WandaVision: did Hayward plan White Vision all along?

The post-credits scene of WandaVision Episode 8 gave us White Vision. At the time, my read was that it all pointed back to Hayward: I thought the SWORD director had wanted Wanda to steal Vision's body so he could get hold of her magic. WandaVision (2021), the Disney+ series starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, released Episode 8 on February 26, 2021. Jessica Clemons and I went through the comics history behind White Vision, how Hayward pulled off the resurrection, and what his plan said about Wanda's power.

Paul Bettany's White Vision was the WandaVision Episode 8 post-credits reveal

My first reaction to the scene was simple: so that's how they were playing it. Before the episode, the show's big mystery cameo had seemed like it might be Paul Bettany, and the post-credits scene made it clear: of course it was him.

I called Bettany a jerk for it, but I didn't mean it. I love Paul Bettany. He got all of us.

White Vision comes from the 1989 Vision Quest arc in West Coast Avengers

Jessica pointed out that anyone who hasn't read the comics might assume White Vision is just Vision in a different color. It's more than that. White Vision comes from the Vision Quest arc in the 1989 West Coast Avengers comics, which is a very big deal for several reasons.

The arc starts around the time Wanda and Vision are living in a New Jersey town in the 80s. At some point a time traveling villain called Immortus dismantles Vision's body. Immortus is later revealed to be Nathaniel Richards, also known as Kang the Conqueror. He's one of those characters who keeps getting retconned into someone else.

After Vision is dismantled, the Avengers and Hank Pym gather his parts to try to reassemble him. They want to use the brain waves of Wonder Man, Simon Williams, to transfer Vision's consciousness. Williams had been involved in an earlier plot involving the Grim Reaper. That earlier process ripped out Williams' soul, so they can't do it. That problem, plus the damage to Vision's tissue, results in a white, soulless Vision. He isn't evil. He's just there. That's what Vision is now.

There's also a fun detail in the character's history. Vision dates back to a Golden Age era of Marvel comics in the 40s, where he had a white form. When Marvel rebooted him as a member of the Avengers in 1968, the plan was to keep that white, ghostly complexion, but Stan Lee wanted him red. Even so, he still turned up white in many issues, so the Vision Quest storyline brought him full circle back to that original incarnation.

Jessica saw White Vision as a walking computer with no emotional attachments

Jessica described White Vision as no longer a soldier but a robot. She also noted that in the comics he goes through a different dimension or reality and takes the body of another Vision. For her, bringing that into the MCU opened up limitless possibilities. She acknowledged we say that often in these discussions because magic is limitless, but she argued White Vision is a walking computer with no emotional attachments to anything. If he can go into other realities, he can take things from them. The idea of a sentient weapon came up in the discussion.

Jessica was exactly right about how the comics resolved it. Vision is eventually restored after this era when he gets a body from another dimension. He uses the brain waves of a deceased scientist, and then Simon Williams' brain waves merge with those. That restores Vision's empathy and his soul.

From that point forward, Vision goes back and forth between various forms. It raises the question of what part of Vision is really Vision. Sometimes he's a disembodied AI voice coming through speakers. Sometimes his body is being used for some other purpose. Jessica added that bringing in Nathaniel Richards made her wonder where the show was going with all of this.

Hayward used Wanda's magic from the Episode 5 drone to rebuild Vision

In the MCU, we learned that Hayward had built his own soulless, weaponized version of Vision. It looked to me like he first tried some reverse psychology to trick Wanda into resurrecting Vision with her magic. In the end, they got what they needed by using the residual magic on the drone from Episode 5. It reminded me of investigators taking someone's thumbprints off a soda can handed to them in an interrogation room.

Jessica had questions. She had been talking it through on Twitter, including with another user there she gave a shout-out to and called very smart. Did Hayward know he needed only a little of Wanda's magic to remake Vision, or did he simply decide to use the drone because it was there? She also asked why SWORD didn't take the magic from Monica's clothes or something else that had gone into the Hex.

