“On a Very Special Episode…” of WandaVision, did Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) open the door to the Marvel Multiverse? In Episode 5 of the Marvel Studios series, an argument between a reality-bending Wanda and her newly-resurrected synthezoid husband Vision (Paul Bettany) is interrupted by a very special guest star. Wanda opens the door and reveals — spoilers — Fox’s X-Men star Evan Peters as “Pietro,” the slick-haired Quicksilver, a “recast” of Wanda’s late twin brother (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Reacting to the unexpected visitor who arrives in Westview at just at the right moment, WandaVision viewer Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) recoils in surprise: “She recast Pietro?!”
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Because WandaVision connects to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — where Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff returns opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s Stephen Strange — the assumption is that this drop-in from Wanda’s “far-away” brother is made possible by a Multiverse crossover between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Fox’s now-defunct X-Verse. It’s there that Peters played Peter Maximoff, a.k.a. the super-hyper and super-fast Quicksilver, in such films as X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
But the “recast” could be more meta than Multiverse. As Wanda and Vision go about their lives in a suburbia shaped by decades of classic sitcoms, we learn that their neighbors and co-workers — among them “Norm” (Asif Ali), “Herb” (David Payton), and “Mr. and Mrs. Hart” (Fred Melamed and Debra Jo Rupp) — are real people with real-world IDs playing various roles inside the sitcom referred to as “the Hex.”
In Episode 4, “We Interrupt This Program,” FBI Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) meets S.W.O.R.D. Captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) when a missing person case brings him to the mysteriously now-missing town of Westview, New Jersey, population 3,892. They have this exchange:
Woo: I got a witness set up down the road in Westview. And this morning, it looked like he flew the coop.
Rambeau: Your missing person is in the Witness Protection Program?
Woo: I have contacted known associates, relatives —
Rambeau: And let me guess. None of them have seen him either.
Woo: No. None of them have ever heard of him.
Could Peters’ “Pietro” be Woo’s missing person? Asked about the secret identity of Woo’s missing person, Park told ComicBook.com: “That’s a good question that I will just leave a question.”
If Peters is the missing person, might he also be the mysterious Ralph, the oft-mentioned but so-far unseen husband of Agnes (Kathryn Hahn)? Because Wanda’s real twin brother is dead — Ultron (James Spader) kills him eight years earlier in Avengers: Age of Ultron — the WandaVision sitcom is forced to “recast” Pietro, explaining why he looks like Peters instead of Taylor-Johnson.
Like Westview’s other “guest stars,” this supposed sibling could be an as-yet-unnamed resident sucked into the “cast” of WandaVision — a person who already exists inside the MCU proper instead of one pulled from the Multiverse.
Episode 5 also confirms that the Vision is really dead when S.W.O.R.D. Acting Director Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg) reveals footage of Wanda storming a top-secret facility to steal the android Avenger’s corpse, a heist taking place nine days before the events of WandaVision. Vision is only semi-resurrected because Wanda possesses his robot body, which isn’t the case with the long-dead Pietro — possibly indicating the “recast” is a meta-joke for viewers who recognize another Quicksilver actor from the X-Men films in another universe.
Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Kathryn Hahn, Teyonah Parris, Kat Dennings, and Randall Park, new episodes of Marvel’s WandaVision premiere Fridays on Disney+.
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