Oh dear lord, Wanda and Vision have twins. We're hosed. We're absolutely boned. There's a lot to cover in this week's WandaVision — titled "Now in Color," which is an Easter egg for the fact the show is now in color—but the most pressing matter is the fact Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) now, in whatever illusion/pocket universe/fever dream they're living in, are parents to two twin boys. In the long history of Wanda and Vision's comic book relationship, this is on par with Bruce Banner making peace with The Hulk, or Bruce Wayne hiring a healthy new sidekick, or Peter Parker meeting a loving girlfriend with a completely intact neck. Almost 100% of the time, it's just a precursor to some tragic, cataclysmic nonsense that rocks the entire world. The sing-songy I Dream of Genie vibes of the first three WandaVision episodes are, more likely than not, about to get yeeted into the ether more rudely than Geraldine (Teyonah Parris) got tossed into 2021.

Right, we'll probably have to talk about that, too. So, without further ado, here is every question we have after WandaVision Episode 3, "Now in Color":

Who (and What??) Are Tommy and Billy?

WandaVision Twins
Image via Disney+

Buckle up, kids, because we're about to get into the comic book history of Thomas and William Maximoff, a legacy of absolute bananagrams wonkery that can be summed up by the truly deranged way John Byrne drew these poor children in 1989:

Timmy and Bily Maximoff in Marvel Comics
Image via Marvel Comics

"Those do not look like real human babies" is what you're probably screaming, which is a fair critique of the artistic stylings of John Byrne but also, technically, accurate. As established in Byrne's run of Avengers West Coast, Wanda and Vision's twin children just...don't exist. After falling in love and marrying a synthezoid, Wanda discovered the unfortunate truth that the horniest corners of the internet have been debating for decades: No, the Vision does not possess a biologically sound package, and therefore could not conceive a child with his wife. So Wanda, in her own words, "used my power to warp probabilities and caused my womb to bring forth the fruits of an otherwise impossible mingling of mutant and android." She pulled two babies out of nothingness, basically. Jesus Christ-ass move, imho.

Unfortunately, that's when stuff got real freaking weird. It turns out William and Thomas didn't come from nothing, but were, in fact, two pieces of Mephisto's soul. Mephisto, in case you were unaware, is basically Marvel's Satan. Wanda accidentally created two babies using shards of the literal Devil's soul, which any obstetrician will tell you is "bad." It turned into a whole production; at one point, a man named Master Pandemonium transformed William and Thomas into his arms(?) and used them to chomp on Wonder Man's head(??) until Mephisto showed up and was like "give me back those weird adult-looking babies they are a part of my soul." The 1980s were a wonderful time. The main point being, Wanda eventually lost her children, forcing her mentor, a powerful witch named Agatha Harkness, to erase any memory of them from Wanda's head. This worked well, until much later, when Wanda remembered and ended up murdering half the Avengers. We'll get to that in a bit.

But first, let's round back to WandaVision. The jury is still extremely out on whether freaking Mephisto is about to show up in this Disney+ series demanding his soul-babies, but if so I'd like to warp probabilities to ensure he's played by Peter Stormare. But no, really, the only thing that's clear after three episodes of WandaVision is that Wanda is, if not in control of what's happening, then definitely the source. "Now In Color" features a moment in which Vision realizes 12-hour full-term pregnancies and neighbors mindlessly sawing into their fences is kind've strange, and Wanda seems to literally rewind reality to get him back on board. WandaVision has "warping probabilities" written all over it and, what's more, it's all in service to a life Wanda could not possibly have in the real world, seeing as how Vision is aggressively dead. And, as we see here, she'll fight to keep the real world out of her fantasies:

What Was Up with That Ultron Shout-Out?

