If last week’s episode of “WandaVision” showed the Marvel series was not going to strictly follow its sitcom format from the previous episodes and do something bold, this episode cemented the show as Marvel’s greatest experiment in years. As Wanda receives a surprise guest, the show blows our expectations for the future of the entire MCU.
If it wasn’t clear already, major spoilers ahead.
After a heated argument between Wanda and Vision, who is now aware that his wife is in control of the entire town of Westview and has now questioned the nature of his reality, the door rings. Thinking it will be Agnes once again, Wanda opens the door, but finds her brother Pietro instead. Except this is not Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but Evan Peters, who played Quicksilver in “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “X-Men: Apocalypse.” The implications for this are huge, both for the show and for the MCU at large. For one, it means that Wanda is capable of completely rewriting reality, as shown earlier in the episode when we see that Wanda turned a kevlar vest into a dress. But more than that, it means that Wanda is capable of tapping into other realities, and even bring people over.
As she said a few minutes before, Wanda can’t bring people back from the dead, so she can’t bring her actual brother back. But given that this is the 1980s, the same decade as “X-Men: Apocalypse,” she can bring another version of Pietro into this reality and rewrite his mind into thinking he always belonged in Westview.
The more obvious reading of this scene is that Wanda just made the entire Fox “X-Men” timeline canon, opening the doors to everything from Professor X to Wolverine and even Deadpool to join the MCU, and it’s very likely that’s exactly where we are headed. After all, it’s already been confirmed that Wanda will have a role in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” a film that will, presuming from its title itself, deal with the Marvel multiverse. Given the rumors of the next “Spider-Man” also dealing with a multiverse, it seems clear that’s where Marvel is setting its eye on next, which is a clever way of cohesively grouping all previous Marvel movies under the same umbrella.
In the more immediate future, it seems “WandaVision” is also building up Monica Rambeau to get some new abilities like her comic counterpart, Spectrum. In the episode, she not only gets her clothes transformed and re-written, but when she gets an X-ray examination, the SWORD operatives mention that there was an error in the machine and it didn’t work. One of her powers in the comics is the ability to transform and absorb any kind of energy within the electromagnetic spectrum, including X-rays.
But will “WandaVision” bring Wanda and Pietro’s father, Magneto, to the MCU? As of now, it seems unlikely. Wanda has no emotional attachment to Magneto, as that’s not who her father is in this reality. But she definitely has a connection to Pietro, who she’s mentioned several times in the course of the show, so it makes sense to start with bringing Pietro over, and maybe causing a rift in time-space that threatens to allow other, bigger villains to cross over — something that can then be dealt with in “Doctor Strange 2.”
Even if Marvel starts bringing back fan-favorite actors like James McAvoy or Michael Fassbender for gratuitous cameos and no much else, it’s still exciting that we are entering a side of comicbook movies never thought possible before. Whatever comes next for “WandaVision” or the MCU, it is clear we are entering uncharted and exciting territory.
