Like Its Hero, Marvel’s ‘VisionQuest’ Struggles to Connect Emotionally: TV Review

Partway 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 goes something like this: Vision is a reconstituted version of his former self, who was killed by Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War” and then kinda-sorta brought back sans 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, which survived the collapse of his mother’s suburban simulation and crossed the pond in search of a host. Vision runs a simulation where he struggles, over and over again, to condense all this lore and explain it to Tommy in a way that doesn’t overwhelm him with anger and confusion. There’s not a single version that doesn’t end with Tommy storming out of the room. Popular on Variety This is more or less how it feels to watch “VisionQuest,” an eight-episode Marvel Studios series that’s positioned as a sequel of sorts to “WandaVision.” The show plays with some clever concepts, particularly in its visual presentation; as the simulation scenarios pile up, so do Vision clones until a dozen exhausted, exasperated Bettanys all collapse on a hotel floor. (Much of “VisionQuest” strips away the monochrome coating to show Vision as an ordinary human, allowing Bettany to flex his fusty charm.) But this imagery is larded with so much convoluted backstory and abstract concepts that “VisionQuest” ends up in the exact 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 comics and other forms of science fiction, but as real-life AI companies talk seriously about potential sentience, there’s a topical slant to Vision’s preferred strategy for getting in touch with his feelings. He’s created and/or convened a bunch of autonomous AIs — what we would now call “agents,” though creator Terry Matalas may have overseen the scripts before that term fully entered the popular lexicon — to help him with various tasks. There’s F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), who helps decode social interactions, and E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), who’s a proponent of fun. Mechanics D.U.M.-E. (Henry Lewis) and U (Jonathan Sayer) tend to the more mundane work of keeping internal systems in shape. Finally, there are more familiar figures from earlier stages of the MCU: Tony Stark’s old pal J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy) is on hand; most intriguingly, so is Ultron (James Spader), the namesake antagonist of the second “Avengers” film. All these assistants take corporeal form in Vision’s so-called Mindspace, a virtual and psychological plane that takes the shape of a quirky Victorian mansion. Here, Ultron looks not like a menacing CGI robot but the 66-year-old Spader himself: a schlubby guy with a flowing beard and a trenchcoat whose menacing, purple-prosed monologues (“It feels to me like your Greek tragedy has a deuteragonist”) are undercut by his appearance. To the show’s credit, this Ultron is a highly entertaining creation, allowing Spader to layer some of his signature sardonic air to a character who’s still cynical, but much humbled from his supervillain days. Without access to the real world, Ultron has to settle for being the devil on Vision’s shoulder rather than an actor in his own right. It’s when the Mindspace intersects with said real world that “VisionQuest” gets overly complicated. Directors Christopher J. Byrne, Gandja Monteiro and Vincenzo Natali — along with Matalas, who helms the final pair of episodes — have some fun inside that 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 code compels you!”), and when Ultron begs Vision to let him “take the wheel,” it’s a literal ship’s wheel buffeted by stormwinds. But apart from having the AIs appear and speak to Vision as a kind of imaginary friend, invisible to everyone else, “VisionQuest” never lands on a consistent or legible way to map the relationship between the two realms, or how events in one affect the material reality of the other. Constantly toggling between the Mindspace and meatspace (sorry, it’s right there!) inevitably takes a toll on Tommy, who only exists in the latter. Even by the fantastical standards of comics-based storytelling, the tenuousness of Tommy’s nature — he’s kind of another incarnation of Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters in “WandaVision,” but also kind of not? — makes him a difficult protagonist to map onto. That straining to comprehend the irrational fog of human emotions is the show’s explicit subject only clarifies the problem rather than neutralizing it. As Vision wonders what his purpose is without Wanda or the Avengers, we do, too. “VisionQuest” tries to balance such philosophical questions about consciousness (yes, the Ship of Theseus metaphor comes back) with more active conflicts. At the behest of a mysterious client, the bounty hunter Paladin (Todd Stashwick) is on Vision’s trail, as is the aforementioned android (T’Nia Miller). Evading them provides some momentum, though not enough to propel an entire cast so massive I haven’t even mentioned Diane “Philomena Cunk” Morgan, who plays the Paladin’s assistant, yet. Before long, “VisionQuest” is trying to stitch all its unwieldy threads together with basic clichés about chosen family. “VisionQuest” often tells the audience what we’re supposed to be feeling, yet rarely achieves its stated aim. “WandaVision” was the first Marvel Studios show to air on Disney+, and with its shapeshifting sitcom homage as an allegory for grief, that series has remained a high bar to beat amid the MCU’s oversaturation era. This remains the case for the direct sequel. “VisionQuest” rehashes many of the same themes about recovering from loss — there is, of course, a flashback to the famous line about love persevering — with a hero who is, by definition, much less accessible. (And given AI’s alarming trajectory toward mass job replacement and/or civilizational destruction, I didn’t feel especially inclined to empathize with a bunch of digital entities.) “VisionQuest” can be enjoyable in its comfort zone of zanily tweaking the Mindspace. But when it’s time to venture out into the tactile world, the show doesn’t leave a lasting mark. The first two episodes of “VisionQuest” will premiere on Disney+ on Oct. 14, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Wednesdays.