Having a mysterious government organization with ulterior motives is one of the oldest plot developments in the book, but looking at how the first six episodes of WandaVision have played out, S.W.O.R.D.’s ultimate goals don’t feel as though they’re going to be completely straightforward.
The outfit swarmed to WestView in order to contain what they’ve dubbed as The Hex, but acting director Tyler Hayward has always given off the impression that he’s withholding some of the key facts from his underlings. Having banished Darcy Lewis, Jimmy Woo and Monica Rambeau from his inner circle, the intrepid trio hacked into S.W.O.R.D.’s systems and discovered that Hayward has plans to recover Vision’s body for himself.
This has already led to speculation that he’s Ultron in disguise looking to finally claim the vibranium body that he designed for his own use in the first Avengers sequel, but a new theory now claims that Hayward might be responsible for creating the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of the Sentinels.
Of course, Evan Peters’ appearance as Quicksilver has already made the X-Men connection abundantly clear, and when we saw security footage of Wanda reclaiming Vision’s body, the synthezoid had obviously been the subject of much experimentation. Hayward’s role as the ‘angry official who doesn’t trust superheroes’ has been seen plenty of times before in the genre, too, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that he could be looking to weaponize Vision’s remains to combat exactly the sort of threat that Wanda offers.
As ScreenRant explains:
A key indicator that S.W.O.R.D. has been violating Vision’s wishes is in their security footage itself. When Wanda broke into the lab where Vision’s body was being held, the synthezoid’s remains were in pieces, scattered across multiple tables and work stations. The assumption can be made that S.W.O.R.D. was in the process of experimenting on the Vision, especially considering that his body was still mostly intact after he was killed when Thanos ripped the Mind Stone out of his head at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. While incredibly immoral, S.W.O.R.D.’s reasoning does make a certain amount of sense. Vision was one of the most advanced artificial intelligences ever created housed in a vibranium body.
Not only that, but his creation came from the power of an Infinity Stone, which aided in giving him a true soul and life, allowing him to have emotions and feelings which lead to his love for Wanda. As such, Vision was one of the most powerful Avengers to join their ranks after Avengers: Age of Ultron, which no doubt made his body too tempting for S.W.O.R.D. to pass up, especially during the five years after the Decimation before the characters returned. Short on hope and full of fear, it seems likely that S.W.O.R.D. had been experimenting on his corpse in order to create new and powerful weapons to protect themselves and the rest of the world.
It would also thread another aspect of the X-Men mythology into both WandaVision and the mainline MCU, as well as providing plenty of canon fodder throughout Phase Four as the franchise’s roster of heroes could end up with an army of angry robots on their respective tails.