The Evolution & Possible Future of ‘WandaVision’s Billy and Tommy: WATCH

30 Seconds of Marvel presents: WandaVision but only with BILLY and TOMMY. To some fans the twins got short thrift if you consider they are the future founding members of Young Avengers.

Wiccan and Speed (Billy Kaplan & Tommy Shepherd) pic.twitter.com/j7GuJyUEiC

— yehu (@comicyehu) March 22, 2021

The Ringer: Over the course of just eight episodes of WandaVision, Wanda Maximoff and Vision moved into a new home together; Wanda became pregnant and gave birth to twin boys; the twin boys aged 10 years; the Maximoff family got a dog named Sparky; the dog died; Wanda’s brother returned from the dead; and Vision nearly died (again).

To quote Wanda, “Life moves pretty fast out in the suburbs.”

In Episode 6, Billy and Tommy didn’t age again, but they did both still grow in a significant way. They began the day as children getting ready for their first Halloween, and ended it as super-powered preteens. Tommy (played by Jett Klyne) takes after his speedy uncle Pietro and can trick-or-treat through an entire neighborhood in the blink of an eye, while Billy (Julian Hilliard) appears to take after his magical mother, one of the most powerful beings in the Marvel universe.

With the appearance of the Maximoff boys, fans believed them to be the heralds of a new generation of superheroes in the MCU.

Will they disappear as quickly as they grew inside of Wanda, or will they go beyond just cosplaying as superheroes to become Wiccan and Speed we wondered? Turns out it’s slightly more complicated.

Billy and Tommy’s origins in the comics are even stranger (and more confusing) than they are on WandaVision. Including the twins, the Maximoff family history is a bit of a convoluted mess, subject to its fair share of good old-fashioned comic-book retconning as dozens of authors and artists have given their take on the Maximoffs over the years.

Billy and Tommy Maximoff were first introduced at the conclusion of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch mini-series from the 1980s where, like in WandaVision, they were conceived by Wanda’s magic. At first, they appear to be normal baby boys — besides, you know, the fact that they have a Synthezoid and a witch as parents — but when the nature of the children was revisited by John Byrne and Bob Sharen in the West Coast Avengers (later Avengers West Coast) a few years later, the twins turn out to be much more than that.

In West Coast Avengers, Agatha Harkness — a witch and Wanda’s mentor — returns from the dead and casually shows up at Wanda and Vision’s house. (In case you didn’t know, nobody really stays dead in the comics. Except for, like, Uncle Ben.) Agatha confronts the unsuspecting parents with the fact that the moment Wanda loses sight of her children and stops thinking of them, they simply cease to exist.

And if that news weren’t bad enough, a demonically enhanced villain named Master Pandemonium later shows up to kidnap Billy and Tommy. Master P was once a normal guy, as he helpfully explains, but after losing an arm in a car accident, he made a deal with the devil Mephisto, who replaced his limbs at the price of his soul.

As it turns out, Billy and Tommy were created using pieces of Mephisto’s own fragmented soul, so he, like a classic devil, tricks Pandemonium into helping him reabsorb the twins’ souls into his body, essentially killing them in the process. In order to shield Wanda from the trauma (and the searing images of those horrifying demon-baby arms), her memory of her children and all the demon drama is wiped clean, and her twins are forgotten for years thereafter.

The twins, and their souls,  return years later, but now they grow up with different biological parents. They only meet and begin to suspect their spiritual familial connection once they’re both recruited into the Young Avengers.

Tommy and Billy (a.k.a. Speed and Wiccan) realize that they bear an uncanny resemblance not only to each other but also to the original Maximoff twins, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, respectively. Before long, they discover the truth of their ties to the Maximoffs — demon-baby-arm history and all — and search for Wanda, who had gone into hiding following her reality-altering transgressions in the 2005 series House of M. Their suspicions are finally confirmed in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, as Billy and Tommy properly reunite with their mother for the first time.

WandaVision blended Billy’s and Tommy’s various characters and story lines from the comic books. “The beauty of bringing these characters to life on television is that WandaVision showrunner Jac Schaeffer could sift through the occasionally soap-opera feel of the comics to pluck out the good bits—while not having to simultaneously worry about anything conflicting with Kevin Feige’s precious web of story lines in the MCU.”

With WandaVision over, the young Maximoff twins now stand at the crossroads of the diverging paths that their characters take in the comics.

The fans are down and the twins even have their own limited edition Funko Pop dolls. There’s even a real time Twitter account following the boys called Billy and Tommy Updates @wandaslostboys.

Made this account as a way of coping with the fact we won’t see the twins again until Doctor Strange 2 and I like imagining they’re just chilling in the multiverse waiting for their mom to pick them up pic.twitter.com/JxR31GWSgs

— Billy and Tommy Updates (@wandaslostboys) March 6, 2021

We suspect it won’t be long before we see them again, especially after hearing Billy’s cries during the post credit scene of the season finale. In the meantime watch WandaVision the Billy and Tommy cut below.