What is VisionQuest, the new Marvel series on Disney+? Paul Bettany once again plays Vision, although this is not the same character from the films of the cinematic universe
If you didn’t know that a new Marvel series was about to drop — specifically VisionQuest, conceived by Terry Matalas — that’s entirely understandable. The MCU hasn’t inspired much confidence lately. The recent skepticism toward the superhero studio only began to fade, and with some conviction, when 2026 brought the return of its past giants. With Avengers: Endgame back in theaters, Marvel dominated the box office despite the film being seven years old, a moment that connects and reverberates with the imminent December arrival of Avengers: Doomsday, which — roughly a hundred days out from its release — has already raked in around 50 million dollars through pre-sale ticket purchases.
@marvelit Il 14 Ottobre lasciati trasportare dalla Visione finale della trilogia che ha fatto la storia. #VisionQuest, una serie Marvel Television, sarà disponibile dal 14 Ottobre su #DisneyPlusaudio originale – Marvel Italia
The show, comprising eight episodes in total, is a more or less direct sequel to WandaVision, which in 2021 had kicked off Marvel’s second wave on the small screen. A new era for the superhero company’s serialized storytelling, with Disney+ as its designated home — one that launched with a project that had convinced fans to migrate to the platform to deepen their knowledge of beloved characters. Along the way, as a connective bridge, came an exploration of another figure: protagonist Agatha Harkness in Agatha All Along, which expanded the family unit of Scarlet Witch and Vision with Billy Maximoff, played by Joe Locke — offspring who will become a focal point as the Young Avengers storyline takes shape.
VisionQuest is therefore the third installment in a trajectory that will likely culminate with the couple’s children on the big screen. This makes the series’ reason for existing immediately clear: like most streaming releases, it was not made primarily to tell self-contained stories, but rather to expand the broader mythology of its universe and advance an empire built on interconnected and communicating dynasties. This is noteworthy in an expanded universe whose choices have, for years now, always served a secondary purpose — demonstrating that some narrative decisions are so forced that, if they don’t entirely betray what has been built so far, they at least subtly alter characters and their respective storylines.
In this case, VisionQuest gets something of a pass because, as the protagonist Vision takes care to explain at least once or twice per episode, he is not the real Vision, but the version conjured by Wanda Maximoff during her breakdown — the one that led her to create the town of Westview, leaving behind a trail of disasters whose consequences the MCU is still grappling with. At the same time, the re-introduction of Ultron — one of the protagonist’s “consciousnesses,” as we might call them — is yet another example of a character being thrown into a blender and emerging transformed from what we once knew. So even if this is a buried facet of Vision rather than a direct continuation of the previous version, it still bears the appearance of the 2015 Ultron, who more than ten years later becomes a comic figure in the show, voiced once again by James Spader, who originally voiced the villain in the films.
This seems to be the fate of characters condemned to remain in circulation within production machines like Marvel, whose most glaring example of everything changing so that everything stays the same — following the lesson of The Leopard — is the recasting of Robert Downey Jr., who died as Iron Man, now returning as Doctor Doom. VisionQuest must therefore dutifully revisit certain threads from the protagonist’s past-that-isn’t-quite-past in order to laboriously construct a story that feels new while remaining anchored to characters we had left behind — and, to repeat it as Paul Bettany‘s character would, the Vision in this series is still the one Wanda created in WandaVision, not the one from the films. Take, for instance, the Ship of Theseus paradox, which had been central to WandaVision and is referenced again here — but this time superficially, as so often happens in these Marvel contexts, where prior narrative pillars can be modified or bypassed at will in order to keep the story moving at any cost.
All things considered, VisionQuest is a competent series, if somewhat didactic. Pleasant, but not particularly illuminating when it comes to exploring themes of identity, parenthood, and artificial intelligence — the latter more relevant to today’s world than ever, yet confined here to a by-the-numbers narrative that stays firmly on its tracks, pointed toward the MCU’s future, whatever that may be. Newcomer Ruaridh Mollica makes a strong impression as Thomas Maximoff, whom we expect to see as a member of the Young Avengers — though we’ll only find out when the rest of Marvel’s fate becomes clearer, a fate whose dice can only be cast after the day of reckoning: read also as the theatrical release of Avengers: Doomsday.
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