‘VisionQuest’ Review: Marvel’s Latest Disney+ Series Turns Simulated Emotions Into A Puzzle Box Built Strictly For Fans

Watching the recap that explains, for the benefit of anyone who might need a refresher, what happened to Vision before his own series picks up, you have two options as a viewer. If you’re deeply invested in the Marvel universe, you probably don’t need the infodump because you already know everything that happened to this “synthezoid,” who died, came back to life, and is now trying, more or less, to figure out who he is and what all those emotions he’s supposed to feel are actually about. If, on the other hand, you know little or nothing about the MCU, you might conclude that everyone has gone completely insane and ventured so far down the multiverse rabbit hole that pretty much anything makes sense at this point. Or makes sense and doesn’t make sense at the same time.

What’s curious about VisionQuest is that, every now and then, it seems willing to acknowledge just how absurd and convoluted its own premise is. What is it actually about? Hard to say. In roughly human terms, it’s the story of this guy named Vision (Paul Bettany), an android trying to figure out who he is by attempting to lead a normal life. This involves working in a Scottish pub alongside actual human beings, whom he doesn’t do a particularly convincing job of imitating. One day, out of nowhere, someone shows up, kills the woman who owns the place, and starts hunting him down. To get to him, the bounty hunter resorts to a particularly cruel form of blackmail: he kidnaps Vision’s son Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica), whose very “existence” Vision was unaware of. To rescue him, Vision must not only decide whether to do something about the situation but also, crucially, feel something for this creature. Because knowing that someone is your son (something he’s not entirely sure of, either) is one thing; having that knowledge trigger an actual emotion is quite another, at least when you’re a synthezoid.

But this would be a fairly straightforward, if somewhat basic, way of describing what happens in VisionQuest, because all of the above is only part of the story. While these events unfold in the real world, Matalas’ series also takes place in a sort of hideout where the “real” Vision and several other synthezoids with various powers (old acquaintances F.R.I.D.A.Y., J.A.R.V.I.S., E.D.I.T.H. and others) observe and manipulate what’s going on. This is their MindSpace, a sort of Control Tower where this collection of artificial intelligences gathers to decide how to operate in the real world or how to respond to it. But the arrival of Paladin (Todd Stashwick), the bounty hunter who’s come looking for Vision, forces just about everyone to come up with a solution. Among the residents of this synthetic AI mansion is none other than Ultron (James Spader), dispensing advice that veers between cynical and malicious and always seems to have something lurking beneath the surface.

And yet, all of this barely scratches the surface of the multiversal twists and turns packed into a series that is, above all, one for the fans and the completists. Everyone else will spend a good chunk of their time trying to figure out when someone is actually dead and when they’re merely a digital program. Or when a simulation is still a simulation and when it somehow stops being one. Or how Tommy can be real if he was also born out of a simulation. Or, on a more fundamental level, why MCU stories have become so tangled and complicated in the first place. Whatever happened to superheroes dealing with supervillains and simply trying to save a planet? Why does everything now come with an instruction manual and dozens of layers of supposedly meaningful complexity?

This confusion over the various levels at which the plot unfolds — a plot whose biggest mystery seems to be who’s after Vision and why — makes it difficult to invest in the emotional tension the story is trying so hard to generate. In one supposedly powerful scene early on, Vision’s life appears to be in danger, and the only person who can save him, by learning to control his own powers, is his son. But the whole thing barely registers because you don’t know whether Vision’s life is actually at risk, whether Vision is even “alive,” whether his son is real, whether his son is actually his son, or whether the whole thing is just another simulation being manipulated by other characters from inside that virtual mansion where everything seems to be under someone’s control. Almost everything, anyway. It’s hard to tell.

MCU fans will presumably be more invested because they have answers to all the questions I’m asking myself, all the doubts I can’t seem to shake. They’ll tell me it’s obvious and that all I need to do is remember every single series and movie in the franchise to understand what’s going on. And if I point out that I’ve watched almost all of them and still don’t get it —believe me, I’ve had this argument with several people— they’ll tell me I need to read the comics. At which point, they’ve got me. So let me make this clear: for those of us who don’t have every layer of the multiverse and every character’s place within it stored in our heads, VisionQuest is moderately entertaining but, more than anything, confusing. Fans will no doubt delight in things that the rest of us find utterly incomprehensible. And so it will go on until the MCU movies are finally made by the AIs themselves.

The first installment of this trilogy, WandaVision, was fascinating for fans and newcomers alike because it drew you into a world with its own internal logic. Only after you’d settled into that world and become invested in what was happening did the series pull the rug out from under you and rearrange the entire board. By the time we get to VisionQuest, the third chapter in the saga (I don’t have much to say about the second, Agatha All Along, because I gave up on it after getting dizzy), everything has already been dismantled, connected, and reconnected so many times that there’s no way to enter this world with a clean slate. In the end, what series like this do is turn viewers like me into a sort of Vision impersonator ourselves: someone who watches all these supposedly powerful emotions parading across the screen but remains on the outside, unable to participate or even understand them. You get the feeling that something momentous is happening up there — after all, there’s a father risking his “skin” for his “son” — but actually feeling something about it proves surprisingly difficult. Could it be that we’re synthezoids, too?