‘VisionQuest’ Officially Makes the MCU’s Most Overlooked Show Essential Viewing
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Between WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) demonstrated just how far grief could drive someone with the power to rewrite reality to do terrible things. Her primary goal in Multiverse of Madness was to reach another universe where she could reunite with her children, Billy and Tommy. After all, the boys from her own universe seemingly disappeared along with the rest of the family she created inside the Westview Hex in WandaVision. But were they ever really gone?
Marvel’s new Disney Plus series, VisionQuest, follows White Vision (Paul Bettany) as he grapples with his identity. Following Vision’s death in Avengers: Infinity War, S.W.O.R.D. rebuilt the synthezoid as an emotionless weapon, but Hex Vision (the version created by Wanda in Westview) was able to unlock his memories during their confrontation in WandaVision. The first two episodes of VisionQuest were released Tuesday night. In them, we learn that Vision has tried to live a peaceful, quiet life in Edinburgh. At night, he interacts with various other artificial intelligences — like J.A.R.V.I.S., F.R.I.D.A.Y., and even Ultron — existing in a mindscape he’s created for himself.
During an early conversation with Ultron, Vision dismisses Westview as pure fantasy. “Bullshit,” Ultron replies. “It’s just a deep, scary well of emotions you can’t handle. Isn’t that the point of this mindspace?” Ultron insists that Vision is afraid to confront the truth. And by the end of VisionQuest episode 1, that truth has become impossible to avoid: Tommy somehow exists in the real world, outside Wanda’s Hex. A bounty hunter called Paladin (Todd Stashwick) has his sights set on Vision and quickly tracks down Vision’s son to use as bait.
If you didn’t watch Agatha All Along, this revelation will make practically no sense. That other Disney Plus series establishes exactly how Wanda’s supposedly imaginary children could survive the destruction of the reality that created them and even how Tommy acquired the new body he inhabits in VisionQuest.
Major spoilers for Agatha All Along follow.
Billy Maximoff survived by taking over another boy’s body
Set three years after the events of WandaVision, Agatha All Along initially follows the witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) and a mysterious teenager played by Joe Locke. Identified only as “Teen,” the boy helps Agatha break free from the spell Wanda placed upon her at the end of WandaVision. He then persuades her to assemble a new coven and travel the legendary Witches’ Road, which supposedly rewards any witch capable of surviving its trials.
Teen’s identity is initially concealed by a magical sigil that prevents witches from hearing him say his name or learning anything that could reveal who he really is. That sigil was placed upon him years earlier by Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), a divination witch who met a boy named William Kaplan at his bar mitzvah. After examining William’s palm, Lilia glimpsed his fractured future and secretly slipped the sigil into his jacket.
As Agatha explains, the enchantment is a “redaction spell” that hides its subject from other witches, including the witch who cast it. Lilia therefore forgets placing it on William. The sigil didn’t resurrect Billy or put his soul into William’s body; it merely concealed his identity until the protection was no longer necessary.
Shortly after meeting Lilia, 13-year-old William is riding home with his parents when Wanda begins collapsing the Westview Hex nearby. Their car crashes at the exact moment Billy Maximoff’s magical world disappears. William dies, but Billy’s consciousness slips into William’s body. Billy awakens with no memory of William’s life. He can hear the frightened thoughts of the people claiming to be his parents, but he has no idea who they are. He subsequently pretends to recover his memories while privately investigating what happened to him.
Years later, Billy explains it to his boyfriend in the simplest terms possible: “I died that night. And when I came back, I was different. Something else. Something more.” Once the sigil is destroyed, Agatha confirms what Billy himself already suspects: He is Wanda and Vision’s son inhabiting the body William left behind.
Agatha describes William as an “empty vessel” and tells Billy that he instinctively seized an opportunity to survive. But in doing so, Billy broke the natural rules governing life and death, which is precisely why Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza), the literal embodiment of Death, considers him an abomination.
