Did ‘WandaVision’ Just Bring Mutants to the MCU?

(Major spoilers ahead for the fifth episode of the Marvel series “WandaVision” on Disney+)

Well. There it is. Maybe.

Since the Disney-Fox merger, fans have been wondering how the Marvel Cinematic Universe would bring the X-Men into the fold. Would they start over from scratch? Would they use the Marvel multiverse to bring the Fox versions of the characters directly? We might have gotten an answer on “WandaVision” this week when Evan Peters, who played Pietro Maximoff aka Quicksilver in the “X-Men” films “Days of Future Past,” “Apocalypse” and “Dark Phoenix,” showed up at the very end.

This episode made a point early on of awkwardly reminding you about Wanda’s brother Pietro and how he died back in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” and so it’s not a huge surprise overall that Quicksilver made some kind of appearance.

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It’s the method that’s shocking — because Aaron Taylor-Johnson played Pietro in the MCU, not Peters. And so rather than Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) bringing the MCU version of the character back to life the way she did with Vision (Paul Bettany), what we apparently just saw at the end of this episode of “WandaVision” is the Fox version crossing over.

Apparently.

Before we get too excited (who am I kidding — you’re already too excited), we should consider the possibility that Marvel is messing with us here. There are a couple reasons to suspect that, perhaps, this is not actually Quicksilver. That is to say, this is not really the alternate universe version of Pietro Maximoff.

The first reason is just the situation in general. Wanda — or someone — has seemingly dominated the minds of everyone in this town and forced them to play roles in a fake sitcom, and there’s certainly a distinct possibility that this is another example of that. Peters could be playing not Quicksilver, but rather a random dude who lived in that town and is now being forced to play the part of Quicksilver.

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The second reason is that this really seems like an odd place to do something as monumental for the greater franchise like merging the MCU with Fox’s X-Men movieverse. There’s still four more episodes of “WandaVision” left, and there have not really been any clues dropped about the multiverse over the course of the show so far. This twist is out of left field, rather than something that it felt like the show was building toward — especially after last week’s episode finally gave us a general idea of how this whole sitcom deal works.

Third: dropping such a huge reveal as a cliffhanger at the end of this episode, rather than closer to the end of the season, reeks of misdirection.

But on the other hand, Kevin Feige and co. absolutely know how fans are going to react to this whole deal, and they know how much of a punch to the gut it would be if a moment this highly anticipated turned out to just be a fakeout. This would be a pretty insane way to mess with the audience if they just brought in Evan Peters as a gag. And it would certainly frustrate fans.

The problem is that it’s tough to make a truly educated guess about this right now because there are still so many unknown variables. The big one is who’s in control of Westview. You might be tempted to think that answer is obvious, with Wanda popping out of Westview to threaten S.W.O.R.D. and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris).

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Think again. The Wanda who went outside was using the character’s original Sokovian accent that she spoke with in “Ultron” and “Captain America: Civil War.” But she dropped the accent in favor of a standard American one in “Avengers: Infinity War,” and hadn’t used her original Sokovian one since then, including on “WandaVision” — except in this one scene. I’m not saying that was necessarily a fake Wanda, but it’s a big red flag that things are still not as they seem.

On top of that, there have been numerous clues that Wanda isn’t in charge here. Her inability to remember the past in the first episode. Agnes having to function as a sort of tutorial for Westview in the second. And this week, Wanda had to beg her sons to not age themselves up after their dog died — not something you’d think she would have to do if she were controlling everything.

Plus, I simply believed her when she said at the very end that she didn’t make someone knock on her door. Her look of shock when she saw this ersatz version of her brother Pietro also felt pretty convincing.

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The leading theory for what’s going on on “WandaVision” is that Marvel is doing an adaptation of the “House of M” storyline from the comics.

At the heart of “House of M” was a demon named Mephisto. This is a guy who convinces people to sell their souls and manipulates humankind, and Mephisto can warp reality the same way Wanda can. Wanda unknowingly uses Mephisto’s disassembled soul to magically become pregnant (what with Vision being an android and all) and when Mephisto’s soul is reassembled, she loses her twins.

Wanda’s witch mentor, Agatha Harkness, then wipes her memory of having children to avoid her spiraling into cataclysmic grief, which basically backfires when those memories resurface years later, leading Wanda to rewrite reality to mold the world to her own happiness.

And the thought is that Agnes on “WandaVision” is the MCU version of Agatha.

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That’s still our best lead after this week’s episode, but with so many variables — plus the MCU’s tendency to take a comic book premise and go in a totally new direction with it — anything remains possible. The fact that this Quicksilver reveal came smack in the middle of the season is part of why it’s difficult to confidently parse.

With so much left of the story still to go — and with the plot really only just kicking in last week — there are still not that many concrete clues to be found. And if years of theorizing about what’s next for the MCU for my job here has taught me anything, it’s that we should never trust a storyline to play out the way it did in the comics.