The Vision (Paul Bettany) is not as he should be, not since the Mind Stone — the Infinity Gem that served as his battery, his consciousness, his intellect — was ripped right out of his head by Thanos himself. That was way back in Avengers: Infinity War, a film that already felt light-years in the past by the time WandaVision, Marvel Studios’ first Disney+ show, saw fit to spin off of that tragedy from the perspective of Vision’s main squeeze. Marvel might have been the one to decide the soft-spoken synthezoid’s journey wasn’t over, but it was Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who made his return possible at all.
Wanda’s grief and magic combined brought Vision back to life, helped them start a family, and manifested a magical, sitcom-ified life in Westview, New Jersey. That none of it was actually real made for some of the best television this side of the post-“prestige TV” boom — but Wanda’s spell, once broken, showed us how hard it is to tell an even story in the streaming era.
Marvel has spent the past five years struggling to show us what happened after the hex. Wanda’s facsimile of Vision definitely vanished with the dissolution of Westview, but not before transferring his memories to another Vision replica, one built by the super-secret organization known as S.W.O.R.D. That exchange was a lot to process, even then — and all the time spent debating quandaries like the “Ship of Theseus” didn’t make things any clearer.
There’s no graceful way to explain all the existential baggage clogging up the new Vision’s circuitry: His lore goes back way before his death and resurrection,before his birth in Avengers: Age of Ultron, before even Iron Man. It extends beyond WandaVision, too, informing Wanda’s own eventual death and another magical interlude in Agatha All Along (which resurrected one of Wanda and Vision’s twin boys, but more on that later). The third and final chapter of what Marvel has dubbed the “WandaVision Trilogy,” VisionQuest, wants to make sense of absolutely all of it, wants to funnel 15 years of data through a character who basically lived through it all but also didn’t, really? It’s like transferring your iCloud onto someone else’s phone, if said phone were sentient with super-strength and a thoughtful British accent. The paradox is compelling until it isn’t, clogging the datastream with yet another mystery box that goes nowhere.
VisionQuest
- Ultron is back!
- The magical weirdness in WandaVision gets a tech-forward remix
Dislike
- So. Much. Talking.
- Too afraid to truly go off the rails
- An extensive MCU rewatch is required for full enjoyment
Of all the terrors conjured up by the Marvel machine to entertain the masses, VisionQuest is without a doubt the one that requires the most homework to understand. It’s also, mercifully, the most formally ambitious in many years, taking the genre-bendy elements of WandaVision and Agatha All Along and imbuing the story with a techy twist. This is a show that requires a detailed recollection of Ultron (James Spader), the Pinocchio-obsessed android who gave the Avengers hell in 2015. Ditto for literally any AI bot that assisted Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) through his myriad outings in the MCU. The silver lining: They all now live in the new Vision’s head, an undulating mass of code personified as an adorable multi-story dream house.
Both Wandaand Agatha were better off in their lands of make-believe than they were at questioning the nature of those realities. VisionQuest is a much more mixed bag. The inside of Vision’s head is compelling and endlessly changing, made all the more arresting with kitschy, malleable set design but limited by perpetual exposition. Our characters constantly sit at tables or stand in loose semi-circles discussing plans of attack, introducing new characters, or refreshing our collective memory about things that happened in movies past. When a bounty hunter called Paladin (Todd Stashwick) — the latest in a long line of oath-bound killers — sets his sights on Vision, Friday uses a mass of conjoined CRT televisions to deliver what is essentially a PowerPoint presentation about how dangerous he is. (It’s like the great HYDRA reveal in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, only 10 times more plodding.)
In a realm where literally anything is possible, the TV tower becomes an eyesore and a narrative crutch. It’s how we learn that there’s a serial killer loose in London, picking off an elite team of scientists, and that Vision’s son Tommy (now played by Ruaridh Mollica) is alive but Paladin’s new hostage. VisionQuest is a show that holds your hand through all the wrong things: It expects that you watched Agatha and thus understand exactly how Wanda and Vision’s kids were reincarnated into our world as teens, but harps on Vision’s existential dilemma — “Do the memories make the man?” and all that jazz — with the incessant repetition of a pop-up ad.
Aside from a few bursts of action, the real world isn’t much more dynamic. When Vision and Tommy reunite, they spend a lot of time presumably on the run, either from Paladin, the mysterious figure who hired him, or that aforementioned serial killer. That doesn’t stop them from constantly stopping and sitting and talking about the past. Every character follows suit: Stashwick is wasted as an endless font for MCU Easter eggs and sad nuggets of backstory. F.R.I.D.A.Y. and E.D.I.T.H. mourn Tony Stark in monologues that come out of nowhere. And a mystery character played by T’Nia Miller (who’s otherwise a fascinating addition to the MCU) spins her wheels with one lore dump after another.
That mismatched plotting would be insufferable if not for Ultron. Returning after a decade to play a human version of his android villain, Spader is basically just doing The Blacklist, but his wry, jaunty sniping strips VisionQuest of all its pretense. Often, Ultron is saying what we’re all thinking: He’s the peanut gallery imprisoned in Vision’s mind-attic, the only one telling him to get out of his own way. (Bettany is reliable as Vision, too — and should be: He’s been playing some incarnation of this character since 2008! — but is best when his synthezoid gets to glitch out.) The show snaps to life when Vision inevitably shortens Ultron’s leash, and it’s at its absolute best when forcing Vision to reckon with the sins of his “father.”
Every once in a while, it feels like VisionQuest is building to something greater than either Wanda or Agatha could have conjured. Matalas is not afraid to let things get weird — when an unwanted visitor infiltrates Vision’s servers, E.D.I.T.H. performs a literal exorcism, and it’s amazing — but hesitates before it gets too interesting. The source code for a great story is here, but it’s too often compromised by endless side quests, the late addition of a compelling-yet-muddled new villain, and the world-ending threat that every Marvel tale is surely contractually obligated to introduce some way, somehow. VisionQuest wants to do for bots what Star Trek did for Commander Data. It wants to unpack grief and loss through characters we never expected contained such depth. It’s not just here to close the loop on the story that finally heated up in WandaVision, and that’s probably its downfall. Vision and his cohorts are far more important to the fabric of the MCU than most of us might have known, but cramming terabytes of pathos into an eight-hour TV extravaganza might be the worst way to honor them.
Premieres: Tuesday, Oct. 13 at 9/8c on Disney+
Who’s in it:Paul Bettany, James Spader, Ruaridh Mollica, Orla Brady, Emily Hampshire, Todd Stashwick, T’Nia Miller, James D’Arcy, Jonathan Sayer, Henry Lewis
Who’s behind it:Terry Matalas (creator, showrunner, writer)
For fans of: WandaVision, James Spader in a good hat, existential optimism
How many episodes we watched:8 of 8
