Who TF Is Tommy Shepherd? VisionQuest’s Maybe-Son and Marvel’s Speed, Explained

Two episodes in, VisionQuest has a kid problem. Not a bad one. Thomas Shepherd (Ruaridh Mollica) is a London con artist with a partner, a patter and, according to the man hunting him, a father named Vision. The show is careful with its verbs: Marvel’s own synopsis says Thomas may be Vision’s reincarnated son. Comic readers heard the name and stopped being careful immediately. Here’s why.

Who is Tommy Shepherd in the comics?

Tommy Shepherd is Speed: a white-haired teenage speedster, twin brother of Billy Kaplan (Wiccan), and one of the Young Avengers. He was created by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung and first appeared in Young Avengers #10 (2006), taking the Speed codename two issues later. The team found him in a juvenile detention facility built to hold superhumans, which tells you most of what you need to know about his temperament. Where Billy is anxious and earnest, Tommy is loud, impulsive and allergic to authority.

His powers are Quicksilver’s with a twist. Besides super-speed he can accelerate the molecules of an object until it vibrates apart, which is how the comics explain the incident at his school that landed him in custody. The costume is white and green, the hair is white, and the resemblance to his uncle Pietro is the first clue the comics drop about where he came from.

The Maximoff connection

In the comics, Tommy and Billy are the reincarnated souls of Thomas and William Maximoff, the twin sons Wanda Maximoff willed into existence with Vision in the 1980s Vision and the Scarlet Witch series (Thomas first appears in issue #12, 1986, by Steve Englehart and Richard Howell). The boys turned out to be fragments of the demon Mephisto’s soul; when he reclaimed them, the children ceased to exist, and Wanda’s grief set up a decade of Avengers stories, House of M included.

Those souls did not stay gone. They were reborn as two ordinary boys in two ordinary families, Billy Kaplan in New York and Tommy Shepherd in New Jersey, who grew up with no idea they were related to anyone with a cape. Young Avengers and the follow-up Avengers: The Children’s Crusade (2010–12) are the story of the twins finding each other, then finding Wanda, then finding out what that means. Vision is their father in every sense the comics care about, even though the Vision who meets them as a teenager is technically a different build of the same android. If that sounds familiar, it should.

What the MCU had already done with him

WandaVision gave us Tommy and Billy as the twins Wanda conjured inside the Westview hex, played as ten-year-olds by Jett Klyne and Julian Hilliard. Tommy got the speed, Billy got the magic, and both vanished with the hex when Wanda let it go. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness showed Wanda tearing through realities to get them back. Then Agatha All Along did the comics’ reincarnation trick on screen: Billy returned as William Kaplan, and the finale ended with him setting out to find his brother.

So the groundwork for a reborn Tommy was laid two shows ago. What VisionQuest adds is the surname. Shepherd is the name the comics gave him; the show spells it the comics’ way on Disney+ and “Shepard” on Marvel.com, which is the kind of discrepancy we will keep an eye on. (Note that Tommy’s comics speedster name does not appear in the show at all so far.)

What VisionQuest has shown so far

Spoilers for Episodes 1 and 2 from here.

Thomas enters the story as a hustler working London with his partner Lisa Molinari (Lauren Morais), another name comic readers will recognize. He is kidnapped by the bounty hunter Paladin (Todd Stashwick), whose interrogation video is how Vision first hears the names “Wanda” and “Vision” come out of the boy’s mouth. Episode 1 ends on Paladin’s claim that he has Vision’s son.

Episode 2, “Theseus,” fills in Thomas’s history: a near-drowning as a child, a jolt that should have killed him, and the sense ever since that there is someone else in his head. That rhymes almost exactly with the end of Agatha All Along, where Billy placed his brother’s soul in a drowning boy. When Thomas breaks out of custody, the show finally lets him move the way the comics do. Vision, for his part, is not convinced, and the series is in no hurry to settle the question for him.

Why it matters

Tommy is the hinge between the two things VisionQuest is about. He is the last piece of the family Vision cannot remember wanting, and he is the fastest route into the Young Avengers the MCU has been assembling one character at a time: Kate Bishop, Cassie Lang, Eli Bradley, Billy. The comics’ Tommy also has history with Lisa Molinari’s comics counterpart, which we’ll get into separately. For now, the show has done the smart thing. It gave us the kid, kept the father skeptical, and let the audience do the math.

VisionQuest streams Tuesdays on Disney+. Our full coverage lives on the VisionQuest hub.