WandaVision: Will Pietro Maximoff Make an Appearance?

This article contains spoilers for WandaVision episode 3.

As we’ve now come to expect from WandaVision, the most unsettling moment of the spinoff’s latest episode arrived during its final minutes, when Wanda’s mysterious Westview pal ‘Geraldine’ showed her hand a bit after Wanda mentioned that she was a twin, just like her new bouncing baby boys.

Geraldine (Teyonah Parris), who the residents of Westview are suspicious of because she’s new to town and doesn’t have a home, is actually a grown up Monica Rambeau in the Disney+ series. We last saw Monica as child during the 90s-set Captain Marvel, and she’s most likely working for SWORD in the world of WandaVision. The organization appears to rush to her aid when she is ejected from Wanda’s reality for the crime of breaking through to her in the midst of this strangely-constructed reality.

She achieves this – albeit briefly – by bringing up the fact that Wanda’s twin Pietro Maximoff was killed by the villainous Ultron. Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron was the first film to properly introduce Scarlet Witch into the Marvel Cinematic Universe after she’d popped up at the end credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and it was also the film that swiftly (no pun intended) killed her twin when he got between Hawkeye and a hail of bullets.

Geraldine/Monica seems somewhat disturbed by Wanda’s reaction to the memory, and it leads to her being summarily dismissed from the equation, but Marvel fans are wondering now more than ever if Pietro could turn up in future episodes of WandaVision. After all, Wanda watched Vision die twice and he appears to be very much alive, at least in this reality. Will Wanda – or whoever else is involved in creating the weird sitcom universe of Westview – bring Pietro back from the dead as part of her comforting family bubble? Chances are actually fairly high!

At a 2015 screening and Q&A for Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel boss Kevin Feige vehemently denied that Quicksilver would rise from the grave, but clearly chose his words carefully even as this information was relayed to fans on the Marvel Studios subreddit:

“Quiksilver(sic) is DEAD. 100%, he’s not coming back any time soon, there are no plans. No LMD, no escaping bullets, no retcon. Kevin Feige said he is dead and wanted to make sure people understood that.”

Director Joss Whedon explained that, in killing Pietro during the climax of Age of Ultron, “the intent was to earn this, and then you have to stand by it” but the actor who played Pietro in the MCU, Kick Ass star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, has said he would “absolutely” reprise the role given the opportunity.

There have also been reports swirling for almost a year around the possible WandaVision appearance of Evan Peters, who served as the X-Men’s version of Pietro Maximoff. These reports were recently refuelled by a now-deleted tweet from Peters’ Spanish X-Men voice actor, Rodri Martin, which seemed to confirm that Peters had a role in the series.

Peters certainly wasn’t too happy that his big screen Quicksilver rival had been nixed so quickly in Age of Ultron.

“I was devastated by it,” he told Yahoo in 2016. “I really wanted that to keep going. I thought it was cool. I don’t really know why they killed him off. I liked what they did with it. It was different. It was a completely different take on it.”

It does feel likely that we’re about to see Pietro Maximoff re-emerge in one form or another, and a prevailing theory around the format of WandaVision itself – that every new sitcom setup is a pocket universe ‘reset’ that could be breaking down the walls between realities and creating a massive amount of fallout for Doctor Strange to deal with in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – could yet hold water.

WandaVision is streaming weekly on Disney+.