Billy gave Tommy another life
Billy spends much of Agatha All Along searching for his brother Tommy. He cannot remember everything about their life together, but he remains convinced that his twin survived the destruction of Westview.
“He’s out there somewhere,” Billy tells Agatha. “I can sense him. I just can’t find him.”
Billy is partly right. Tommy’s disembodied consciousness still exists, but unlike Billy, he hasn’t found a new body. Near the end of the Witches’ Road, Agatha helps Billy reach out psychically and locate a dying person who could become Tommy’s vessel.
Billy finds a boy being held underwater in a swimming pool after a cruel prank. The boy is terrified, and Billy initially resists choosing him because he can sense that the boy has no loving family waiting for him. More troublingly, Billy wonders whether taking the body would make him responsible for the stranger’s death.
“Agatha, am I killing this boy, so my brother can live?” he asks.
“No, Billy,” Agatha replies. “Sometimes boys die.”
Billy then places Tommy’s soul inside the drowning boy’s body, successfully giving his brother what Agatha calls “another life.” Agatha All Along creator Jac Schaeffer confirmed to Entertainment Weekly not long after the episode aired that Billy completed the transfer, even though the series never clearly shows Tommy awakening.
“The intention is that, yes, he got what he was missing in that he successfully put Tommy’s soul into the body of that young man who was the victim of a teen prank,” Schaeffer said. “You know how these things go, and we’ll see in future properties if they stick to that narrative. … It was a tricky thing to shoot because Tommy was not cast at that time, and so we had to shoot it in an obscure way.”
VisionQuest, of course, casts someone as Tommy and picks up on this exact plot thread.
Thomas Shatford is Tommy Maximoff’s new identity
After Paladin fails to subdue Vision with a group of heavily armed mercenaries, he’s very quickly able to hack into classified S.W.O.R.D. files and learn the truth about Westview. That gives him the idea to search all known databases for keywords like “Vision,” “Wanda Maximoff,” “Tommy,” and “Billy.” He discovers a recorded psychological evaluation from somewhere in London. That leads him directly to Thomas Shatford (Ruaridh Mollica).
“I had a family that wasn’t my family, parents that weren’t my parents,” Thomas says in the recording. “Mother… we called her Wanda. Father, a machine. She called him Vision.” Just like with William and Billy, this Thomas was dying when Billy placed Tommy’s mind and soul into the body, though it’s likely that Tommy was trapped in some kind of limbo for years before Billy did this. That could explain why he’s more disoriented than his brother was.
VisionQuest episode 1 introduces Thomas years later as a young London grifter working alongside a pickpocket named Lisa. Thomas claims to enjoy becoming a different person every day, but Lisa pushes back on that, saying, “If you don’t ever get to be the real you, you might as well be invisible.”
That line becomes much sadder once Thomas sees news footage of White Vision’s encounter in Edinburgh. The images trigger flashes of Tommy’s former life, including memories of the original Vision and the Westview Hex. Thomas suffers a panic attack as Lisa tries to ground him by repeating his assumed identity: “You are Thomas Shatford.”
Except he’s not, and that identity crisis mirrors what his father is going through. They’re each themselves and not themselves, holding memories that don’t truly belong to them. Even in episode 1, Lisa makes random comments about Thomas being “weirdly fast.” Tommy was a speedster just like uncle Pietro, so it’s likely that he maintains his powers just as Billy did in his new body.
One episode in, VisionQuest has firmly established the most complicated family tree in Marvel Cinematic Universe history. Thomas Shatford is not the son that Hex Vision physically helped raise in Westview. White Vision never had a son at all, but he does have the memories from the original Vision and Hex Vision. As he says in the trailer, “I have his memories, but not his virtue.” Vision may regard Westview as a fantasy that Wanda conjured, but the frightened young man abducted by Paladin is living proof that at least some part of what Wanda created was real enough to endure.
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