VisionQuest, Marvel’s new Disney+ series about the android Avenger Vision, opens with an episode called “No Strings,” and it is the best TV I have watched this year. Terry Matalas took over a corner of the MCU that fans had stopped trusting. WandaVision, the show this one continues, opened with an interesting hook and never stuck the landing. Its spinoff, Agatha All Along, was panned by fans and never felt right. Plenty of viewers tuned out of the MCU after those two, myself included. This episode pulls me back in.
The show needs some background first. Vision is an artificial man. In the film Avengers: Age of Ultron, a rogue AI named Ultron built his body, and Tony Stark’s AI butler Jarvis supplied his mind. He joined the Avengers, fell in love with the witch Wanda Maximoff, and was killed by the villain Thanos. In WandaVision, a grieving Wanda trapped the New Jersey town of Westview inside a sitcom reality of her own making and conjured a copy of Vision, plus twin sons named Tommy and Billy. When she dropped the spell, the copy and the boys vanished. The government agency SWORD had meanwhile rebuilt a blank white Vision, who got his memories back and flew away. That is the man we meet here.
He is hiding in Edinburgh under the name Sherwood Ellis, closing down a pub. The owner, Fiona, likes him and tells him he used to be better at small talk. She keeps inviting him home for Sunday roast, and he keeps saying he is bad with people. When she asks about Wanda, he tells her Wanda is dead, and Fiona takes it for a metaphor. Later he wipes down a table where Wanda and his old self carved their initials in a heart. Paul Bettany plays him as a man who remembers everything and cannot find the feelings that go with it.
That search is the show’s engine, and the best scenes happen inside his head. After the pub empties, Vision shuts himself in a freezer and powers down into a mindspace, a house he shares with the Stark AIs: Jarvis, Friday, the clumsy robot arm Dum-E, and a few others. The setup plays like a sitcom household, but every joke comes from the fact that the roommates are machines. The groceries are tech puns, like Infinidairy milk and vibranium foil. Jarvis reports a ceiling leak as a security breach. Friday critiques his social skills like a performance review. Vision slips into a private movie theater to rewatch his restored memories, hunting for the emotions that belong to them. Writers rarely make a character’s inner life this fun to look at.
Then there is James Spader. Ultron lives in the house too, and Vision calls him father. Vision has locked him in the loft and ordered him to appear only in a human avatar, after catching him in full robot form screaming at a food delivery driver. Spader plays Ultron as a bored, petty tyrant who needs a hobby. When the other AIs sneak in footage of Vision’s life in Westview at Ultron’s urging, Vision storms upstairs. He insists the Westview version of himself was a facsimile built out of Wanda’s grief and was never him. Ultron, naturally, wants him to look at it anyway.
The real world intrudes the next night. A sniper shoots Fiona dead as the two of them lock up. Vision fights off a crew of armed mercenaries with Jarvis talking him through it, and he turns himself white to end the fight quickly, abandoning his usual restraint. His AI housemate Edith has to steer him out through a skylight before the police arrive. Outside, the mercenary leader Paladin (Todd Stashwick) screams at his snipers about the dead civilian. Back in the mindspace, Ultron admits he leaked Vision’s location to Paladin on purpose, because he figured being hunted would remind Vision he is alive. Vision strips him of his screens and gadgets and sentences him to boredom.
Then comes the hook. Paladin broadcasts footage of a psych evaluation of a young man in London named Thomas Shepherd, held responsible for children getting hurt at a swimming pool a year earlier. A newspaper in Vision’s mind carries a headline about a serial killer called Butcherbird. Ultron looks at Vision and congratulates him on having a son. The only sons Vision ever had were the twins from Wanda’s spell, who vanished when it broke. If one of them is alive and grown, how? The episode ends there, with great visuals and no answer.
One big caveat. The episode opens with Vision recapping his own history, and it cannot get away from that baggage. The Westview footage, the carved heart, and Ultron’s whole relationship with him all assume you saw Age of Ultron, WandaVision, and Endgame. Someone who skipped them will struggle, and that is a problem for the MCU, which keeps asking people to do homework before the next show makes sense. Whether VisionQuest can climb over that wall is a question for later episodes. For now, this opener is some of the best TV of the year.
Can a show this tied to WandaVision and Age of Ultron survive with the viewers who skipped both?
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