VisionQuest May Have Just Confirmed An Avengers: Doomsday Theory
Which witch is which?
Since her debut in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Wanda Maximoff has been a crucial figure within the MCU. She was arguably the biggest catalyst for the Sokovia Accords in Captain America: Civil War, she constructed her own reality after losing herself to grief in WandaVision, and she became a threat to the very fabric of reality in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. She’s been a hero and a villain, and she’s been extremely powerful whenever she shows up.
That she almost took out Thanos on her own in Avengers: Endgame makes her one of the franchise’s strongest characters, but how effective would that power be against the newest threat facing the Multiverse? Avengers: Doomsday is only a few weeks away, and Doctor Doom isn’t just a brilliant scientist; he’s also one of the most accomplished sorcerers in the Marvel Universe, once going toe-to-toe with Doctor Strange himself. The Avengers are going to need all the help they can get, and the Scarlet Witch would definitely be useful. Unfortunately for them, the finale of VisionQuest just suggested that Wanda will be playing for the other side.
This certainly wouldn’t be the first time Wanda Maximoff has had a brush with villainy.
After finally reuniting Vision with his two adult children, VisionQuest’s finale revisits the climax of Multiverse of Madness, where Wanda erases the Darkhold from existence across the Multiverse before being buried under a heap of crumbling rubble. However, the scene now plays out for a few minutes longer, revealing the presence of none other than Victor Von Doom, who instructs Wanda to “rise” and states that her power now belongs to him. That makes her the second former Avenger recruited by Doom, after he kidnapped the Hulk in one of the new post-credits scenes from Avengers: Endgame Encore.
While we have no way of knowing what Doom’s plans are for Wanda just yet, her presence could factor into a mysterious plot point that Marvel has teased a few times in the lead-up to Doomsday. We’ve seen several glimpses of Doom in action, but there’s very little footage of the Latverian Witches, a trio of masked characters shown off earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con. Almost nothing about them has been revealed so far, including which actors will be under the mask, so fans have naturally run rampant with speculation over their role, and the ending of VisionQuest might prove that at least some of that speculation is true.
There’s a chance that some familiar faces are hiding behind those masks.
A popular fan theory suggests that Scarlet Witch might be one of the Latverian Witches, helping Doom either willingly or unwillingly. The idea of Doctor Doom manipulating Wanda to do his bidding has precedent in the comics: after Wanda accidentally warped reality and decimated the mutant population in the famous 2005 storyline House of M, the psychological toll of her actions left her traumatized and suffering from amnesia. The 2010-2012 arc Avengers: The Children’s Crusade revealed that she was taken in by Doctor Doom, who nursed her back to health and even attempted to marry her to weaponize her powers, only for her to be rescued by her two sons.
The context is wildly different in the MCU, but it’s entirely plausible that Doom might need Wanda’s reality-warping powers for whatever his plan is (which, according to rumors, is stealing Loki’s newfound status as the Keeper of Time). It would make sense that the events of Multiverse of Madness and her apparent resurrection would leave her in a state of amnesia, which Doom could easily take advantage of. Since she has no idea her children are alive again, Doom could even manipulate her motherly instincts, which we already know is the easiest way to turn Wanda into chaos personified.
If the Scarlet Witch is one of the Latverian Witches, does that then mean the other two are also characters we’ve seen before? Another theory posits that Clea, introduced in the final moments of Multiverse of Madness, might be one of them — her first and only words in the MCU have been to warn Doctor Strange of an impending incursion, and who’s to say she hasn’t already been working with Doom to stop them? While Wanda’s return certainly answers the question of whether she’ll be in Doomsday, there are still numerous mysteries surrounding the film, and knowing how the MCU does business, they probably won’t be answered until the film finally hits theaters.
