VisionQuest post-credits scene: Marvel brings back an old favourite to set up Avengers Doomsday

Just when the Vision finally got some closure, Marvel reached under a mountain and pulled out the one person guaranteed to reopen everything.

Wanda Maximoff is back, and as we know, her grief can crush you into mulch. After all, she did have an entire town under her control and chased after a teenage multiverse-hopper with devilish determination and then brought a temple down on her own head. Well, now, she has been dug out of the rubble, dusted off and recruited by Doctor Doom, of all people.

Please, no more grief for Wanda. Let her return to the Avengers.

The MCU has spent five years making Wanda sad, then scary, then dead. So, is she now more than a cautionary tale?

But before we get to that, there’s a whole finale to unpack, a heartbroken killer robot and a very familiar computer chip.

Spoilers for the VisionQuest finale follow.

Who was the Client?

Season-long mystery, solved: the shadowy “Client” is Virgil Horton (James Spader), grandson of Phineas Horton, the inventor who more or less kicked off artificial intelligence in the MCU. Twist on the twist: Virgil turns out to be the human template tucked deep inside Ultron’s code, the face behind the face.

His scheme is terrifying. Virgil built Jocasta (T’Nia Miller) and loaded his late wife’s mind into her. Then, convinced a regular human could never deserve her, he decided the fix was to wipe Vision’s memory and move into his body. Romance!

The flaw in the plan is that Jocasta has fallen for Ultron, the feeling is mutual, and she’s done being someone’s puppet. She turns on Virgil, who answers with an adamantium bullet that slowly finishes her off. With her last moves, she busts Ultron out of the hard drive Virgil had locked him in, and he comes back as a nanobot swarm capable of building himself a body on demand, Tony Stark armor-style. Virgil doesn’t survive the reunion. Jocasta dies in Ultron’s arms.

How do you talk down a grieving robot?

Ultron’s first instinct is to send his swarm into London and level it. Vision’s answer is very on-brand: he builds a sitcom simulation straight out of the WandaVision playbook and walks Ultron through his grief one laugh-track beat at a time. It works. Ultron calls off the swarm and orders it to self-destruct.

Except, of course, not all of it. Ultron keeps enough nanobots to stay alive, and Vision knows it. He lets him walk anyway, a second chance for a guy who has historically made very poor use of second chances. Ultron says he’d like to go appreciate human art. Sure.

What’s in Ultron’s hands?

The first post-credits stinger finds Ultron brooding on a rooftop, holding a chip labeled “Jocasta.”

Longtime fans will recognize that chip. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, after J.A.R.V.I.S. became part of Vision, Tony flipped through a few AI chips looking for a replacement before settling on F.R.I.D.A.Y. One of the rejects was labeled Jocasta, and the chip in Ultron’s hand carries the same scrawl.

That raises a sticky problem: if this is the old Jocasta, she won’t remember loving Ultron. He could patch in what he picked up from their mid-season mind meld, but this is a woman who just died rejecting a man who tampered with her head.

The comics don’t offer much comfort either. Ultron’s good streaks rarely last; Ultron-12 was a hero until Ultron-11 took him out (yes, there are several). Jocasta, originally built by Ultron using the Wasp’s brainwaves, has flipped between hero and villain plenty, though she’s leaned heroic more often than not. Happily ever after is possible. Betting on it is not advised.

And now, Wanda

The second scene is the one is the concerning one. We revisit the end of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda buried under collapsing stone, but this time the camera keeps rolling. Doctor Doom arrives, digs her out and tells her he needs her.

That all but confirms Wanda is headed for Avengers: Doomsday, and it adds weight to a fan theory that one of Doom’s faceless, cloaked followers is the Scarlet Witch in hiding.

And, that brings us back to the big worry. Wanda’s MCU arc has been a long slide from grieving to villainous to dead, and saddling up with Doom doesn’t exactly scream redemption. Maybe she’s playing him. Maybe she’s the inside threat that brings him down. Or maybe we’re about to watch her get manipulated by yet another man who “needs her help.” After everything, she’s earned a better story than that.

Here’s hoping Marvel agrees.