This post contains major spoilers for VisionQuest episode five. Unless you can wipe data from your memory, check out our coverage from last week until you’re caught up.
In VisionQuest‘s fifth episode, the show’s mystery buyer got tired of waiting for the Paladin to fulfill his contract and sent another mercenary to capture his synthetic prey. That person was an unexpected figure who helped launch the MCU and a member of the Ten Rings whom we thought died decades ago. The man who led that armed force into Madripoor was Raza Hamidmi al-Wazar. He was the man who captured Tony Stark in Iron Man.
If the name Raza Hamidmi al-Wazar sounded familiar, but you couldn’t quite place it, that makes total sense. The MCU would not exist without him. Neither would the Avengers. But he has not been a part of the franchise since the very first installment. Fans first met Faran Tahir’s character in 2008’s Iron Man. He was the commander of a Ten Rings terrorist group in Afghanistan, the one that the kidnapped Tony Stark. Raza was never supposed to take the American “prince” hostage, but once he realized who’d he’d been hired to assassinate, he never fulfilled his deal with Obadiah Stane.
That failure is also why we had every reason to believe Raza died in Iron Man. The last time we ever saw him before VisionQuest (a whopping 18 years later) was when Stane headed to the Middle-East to meet with Raza in person. But it was a trap, as Stane used a Sonic Taser to paralyze Raza (who had suffered major facial scarring after Tony returned in his Mark III suit). Stane then had his mercenaries kill everyone in the Ten Rings outpost.
That seemingly included Raza, but as we all know, if you don’t die onscreen you become Schrödinger’s character. You’re both dead but able to return if needed. VisionQuest decided it needed Raza alive. The show had made reference to the Ten Rings organization, as it supplied the Paladin with the adamantium bullets he used to nearly capture Vision previously. The impatient mystery buyer decided he would instead go straight to the source to capture his quarry in episode five. For a brief moment, it looked like Raza would succeed, but like Tony escaping via his first suit of super armor, Vision, the Paladin, Tommy, and Lisa (with a major assist from E.D.I.T.H.) got away.
Tahir’s return doesn’t necessarily mean much in the grand scheme of the show. It doesn’t mean much to the MCU either (beyond maybe the future importance of the Ten Rings empire). But it’s more than just a fun Easter egg. It shows the MCU is still rewarding its oldest, most dedicated fans by making it so things that happened as far back as possible still matter. Like how some military commanders won’t learn their lesson when trying to keep a superhero locked up.