Warning: This article contains spoilers for WandaVision Episode 5.
While WandaVision has made a habit of blowing viewers' minds for a couple of weeks now, no one could've predicted the bombshell they dropped on us to end Episode 5.
After discovering Wanda's puppet-mastering manipulation of Westview, Vision confronts his wife about her wrongdoings. Viz's lecture is interrupted by the doorbell, which Wanda swears is not her doing, having the shocked reaction to match. The camera pans from Wanda's speechless visage to the back of the guest's head, revealing a silver head of hair. With Wanda astonished and Darcy Lewis watching from the outside with anticipation, the platinum locks are revealed to belong to Wanda's brother, Quicksilver.
But not just any Quicksilver.
Standing opposite Wanda is Evan Peters as the silver-haired speedster, known for playing the character in X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. In the time since those movies were released, Disney acquired 20th Century Fox and all its assets. While the House of Mouse now owns those characters, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has yet to acknowledge the FoX-Men flicks as canon. While we all expected the mutant movies of old to remain as “legacy” pictures, all bets are now off.
Here's what Evan Peters's role in WandaVision could mean for the future of the show, the character, and the entire Marvel multiverse as a whole.
PETERS IS RE-CAST AS THE MCU'S QUICKSILVER
While Wanda stands speechless inside the Hex, Darcy watches from the outside exclaiming, “She re-cast Pietro?”
Being a fictional character with the MCU, Darcy obviously does not know the significance of Peters's appearance. After all, she knows Pietro Maximoff to look like Aaron Taylor-Johnson, an entirely different actor.
Darcy's acknowledgment of Pietro's altered appearance indicates that this isn't a normal Marvel “re-casting,” such as Don Cheadle as War Machine or Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, but rather one that characters actually notice.
That being said, what if that's all this is?
We know the Westview anomaly doesn't operate like the normal world, and there's an entire possibility that Peters is a real-life Westviewian that Wanda is manipulating to fulfill the role of her long-lost brother. This episode revealed Wanda needed to steal Vision's body in order to bring him back. If she was unable to get her hands on Pietro's bullet-torn corpse, she would need someone new to parade around as her deceased sibling.
In an effort to make a meta wink at the audience, Marvel Studios brought in the Fox Quicksilver actor to fulfill said role, but have no intentions to continue with his character.
X-MEN QUICKSILVER IS BACK
But we all know better than that, don't we?
The Marvel multiverse is being primed to be a main focus of the greater MCU going forward. With Doctor Strange's sequel literally being subtitled In the Multiverse of Madness, combined with the knowledge of actors like Alfred Molina and Jamie Foxx reprising their legacy roles in Spider-Man 3, we know alternate realities will play a big part in the MCU's immediate future.
Marvel knows what they're doing. They know bringing Peters to play THAT character would send Twitter into a frenzy of speculation. “Re-casting” him as Westview's Quicksilver feels a little too tongue-in-cheek.
Beyond that, Peters's is rocking some FoX-Men Pietro garb. Sure, his Days of Future Past jacket was silver, but the leather is still there. The Hawaiian undershirt matches his 1980s vibe from Apocalypse. We didn't get to see Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Quicksilver in a lot of street clothes, but from the quick glimpses we got of him as a civilian in Avengers: Age of Ultron, leather and Hawaiian do not fit his vibe.
Everyone that watched the Fox X-Men movies know that they have wonky canon; however, the nutty nature of Wanda's decade-changing reality set this up to make sense. While we don't know where Quicksilver is in the present-day Fox X-Men timeline, we do know he's running 'Sweet Dream' rescue missions at the X-Mansion in the 1980s.
Remind me again: what time period did this WandaVision episode take place in again?
PETERS WAS SENT BY DOCTOR STRANGE
Let's run with that Fox X-Men theory a bit.
If Peters is indeed reprising his role as that Quicksilver, it's entirely likely that he didn't jump into this reality on his own. Knowing Wanda's rage is getting out of control, what if a certain Master of the Mystic Arts sent a familiar grief consoler into Westview to calm the Scarlet Witch down?
