WandaVision episode 3: are Billy and Tommy the twins?

WandaVision (2021), starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, used its third episode, Now in Color, to confirm that Wanda's twins are Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd, the future Young Avengers. All of this happens while we inch painfully closer to learning what is really going on in Westview. Below I go through the episode shot by shot for the clues and details you may have missed. Spoilers follow.

WandaVision episode 3 mixes 1970s sitcoms, and the hexagons keep returning

After episodes inspired by The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched, the episode 3 titles blend 1970s influences. There is The Brady Bunch with its three by three grid in the titles and Three's Company with the bike ride. The music sounds like The Partridge Family theme. It isn't "C'mon Get Happy," the song heard in Ant-Man and the Wasp, but the theme from the first season.

Once again there are hexagons. Every other aesthetic changes across the decades, but this geometric pattern keeps coming back. It is the one constant. Not every hexagon in the Marvel universe is connected to every other one. Hexagons are common shapes that show up everywhere: the wormhole grid, the Wakandan barrier and the logo of AIM. We probably won't see the Iron Man 3 organization in the same series, since casual audiences are still figuring out what SWORD is. One initiative per series.

Within WandaVision, though, there could be a link between the hexagons we see. That might be the number six, the theory of Westview as a beehive, or simply Wanda's chaos magic, which is often called hex magic.

The movie theater marquee hints at a Wizard of Oz parallel

In the opening, the theater marquee behind Vision advertises a 2013 Oz film, an odd title in a 1970s setting. There could be a parallel between WandaVision and The Wizard of Oz. This series also has multiple witches and a tin man, and it seems to revolve around illusion and deception.

That 2013 film was directed by Sam Raimi. At the time of this episode he was directing Elizabeth Olsen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a film this series may be setting up, possibly with Wanda as its villain.

Agnes's necklace and Herb's finger guns

Agnes is again wearing her necklace, which seems to show three figures. Some say this could connect to the three witches of Macbeth, but I'm not sure about that. There is definitely a taller figure holding something above two smaller figures. Maybe it is a hint that Wanda's children are being moved like puppets by another entity that is really pulling the strings.

Herb greets Vision with the same finger guns gesture he used in the previous episode. Interestingly, Herb spends a lot of time whispering with Agnes in this episode, and she made the same "pew pew pew" gesture at the mailman last time.

Vision's swing and the pregnancy book that shouldn't look so old

Vision's swing has green and yellow colors that match his clothes and the colors of his classic comic costume, which he wears later in the series. When Vision swings with Wanda later, you can briefly spot Paul Bettany's real arm under his sleeve.

Vision reads a red library book called Pregnancy: The Psychological Experience. It looks very worn, which is a little strange, because it was first published in 1973, the same decade this sitcom is set in. A library book shouldn't be that damaged. Some have compared the silhouette on its cover to Mysterio. We'll see how that connects, if it connects at all.

The Brady Bunch house, and Wanda and Vision drifting apart

Their new home is decorated in the style of the Brady family's living room, with the rock wall and the staircase. Even Wanda's hair is styled like Marcia Brady's: long, straight and parted in the middle.

Vision questions how this happened almost overnight, followed by that sharp squeeze on the leg. In this episode we start to see Wanda and Vision diverge in motives and awareness. Wanda cares more about hiding their super nature and settling into their home. Vision seems to go along with that, but he openly reveals his powers in his search to understand what on earth is happening, something Wanda doesn't seem very interested in by the end of the episode.

Dr. Nelson's fruit, the pineapple and a Bermuda hexagon

Dr. Nelson is a bit of a jerk, explaining that he lets the ladies track their babies' growth with fruit because it keeps things simple for them. In his comparison, at seven months the baby is the size of a pineapple. The fruit we later see Wanda cutting might be the same pineapple Agnes gave them in the first episode. It is as if she knew these fruit babies were the plan all along.

The doctor is about to leave on vacation to Bermuda, an interesting destination tied to the Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, where many ships have disappeared over the years. That isn't unlike the toy helicopter that suddenly turned up in Westview after perhaps vanishing from the outside world as a real aircraft. Westview here could be the Bermuda Hexagon, a devil's hexagon with a dark agenda of its own.

Herb's glitch and the accelerating pregnancy

Meanwhile Herb is glitching. That tells us Herb isn't playing a role to fool them; he is under a spell that causes the glitch. It is very similar to the simulated reality in Rick and Morty, which glitches in a similar way.

