The highly anticipated (by me) third installment of WandaVision and Agatha All Along has finally arrived! I called myself lucky in the fall of 2024 when Agatha’s series followed her, alongside an unlikely coven, on a journey through the infamous Witches’ road. So, to have another installment of the series—and one that includes my favorite Young Avengers boy, Tommy, at that?
Oh, you best believe I’m sat.
If you were worried about forgetting the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) lore, don’t be. The first couple of minutes of the show are a recap of Vision’s lore up to the point of Westview. But don’t fret—I’ll go over WandaVision, Multiverse of Madness, and Agatha All Along plots that are necessary to remember before diving into VisionQuest here.
Wanda and vision
WandaVision is, quite frankly, the show of all time.
This limited series follows Wanda and Vision in an episodic sitcom as they adapt to life in Westview. Throughout the first couple of episodes, we get hints that something is very wrong here (Vision died during Infinity War, didn’t he?), but we’re not sure what.
In Westview, Wanda and Vision are married and have kids. Twins, just like Wanda and Pietro. Billy has mind powers like Wanda, and Tommy is fast like Pietro.
But Westview can’t stay perfect for long, and we realize, as the veneer begins to crack, that all of it is made up. Agnes, the friendly neighbor, turns out to be magical like Wanda. However, while Wanda’s ability stems from Hydra’s experiments and is “chaos magic,” Agnes—actually named Agatha—is literally from Salem times. The quintessential witch.
Agatha walks Wanda through her memories before coming to Westview, and we finally understand how this magical fantasy came to be. After Thanos, Vision’s body was held by the government for spare parts. Wanda sees he’s unassembled and appeals that she only wants to bury him properly, and leaves unsatisfied.
We watch her make her way to Westview, holding a property address with a Sharpied on heart. It reads: “To grow old in. V.” So overcome by the grief of this life they never got to live together, and the house they never got to build, Wanda crumples to her knees amid the empty lot and sobs. Her magic flows out of her in waves as she assembles the house they would have had together and a town that perfectly fits their ideal life. She creates a barrier around Westview and manipulates the minds of all its inhabitants to play into her fantasy. She even brings Vision back—and here, her magic flows from her chest, her heart, rather than her hands the way it did with the rest of the town.
With Agatha’s guidance, the truth of all Wanda’s done washes over her, and she realizes she needs to break the hex.
However, Agatha has other plans: she wants Wanda’s magic. To this, Wanda insists she isn’t that powerful, imploring, “I’m not a witch. I don’t cast spells. No one taught me magic.” Agatha asserts that, actually, her magic is large enough to end the world.
They fight. Wanda outsmarts Agatha. She becomes the Scarlet Witch.
During this fight, we meet White Vision for the first time. This is a newer version of Vision, assembled by the government to take down Wanda’s hex over Westview.
In the end, Wanda must accept that Vision is dead and her kids don’t really exist. In their final goodbye, she tells Billy and Tommy: “Thank you for choosing me to be your mom.”
Vision asks her, “What am I?” and Wanda answers, “You, Vision, are the piece of the Mind Stone that lives in me.” She calls him her love, and he says he’s a “memory made real” and “Who knows what I’ll be next?” Wink wink.
With Westview back to the way it was before—except for Agatha, newly magicless because of Wanda, and her memory-wiped mind—Wanda leaves.
The end credit opens with an aerial shot of a valley cabin surrounded by soft hills. We think Wanda is finding peace as she makes tea, but then BAMN! She’s actually practicing with the Darkhold—a book of black magic. We hear Billy and Tommy’s voices crying for help just before the screen goes black.
Wanda and the Darkhold
In Multiverse of Madness, Dr. Strange visits Wanda. She tells him Vision had his theories about the multiverse, and that he believed it was “real and dangerous,” before Dr. Strange realizes she’s in the clutches of the Darkhold. She has no regrets about her intent to find her kids alive somewhere in the multiverse and urges him to bring America (a multiversal traveler) to him before sundown, or else.
When she gets her way and finds her kids, she experiences brief relief at the love they have for the alternate version of herself. However, she sees the alternate Billy and Tommy for the last time at the climax of the movie, when America transports herself and Wanda before the kids. They watch as the woman who looks like their mother has a hand around a young girl’s throat.
They scream and run away, afraid of Wanda.
She freaks out, hurting alternate-Wanda, and Billy and Tommy start throwing things at her in their mom’s defense. She yells at them, and they try to hide, utterly terrified by how scary she is. How much she’s changed because of the Darkhold.
Billy whispers, “Please don’t hurt us,” and Wanda breaks.
She cries, saying, “I would never hurt you. Never. I would never hurt anyone. I’m not a monster, I’m…” But she sees alternate-Wanda on the ground because of her and loses all the wrath inside of her, collapsing to the ground.
Alternate-Wanda tells her, “Know that they’ll be loved.”
To compensate for all she’s done, Wanda brings down Mount Wundagore to destroy the Darkhold (in every universe)—and herself along with it.
Agatha and billy
So, Wanda’s dead. Allegedly. And now we’re following Agatha as she breaks out of Wanda’s spell trapping her in Westview, where she encounters a strange boy who knows too much about witches.