While the Marvel multiverse is an untamed beast, if there's anyone who knows how to navigate it, it's Doctor Strange. Strange has not made his presence felt in the streaming series yet, but you can bet that he's been keeping tabs on what's going down in Westview. Wanda is manipulating energy from the big bang, and as the protector of this reality, that feels like something the Doc would know about.
Unlike these trigger-happy S.W.O.R.D. agents, Strange knows this anomaly is a delicate situation. Instead of going in himself and startling Wanda, risking an enraged reaction, Strange plucked a Pietro Maximoff out of the multiverse to soothe Wanda's unstable mind.
PETERS WAS SENT BY WICCAN
“He's far away from here, and that makes me sad sometimes.”
Wanda opens up about her long-lost brother to her children, if only for an instant. Similar to how she spoke about Pietro to Geraldine, Wanda offers one sentence of insight about her sibling, and avoids noting that he's dead. This time, she acknowledges that and it makes her upset.
While Billy and Tommy are just children for now, comic readers will recognize Wanda's twins as the mutant duo of Wiccan and Speed. As obvious by his name, the second one is fast (like his uncle), but the first operates like his mom. In the comics, Wiccan is known to have magical abilities like telepathy, teleportation, and reality-warping telekinesis.
Let that last ability settle in your mind for a second.
If Wanda's kid has the ability to warp realities, like his mom, and isn't sure how to control his powers, who's to say he didn't accidentally bring Peters's Quicksilver into Westview from a different universe? With Wanda obtaining his abilities from the mind stone, Billy and Tommy represent the first naturally-born mutants in the MCU. If that's the case, their strength could be off the charts.
What if while seeing his mother upset, Billy wished for Pietro to be in Westview with the family, and subconsciously brought him into the fold?
PETERS WAS SENT BY / IS MEPHISTO
It always comes back to Mephisto.
While Wanda is clearly in the most control of the Westview situation, the series has yet to introduce a real “big bad.” The main antagonist could end up being Wanda herself, but knowing these Marvel flicks, it feels most likely that there is at least one other sinister force behind the scenes.
Considering his ties with Wanda's children in the comics, Marvel's resident devil has been long-rumored to pop up in WandaVision. Theories have run wild about how Mephisto could have been pulling the strings from the jump, and now since things are a little more out of control, what better time for him to make an on-screen appearance?
The most direct nod to Mephisto's involvement came in Episode 2, when Dottie proclaimed that the “devil's in the details,” to which Agnes cryptically responds “that's not the only place he is.”
If Mephisto is the over-arching villain in this series, it would be appropriate for him to begin having a closer relationship with who he is manipulating. In order to keep things somewhat normal, he sends Peters to Wanda to keep closer tabs on her. Some suspect Agnes to be a Mephisto pawn, but if this episode taught us anything, it's that Agnes is becoming more and more flustered and afraid of her environment as the weeks go on. Peters could be Mephisto's latest messenger, or, he could be the devil himself.
Mephisto is known to shape-shift in the comics, and what better way to calmly enter Wanda's home than by becoming a familiar face?
PETERS IS A S.W.O.R.D. AGENT
Saving the most unlikely for last, but there is a real chance Peters could just be the latest on-site intel S.W.O.R.D. sends into the anomaly.
Sure, Monica didn't enter Westview voluntarily, but she provided some very valuable information about the Hex that would've been unknown had she not been sucked in. Now that everything has been taken to a higher level, Director Hayward and his boys would sure like to have a first-person perspective again.
Now understanding the “rules” of Westview a bit, S.W.O.R.D. secretly sent Peters in and assigned him the “role” of Pietro Maximoff. Knowing Wanda is especially vulnerable when it comes to his deceased brother, they're using Peters to get close to Wanda, so they can shut her operation down.
Where Peters's Pietro goes next is anyone's guess, but you can bank on his arrival being extremely significant to where WandaVision is going.
WandaVision returns with its sixth episode next Friday, February 12, streaming exclusively on Disney+.
MCU Writer, Editor, Podcaster
