Remember When the MCU Was Good? VisionQuest Surely Will

After years of troubled television output, the third installment of the WandaVision trilogy knows what once made Marvel movies compelling.

After years of uneventful television events, the third installment in the WandaVision trilogy understands what once made Marvel movies so compelling.

It's very easy for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to try to save an ongoing storyline because it's a total crap show these days, with comic book movies being thrown around while Marvel pretends it's not putting the songs in real time for its multiverse saga. There was a time when Marvel felt intentional about bringing together disparate elements of a shared universe, and it paid off in a big way. Those early stages leading up to Infinity War and Endgame, when we saw at most one or two movies a year that actively advanced the larger story, were a very unifying experience for moviegoers. Now that the MCU has been pulled in many different directions, Marvel has released more than a dozen TV shows of varying importance, and the Multiverse storyline has slowly started to fall back into a nostalgic game with Avengers: Doomsday, which has Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. returning after "retiring" from their roles in Endgame. But every now and then, there's a fleeting moment where Marvel uses years of building these movies and shows to create something worthwhile and emotionally satisfying. VisionQuest is the latest Marvel project to end.

The first two episodes of Disney+'s newest MCU series premiered last night, marking the third in a trilogy of shows alongside WandaVision and Agatha. All Along naturally has ties to those (also excellent) series. While Marvel's Disney+ output has been inconsistent to say the least, the Wanda and Vision trilogy is one of the best things Marvel has put out on the big or small screen. In fact, he's so steadfast in his vision of what he wants to explore with these characters that it became abundantly clear when another director decided to take the Scarlet Witch in a different direction in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Although Agatha All Along and VisionQuest have had to struggle with the decisions it made, the trilogy has collectively resulted in one of the best and highest-grossing returns to come together in nearly a decade since the game ended.

VisionQuest follows White Vision, a recreated facsimile of actor Paul Bettany's hero after the events of WandaVision. He is given the memories of the original synthzoid, but he admits that while he can remember everything the Avenger went through after being "born" in Age of Ultron, he has no emotional attachment to those events. That being said, he is not above emotions. Inside his powerful processing unit, he's created a "home" for him and his "family" of AI units from throughout MCU history to come together as human-like avatars, with several returning actors primarily portraying those artificial characters as voices that eventually make it to the screen in Vision's mental home. It's a nice way to bring a lot of characters who were mostly just supporting heroes as omnipresent voices in their headsets to the forefront as main actors in the cast.

The most prominent inhabitant of Vision's house is, of course, Ultron, once again portrayed by James Spader, and Vision is clearly dealing with the push and pull of having what in human terms is his "father" live in this AI-constructed mental palace. Having Ultron here is important because Vision is already wondering if he really has a "prayer" to the original Vision's life, but as he struggles with this, he finds that even the painful parts of Vision's life, including Ultron, with Spider fighting as a distant father figure to Vision at the same time, are hardly left out. Having someone he's not even sure he should call "Dad" causing trouble in the attic pretty much covers the themes of the show as far as you can tell.

The internal struggle itself seems to be a generational struggle. During the events of Agatha All Along, Tommy, one of Wanda and Vision's sons, was cast into the body of a teenager in London named Thomas Shepard. Tommy is now also at war with two conflicting life experiences in his mind, and unlike his brother Billy, whose soul is imprinted in the body of a teenager with a loving family, Tommy has no support system or family to speak of, despite the memories of his mother, father, and brother in the suburbs. A Town That Doesn't Exist At the end of episode two, Vision and Tommy are reunited, although neither of them is willing to call each other father and son, but Vision says that Tommy It's his "thing," and that makes fighting a bounty hunter to apprehend the ex-Avenger worth it, even if they just "met" each other in this life. Sure, Marvel isn't known for subtlety, but when it has a brief theme to work with, it can pursue it seriously and wear its heart on its sleeve in a way that I'm not immune to.

Episode 2 ends with Vision, Tommy, and a representation of Ultron all getting away in a getaway car, leaving the deadly but perhaps grossly incompetent Paladin Todd Stashwick in the dust. I'm not sure I'm sold on the villain, who has done little to feel like a real threat to Vision and the quick-witted boy even as he fires vibranium bullets into the first metal shell, but what I'm sold on is how VisionQuest brings together years of character work done in movies and shows ranging from Age of Ultron to Agatha. Catharsis for the MCU's most tortured family of heroes in a way that could lead to something real and fundamental to the future of the film.

WandaVision kicked off all of Disney+'s 2021 initiatives and showed that the MCU is at its best when it's experimental, intentional, and does more than just waste time between bigger movies, even if Marvel often proves it wrong. Long term. Now, five years later, its second "sequel" proves that approach has always been the secret to its success. With more episodes coming out in the coming weeks, we'll see if it can live up to all the promises. New episodes of VisionQuest premiere Tuesdays at 9pm on Disney+. Eastern

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