Warning: This article contains spoilers for Episode 5 of Marvel Studios’ What If…?
In the latest episode of What If…? on Disney+, a zombie apocalypse overtakes the world following Hank Pym's attempt to rescue an infected Janet Van Dyne from the Quantum Realm. The zombies were able to infect even some of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes such as Iron Man and Captain America.
This prompted a ragtag team of leftover Avengers — including the likes of Okoye, Bucky Barnes, and Spider-Man — to rescue whoever else remained alive while searching for a cure for the infected.
The group of displaced heroes eventually came across a beacon that seemed to promise the cure they were looking for. Upon further investigation, they found Vision hiding out in a familiar MCU location.
At Camp Lehigh in New Jersey, Vision had been working on a cure for the new plague after discovering that the Mind Stone in his head gave off a frequency that seemed to repel the zombies. But the android was also hiding something much darker in his new subterranean sanctum.
Wanda Maximoff: Zombie Supreme?
The middle of What If…?’s latest episode came with a surprise twist for fans providing a great new spin on the story of Disney+’s first MCU show WandaVision. A new scenario was introduced within the zombie apocalypse: what if the Scarlet Witch was a zombie that couldn’t be cured?
The Avengers discovered that Vision had been keeping the undead Wanda hidden because she was too powerful to be cured. When asked why he didn’t eliminate the threat that a zombified Scarlet Witch posed, Vision admitted that he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
This part seems very on-brand for the synthezoid, considering Vision’s love for Wanda is his greatest and most affectionate connection to human life. But the measures to which he went in order to keep the zombie Wanda around are questionable, showing that Vision could have been driven just as mad in the MCU if Wanda had died instead of him.
What If Vision Couldn't Let Wanda Go?
What’s even more “unsavory,” as the android put it, is that Vision had been “(luring) innocent people to their deaths” and feeding them to Wanda in order to keep her alive.
Vision’s desperate attempt to keep Wanda alive was as shocking as it was cold, but it’s also eerily similar to how fans saw Wanda deal with her grief in WandaVision.
In the Scarlet Witch’s streaming series, Wanda fabricated her own perfect life, which became complete with her own magically materialized Vision. This came at the expense of all of Westview’s freedom, but Wanda still chose her own needs even after realizing the harm she had caused.
“What is grief, if not love persevering?”
-Vision, WandaVision
It seems that Vision took similar approach in What If…?, resorting to meeting Wanda’s needs instead of the needs of human life, which was otherwise his top priority since his birth in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
In fact, Wanda made sure no one could interfere with her Westview experiment in WandaVision by putting up a forcefield around the town. Very similarly, the Mind Stone in What If…? created a frequency forcefield against the zombies around Camp Lehigh, which Vision used to protect his studies while he held Wanda underground.
Vision admitted that he still hadn’t fully come to terms with what he had done to preserve the zombified Wanda’s life, which is almost exactly the state in which the audience finds Wanda throughout WandaVision.
Her grief had driven her to do terrible things, and now it seems that Vision would have gone down a very similar path given those circumstances. Even though the real Wanda was gone and couldn't be brought back through his cure, Vision could not let go of the bit of Wanda that was left.
The way Vision’s story in Episode 5 of What If…? aligns with how Wanda handled her grief in WandaVision is a dark but touching twist hidden within the animated Disney+ series. If anything, it serves as a rather disturbing reassurance that Vision and the Scarlet Witch are truly inseparable, even if an actual zombie apocalypse tries to break them apart.
