【occult eroticism】

WandaVisionis the perfect TV obsession for people who like their superhero fun served with a heaping side of stress. It’s especially good at layering feelings of unease and occult eroticismsuspicion over moments that seem fine at face value, winking at double and even triple meanings behind every laugh line in Wanda and Vision’s sitcom reality. Some characters serve that purpose more obviously than others, but none of them have embraced Westview’s multifaceted weirdness like Wanda’s “brother” Pietro Maximoff.

To say that Pietro’s return to the MCU in WandaVisionEpisode 5 was a surprise would be an understatement. Not only did his character die in Avengers: Age of Ultron, but the version of Wanda’s brother who appeared on her doorstep was the wrong Pietro for this universe and franchise. Actor Aaron Taylor Johnson played Pietro (a.k.a Quicksilver) in Age of Ultron. The Pietro in WandaVisionis played by Evan Peters, who starred as Quicksilver in the previously unconnected X-Men movies.

The appearance of an X-Men hero in the Avengers’ universe is huge and that alone would be enough to make Pietro a character to watch, butWandaVisionEpisode 6 really leans into the idea that something is wrong with Pietro regardless of his origin. Solving the mystery of how Evan Peters’ Quicksilver got to Westview, whether or not he is the X-Men version of himself or is really Wanda’s undead brother, and how much he knows about his sister’s hex anomaly is now one of WandaVision’s most pressing questions. Of course, all of the clues that point towards answers to those questions are impossibly scrambled.

To start: this Pietro looks, talks, and more importantly acts like the X-Men Quicksilver. The MCU Quicksilver was fueled by vengeance, stoic except for the occasional cruel quip, and clingy when it came to Wanda. He made sense for the Age of Ultron–era MCU, which delved into the trauma of surviving in a world plagued by superpowers and extraterrestrial threats. That personality is nowhere to be found in WandaVision’s Pietro, who has the kleptomaniac tendencies, gonzo humor, and comic relief behavior seen in X-Men’s Quicksilver.

Countering the suggestion that this Pietro is pulled from the X-Men universe is the fact that he knows things that only the MCU Pietro would know. Like that he has a twin sister named Wanda at all, since her character does not exist in the X-Men movies, or that he and Wanda lost their parents when they were children, when Pietro has a living mother and father (boy, does he) in those films as well. Those facts appear stable inWandaVisionPietro’s mind, which naturally means things are about to get more complicated.

When Pietro shares a memory of trick-or-treating with Wanda early in Episode 6, she shakes her head and replies “that’s not how I remember it.” For the rest of the episode, Wanda becomes suspicious of Pietro’s memories and tries to test him on remembering other childhood experiences. Instead of answering, he admits that he’s aware of his changed appearance and suggests that his new face is Wanda’s doing. Pietro then reveals that he knows Wanda somehow created Westview and assumed he looked different because his sister didn’t want to be reminded of the past in her paradise.

Which brings us to the biggest problem with Pietro Maximoff in WandaVisionEpisode 6: Aside from Wanda, he’s the only other character who knows Westview is fake. He even jokes with Wanda about it, laying out the parameters of his series role as the annoying man-child uncle and congratulating his sister on finding the “least ethically objectionable” way to imprison an entire town. If Pietro is a construct of Wanda’s powers, why would he be the only construct to have full awareness of his false reality? That’s very weird!

There are more hints that Pietro either knows more about Westview or is somehow more "wrong" than viewers might anticipate. None of the other characters pay attention to Billy Maximoff’s Malcolm in the Middle–style fourth wall break except for Pietro, who lurks in the background with a confused expression as if he’s wondering who the hell his nephew is talking to. He also refers to Billy and Tommy as “demon spawn,” which is an Australia-sized clue that WandaVision’s most likely hidden villain Mephisto had a hand in creating the twins, and that Pietro knows about him.

Seriously fam, what’s going on here? Episode 6 ended with a bang as Wanda expanded the boundaries of the hex to save Vision, which trapped most of “real life” SWORD and FBI agents inside Westview, the effects of which we won’t know until next week. Like Pietro Maximoff and everyone else stuck inside Wanda’s world, everything will probably seem fun until it very clearly isn’t.

WandaVisionis streaming on Disney+.