Marvel Fans Need To Pay Attention To Vision's Look In WandaVision Episode 4

WandaVision's fourth episode brought with it a moment that its more anxiety-inclined viewers have been dreading: a good, hard look at what how Vision is actually holding up post-Infinity War. The unfortunate truth seems to be that, while Wanda can turn a town into the set of Bewitched, she can't fill the love of her life's forehead in with a thick wad of plumber's putty. Vision, as many fans suspected, appears to be roughly as undead as a synthezoid can get, still sporting the physical ramifications of Thanos plucking out Marvel's cosmically powered answer to the metaphysical third eye from Vision's dome. More than that, though, his trademark burgundy and forest green aesthetic remains just as drained as it was when his body slumped lifelessly to the ground of the Wakandan forest.

Visually stunning and emotionally loaded? You bet. But, keeping in mind that any frame in the MCU that isn't referencing the source material is, by its very nature, a frame wasted, it's also a potential callback to the comics — specifically, another time when Viz had chunks of himself scattered all around. It could even point to the mechanical man's near future in the MCU, and the Pet Sematary-adjacent "sometimes, low power mode is better" ramifications of his return. We take you now to the late 1980s, and a comic book story arc called, appropriately, "VisionQuest."

The West Coast Avengers, California's spinoff of Earth's Mightiest Heroes, had a rough go from the start. They were made up of characters like Hawkeye, Ant-Man, and Tigra — maybe not full-on B-listers, but calling them A-minus-listers feels charitable. Comic book royalty John Byrne's run on the series saw a pile of stories that seem to factor into WandaVision 30 years later, like the birth of Wanda's twins.

Then, in the pages of West Coast Avengers No. 42, Vision, the team's leader, went missing. One issue later, he was found — well, sort of — in the bowels of a secret facility. In a particularly harrowing panel, Marvel's favorite synthezoid is shown to have been entirely disassembled by his captors. Comics being comics with the wonders of ret-conning, the Vision's death turned out to be a temporary setback, and by issue No 45 he'd been reassembled. There were two immediately noticeable changes: first, he'd lost his ability to feel emotion and was now operating like a cold-hearted machine; second, he was completely drained of color, looking remarkably similar to the way he does during WandaVision's brief, nightmarish shot of the character.

Vision's inability to feel emotion after being pieced back together would fit pretty naturally in the MCU, given the on-screen discussions in Infinity War about the possible effects that removing the Mind Stone might have on him. It seems possible that Wanda, with her Mind Stone-triggered abilities, is all that's keeping him lucid and personable now that he's more or less a vitruvian Boston Dynamics project. Whether Vision's new look is just another WandaVision Easter egg or a hint at what's to come, it seems like this show is going to keep us guessing right up until the end.