(Billy goes by Teen for the first five episodes, but for clarity we will be using the name Billy. There’s a huge reveal to “you should see me in a crown” that confirms he’s Wanda’s kid, but we’ll get more into how that’s possible in a second.)
Together alongside a coven of unlikely companions, Agatha and Billy walk the Witches’ Road. It’s something from folktales: a set of dangerous trials that gives you the thing you want most if you make it through. For Agatha, that’s the magic Wanda took from her, and for Billy, it’s the power he needs to finally cast the spells he’s been learning.
Agatha later drops the bomb that she’s known he was Wanda’s kid the whole time: “You are so much like your mother.” In a demonstration of Billy’s power, we see blue magic like Wanda’s red and a crown mirroring the Scarlet Witch’s.
After this big reveal that he is, in fact, Billy Maximoff—at least to some degree—we get a flashback episode.
After his bar mitzvah, William Kaplan is on the way home when the barrier around Westview falls. He gets into a car crash that should be fatal, but instead, the soul of Billy finds a new home in William’s body. As William’s heart stops, we hear Billy and Tommy’s “goodnights” to each other overlaid from Wandavision, and William/Billy wakes up, gasping: “Tommy!”
We watch Billy feel out of place with his two parents, and as he searches for the reason, he remembers another mom, dad, and brother. Eventually, he goes to Westview to find Agatha, who might know what happened, and starts searching for the Witches’ Road.
We’re told by Rio—who is the grim reaper, essentially, and also Agatha’s long-term situationship—that the very existence of Billy (two souls in one body; one soul that shouldn’t even exist) is an abomination and “disrupting the sacred balance.”
In the last trial, Agatha reveals she knows Billy wants to find his brother. “Tommy isn’t waiting out there,” she asserts, knowing Billy will need help with the magic required. “Not in a body, anyway.”
Agatha helps Billy find a new body for Tommy, the same way Billy found William’s in the car crash. Billy holds the last memories he has with Tommy and looks for a new place to go. There’s a boy drowning, afraid, being pushed under by a group of boys “killing him.” He asks Agatha, “Am I killing this boy so my brother can live?” but it’s already too late. The merge is done.
When Billy goes home, we see the road was never real. All the posters and trinkets in his room mirror objects and events on the road. As Wanda made Westview, Billy made the road.
A flashback to Agatha’s life shows us how the Witches’ Road was something she made up in the past. A trick used to steal witches’ powers from them, the way she had tried to do with Wanda.
After a vulnerable moment and the realization that the two of them are the only ones who get each other, Billy seals off the road for good. They head off together, and Agatha remarks, “Let’s go find Tommy.”
Vision and Tommy
VisionQuest introduces us to the AI world inside Vision’s head. He’s not Wanda’s Vision anymore—he’s an alternate version. The White Vision who fought past Vision in the series’ finale.
We meet all the Stark AIs like J.A.R.V.I.S. and F.R.I.D.A.Y., as well as Ultron. We also find out that Vision plays the memories of past Vision to try and understand how to feel. He has the memories, but not the emotional connection to everything that happened.
The most curious thing about watching these memories, though, is that Vision refuses to watch anything from Westview (A.K.A. what happened in WandaVision). It’s not real, is what he tells himself and the other AIs.
But after a data breach of his systems by a bounty hunter called Paladin, hired by an unknown client, we find out that Tommy is real. Alive, in some way that Vision (who, of course, isn’t aware of Billy either and therefore isn’t aware of the lore of Agatha) can’t fathom.
There’s an old clip of Tommy being put into a psych hold, and speaks about his fragmented memory. About the way he remembers what we know happened in Westview. About drowning in the way Billy saw him die. About how he feels like two different people:
I had a family that wasn’t my family. And parents that weren’t my parents, okay? Um, a mother. He called her Wanda. And a father, a machine. She called him Vision. I don’t know what’s happening to me, okay, but… But I know it’s true. It’s true. (VisionQuest, episodes 1-2)
Paladin leverages having Vision’s son against him, and while Vision pretends not to care, he goes to help Tommy anyway.
Tommy has super speed in the comics, and the show has turned that into a more physical energy. When he uses his abilities, there’s electricity—not unfamiliar to Barry on CW’s The Flash. I’m curious how much they’re going to play into this electric aspect of speed, since there’s a lot of speculation in the comics fandom that Tommy is more powerful than he appears. Many times, it’s been hinted that Tommy has some ability to manipulate time.
There’s a running theory that it’s not just Billy who is the demiurge (most powerful being in the universe), but Tommy, too. Fans have dubbed them the SpaceTime duo because of their tandem abilities, which is something I would love to see play out in the MCU!
Regardless of what happens in the upcoming episodes, I look forward to the rest of VisionQuest. I hope we get a Billy cameo—or maybe even Agatha!—but for now I’m content watching Vision take on the quest to remember himself, and Tommy find a family so he no longer feels so alone. (And I am always rooting for the return of Mother Wanda! Family is forever, after all.)
VisionQuest’s two-episode premiere is now streaming on Disney+.