There’s a moment in Avengers: Age of Ultron that I think about more than I probably should. The Avengers are at a party. Thor’s hammer is sitting on a coffee table. One by one, Earth’s mightiest heroes step up to try to lift it, and one by one they fail — with varying degrees of effort and wildly varying degrees of dignity. It’s a fun, loose, relaxed moment that reminds you why these characters work so well together. They’re genuinely likable people, even when they’re showing off. Except, maybe, for Tony.

But the film surrounding that party scene isn’t just about the team we already know and love. Avengers: Age of Ultron is, at its core, a story about what happens when that team has to grow — not because they’re ready, but because the world doesn’t really ask permission. And the three characters introduced in this film — Pietro Maximoff, Wanda Maximoff, and Vision — don’t just expand the Avengers roster. They change what the Avengers are.

Each of them deserves their moment in the spotlight. Even the one who didn’t get nearly enough of it.

Pietro Maximoff: The One Marvel Gave Away Too Soon

Here’s a confession: Pietro Maximoff might be the character in the MCU I feel the most retroactive sympathy for. Not because he’s a bad character — Aaron Taylor-Johnson brings genuine energy to the role, and the sibling chemistry between him and Elizabeth Olsen feels real. But Pietro is essentially set up, used, and discarded within the span of a single film, which is a rough way to exist in a franchise that rewards patience.

He first appears in the mid-credits scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier — a brief, mysterious tease of a young man pacing the walls of his cell at inhuman speed. He spends the majority of Age of Ultron being antagonistic toward the Avengers, then makes a heel turn when he and his sister learn what Ultron is actually planning, and then dies saving Clint Barton and a Sokovian child from gunfire. His last words are “You didn’t see that coming?” which, depending on your charitable inclinations, is either a solid callback to an earlier joke or the universe’s most on-the-nose bit of dramatic irony.

To be fair, Pietro’s abbreviated arc is rooted in something real and understandable. He and Wanda grew up in Sokovia during a war, watched their parents die when a Stark Industries missile struck their apartment, and spent two days trapped in the rubble waiting to be rescued. The hatred they carry for Tony Stark isn’t cartoonish villainy — it’s the completely logical result of a childhood defined by grief and powerlessness. Taylor-Johnson described Pietro as overprotective of his sister and easily bored, someone with a short fuse and an even shorter attention span, which tracks for a character who can move at superhuman speed and probably experiences every ordinary moment of life as an excruciating crawl.

It’s worth acknowledging that at the same time the MCU’s Pietro was running around Sokovia, another version of the character — Evan Peters’ Peter Maximoff in Fox’s X-Men films — was getting a lot of attention for a show-stopping slow-motion sequence in Days of Future Past. The two studios had a shared arrangement to use the character, and the comparison was inevitable. But the MCU’s Pietro isn’t trying to be that version, and judging him by that standard isn’t quite fair. Taylor-Johnson’s Pietro is grittier, angrier, and more grounded in genuine loss. He’s not a scene-stealer. He’s a soldier.

And when he dies, it works. It works precisely because Pietro’s entire identity in this film is built around one thing: protecting Wanda. Everything he does — joining Ultron, fighting the Avengers, switching sides, running into battle — is filtered through that singular loyalty. So when he takes a burst of gunfire that was meant for someone else, it’s completely consistent with who he is. Heroic and sudden and deeply unfair.

The character deserved more time. The MCU didn’t give it to him. That’s just the way it goes sometimes, and Pietro Maximoff remains a small but genuine loss in the franchise’s history.

Wanda Maximoff: The Most Important Character Marvel Introduced in Phase Two

Let me make a case that might seem obvious in retrospect but probably wasn’t in 2015: Wanda Maximoff is the most significant character introduction in all of Phase Two.

Not the most powerful, though she certainly becomes that. Not the most visually flashy — that’s probably Vision, who shows up radiating gemstones and existential gravitas. But in terms of raw narrative importance to everything the MCU builds toward in the years that follow, Wanda is the one. And Age of Ultron plants every seed.

Elizabeth Olsen has said that when Joss Whedon offered her the role, one of the first things he told her was that she would never have to wear the character’s comic book costume — a red corset-and-headpiece situation that screams a very specific era of comic book design. That was apparently the selling point. What she got instead was something considerably more interesting: a character who starts the film as a villain, ends it as a hero, and spends the intervening decades of MCU storytelling becoming one of the most psychologically complex figures in the franchise.

In Age of Ultron, Wanda’s power set is genuinely unsettling in a way that most superhero abilities aren’t. She doesn’t punch things harder than regular people punch things. She gets inside your head. She shows Tony Stark his worst fear — the deaths of everyone he loves, his own failure to prevent it — and that vision is directly responsible for the creation of Ultron. Everything that goes wrong in this film can be traced, at least partially, back to the hallucination Wanda planted in Stark’s mind in the opening act. That’s an unusual amount of narrative weight for a character who starts out as the antagonist.

What makes her arc genuinely compelling is the turn. When Wanda reads Ultron’s mind and realizes his plan isn’t to conquer humanity but to wipe it out entirely, something shifts. She and Pietro had joined Ultron for personal reasons — revenge against Stark, a specific and understandable grudge. Mass extinction is a different order of evil. She can’t be complicit in that, and she isn’t.