In just the time Vision was outside, Wanda's pregnancy jumps to five months, based on the papaya held next to her belly. Like the whistling toaster and the ticking Strucker watch, time is speeding up more and more. It isn't advancing logarithmically. It is accelerating exponentially.

Orange slices and Wanda's "Did I do that?" moment

In the nursery, Wanda eats an orange, maybe the one that fell off the table in the previous scene. Orange slices are a notable thing in the MCU. Scott Lang mentioned them as food to recover energy after going giant in Civil War, and the same orange slices showed up again in Endgame if you look closely. There, though, they're painted in a Sims color style, a reference to a Marvel Studios storyboard artist who worked on WandaVision, Doctor Strange and She-Hulk.

Then Wanda's hanging butterfly mobile comes to life and flutters. She asks whether she did that and says she didn't mean to. Wanda, the 1980s sitcom world wasn't due until the following week. Wanda is also showing here how she can unintentionally change the world and bring things to life with offhand words. That is something that could happen with mutants. Instead of no more mutants, let there be mutants. Oops.

Billy and Tommy confirmed as Wiccan and Speed

Then they discuss names: little Billy, and Tommy, a nice classic American name. Confirmed. As we speculated all last year, Wanda's twins are indeed Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd, Marvel's mutants and Young Avengers Wiccan and Speed, respectively.

Their history in Marvel Comics is a little confusing. When Wanda first had her children in the comics, they didn't yet have full identities. They were revealed to be illusory fragments of Mephisto's soul and were later reabsorbed into Mephisto. Agatha wipes Wanda's memory. Later Wanda tries to bring those children back in House of M, and in that era of the comics Wiccan and Speed were introduced as Young Avengers, then tied to Wanda as her mutant children through that Mephisto link. I know, I know.

The MCU seems to be simplifying this. WandaVision is a kind of setup for Wanda's House of M style reality warping, to prepare the Young Avengers for the MCU's future. These are the kids who would team up with Kate Bishop from the Hawkeye series, which was still to come at the time, Cassie Lang from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and others.

Vision quotes Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man

Vision quotes Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." This is the famous Seven Ages of Man monologue from As You Like It. It is an extended metaphor comparing a person's life to a stage performance, which parallels the core idea of WandaVision, where these Avengers' lives are a kind of scripted routine in front of an audience.

The Coy soap, the HYDRA lamp and Wanda rewinding the conversation

The kitchen soap carries a Coy label, perhaps a hint that this whole reality is being a little coy, reluctant to tell the truth. Over at the Joneses', Phil reads a newspaper headline about two fire hydrants being added on Main Street. Jessica already pointed out how the fold makes it look like the word HYDRA, but the lamp is what I'm looking at. It has two little angel figures. Remember, the father is there for the children, and the children are now in Westview as Wanda's twins, Billy and Tommy.

Then comes the moment when Vision tells Wanda he thinks something is wrong, and the truth is that they are in uncharted territory. Yes, that is a deliberate editing choice. The music shifts from a very serious score to sitcom fluff. It is similar to when Wanda said no and rewound events in Westview, the same editing language. It looks like Wanda is doing it again. Watch her just before the jump: her eyes move from side to side as if she is saying no, get me out of this conversation, I can't face the truth.

I also like how Vision says in the edited version afterward that they are in uncharted waters, just like the uncharted waters inside the Bermuda Triangle or the devil's hexagon. Maybe everything we see inside this reality is a sitcom broadcast that Wanda is putting out over the local airwaves. That would be how SWORD is monitoring her, and why Wanda can cover the gaps with this kind of awkward editing.

The Hydra Soak commercial and the Agents of SHIELD Framework

In the commercial, the boy in the background is played by Wesley Kimmel, Jimmy Kimmel's nephew, who gave us a hint in a preseason interview with Paul Bettany by complaining that he hadn't been invited to the friends and family studio taping.

Of course, the product is Hydra Soak, with the HYDRA logo worked into the pattern. This is a great reference to another Marvel series, Agents of SHIELD, where in one episode Coulson, inside a simulation called the Framework, rants that the blue soap everyone uses is laced with chemicals by HYDRA that seep into the bloodstream and plant false memories. That was obviously a funny conspiracy theory from Coulson, and I'm not sure Westview is exactly the same as the Framework. I still love the parallel, because Wanda is in the same kind of fictional reality, and these commercials keep giving us references to her past as a lab rat for HYDRA.

