Marvel Studios has posted a message written entirely in binary code, hours before the finale of VisionQuest, and fans have already cracked it. The post on X, published at 17:00 UTC on 10 November, consists of 55 groups of eight ones and zeros. Read as standard ASCII text, it spells out a single line, “We could never truly leave each other, even if we tried”, and nothing else. The post had passed 970,000 views within a few hours, and Marvel has not explained who is speaking or to whom.
The timing points straight at VisionQuest, the Disney+ series that concludes the trilogy that began with WandaVision in 2021 and continued with Agatha All Along in 2024. An hour before the binary post, the same account shared a clip captioned “VISIONQUEST PROGRAM: FINALIZING”, reminding fans that the season finale streams at 6pm Pacific Time on 10 November. That is 02:00 UTC on 11 November, and the message reads like a line of dialogue lifted from the episode. This article contains no spoilers for the finale, which had not been released at the time of writing.
How to decode Marvel’s binary message
Each group of eight digits in the post is one byte, and each byte stands for a single character. The first group, 01010111, converts to the number 87, which is a capital W in the ASCII table that computers have used for decades. The next, 01100101, is the number 101, a lower-case e, and 00100000 is the number 32, which is a space. Working through all 55 groups in the same way produces the full sentence, comma included, with no hidden second layer that fans have found so far. Anyone can check it with a free binary-to-text converter, or by hand with an ASCII chart.
| Binary | Number | Character |
|---|---|---|
| 01010111 | 87 | W |
| 01100101 | 101 | e |
| 00100000 | 32 | (space) |
| 01100011 | 99 | c |
| 01101111 | 111 | o |
| 01110101 | 117 | u |
| 01101100 | 108 | l |
| 01100100 | 100 | d |
Binary is a natural choice for a show about a synthetic being. In VisionQuest, the rebooted Vision searches for his humanity by consulting the artificial intelligences in his own programming, including J.A.R.V.I.S., F.R.I.D.A.Y., E.D.I.T.H. and Ultron. Marvel has leaned into that idea throughout its campaign, with promotional posts styled as system messages and loading screens. The series also leans on Marvel’s history of synthetic heroes, including Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch, whom VisionQuest reimagines. Its finale event write-up carried the heading “FINAL SEQUENCE LOADING”.
Who could be saying “We could never truly leave each other”
Fans have offered several readings of the line, and Marvel has not confirmed any of them. Accounts devoted to the Scarlet Witch were among the first to quote the post, reading it as a message between Vision and Wanda Maximoff. Elizabeth Olsen has not been confirmed for VisionQuest, and showrunner Terry Matalas has declined to say whether Wanda appears. Wanda’s apparent death in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was never shown on screen, which has kept that theory alive. Olsen has not played the character on screen since that 2022 film.
The line fits the series’ own story just as well. Marvel describes VisionQuest as a journey that forces Vision to face his “father-figure”, Ultron, played by James Spader, and to reunite with his son, Tommy Shepherd, played by Ruaridh Mollica. Paul Bettany said at the finale screening that he and Matalas “really wanted it to be about fathers and sons”. A sentence about two beings who cannot escape each other could describe Vision and Ultron, Vision and the AIs inside his mind, or a father and son.
What Marvel has said about the VisionQuest finale
Matalas warned the screening audience in New York that the final episode takes risks. “It’s a bit nerve-wracking because there are a couple of really big swings in this,” he said, according to Marvel. He added that “all good endings touch upon the beginning”, a remark that fans have linked to the WandaVision series where this version of Vision’s story began. At D23 in August, Bettany joked that in the Marvel Universe, “no one is ever really dead”, unless Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige says otherwise.
VisionQuest premiered on Disney+ on 14 October, and the finale will be followed by a VisionQuest Official Podcast with Bettany, Spader, Mollica and Matalas. Marvel’s wider plans are just as busy, with Avengers: Doomsday heading to cinemas in December and a global marketing push already under way. Marvel’s games are also moving fast, as Marvel Rivals Season 11 shows, alongside the Thanos PvE mode announced in October. The VisionQuest finale streams on Disney+ at 02:00 UTC on 11 November.
