To this day, WandaVision is still arguably the most successful Disney+ series that Marvel Studios has put out. The show follows Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda as she becomes overwhelmed with grief, leading to the imprisonment of an entire town of unwilling participants in her new false reality of Westview. While the birth of Scarlet Witch gets most of the attention now, likely fueled by the upcoming release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, there's someone else who tends to get lost in the conversation: Vision.
The android that was first created in Avengers: Age of Ultron met his end in the closing minutes of Infinity War. Thanks to Wanda's fictional sitcom world in WandaVision, he was given a new lease on life.
However, viewers learned he wasn't quite alive; he was a lie, just like Westview itself. Vision had died for real—in fact, audiences witness Wanda visit his dead, deconstructed, and torn apart body within the inside of a SWORD facility in the series' eighth episode.
As awful as it was to see the MCU's lovable android in pieces, thanks to some new concept art, fans can now see how horrifying other variations of that scene were.
A Horrifying WandaVision Design
On Instagram, Artist Phil Saunders has posted some new designs of his from the Marvel Studios series WandaVision that showed some horrifying alternate designs of the Vision autopsy seen in episode 8.
This new take on the scene shows Paul Bettany's hero being cut open and taken apart in a much more human manner.
In a quote attached to the images, Saunder mentioned how he was "looking to humazine him as much as possible," so he tried making the entire scene look like "a traditional autopsy:"
"The Art of WandaVision book is finally out, so I can start posting some of the designs I worked on in my brief stint on that show. This was my first pass at Vision's autopsy. I was looking to humanize him as much as possible, so tried to create an analog to a traditional autopsy, with bionic organs that mimicked human anatomy. Due to an unfortunate mis-dating of the file, an earlier WIP (work-in-progress) was included in the book, so this is the final image."
A key element of humanizing the procedure was the Y-shaped cut performed in the same way as it would be on a human.
On the various metallic tables and strayed, liquid can even be seen oozing out of his various body parts and organs, resembling blood. Saunders continued:
"I was trying to think of it in terms of how do we humanize Vision as much as possible. Like, treat him like you would a human being and mimic an actual human autopsy-that sort of Y-shaped opening of the chest cavity. And then there's the horror of that for Wanda when she sees her loved one chopped up as if you were watching your loved one's autopsy at the coroner's office. It's very much just trying to do that and make his internal organs relatable-like there was some equivalent of various organs but in mechanical form, some kind of synthetic muscle fiber, some equivalent to a bone."
One of the alternate designs for White Vision shown in the Art of WandaVision mirrored what this more horrifically taken apart android would have looked like reassembled; stitches and all.
The final visualization that made the cut was a more spread-out, mechanical breakdown—one that made the android look as lifeless as ever.
Vision Meets Horror
Saunder's take on a more humanized deconstruction of Vision is truly horrific and a shocking sight to see. That dark image would have stuck into the minds of fans across the world—even more than the one which made it.
Some may think it was a bad move to have eased up on the dark nature of the scene. However, as neat as the more human take on it was, Marvel's move away from it was likely purposeful and not to be any less gritty.
Instead, the writers wanted to show Vision as not-human as possible. Break him down into parts, wires, and scarp to distance him as far away from his human, living elements as possible. This was the truly horrible part for Wanda. The beautiful, alive, and caring android she once knew was now no more than some metal being tinkered with on a table.
At least there's now some version of Vision alive and out there in the MCU, even if it's not the same one Wanda knows. Though, she's probably too busy breaking the Multiverse to be worried much about that.
WandaVision is now streaming on Disney+, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness hits theaters on May 6.
