- Some inspired comic moments here and there
- It’s nice to see Diane Morgan getting a Hollywood paycheck
- Copies the emotional beats of WandaVision with nothing new to add
- An outdated, romanticized look at AI
- Ultron is a deeply irritating villain
After watching “VisionQuest,” the Marvel scriptwriter responsible for the quote “What is grief if not love persevering?” will feel like Robert Oppenheimer after inventing the atomic bomb. The second spin-off from the 2021 miniseries “WandaVision” amounts to eight episodes of relitigating this idea from the earlier show from every conceivable angle, from Paul Bettany’s newly rebooted AI struggling to learn the human emotions to grieve, to his son Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) unable to process any childhood memory about growing up with his parents in Westview.
The simplicity of that “WandaVision” quote — repeated several times throughout this series — is what made it so resonant for millions of viewers, and “VisionQuest” spends several hours painfully trying to expand upon it without realizing those seven words already encapsulated every idea it’s bringing to the table. It’s a cynical attempt to try replicate what worked before, without anything organically moving or creative that would make it feel like a worthy successor to that earlier Marvel TV hit.
What is VisionQuest, if not mediocrity perservering?
Shortly after being brought back to life in “WandaVision,” the human form of Vision moved back to Edinburgh to work in a pub he and Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen, who clearly turned down an offer to cameo here) frequented before the Blip. He has his memories intact but not the emotions connected to them, so to help readapt to the human experience, he retreats to his “Sherlock” style Mind Palace populated entirely by other AI with human avatars, all designed after figures from Tony Stark’s past, to talk through everything. For the sake of further underlining this is a continuation of that earlier show, this “Mindspace” is also stylized like an old sitcom, despite Vision not having the affinity for the genre that his former flame did.
It’s a lonely existence which he spends endlessly reliving old memories, but this all changes when the bounty hunter Paladin (Todd Stashwick) shows up to kill him, learning that his estranged, magicked-into-life son Tommy is also being targeted. It turns out that the evil AI Ultron (James Spader), now living in a secluded part of Vision’s mind like Marion Cotillard’s character in “Inception,” hired the hitman, and Vision has no choice but to go on the run to save a son with no coherent idea about who his father is. When they finally reunite, Ultron keeps showing up to antagonize Vision as the world’s most grating imaginary friend, in what might be the first case of me wishing Spader had less screen time.
Creator and showrunner Terry Matalas has to be keenly aware that there’s a timeliness of reintroducing Ultron to the MCU more than a decade after his last sighting — which is still Spader’s most recent film credit — when the self-learning developments of generative AI are consistently in the headlines. Multiple developers in the tech industry have sounded warning bells that its capabilities are already further advanced than we may realize, and that we’re already past the stage where we could avert a disaster. It’s bad for humanity, but it is at least the ideal climate to reintroduce this C-tier Marvel villain to the franchise, as what might have sounded like high-concept speculative sci-fi in 2015 now speaks to the moment.
One of the core issues with “VisionQuest” is that, despite Ultron having the ability to rewrite his own code that many experts have warned AI now can, the show is still operating from a place of escapist fantasy. Ultron is the sole bad AI, as Vision and the other agents operating within him all appear helpful and keen to understand mankind, with the protagonist’s attempts to relearn human emotion central to his arc across the series.
An outdated AI story
In the five years since “WandaVision,” the fantasy of an AI in a loving human relationship has begun to pose darker existential questions about the evolution of this tech for nefarious reasons, a juicy recontextualization the series doesn’t even mine for much tension. Even Ultron’s characterization is closer to a cynical Reddit commentator than an evil mastermind, too petulant to be taken seriously even as he’s talking about killing billions.
The show has an inherent glass half full approach to AI, seeing Vision and the other Stark Industries bots as machines who want to help humanity by learning from it, with Ultron the aberration for his murderous intentions. And these are more advanced than the other AI we see, with other bots only able to ask simple questions that they can be tricked into — jokes about Captcha tests and bypassing security questions are the only moments of comic invention in the series. Well, that and some throwaway lines by comedian Diane Morgan (here playing a slightly smarter version of her Philomena Cunk character) as Paladin’s remote assistant, which are funnier for her delivery rather than the dialogue itself.
“VisionQuest” also feels jarringly behind the times in how it explores themes in ways perfected decades earlier elsewhere in the genre – Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” already had the final word on whether the technology can grow to have human emotion — without offering a new reason to go back to that well. It’s as familiar as a stand-alone sci-fi due to not adding anything fresh to these cliches as it is a repeat performance of the grieving themes “WandaVision” articulated more intelligently.
Terry Matalas has said he views the character of Vision as akin to Spock, another hyper-literal figure who didn’t have the best grasp of human interaction, and one who generations of autistic fans have held up as positive, groundbreaking representation for those on the spectrum. I mention this only because Vision isn’t interestingly written enough as a character in this new iteration to warrant comparison, his various simulations of how to navigate awkward social situations — and by the finale, following Wanda’s lead and framing them as TV shows — a few rewrites away from being resonant on that level.
Although, when the central narrative thrust of the show is a lazy carbon copy of “WandaVision” rather than a continuation that builds upon its emotional ideas to begin with, there’s little “VisionQuest” could do to regain momentum. It’s not the worst MCU series, but it might be the most passionless.
“VisionQuest” premieres with its first two episodes on Disney+ on October 14.
