The following post contains minor SPOILERS for VisionQuest. If you’re concerned about spoilers and don’t have a good Vision handy to touch you on the forehead and mess with your brain while telling the story of the Ship of Theseus, I’d avoid reading further.
Marvel has already announced the cast and creative team of their first X-Men movie, but the official introduction of mutants to the Marvel Cinematic Universe still resembles a leaky faucet. Drip … drip … drip.
The latest droplet with potentially major ramifications for the future of the MCU happens in Episode 2 of VisionQuest. In a broad sense, the show has nothing to do with the X-Men; it follows Paul Bettany’s Vision, who is a psychological mess following the events of WandaVision. He’s trying to piece together who or what he is at this point, after his body was reassembled by scientists at S.W.O.R.D. and his old memories were re-implanted in his robot brain by the artificial Vision created by his love and Avengers teammate, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen).
Meanwhile, Vision is being pursued by a ruthless bounty hunter named Paladin (Todd Stashwick) who kidnaps a young man named Thomas he claims is actually Vision’s son Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) from Vision and Wanda Maximoff sitcom existence in WandaVision.
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Vision insists Thomas is not his kid — and even if he was the old Vision’s son he’s not his son — but he still goes to rescue him anyway. He arrives at the sanitarium where Paladin is holding Thomas and a fierce firefight breaks out. With his super-strength and forehead-mounted death laser, Vision makes quick work of Paladin’s henchmen.
Then Paladin himself appears, and blasts multiple holes through the normally invulnerable Vision. How is that even possible?
“The bastard’s using adamantium rounds!” says one of Vision’s A.I. allies, F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady)
This detail builds off the events of the largely not-great 2025 MCU movie Captain America: Brave New World. Its core conflict centered around the battle for control of “Celestial Island,” the remains of an ancient alien that was nearly born during the events of the even-worse 2021 MCU movie Eternals. Those remains contained a brand-new substance called “adamantium,” which is supposedly harder than any other element on the planet.
Naturally, every country on Earth wants the stuff for itself; the United States and Japan nearly go to war over control of adamantium, even though Celestial Island is bigger than Bermuda and the whole thing is made of this mineral or metal or whatever, so there should be plenty of it to go around. (Also: How do you mine something that’s harder than anything you could make a drill out of? Would a vibranium drill work? I have so many questions.) Just one year later in VisionQuest, we see that adamantium is already starting to make its way out into the world in the form of Paladin’s adamantium-tipped bullets.
Adamantium is best known as the stuff coating Wolverine’s claws and skeleton. So it’s primarily here as yet another teeny tiny tease of the X-Men}s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (The announced X-Men cast does not include Wolverine, although it seems likely Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine could show up somewhere in Avengers: Doomsday or Secret Wars.)
Maybe more importantly than its connection to the X-Men, though, is the fact that the addition of adamantium to the MCU also adds a new level of threat for the Avengers. The first two episodes of VisionQuest showed the title character shrugging off dozens of bullets and knives and other conventional weapons. He tears through bad guys like a forehead-mounted death laser through human flesh. It seems like nothing can stop him — until he’s shot a couple times with these adamantium rounds. Suddenly, Vision’s near death and needs a timely rescue from Thomas to escape from Paladin.
It’s tough to tell a suspenseful story about a character who can’t be killed. (Lest we forget, Vision has already died twice in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) That makes the addition of adamantium is even more important, because this stuff is so deadly it poses a danger to Marvel’s strongest characters. Granted, half of the entire universe was snapped out of existence by Thanos and then resurrected by the Avengers, so maybe death is meaningless in the MCU at this point anyway. But it’s still nice to be able to emotionally invest in the idea that there’s something at stake for these heroes. Otherwise, what are we watching for?
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