VisionQuest’s finale premiered this week, and Marvel’s father/son sci-fi series ended with Vision reuniting with his sons Billy and Tommy. However, the whole family isn’t together in the end, as the boys’ mother Wanda, aka the Scarlet Witch, is still presumed dead after the events of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. According to Vision actor Paul Bettany, there were discussions about Wanda coming back in the show so the entire family could be whole once more, but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was against it.
In an interview with The Playlist, Bettany explained that Feige feared the eleventh-hour return of Wanda, a beloved character whose fate many fans (and even actor Elizabeth Olsen) weren’t happy with, might “distract” from the characters the show was focused on. Vision, his son Tommy, and his not-father Ultron had been the focal point of the series, and Feige wanted the show to end with them as the focus. Joe Locke, who plays Vision’s other son Billy, does make an appearance in the finale, but his role is relatively small.
“There were questions about [bringing Wanda back], whether that should happen, whether it opened up too much for the MCU, whether they wanted to do it later,” Bettany said. “I don’t know. But I remember having this conversation with [Kevin], and he said, ‘You and Terry [Matalas, showrunner] have done such a great job at making me care about Vision. I really don’t think you should distract from that by giving the audience that at the end of the [show]. It will just fundamentally all become about WandaVision again, and this should and can stand on its own.’ And I think he was right.”
He was right, as it so happens. This answer was given before VisionQuest’s finale premiered, which featured a post-credits scene not included in any press screenings. In it, Wanda is rescued from the rubble she was buried under in the Doctor Strange movie by none other than Doctor Doom, the antagonist of next month’s Avengers: Doomsday, adding credence to months of speculation that she might be one of the villain’s Latverian Witch followers. Wanda’s return after four years in a minute-long scene has absolutely overshadowed almost everything that actually happened in VisionQuest, trending on social media and dominating the conversation around the show itself.
Hopefully whatever fate Wanda finds at the end of this is kinder to her than the end of the Thanos saga, but if she’s under the control of Doom, I imagine she still has a lot of suffering left to get through before that. Avengers: Doomsday comes to theaters December 18.
