The MCU Quietly Set Up Its Next Great Avenger — And You Probably Missed It
Marvel’s post-Endgame compass is spinning: Thunderbolts* closes with the reveal of a New Avengers squad assembled by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, stacked with notorious loose cannons and primed to blur the line between savior and scoundrel.
Marvel has been wobblier than usual since Endgame, and the whole hero/villain line has basically turned into a smudge. Case in point: the 'New Avengers ' reveal at the end of Thunderbolts*, where Valentina Allegra de Fontaine scooped up a handful of highly effective criminals and slapped a government logo on them. Now she may be adding one of the deadliest shooters in the game to her stable — Bullseye — with all the same cover and clearance as her public-facing team. Great for results. Less great for anyone who thinks he can be housebroken.
Quick catch-up: how Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 set this up
- Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D'Onofrio) got bounced from the mayor's office and banished from New York.
- Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) told the world he's Daredevil and promptly got arrested for the vigilante thing.
- Dex Poindexter (Wilson Bethel) was publicly patted on the back for 'heroic' work taking down Kingpin and protecting Governor Marge McCaffrey (Lili Taylor).
- Then Dex got a call from Mr. Charles (Matthew Lillard), hopped a plane, and headed overseas for whatever job Charles lined up.
- In an epilogue, we learn Bullseye is being slotted in as a replacement for Luke Cage (Mike Colter) — who came back to Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and their daughter looking like the work Charles had him doing took a real chunk out of him.
So... is Bullseye a 'New Avenger' now?
Short answer: kind of, but not really in the suit-and-press-conference way. Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has been busy rebranding Avengers as a government project while also tinkering with other assets — up to and including building new supers from scratch, Sentry- style. She is a CIA lifer running overlapping ops and laundering them through proxies like Mr. Charles to keep her fingerprints off the mess.
Could Luke Cage and Bullseye be cycled into the Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh)/John Walker (Wyatt Russell) squad when needed? Sure. But based on what Born Again shows, they look more like independent contractors doing the jobs Val cannot put on a whiteboard — the deniable, ugly stuff.
Wilson Bethel basically says the quiet part out loud
Bullseye being a government-backed hitter tracks with the comics, and Bethel is not exactly denying it. Asked about Dex getting recruited by Val/Charles, he offered this:
"Yeah, I think there's a very fair assumption to make... We know from the comics, too, that at various moments, Bullseye has worked for the government in all kinds of shady capacities. Bullseye at the end of the day, in a lot of the comics, is just a straight-up hitman for hire, and so, I don't think it would be out of the realm of possibility for a government to be the one that comes up with the money to hire him."
He also hinted that Dex is not walking into another Fisk-style manipulation. In his view, the terms matter, the leash matters, and this time Dex is negotiating from strength — which means more freedom to be exactly who he is. Translation: useful until he is not, and then someone gets burned.
The messy big picture
Where all this plugs into the broader MCU is still fuzzy. How do Val and Charles's black ops intersect with her New Avengers rebrand, with whatever lineup Sam Wilson's Captain America is steering, with Damage Control's crackdown on powered people, and with the rest of the geopolitics spinning in the background? No clean answers yet. What is pretty clear: bringing Bullseye into your orbit works until it spectacularly does not. History says employers end up learning that lesson the hard way.