5 Years Ago, Marvel Studios' Best TV Show Ended With a Bad Finale (But There’s Hope to Fix It)

WandaVision premiered on Disney+ on January 15, 2021, and spent the next couple of weeks doing something no Marvel project had managed before. A nine-episode mystery about grief disguised as a sitcom from different eras, the show dazzled critics right out of the gate with a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany transformed what could have been another forgettable Marvel project into the kind of character study the franchise rarely allows itself to attempt.

Then on March 5, the show's finale aired. It was widely viewed as the worst episode of the show, scoring a lot lower than other episodes on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics and fans who had spent weeks marveling at the show's emotional sophistication felt the final chapter blinked first, trading the show's more important questions for a sky-battle showdown that could have belonged to almost any Marvel film. The episode had many issues, and, surprisingly, Wanda did not pay for the massive damage she caused to people's lives. As underwhelming as the Wanda bit was, the worst part of the episode was the Ralph Bohner twist. 

Fans were made to believe Evans Peters was playing Pietro Maximoff in earlier episodes, only for the finale to reveal he was a fake Quick Silver. It turned out his real identity was Ralph Bohner, a random Westiew citizen. Then there's White Vision flying away to God knows where at the end. These turn of events made the finale feel less meaningful.

Five years later, there is a real possibility that the story will get a better ending. VisionQuest, the upcoming Disney+ series from showrunner Terry Matalas, arrives in late 2026 as the confirmed final chapter in the trilogy that began with WandaVision and continued with Agatha All Along. It picks up directly from where the 2021 finale left off, and the threads that were left hanging five years ago are where VisionQuest appears to be headed.

How VisionQuest Could Fix WandaVision Finale

VisionQuest arrives with the right people and the right premise to address all of this. Marvel Studios executive Brad Winderbaum described the series to Entertainment Weekly as a love letter to Jac Schaeffer's work on WandaVision. The premise centers on White Vision, the all-white android seen flying away at the end of the WandaVision finale, now struggling to make sense of the memories that Wanda's Vision imparted to him in that philosophical standoff. 

Matalas compared Vision's journey to Spock's in Star Trek IV, a character operating at full cognitive capacity while feeling emotionally uncertain. The show takes place largely inside a mansion, presumably in Vision's mind, where he encounters personifications of other AI programs from across the MCU, many of them appearing in human form. 

Paul Bettany returns alongside James Spader as Ultron, James D'Arcy as JARVIS, Orla Brady as FRIDAY, Emily Hampshire as EDITH, Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer as DUM-E, and U. Winderbaum described the series as exploring three generations: a grandfather, father, and son, and whether a man who came from an abusive father can be a good one himself. 

This points to a resolution of the emotional plot points WandaVision finale left open. The question of what it means to be Vision, to carry those memories, to love someone, and then to lose the capacity to feel that love will be explored in depth in the show. The confrontation between the two Visions in the WandaVision finale could be revisited and given more context.

Also, the SWORD storyline was another casualty of the finale's haste. Director Hayward spent the back half of WandaVision rebuilding Vision's body as a weapon, reviving a dead synthezoid for deployment against Wanda. He was arrested in the finale's closing moments, but the organization itself wasn’t really meaningfully addressed. 

SWORD, a government agency tasked with handling sentient weapons threats in space and on Earth, had just covertly reactivated Vision's corpse, but we didn’t get to see more of the institutional fallout. VisionQuest centers on White Vision as someone who was created by and then escaped that program. It'll be interesting to see if SWORD still considers Vision agency property, and if any part of that apparatus comes looking for him. The show could explore the organization better than was done in WandaVision

The fallout of Westview also isn’t properly resolved. The residents of the town lived through a months-long forced imprisonment inside Wanda's illusion, experiencing her nightmares as their own and losing control of their bodies and minds. The WandaVision finale addressed this in only the most cursory way. 

VisionQuest is set in the same continuity and picks up after those events. A story about Vision coming to terms with his identity, and the consequences of what the Hex was, would be incomplete without accounting for what happened in that town and what justice, if any, the people caught in it ever received.