Tommy Maximoff Returns in VisionQuest Carrying Two Lives in One Body

Tommy Maximoff is back in VisionQuest, but the boy who returns remembers being two different people. In the teaser, he's sitting in police custody being psychologically evaluated, and he's caught in a dilemma: one life belongs to Wanda and Vision's son, while the other belongs to Thomas Shepherd, the boy whose body he now lives in.

If you've seen Agatha All Along, this isn't surprising at all. Even if this show doesn't explain how Tommy comes back, Agatha All Along basically explains it for us, and I'll get to that in a while. But it does leave us wondering what really happened to him, and which Tommy is actually the real Tommy.

Tommy Maximoff's soul is in Thomas Shepherd's body, and Thomas's memories never left

So here's what's going on. Tommy Maximoff's soul is in Thomas Shepherd's body. But here's the twist we never saw coming: Thomas's life hasn't simply disappeared from his head. It's like two souls in one body. I'm scratching my head and wondering if that's even a thing, but this is the MCU. Strange things happen.

Essentially, while he's in custody, he's trying to explain all of this. I just wonder how the people across the table are going to take his story. I just hope they don't take him for a crazy dude.

Agatha All Along set it up with the drowning boy

The genesis of all of this began in Agatha All Along. The Thomas we're talking about is the drowning boy from that show. In the finale, other boys push him into a swimming pool. It wasn't anything personal, it was a prank, but he begins drowning. Billy sees the prank for what it is and realizes that the boy has nobody who loves him.

Meanwhile, Agatha guides Billy through his last memories of Tommy in Westview, helping him locate his brother's surviving soul. The thing is, Tommy needs a body to return to life. Seeing the drowning boy as the opportunity for a body, Billy reaches him through this magical connection and places Tommy's soul into his body.

WandaVision explains how the twins lost their original bodies

I know there's been a long time between these events, and some things may sound confusing. In the larger story of WandaVision, Tommy loses his original body when Wanda dismantles the Hex at the end of the series. His physical existence depends on that magic, so when Wanda releases Westview, Tommy and Billy disappear along with the Vision she created there.

Billy also disappears, but his soul survives by moving into another boy's body. That boy is William Kaplan, a teenager traveling with his parents near Westview when he dies in a car accident. Billy Maximoff's soul enters William's body, which comes back to life. That's why he can appear in Agatha All Along.

So in Agatha All Along, Billy wants a body for his brother, just as he has one. Billy doesn't cause Thomas's drowning; the boy is already dying. Tommy received a second life through his body. Now he's back in VisionQuest, and from what we've seen so far, Vision is reacting to the possibility that his son survived the Hex. Unlike Vision, who has yet to discover that his son might exist, Billy knows how Tommy got a body. Tommy has the body now, but he has to wake up inside it, something that will take a good deal of time to achieve.

Tommy's Westview memories are real, which puts him in a mental cage

We only have trailer material so far, which doesn't give us a full picture of what happens next. But we have WandaVision, Agatha All Along, the promotional material and interviews, which is enough to start from.

Rewinding to WandaVision, Wanda creates the twins through her chaos magic inside the Hex, a name given by Darcy Lewis, who was working with SWORD, because of the hexagonal shape of the boundary. The problem is she kept the residents of Westview in a sitcom, her little world, just so she could have her family, and most importantly Vision, back. She gave birth to Billy and Tommy Maximoff, who are also superabled. When she finally has a change of heart and brings it down, their existence there also ends. But the twins didn't completely vanish. Their souls linger, and that's what Agatha All Along establishes.

One thing, so we're not getting ahead of ourselves: the fact that these twins were created inside the Hex with her magic doesn't mean their memories are fake. Tommy's magically created life is still a life he experienced. He has a brother. He has parents. He has affection. Losing his home or his world doesn't erase any of that. But being in another boy's body is like being placed in a mental cage.

He remembers Vision, and that's his father, though not really the 100% version of Vision we know. This is the White Vision with memories of the true Vision, except both later agreed that both of them are the true Vision and neither is. Whatever the case, that fatherly connection has to exist between him and Vision. And I call it a mental cage because the body the boy from Westview is in belongs to somebody with a completely different history. The body is one, but there are actually two minds. Two souls in one body.

How Tommy's return differs from Billy's

We may be tempted to compare his return with Billy's. When Billy wakes up inside William's body, he doesn't have an easy understanding of who he is. He's confused to begin with, he battles some memory loss, and then he searches for Tommy. All of that is real. But Billy has the Kaplans, loving parents who keep caring for him, and he builds a life after the accident. Of course, they had no idea who he really is. How do you tell a parent that the son who had an accident isn't really their son anymore? That's ridiculous.

Later, Billy has Agatha as a guide. I know how ridiculous that sounds, taking into account everything we know about Agatha's history with the Maximoff family. Still, she helps him understand his power and locate his brother. He has people to answer back when he's lost.

The difference I want you to see isn't that Billy didn't have an identity crisis. It's that he isn't shown remembering William's entire earlier life alongside his own Westview existence in the way this Tommy teaser presents. Billy gets a new life that slowly becomes his. Tommy is still carrying the history of the body's original owner as well.

There's another distinction. Billy realizes the drowning boy has nobody to love him, while William Kaplan was loved by his parents. So while Billy gets a loving family, Tommy doesn't. Even his friends don't love him. I don't know how it will feel for Tommy to wake up alone in a stranger's body. And yet this stranger isn't entirely new to him. His memories are there, and Tommy can remember that past from the inside. It's like looking into a mirror, seeing your own reflection and asking, "Is this really me?" For most of us, who else would it be? But that's not the same for Tommy. He's lost. Imagine being called Tommy by a father called Vision, while remembering Thomas's earlier life tells you you're Thomas.

What has been confirmed about Tommy and Vision in VisionQuest

None of this is guesswork. It has been confirmed that Tommy Maximoff is returning, so that's good news. Marvel also confirms Vision going on the run alongside Thomas, who may be his reincarnated son. The actor who plays Tommy describes him as a grifter and small time thief who is lost in his life, and that's the boy Vision is about to run with.

From earlier trailer breakdowns, Tommy is remembering a father who is a machine called Vision, and searching for him. Later, Tommy presses Vision about what he's withholding, and Vision accepts him as his son while warning about a fight he may not win. But we don't yet know which identity ultimately shapes Tommy's future.

As for Vision, White Vision carries the original Vision's restored memories, but he's still having a hard time with that. I've covered Ultron's return before, and in this trailer he says it himself: "Her witchy bubble has a consequence."

Tommy's super speed has me questioning Ultron calling him a problem

In the trailer, we see Tommy use his super speed to save a character from Jocasta while Vision isn't there to help. That makes me question Ultron making him sound like a problem. Tommy is struggling to understand which life is his, but he still chooses to protect somebody. That's a hero's job, right?

There's also something different about his speed. He moves in a quick blue blur, without the glow he had as a child in WandaVision or the lingering images Pietro left behind in Age of Ultron. But the way his power looks can't tell us whether he feels more like Tommy Maximoff or Thomas Shepherd. What we can see is that he's already helping people before he figures out who he is, so he's capable of making a choice even now.

That sets Speed up as another young Avenger alongside Wiccan, Ms. Marvel, Kate Bishop and Cassie Lang, who is associated with Stature in the comics. I actually love that, to be honest. It makes my soul jump.

So far, we know Tommy's soul survives, and Thomas's body survives with a remembered life of its own. Both histories are real, even though we still don't know how he learns to live with them.

Is the real Tommy the boy from Westview, the boy whose body he takes, or someone new made from both? And is he coming back as a hero, or as the consequence Ultron is talking about?