Thomas Shepherd remembers two childhoods: his own and the one Tommy Maximoff lived inside Wanda’s Westview hex. Played by Ruaridh Mollica, the young Scottish thief in VisionQuest is now the host of Wanda Maximoff and Vision’s lost son. The series explains how he reached London and what happens when he finds his family again.
VisionQuest’s first episode resolves a mystery left open by Agatha All Along. Billy had found a body for his twin brother’s wandering soul, but neither he nor viewers knew where Tommy had ended up.
To understand Thomas’s story, it helps to look at Speed, his Marvel Comics counterpart. Both face confinement after their powers emerge, though their escapes lead them down different paths. Spoilers follow for Agatha All Along and VisionQuest, including the latter’s finale.
Before Thomas Shepherd, there was Wanda’s lost son
In Marvel’s 1980s comics, Wanda Maximoff and Vision traded Avengers life for the suburbs, where Wanda used magic to give birth to William and Thomas. The explanation took a darker turn in West Coast Avengers: the twins were constructs that Wanda had unknowingly made using fragments of Mephisto’s soul.
After the children vanished, Agatha Harkness removed all memory of them from Wanda’s mind. WandaVision drew loosely on this story. In the comics, years passed with little attention to the twins before their return became part of the Young Avengers’ story.
That return followed Avengers Disassembled in 2004, when Wanda’s loss of control over her powers nearly wiped out the Avengers. Vision then activated a recruitment protocol for a younger generation of heroes. It identified Billy Kaplan, a magically gifted teenager who took the name Wiccan. Billy was, in fact, Wanda’s son reincarnated.
While helping build the Young Avengers, Billy sought out other young heroes without knowing he was a Maximoff or that he had a twin to find. The search brought the team to Springfield, New Jersey, and Tommy Shepherd. A broken home had given Tommy a more difficult childhood than Billy’s.
Like his uncle, Quicksilver, Tommy could move at super speed. His abilities first manifested in an accident that vaporized his school. He was subsequently locked in a high-tech juvenile facility, where experiments were intended to make him a living weapon. The Young Avengers rescued him, and he met Billy, though neither knew yet that they were brothers.
Once they learned who they were, another question remained: how had Wanda and Vision’s children returned? The comics never settle whether their souls traveled into the past to be born to other parents or entered teenagers who already existed. Wanda favors the second explanation, but it isn’t confirmed.
As Speed, Tommy joined his brother on the Young Avengers, and the pair found Wanda in Young Avengers: The Children’s Crusade. Tommy is openly bisexual. His relationships have included a brief romance with teammate Kate Bishop/Hawkeye and, later, David Alleyne, the mutant hero known as Prodigy.
VisionQuest turns that comic-book pattern into a family story
Unlike the comics, the MCU shows how Tommy enters his new body. Agatha All Along, which follows WandaVision, first explained the past of Joe Locke’s Billy Maximoff, or Wiccan. Finding his missing brother was what Billy wanted from the end of the Witches’ Road.
Although Tommy never appears in Agatha All Along, Billy tells Agatha in episode 8 that he can sense his twin. Tommy’s soul was still without a body, rather than having found one immediately as Billy’s had. In the Road’s last trial, Agatha helped Billy reach that soul and steer it toward a host.
Billy found a boy who had nobody looking out for him, and whom bullies drowned. At the moment of death, Billy guided Tommy into the child’s body. Agatha All Along never named the boy or said where he was.
VisionQuest fills in those gaps. The boy was Thomas Shepherd, an orphan raised in foster care, and the drowning happened when other boys held him under at a public swimming pool in the UK. As Tommy’s soul entered Thomas, his speed powers awakened, leaving him with memories from both identities.
What happened to the bullies is less certain. The show suggests the sudden activation of Thomas’s powers injured them, perhaps fatally, without confirming their fate. Thomas was placed in a psychiatric institution afterward. There he befriended Lisa Molinari, another troubled young person, who helped him escape before he could be transferred to a worse institution.
Lisa’s comics counterpart is Coat of Arms, a heroine who once had a romantic relationship with Tommy. On screen, Lisa and Thomas make a living as grifters in London. Where the comics have the Young Avengers free Tommy and welcome him into the team, VisionQuest has Lisa help him get out, with their life on the streets following his confinement.
His path crosses Vision’s when Paladin, the bounty hunter, uses Thomas as bait in a trap for the android. By the close of episode two, “Theseus,” father and son are reunited.
Vision comes to accept that Thomas is his Westview son reincarnated. For Thomas, watching the WandaVision episodes that Vision recovered from S.W.O.R.D.’s archives brings reassurance: the memories that made him question his sanity had a real basis. By the end of VisionQuest, he can also use his full super speed, which helps him rescue his father from Ultron.
The finale brings Billy, again played by Joe Locke, back into Thomas’s life. Together with Vision, the brothers become a family again, though Wanda isn’t part of the reunion.
In the comics, Tommy’s escape leads him to the Young Avengers; in VisionQuest, it leads him back to his family. The finale reunites him with Billy and Vision, but Wanda is still absent.
