Vision's View

An attempt is made once again to make us feel something by tapping the well worn veins of nostalgia and deconstruction in the first two episodes of Marvel's VisionQuest, which premiered on Disney+ a couple days ago. Showrunner Terry Matalas has established his bona fides after creating a successful third season of Star Trek: Picard that relies entirely on nostalgia, following from his universally panned second season which attempted to get by on original ideas. But his Wikipedia entry says he's best known for co-creating and showrunning the 2015 SyFy series 12 Monkeys, which is a dumbed down remake of Terry Gilliam's classic 1995 film. No-one seems to remember that show, though, because a star of that series, Todd Stashwick, was regarded as a surprisingly talented newcomer in the third season of Picard, and Stashwick turns up again in VisionQuest. He's good in it, too. Also delivering good performances are Paul Bettany, Ruaridh Mollica, and the ever reliable James Spader.

Bettany reprises his role as Vision, or creates the new role of the white Vision last seen at the end of WandaVision, though distinctions between the two characters are unclear at this point except for the white Vision's ability to safely drink whiskey. This occurs during a confrontation between him and Stashwick's character in which the new Vision attempts to assert that he's different from the original and demonstrates that he's able to predict everything Stashwick might do by speaking some of his lines with him in unison. This may be Matalas' nod to real world AI language models, and perhaps his criticism of them considering Vision isn't able to predict anything else Stashwick does. Stashwick plays the series' villain, the Paladin, and gets to wear that character's costume from the comics, but it's as unimpressively rendered as Daredevil's, sadly. There is a very clear difference between the quality of the MCU movie costumes and the TV series costumes.

Most of the story involves an Inside Out (or Herman's Head) style plot in which other Stark AIs manifest in Vision's mind as aspects of his programming or as advisors. Instead of employing the voice actors of FRIDAY and EDITH from the movies, Matalas casts two more of his stable of familiar faces, Orla Brady from Picard and Emily Hampshire from 12 Monkeys. James D'Arcy plays JARVIS. D'Arcy originated the role of the Stark family butler who inspired Bettany's AI. D'Arcy first played the character on the 2015 Agent Carter series before reprising it in 2019's Avengers: Endgame.

Ruaridh Mollica is not Ed Speleers, though he looks like him, and has basically the same part on VisionQuest that Speleers had on Star Trek: Picard. In Star Trek: Picard, the Captain Picard we see is in reality a synthetic recreation of the original Jean-Luc Picard and he discovers that the original Picard had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Picard must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Picard's endeavours and his very survival. In VisionQuest, the Vision we see is in reality the synthetic recreation of the original Vision and he discovers that the original Vision had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Vision must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Vision's endeavours and his very survival.

In reality, he is Tommy Maximoff, whose consciousness, as we saw in Agatha All Along (before Mollica was cast), was placed in the body of a teenager named Thomas Shepherd. Scenes between Mollica and his love interest, Lisa (Lauren Morais), are effective, though they're placed in the usual context of sainted criminal misfits pitted against the cartoonishly evil law enforcement institutions.

Matalas strikes for grand emotional beats on the show but they don't have much substance because the stakes are unclear with most of the drama being in abstract, conceptual space. The conversations between Ultron (Spader, reprising his role from the second Joss Whedon Avengers film) and Vision are pretty good, though, thanks to the acting chops of both involved. As is often the case with fantasy villains in genre movies of the past thirty years, they either die a villain or live long enough to see themselves become a hero, mostly because of the implicit assumption modern writers make that evident amorality is a sign of strength, both of psyche and physique.

VisionQuest is available on Disney+.