VisionQuest Gives Marvel's WandaVision Trilogy a Conventional, Tiresome Ending

The Series Concluding Disney+'s WandaVision Trilogy Lacks the Style and Energy of Its Two Predecessors.

The marriage of Disney+ and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a perfect match at first. WandaVision, the high-concept miniseries that cast Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her beloved synthzoid Vision (Paul Bettany) in a series of old-timey sitcoms and challenged viewers to find out what's really going on beyond the suburban veneer, opened with an audience of nearly 201 people. But it ended with the same predictable, digitally-enhanced battle as other average MCU entries. With a few fun exceptions, such as Wonder Man, which was renewed and then canceled this year, and WandaVision's 2024 magical sequel Agatha All Along, its returns have dwindled since then. So it's no surprise that Disney seems to be cutting back on its small-screen Marvel offerings.

To understand what went wrong, just watch the first episode of VisionQuest, the last part of the WandaVision trilogy. It opens with Bethany's account of Vision's storyline in the MCU, from his origin as the creation of the social supervillain Ultron and the training of humanity at the hands of Avengers Bruce Banner and Tony Stark to his destruction by Thanos and his resurrection as a projection of Wanda's grieving, which will make sense to viewers who have been following it for over a decade. Soon, it introduces a series of anthropomorphic AI (Orla Brady's F.R.I.D.A.Y., Emily Hampshire's E.D.I.T.H., James D'Arcy's J.A.R.V.I.S.) that have their own franchise background. Less than 15 minutes later, Vision is sitting in a movie theater, in his robotic mind, thinking about Wanda's memories. The story is too difficult, at this point, to be impossible without constant reminders of what has come before. However, VisionQuest's narrative is emotionally simple and stylistically conventional, especially compared to the previous two installments of the trilogy, which deserve all the mention.

Destroyed a second time by the collapse of Wanda's grief fantasy, Vision is restored—she tells us "same body, different mind," meaning she no longer has the capacity for love that once bound her to her sons Tommy and Billy. In the physical world, he is disguised as a human barbeque in a Scottish pub relevant to the Wanda-Vision romances. But his more obvious existence is the life of the (artificial) mind, where he retreats to a sort of beaux-arts-with-a-mid-century-modern country estate full of autonomous artificial intelligence. While J.A.R.V.I.S. and F.R.I.D.A.Y. Virtual Family Leadership or Mindspace, E.D.I.T.H.'s "Entertainment Artificial Intelligence" It provides comic relief and goes through skylights with daring stunts.

Now that Vision is serving beer instead of fighting to save the human race, everyone seems a little aimless. This gives him time to lose his feelings and relationships and to think about how much he is and isn't the same synthzoid that loved his family. His anger may also be the only plausible explanation for his potentially disastrous choice to keep alive Ultron (James Spader) imprisoned in the Isolation Tower in the Vision's memory palace.

When a fearsome hunter named Paladin (Todd Stashwick) is hired to capture him, physical reality disrupts Vision's grief. It also draws his attention to the existence - and the danger associated with Paladin - of one Thomas Sheppard (Ruarid Mullica), a troubled young man in London who there is never reason to suspect is a version of Tommy Maximoff. (If you want to know what happened to Billy Maximoff, watch Agatha All Along, which remains an ideal Halloween binge.) The question is: Are he and the current incarnation of Vision really father and son? Does this vision have the ability to take care of the boy? Somehow, as the season progresses, everything turns into another disaster that requires a superpowered hero to save humanity. But wait: does humanity even want to be saved or are we subconsciously craving our own extinction? "They are relentlessly aspirational, but at the same time wallowing in their own hardship, misery, guilt," Ultron notes. To illustrate this point, his tower includes a rendering of Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

VisionQuest, created by Terry Matalas (Star Trek: Picard, 12 Monkeys), is loaded with heavy themes — timeless ones like fathers and sons, as well as the ubiquitous artificial intelligence. (I'm curious how this story, which goes back at least to 2022, has evolved in response to the increasingly AI-dominated news cycle that's become an obsession for Hollywood as well.) In typical Marvel fashion, however, it spends more time building action spectacles and changing settings, traversing the physical world as well as the infinite space of virtual mindspace than it does through cyberspace, while at the same time Enough to do the background space job well enough on infinite backgrounds. More than developing characters or ideas. Vision often engages in tortured introspection, but this is mostly extra spin. AI handwriting is neither new nor particularly consistent. Some of the uncooked aspects of the second plot made me look forward to the next chapter of Pluribus. Now there's a character-driven sci-fi drama that knows when to confuse viewers about basics like where the scene is set and what's happening (rarely) and when to help us think more abstractly (often).

That's not to say VisionQuest is without fun. It makes for a great showcase for Bethany's career, though it's hard to explain why without giving too much away. Even though I don't quite buy Vision because of his sense of loyalty to Ultron, Bethany and Spider, a total brain villain, are great together. (One of the reasons it's hard to get invested in the question of whether these AIs can feel emotions is that Mindspace's characters are so much more vividly portrayed than flesh-and-blood humans.) It's great to see Marvel's one-man plug as just the right actor in a small role. In this case, it's Diane Morgan, best known to fans of British comedy as the fictional and arrogantly ignorant TV presenter Philomena Conk, as Paladin's sarcastic sidekick. There are some interesting visual ideas, particularly in the way production designer Will Hughes-Jones envisions Vision's Mindspace as a place permeable to outside interference.

However, as the cornerstone of an innovative style trilogy, this show falls short even aesthetically. WandaVision had its Ozzie and Harriet and Brady Bunch riffs. Agatha blazed through magical feminine songs from Ouija to catchy originals in the style of Stevie Nicks. While periodically calling back to the comedic realm Wanda created (remember Small Wonder?), VisionQuest is essentially a technological action thriller with a lone protagonist pondering the nature of his own existence. We've seen a lot in 21st century superhero storytelling, and here the monotony is exacerbated by the amount of MCU backstory that needs to be repeated and referenced in every episode. In theory, Disney Plus was an opportunity for Marvel to deepen its universe and keep fan-favorite characters active between movies. But an important element is missing from much of that content. Ironically, this is vision.