fan, and a Marvel fan. He is always up for the absolute weirdest option. And he’s a pleasure – truly a pleasure to work with. Everybody was really excited. I think Kevin wanted to make sure that there was a reason for it, that it made sense. And I hope that’s what we did.”
So, what’s the “good reason”? Well, my theory is that Wanda isn’t outright creating new people but instead pulling in versions of them from across the multiverse. As such, if Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Pietro is definitely dead, her powers will subconsciously search for the next best candidate, yanking Evan Peters’ hero from the dormant X-Universe.
If that proves true, it makes sense that Wanda will play a large part in the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and could be responsible for Doctor Octopus and Electro turning up in Spider-Man 3 (as well as potential appearances from Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spideys).
My bet’s that WandaVision is on course for a reverse House of M storyline. In the famous comic arc, she uttered the line “No more mutants,” instantly depowering the majority of the world’s mutants. Perhaps in the MCU she’ll say: “No, more mutants.”
In any case, we should get some answers in this week’s WandaVision, which hits Disney+ on Friday.