Olsen has described Wanda as “overly stimulated” rather than mentally unstable — a character who has access to more psychic input than any human being should have to process. She can feel what others feel, see what they see, experience their fears as though they were her own. She can perceive parallel times and worlds simultaneously. The film handles this somewhat obliquely — Whedon reportedly drew on dancers to shape how Wanda physically moves through space, which gives her scenes a strange, expressive quality — but the emotional core is clear. This is someone who knows too much and can control almost none of it.

The most honest moment in the entire film might be the one where Wanda abandons her post at Sokovia’s central machine because Pietro has just died. She is supposed to be guarding the core. She leaves anyway. She grieves and rages and destroys Ultron’s primary body in an act of raw revenge, and in doing so allows one of his drones to activate the machine and start the city’s descent. That decision almost costs everyone their lives. The film doesn’t excuse it or explain it away. Grief makes you impulsive and dangerous, and Wanda is allowed to be genuinely flawed in a way that superhero movies don’t always permit.

By the time the credits roll, Wanda is standing in the new Avengers compound — a member of the team, carrying her dead brother and her considerable guilt and her completely uncharted power. That’s not a resolution. That’s a beginning.

Vision: The Character Who Shouldn’t Work (But Absolutely Does)

Let’s be honest about what the film is asking you to do with Vision: accept, in roughly fifteen minutes of screen time spread across the third act, that an android built from a stolen synthetic body, uploaded with the AI of Tony Stark’s digital butler, powered by an ancient cosmic gemstone, and activated by a lightning bolt, is now a hero you should care about. On paper this is asking a lot. In practice, it somehow works completely.

Paul Bettany deserves the majority of the credit. He had been voicing J.A.R.V.I.S. — Stark’s AI companion — since the original Iron Man, entirely without appearing on screen. When Whedon decided to make Vision a major character, he offered Bettany the role in a move that surprised the actor, given that MCU performers aren’t typically double-cast in separate roles. What Bettany understood immediately was that Vision shouldn’t be played as a robot doing a passable impression of a human being. He plays Vision as something genuinely new: a consciousness that has never existed before, encountering its first moments of existence with total openness. Omnipotent and naive simultaneously, which is a strange combination and exactly the right one.

The scene that establishes Vision’s trustworthiness is elegant in its simplicity. The Avengers have been arguing about whether to trust this newly created being — whether uploading J.A.R.V.I.S. into a vibranium body powered by an Infinity Stone was a reasonable thing to do, which, in fairness, is a reasonable thing to argue about. Then Vision casually picks up Thor’s hammer and hands it to him. Thor’s hammer is enchanted so only the worthy can lift it. The argument is over. Whatever Vision is, he’s good. The film earns that moment without overexplaining it, which is exactly the right instinct.

The Mind Stone embedded in Vision’s forehead is also, quietly, one of the more important pieces of setup in all of Age of Ultron. Thor explains that it’s one of six Infinity Stones — the most powerful objects in the universe. In a film that’s already nodding toward the larger mythology of the MCU, Vision’s very existence is a signal that the stakes are going to get considerably higher. He is, in a very literal sense, walking evidence that the universe has been building toward something.

There’s also something quietly affecting about the dynamic between Vision and Wanda in these early scenes, even though the film doesn’t dwell on it. He pulls her out of the collapsing city at Sokovia. She has just lost her brother. He is a being who was born approximately eight hours ago and is still in the process of figuring out what that means. They’re both, in their different ways, trying to exist in a world that doesn’t quite have a category for them. Age of Ultron plants this seed very lightly. WandaVision, years later, does extraordinary things with it. But even here, in these first tentative moments, you can feel the connection forming.

What These Three Mean

When the dust settles at the end of Age of Ultron, the Avengers look different. Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff are running a new team at a new compound — War Machine, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, and Vision — and the original lineup has scattered. The team that replaced them is smaller and quieter and carrying considerably more complicated emotional baggage.

Introducing three significant new characters in a single film is a genuine high-wire act. The fact that two of them — Wanda and Vision — went on to anchor WandaVision, one of the most emotionally ambitious things Marvel has ever produced, says a lot about how carefully the foundation was built here. Pietro’s shorter arc is a genuine loss, but even that serves a narrative purpose: it establishes that the MCU is willing to take things from you, and it shapes every decision Wanda makes for the next several years of storytelling.

Joss Whedon once described Age of Ultron as a story about creation and cost — what you build and what it takes from you. Ultron is the literal expression of that theme. But Wanda, Pietro, and Vision are the human version. Each of them was made into what they are by forces outside their control — trauma, experimentation, technology, grief. Each of them had to decide, under pressure and without a guidebook, what to do with what they’d become.

That’s not just a superhero movie premise. That’s something considerably more universal.

The Avengers got bigger in Age of Ultron. They also got messier and more vulnerable and more interesting. Which, honestly, is the best kind of growth.

What’s your take — did Marvel do right by these three characters? Drop your thoughts in the comments.