Midway through “VisionQuest,” the titular android Vision (Paul Bettany) attempts to help a British teenager named Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) understand the precise nature of their relationship. The truth looks like this: Vision is a reconstructed version of himself, who was killed by Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War” and then brought back somehow without memories by his wife Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a grieving witch, in the 2021 series “WandaVision”; Tommy is an ordinary person suddenly imbued with the consciousness and abilities of a child Wanda invented with magic, who survived the collapse of his mother’s suburban simulation and crossed the pond in search of a host.
Vision runs a simulation in which he struggles, over and over again, to condense this whole story and explain it to Tommy in a way that doesn’t overwhelm him with anger and confusion. There isn’t a single version that doesn’t end with Tommy storming out of the room.
That’s more or less what it feels like to watch “VisionQuest,” an eight-episode series from Marvel Studios that positions itself as a sort of sequel to “WandaVision.” The show plays with some clever concepts, particularly in its visual presentation; As the what-if scenarios pile up, so do Vision’s clones until a dozen exhausted and exasperated Bettanys all collapse on a hotel floor. (Much of “VisionQuest” strips away the monochrome veneer to show Vision as an ordinary human, allowing Bettany to exert his old-fashioned charm.) But these pictures are filled with such convoluted history and abstract concepts that “VisionQuest” finds itself in exactly the same predicament as Vision himself, a synthetic being trying and mostly failing to connect with his emotions.
Artificial intelligence has long been a staple of comic books and other forms of science fiction, but while real-life AI companies talk seriously about potential sentience, Vision’s preferred strategy for getting in touch with his feelings has a topical aspect. He created and/or summoned a group of autonomous AIs – what we would now call “agents”, although creator Terry Matalas may have overseen the scripts before that term fully entered the popular lexicon – to assist him with various tasks. There’s FRIDAY (Orla Brady), who helps decode social interactions, and EDITH (Emily Hampshire), who is all about having fun. DUM-E mechanics. (Henry Lewis) and U (Jonathan Sayer) handle the more mundane work of keeping the internal systems in shape. Finally, there are more familiar characters from the early stages of the MCU: Tony Stark’s old pal JARVIS (James D’Arcy) is present; Most intriguing is Ultron (James Spader), the namesake antagonist of the second “Avengers” film.
All of these assistants take corporeal form in Vision’s so-called Mindspace, a virtual, psychological plane that takes the form of an original Victorian mansion. Here, Ultron looks not like a menacing CGI robot, but like the 66-year-old Spader himself: a schlubby guy with a flowing beard and a trench coat whose menacing monologues in purple prose (“I feel like your Greek tragedy has a deuteragonist”) are undercut by his appearance. To the series’ credit, this Ultron is a very entertaining creation, allowing Spader to apply some of his characteristic sardonic air to a character who is still cynical, but very humbled by his days as a supervillain. Without access to the real world, Ultron must settle for being the devil on Vision’s shoulder rather than being a player in his own right.
It’s when mental space intersects with the real world that “VisionQuest” becomes too complicated. Directors Christopher J. Byrne, Gandja Monteiro, and Vincenzo Natali—along with Matalas, who directs the final pair of episodes—have fun in this mutable dimension: When a hostile android’s neural network connects with Vision’s, the episode becomes a riff on possession and exorcism (“The power of the code compels you!”), and when Ultron begs Vision to let him “take the wheel,” he’s literally the rudder of a ship tossed by stormy winds. But other than the AIs appearing and speaking to Vision as a sort of imaginary friend, invisible to everyone else, “VisionQuest” never arrives at a coherent or readable way of mapping the relationship between the two realms, or how events in one affect the material reality of the other.
Constantly switching between Mindspace and Meatspace (sorry, it’s right there!) inevitably takes its toll on Tommy, who only exists in the latter. Even by the fantasy standards of comic book-based storytelling, Tommy’s tenuous nature – he’s type of another incarnation of Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters in “WandaVision,” but also sort of not? – makes him a difficult protagonist to map. The fact that striving to understand the irrational fog of human emotions is the explicit subject of the series only clarifies the problem rather than neutralizes it. As Vision wonders what his purpose is without Wanda or the Avengers, so do we.
“VisionQuest” attempts to balance these philosophical questions about consciousness (yes, the Ship of Theseus metaphor comes up) with more active conflicts. At the request of a mysterious client, bounty hunter Paladin (Todd Stashwick) is on Vision’s trail, as is the aforementioned android (T’Nia Miller). Escape them provides a few momentum, but not enough to propel an entire cast so massive that I haven’t even mentioned Diane “Philomena Cunk” Morgan, who plays the Paladin’s assistant yet. Before long, “VisionQuest” attempts to tie together all of its unwieldy threads with the basic clichés about the chosen family. “VisionQuest” often tells the audience what we are supposed feel, but rarely achieves its stated goal.
“WandaVision” was the first Marvel Studios show to air on Disney+, and with its shapeshifting homage to the sitcom as an allegory for heartbreak, this series remained a high bar to beat amid the MCU’s era of oversaturation. This remains the case for the direct sequel. “VisionQuest” carries many of the same themes about healing from loss – there is, of course, a throwback to the famous line about persevering love – with a hero who is, by definition, much less approachable. (And given AI’s alarming trajectory toward mass replacement of jobs and/or destruction of civilizations, I didn’t feel particularly inclined to sympathize with a group of digital entities.) “VisionQuest” can be enjoyable within its comfort zone of tweaking mind space in wacky ways. But when it comes time to venture into the tactile world, the spectacle leaves no lasting mark.
The first two episodes of “VisionQuest” will premiere on Disney+ on October 14, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Wednesdays.
Gn entert
