How WandaVision’s Fake Quicksilver Has The Correct Powers

Warning: Spoilers for the WandaVision finale below.

It was heavily implied for the last few episodes of WandaVision that Pietro (Evan Peters) was not an alternate version of the brother Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) loved and lost. The Marvel show’s series finale not only confirmed that but proved that “Fietro” was just an actor named Ralph Bohner selected by Agatha (Kathryn Hahn). But if he was just a regular person, then how did he have the real Pietro’s super-speed?

The “Agatha All Along” sequence in the episode “Breaking the Fourth Wall” confirmed that Agatha had been controlling “Pietro” all along. That episode’s post-credits scene showed that Pietro was acting as Agatha’s henchman and took a snooping Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) into his custody. But in the series’ finale Monica took back the upper hand and eventually freed Pietro from Agatha’s hold, revealing he’d really been a guy named Ralph Bohner all along.

Monica’s multiple trips through the boundaries of the Hex gave Monica the energy-based superpowers that, for one, enable her to see multiple forms of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. Because of that, she noticed that Pietro’s necklace was glowing purple. That happens to be the signature color of Agatha’s magic, indicating that it was what kept him under Agatha’s spell. It’s also what gave him Quicksilver’s abilities.

Despite fans’ hopes and wishes for Mephisto or Nightmare, Agatha was always WandaVision‘s big bad. As a powerful sorceress herself, she infiltrated Westview with the hopes of learning how Wanda learned to wield Chaos Magic. Casting Ralph as Pietro was a strategy to help her get to the bottom of things. Agatha was fully committed to Westview’s sitcom motif, so conjuring a new Pietro that looked different than the one Wanda grew up with paid homage to the sitcom trope of recasting major characters. That, combined with his super-speed allowed Wanda to trust the new version of Pietro just enough to allow him into her home. Agatha’s mission was nearly successful when Wanda started to talk to Pietro about how she formed the Hex. But when that ultimately proved to be unsuccessful, Agatha decided to reveal herself to Wanda and cast Pietro aside.

Casting Peters in this role was a bit confusing and disappointing. Peters famously played Peter Maximoff a.k.a. Quicksilver in the X-Men franchise. Disney now owns Fox, meaning that Marvel finally has the rights to the X-Men and mutants. As upcoming Phase 4 movies Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home will be exploring the multiverse, Peters’ appearance in WandaVision understandably led fans to believe that he was playing his version of Quicksilver and the multiverse had officially been ripped open. But with the Ralph Bohner reveal, it seems hard to imagine how Peters could return as Quicksilver when the X-Men inevitably make their MCU debut. WandaVision made plenty of bold and powerful choices, but the conclusion of the fake Pietro storyline simply wasn’t one of them.