My answer was that he needed Wanda's magic because it is derived from the Mind Stone, which was now missing from Vision's corpse, to bind all the pieces together. The drone was different from Monica's clothes because it still had that red sorcery coursing over it. It hadn't just been warped and changed. Wanda seemed to have put a permanent hex on it to keep it from being weaponized again, trapping that drone in stasis. Somehow, probably by a method that would never be explained, they scraped some of that magic off and applied it to Vision.

I believed Hayward wanted Wanda to steal Vision's body

I thought the implication was that Hayward had been trying for five years to reanimate Vision's body. The question raised in our discussion was why SWORD seemed to start working on him the moment Wanda showed up. I thought that was all a show. They were sloppy in the way they were pulling the body apart. These were supposed to be world class technicians, yet they went at the corpse like someone with a power saw from Home Depot, because they needed to provoke her.

Jessica said Hayward was a very smart villain in that respect: bring in the person most attached to Vision and see whether she can do something. Maybe it was trial and error. Wanda looked at Hayward through the monitor, which was a cool moment. SWORD originally directed her to Hayward's office, and she simply didn't wait to be buzzed in. To me, that said Hayward wanted Wanda to steal those Vision pieces. I thought he was disappointed when she left without them.

Jessica agreed that he definitely wanted her to take the body. She had noticed that, in the security tapes of Wanda walking in, nobody reacted. Everyone was calm. In her view, Wanda didn't break into anything. She asked why anyone would let the strongest woman, basically the strongest Avenger in her opinion, walk into a place separated only by glass. To her it made "zero sense" unless Hayward wanted Wanda to take the body so he could find some kind of connection.

Why I thought Hayward sent Monica toward the Hex

Hayward wanted the body taken so badly that in Episode 5, or whichever episode it was, he told Monica he had been cleared to show those security tapes, and he lied to her. Presumably some of the SWORD agents in that room knew it was a lie too. They knew Wanda had not successfully left SWORD with Vision's corpse.

I thought his disappointment when Wanda left empty handed might be why he sent Monica up there to connect with whatever Wanda was doing. He could then complete his mission of getting Wanda's magic outside the Hex to use on his Vision pieces.

That brought me back to my sense that Monica must already be a kind of superhero. That would explain the security protocol when she first walked up. SWORD seemed to know she was at almost an Avenger level of power. I thought Hayward's logic was to throw one Avenger at another and see if one got knocked out of the Hex so he could collect some of that magic.

Is Hayward the Grim Reaper or Ultron? Jessica thought he was just human

Jessica admitted she was still confused about Hayward's motive and concluded that he just hates superheroes. The discussion ruled out him being like Ultron or Mephisto. My take was that he hates superheroes he can't control. He's the classic government agent.

The show seemed to be adapting the Vision Quest comic while leaving out some of its more comic book characters. It appeared to be leaving out Immortus, though it might bring in some version of Wonder Man or the Grim Reaper. Some people were wondering whether Hayward was secretly the Grim Reaper or Ultron, or simply inspired by them. My view was that his character might have seen some logic in what Ultron was trying to do with Vision, or in what the Grim Reaper was trying to do with Vision's corpse in the comics, and that this was his motive. The discussion agreed he wasn't going to put on a hood and grab a scythe.

Jessica thought a secret identity would be so close to the comics narrative that the show couldn't pull it off. She believed Hayward was simply a director starting a beef as a human. What bothered her most was his belief that money could protect him against the Scarlet Witch. She thought he was just a human behaving badly.

I expected Hayward's fate to show what the Scarlet Witch could do

My own expectation was that Hayward would serve as a bit of an audience surrogate. I thought casual MCU fans had underestimated the Scarlet Witch's power up to that point, because Age of Ultron and Infinity War only gave a glimpse of what she should be able to do. Even Agatha seemed surprised by everything Wanda had managed.

The discussion also touched on Agatha. There had been a thought that she might help Wanda find her powers, before it became clear she only wanted to know how Wanda was doing it, like a neighbor asking for a brownie recipe.

I thought the price Hayward paid would give us a very clear indicator of what Wanda would be capable of going forward, including in Multiverse of Madness. My verdict at the time was this: she can rewrite reality and create a multiverse, so don't mess around with her.