[Editor’s note: The following containsspoilersforWandaVision, Season 1, Episode 8, “Previously On."]
Marvel Comics superheroes are defined by their imperfections. Compared to the gods-among-men of DC comics, Marvel superheroes are about their flaws. They’re regular people in a real world who make mistakes. And so, perhaps it should come as no surprise that The Avengers, a group whose identity is about the mistakes they make along the way, screwed up majorly in the aftermath ofAvengers: Infinity War.
This week’s episode ofWandaVision, “Previously On,” revealed that The Avengers allowed S.W.O.R.D. to take possession of Vision’s body. Let’s rewind back further to note that Vision is the product of Ultron, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and even Thor’s lightning. He is technically a weapon, but obviously, he’s so much more and he was willing to sacrifice his life to save the universe. He’s a synthezoid, but also a good person, and he fought alongside the Avengers in multiple battles. He was their comrade and what did they do? They let his body get taken by some shadowy government organization overseen by the nefarious Tyler Hayward.
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To be charitable to The Avengers, everyone was reeling after the events of The Blip, but someone needed to have the wherewithal to say, “Vision’s body stays here with us. We’re going to have a funeral for him and we’re going to bury his body on our secure premises.” (Yes, Avengers HQ was blown up, but they’ve got finances; they can build a secure location to house Vision’s body) Instead, they basically treated both Vision and Wanda like crap by letting S.W.O.R.D. take his body and denying Wanda any kind of closure. With allies like that, who needs enemies?
In all fairness, these kinds of oversights are in character for Marvel’s superheroes. Their tenure is marked by failures not because they’re bad people, but because they’re people. If you look at the broader scope of the MCU, letting Vision’s body fall into the wrong hands is of a piece with other storylines about arms races that get out of hand. As Vision said, “Our very strength incites challenge. Challenge incites conflict. And conflict… breeds catastrophe.” Look at all the Marvel storylines about a powerful device being brought out into the world only to have it blowback:Iron Man,Iron Man 2,Ant-Man, andBlack Pantherare all sorts of “mirror-matches” where the good version must fight the bad version, and it looks like we’re getting that again in the finale ofWandaVisionwith Wanda fighting Agatha and Vision takingon White Vision.
And yet, I hope there is some kind of reckoning for The Avengers, or at least an explanation of how they let this happen. Nobody should expect heroes defined by their imperfections to be perfect, but losing Vision speaks to a callousness that’s kind of disheartening. Wanda wasn’t the only Avenger who saw Vision as more than just a robot. “He’s more than that. He’s evolving,” said Tony Stark inInfinity War. “We don’t trade lives,” Steve Rogers said of his fellow Avenger. So they clearly didn’t see him as a piece of machinery when he was alive, so why treat him that way in death?
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In “Previously On”, Hayward claims that S.W.O.R.D. had every “legal and ethical right” to take possession of Vision’s body, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense (also Hayward clearly has his own agenda, so everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt). Vision was created in Tony Stark and Bruce Banner’s lab. Hell, if Ultron came back to life, he would have more of a claim than S.W.O.R.D. does. The only “legal” avenue I can see here is if Vision signed the Sokovia Accords (andCivil Warseems to indicate that he does), which have some clause defining his body as the property of the U.S. government upon his death. But even there, we’ve seen the Avengers say, “To hell with your rules,” and do what they deem is right (this is the constant push-and-pull between the group’s benevolence and their fascism). To put it another way, if The Avengers had taken Vision’s body off the battlefield after the battle in Wakanda and stashed it away, who would have stopped them? Whocouldhave stopped them?
I’m done trying to predict what’s going to happen in the MCU (that already blew up in my facewith my Pietro prediction), so I’m not going to say that this oversight is part of some larger plan or payoff with regards to The Avengers. Maybe there will be some explanation about how they let Vision’s body get away, but for now, it looks like Earth’s Mightiest Heroes made one of Earth’s Biggest Whoopsies.
WandaVisionis currently available to stream on Disney+. Catch up on the Marvel Disney+ series ahead of the finale on Friday, March 5.
