The VisionQuest Finale Reminds Us That No One Is Really Gone In The MCU
But does anything matter, then?
Spoilers ahead for VisionQuest Episode 8.
A decade ago, when Marvel was at the height of its powers, it was obvious which franchises were borrowing from its playbook. The Fast & Furious saga was a particularly shameless copycat — but ten years later, the MCU is very much returning the favor.
No one is ever really gone in a franchise this enduring, and Marvel’s latest series demonstrates how easily the rules can bend when it’s time for the next Avengers team-up. So much of VisionQuest forced the new Vision (Paul Bettany) to reckon with the memories of his predecessor, accept the old Vision’s lived experience as his own, and confront the grief he still felt for Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). By the end of the series, he’d come to terms with it all, even reuniting with his reincarnated sons, Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) and Billy (Joe Locke). It’s as happy an ending as the Maximoff family has ever gotten, but it’s about to get a whole lot weirder — and maybe more tragic — with another shocking resurrection.
VisionQuest ends with a startling tease for Marvel’s next film, Avengers: Doomsday. It turns the clock back to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where Wanda succumbed to her grief and crushed herself beneath Mount Wundagore. We learn that the evil Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.) visited her final resting place shortly after her sacrifice... and promptly revived her.
The Scarlet Witch lives again.
“Your powers will be mine,” Doom tells Wanda in VisionQuest’s post-credits scene. Her purpose is pretty clear: when next we see the Scarlet Witch, she’ll likely be one of the Latverian witches serving Doom in Doomsday. Exciting as it may be to see Olsen return to the MCU, it’s bittersweet to know that Wanda is once again suffering at the hands of the franchise’s latest Big Bad. The circumstances of her return also nudge the Marvel Universe even closer to a franchise like Fast & Furious: a world where nothing really matters, no demise actually carries any weight, and fan favorites cheat fate if it means stoking excitement for the next big team-up.
For a series ostensibly about confronting grief and accepting death, VisionQuest wasted no time trampling over that message in its final episode. Paladin (Todd Stashwick) seemed to perish in a fiery van explosion in Episode 7 — but nope! He somehow got a heads-up from Edith (Emily Hampshire) just before a nameless henchman launched a rocket in his direction, allowing him to make a quick escape off-screen. Ditto for Friday (Orla Brady), who fell victim to Ultron’s (James Spader) duplicitous schemes in the penultimate episode: turns out that was more misdirection. Ultron’s new paramour, Jocasta (T’Nia Miller), was destroyed by her ex-husband (also Spader), which sent Ultron into a murderous rage that nearly culled the entire population of London. Not to worry, though: VisionQuest’s first credits scene affirms that she’ll be back if Ultron has anything to say about it. Every sacrifice and shocking turn in the series finale is overturned as soon as humanly possible, culminating in the ultimate retcon with the Scarlet Witch and Doctor Doom.
The WandaVision trilogy was all about grief and acceptance — until Marvel brass saw fit to undo it all.
Wanda’s resurrection isn’t quite so corrosive as those aforementioned fake-outs, mostly because we’re a few years removed from her sacrifice and have had some time to wallow in her absence. But it still rings hollow after sitting through two multi-hour shows all about her demise. Both VisionQuest and Agatha All Along before it addressed the void Wanda left in the MCU — and though Tommy, Billy, and Vision are all hoping for a reunion someday, setting it up immediately after all the emotional work the Maximoffs have done feels utterly tacky.
The MCU has struggled with stakes in the past, particularly as the franchise made a hard pivot from The Kang Dynasty to Doomsday. It’s thrown a lot of hard-won plotlines to the wind to bring back a status quo that can excite and entice fans, but does any of it mean anything? Why should we care when a character is in mortal peril? They’ll probably be brought back to life even if they bite the dust. Why spend so much time entwining character growth with the stages of grief if death doesn’t even matter? It was hard enough to care about the goings-on in the MCU before VisionQuest, but with one brief credits sequence, the series just affirmed its own futility — and that of the whole franchise leading up to Doomsday.