Teyonah Parris in WandaVision
Image via Disney+

The most devilish trick the MCU likes to pull is ensuring its worst movies become retroactively very important to its ongoing story. Avengers: Endgame made sure you couldn't just tell newcomers to skip Thor: The Dark World. Now, the mystery underneath WanderVision seems to hinge on by far the worst Avengers movie, Age of Ultron. Apologies if this offends. I still enjoy the part where they all try and pick up the hammer and James Spader just doing Robert California in the body of an evil robot will never not be funny.

But we're not here to re-assess objectively-without-argument-terrible-film Age of Ultron, we're here to look at the most intriguing moment of "Now in Color." Both her babies born and Vision occupied outside, Wanda sings a Sokovian lullaby to her twin boys and does what millions of moviegoers across the globe have failed to do: Remember she had a brother, Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). "He was killed by Ultron, wasn't he?" Geraldine asks Wanda, which pretty much cracks this show in half.

I want to pay special attention to the performances by Olsen and Parris, because they're both stellar, and they both tell a story that WandaVision isn't ready to tell plainly quite yet. Olsen seems to shrug off the sitcom-era trappings like an old skin and become the Scarlet goddamn Witch just by the way she holds herself. Look at her eyes; those eyes aren't doing the jitterbug at a sock hop, those eyes were raised as a lab rat by HYDRA and almost singlehandedly beat Thanos' ass to death. Parris, for her part, looks like she's tip-toeing through a tiger cage. She's introducing bits of reality back to Wanda very, very carefully, like she's waking up a sleepwalker wearing a bomb vest. Beneath its Bewitched-y good-times vibes, WandaVision seems to be establishing what the MCU hasn't touched on yet, the fact that Wanda Maximoff is dangerously powerful and prone to absolutely effing up the entire world when prodded.

Which is why I wanted to bring up the comics history of those two twins, because woof, is it starting to sound familiar. Decades after John Byrne inexplicably drew two children to look like Kevin Sorbo, writer Brian Michael Bendis introduced the crossover storyline "Avengers Disassembled", in which Wanda is reminded she once had two living, breathing kids erased from her brain. She promptly loses every ounce of her shit, killing Ant-Man, killing Hawkeye, and, tragically, killing Vision. But also—and please, stop me if this sounds familiar—she attempts to re-create Thomas and William in a black-and-white fantasy. Flashes of color intrude, Wanda is reminded that none of this is real, and it effectively cracks her mind for good.

Avengers Disassembled
Image via Marvel Comics

The kids are bad news, folks!

"Because We're All..." What??

Kathryn Hahn and David Payton in WandaVision
Image via Disney+

At this point, it's pretty safe to say that some of the residents in Westview are not what they seem. My man Herb (David Payton) is out here casually driving his electric hedge-clippers through a brick wall. Dr. Nielson (Randy Oglesby) looks Vision dead-ass in the face and says "small towns, you know, so hard to escape" so unsubtly I'm surprised he didn't hand over a paperback copy of Tom King's Vision. Agnes is played by Kathryn Hahn, which...I don't know, still seems significant. But thanks to "Now in Color," the question is now less about who these people are, but the fact they're not all on the same side. Says Herb, about Geraldine: "She came here because we're all..."

Figments of Wanda's imagination? Dead? Skrulls? Vision was tragically robbed of his ability to ask follow-up questions so we don't know quite yet, but the mystery only deepens now that we know there are factions within the sitcom-verse. We basically know for sure that Geraldine—who is actually Monica Rambeau—represents S.W.O.R.D., the sister organization to S.H.I.E.L.D. in charge of monitoring sentient weaponry. (I'd also bet that's who shows up in military-style humvees and helicopters after Monica gets straight catapulted into another universe.) As for Agnes, Herb, that one guy who looks exactly like David Schwimmer, and the rest? Still a massive question mark. But woo boy, as I was last week, I am still holding out hope for Advanced Idea Mechanics to be involved, because the dream of a live-action M.O.D.O.K. lives on in those of us who believe.

WandaVision Episodes 1 through 3 are now available to stream on Disney+. A new episode of WandaVision will premiere on Friday, January 30. For more, check out our interview with Teyonah Parris about her mysterious character.