"Find the goddess within" and Wanda as a god of her own reality

The slogan "Find the goddess within" is interesting. It may reflect Wanda's role as the goddess of this miniature reality and an emerging Omega level threat in the MCU. Like the HYDRA Strucker watch's "make time" and the Stark toaster's forget the past, focus on the future, it is another call to action for this goddess.

In Marvel lore, Wanda's magic also comes in part from the curse of the demon god Chthon, and this could be connected to that. Jessica raised the interesting theory that this could be Hecate, the Greek goddess of witches, whom Wanda meets in James Robinson's 2016 solo Scarlet Witch series.

Red smoke, a demonic scream and the birth of the twins

Wanda comically tries to hide her pregnancy from Geraldine, a nod to how sitcoms awkwardly hid pregnant actresses' bellies with props and camera angles. Wanda then tries to drive the stork away with red smoke, just like the red smoke used by the Wicked Witch of the West. The smoke doesn't work, which suggests Wanda isn't fully in control of this reality.

Wanda goes into labor and the house turns into a haunted house. The fireplace blazes like an inferno, and her final scream has a deep demonic echo. Billy and Tommy are born. If you think about it, Tommy comes out first, because he is the fast one. Dr. Nelson then decides to cancel his trip, remarking that small towns are very hard to escape.

Herb almost tells Vision the truth, and Agnes stops him

That is followed by a shot of Vision observing Agnes and Herb. Agnes jokes that her husband Ralph looks better in the dark, almost the same joke we heard from another couple earlier, so not very original. Agnes, is your mysterious husband really the Grim Reaper or Mephisto?

Herb and Agnes cast suspicion on Geraldine, calling her an outsider who is new in town, with no family, no husband and no home. Herb says she came here because they all came here, and Agnes cuts him off by telling him to stop it. It seems Herb was about to say trapped, or under a spell, maybe even dead.

I find Agnes's reaction interesting. She clearly sees Geraldine, or Monica, as a threat and wants her gone, but she also desperately doesn't want Herb revealing to Vision what is really going on yet. Her words "stop it" are exactly what Mrs. Hart said when she broke down, a bit like a stuck record. Agnes wants to keep the Westview illusion alive, and she seems to exercise some control over Herb and others in town to keep up that act. They also need Wanda to want to stay immersed, using her desire for children to keep her happy. SWORD and Monica threaten that illusion. They want to end it, to free Wanda and the town's residents, hence Agnes's concern about Monica. Judging by Wanda turning on Monica at the end of the episode, Wanda still seems taken in by what Agnes is saying.

Pietro, the SWORD necklace and Monica's expulsion from Westview

Wanda tells Monica: "I'm a twin. I had a brother. His name was Pietro." That is Pietro Maximoff, Quicksilver, who died in Sokovia in Age of Ultron. Wanda returns to that past as she sings a Sokovian lullaby, and I love how her accent comes back when she says Pietro. Monica, thinking she has found a way in, then mentions that Ultron killed him. That briefly pulls Wanda out of her trance and back to the reality of being an Avenger and the MCU's history. But it is still early, and Wanda doesn't want that yet.

She sees Monica's SWORD necklace and connects it to the logo she saw on the toy helicopter and on the beekeeper. She advances menacingly, and suddenly Monica is gone. When Vision asks where Geraldine is, Wanda says she had to rush home. Wanda looks eerily calm, like Mia Farrow at the end of Rosemary's Baby, or the creepy boy at the end of a Twilight Zone episode after he has banished the bad man.

Outside Westview, Monica's 1970s clothes don't change back

The aspect ratio widens and we see SWORD's camp outside as Monica crash lands to the Monkees' "Daydream Believer," which we discussed in an earlier trailer breakdown. In these shots you can see the town welcome sign with logos for various community groups, including an eagle club and a neighborhood watch group, which I think is the one Vision joined. It has an eye logo. Whether it is SWORD or someone else, someone is always watching Westview.

If you look closely, you'll also see a house visible from outside, which tells us Westview was a real town in the real world before Wanda's alternate reality warped it into this sitcom illusion. And this is important: Monica's 1970s clothes don't change back outside. That suggests any changes Wanda makes inside her reality remain permanent changes to the whole reality outside. Something to keep in mind in case Wanda ever says let there be mutants.

One last detail. In the end credits for these episodes, you can briefly hear a woman's mournful wailing in the score. So however Wanda seemed at that point in the series, deep down she was a woman in distress.