VisionQuest, the Disney+ series that closes the trilogy begun by WandaVision and Agatha All Along, released episodes 3 and 4 together Tuesday night, and the two play like different shows. Episode 3, “Reboot,” stops the story for a long talk about childhood trauma. Episode 4, “Malware,” sends Vision and his son after an android who has been murdering people, and it moves from the first scene. For once, Marvel has a good show.
A quick catch-up for anyone behind. Vision here is the rebuilt “White Vision” from the end of WandaVision, hiding from the people who want to use him as a weapon. Inside his head is a shared virtual space called the Mindspace, where the Stark-built AIs F.R.I.D.A.Y. and E.D.I.T.H., the robots DUM-E and U, and Ultron, the killer robot from Avengers: Age of Ultron, all live and argue with him. Thomas is a teenager who carries Tommy Maximoff, the son Wanda and Vision had in WandaVision. A bounty hunter named Paladin was hired to bring Vision in, and at the end of episode 2 he shot Vision in the gut with an adamantium bullet.
Episode 3 opens with a murder story running in the background. A killer in a black robe, dubbed the Butcherbird by the press for the bird wings carved at each crime scene, walks through shotgun blasts to reach a rich victim. Ultron watches the news report from his corner of the Mindspace, and Paladin follows a trail of Vision’s leaked coolant to the victim’s apartment. Most of the runtime goes to something else. Vision seals his wound with battery acid from the stolen station wagon, and he and Thomas check into a hotel.
Thomas freezes at the hotel pool. He explains that bullies held him under until he drowned, that something else filled the space where he had been, and that the water boiled around him. Vision answers with a speech telling him that Tommy Maximoff is real and that “You are who you think you are.” Then Vision shuts himself down in the pool, because his core is failing and Thomas’s super speed is the only thing that can restart him.
Stopping the plot so a character can describe his trauma, then treating the description as the payoff, is a habit of millennial-era writing, and it eats the episode. The killer plot waits in the margins until the last seconds, when a voice greets Vision with “Hello, Vision.” The cause is the reboot itself: Vision’s restart connected him to the killer, another synthetic being.
Episode 4 skips the talk and goes hunting. The killer offers Vision a deal: leave me alone and I leave you alone. Vision refuses. E.D.I.T.H. cuts the connection in a scene staged as an exorcism, and Vision and Ultron hack Interpol’s files as if they were in a spy movie.
The files show all three victims belonged to a team of five researchers who built the first synthetic consciousness, the ancestor of Vision himself. One of the five, Dr. Josephine Carrington, died of natural causes in 2008. Katerina Wells, played by Mary McDonnell, is the last one alive, and she is hosting a fundraising gala. Vision and Thomas crash it on tickets that Lisa, a contact of Thomas’s played by Lauren Morais, lifts for them.
The tension holds from there. Vision has told Thomas he carries four AIs and left Ultron off the list. At the gala he slips and says five. Thomas works out who the fifth is just as Katerina starts talking about Ultron on stage, and he storms off, furious that his father is hosting the villain who nearly destroyed the world. That leaves Vision alone when the Butcherbird drops her robe. Underneath, she looks a lot like Ultron.
Vision’s powers are still offline after the reboot, and he is losing. E.D.I.T.H. has spent the episode learning she was modeled on a real person, a test pilot, and that leads her to a theory: the killer is modeled on Jo Carrington, the dead researcher. Vision says so mid-fight. The Butcherbird, played by T’Nia Miller and named Jocasta, corrects him: “I am not based on her. I am her.”
Then Ultron makes his offer. He tells Vision he cannot win while he is emotionally compromised and that someone with less at stake has to take over his body. He promises not to hurt Jocasta. Vision knows Ultron is the last one who should hold the controls, and he agrees anyway.
The episode plays with the old shoot-the-hostage trick, in which a hero kills the captive to strip the villain of leverage. Katerina is the one person Jocasta needs alive, because Jocasta has been collecting a DNA key from each victim and Katerina holds the last one. Ultron maneuvers Jocasta into firing the laser that kills Katerina, and the body disintegrates with the key. Jocasta flies out through the skylight. Ultron kept his word, since Jocasta is unharmed. He locks Vision and the other AIs out of the core systems, then puts an arm around Thomas and says it is time for a chat.
The ending also pays off a line from the 2015 film. In Age of Ultron, Vision tried to find common ground with Ultron, and Ultron called him naive. Episode 4 replays that scene in a flashback, and Ultron says it again when Vision describes the evolution of man as a family tree. Handing over his body proves Ultron right.
One gripe. The schedule runs three straight weeks of double drops: episodes 1 and 2 on October 13, 3 and 4 on October 20, and 5 and 6 on October 27. Only the last two get single weeks. WandaVision and Agatha All Along both opened with two episodes and then went weekly. I would rather have one episode a week so each gets a separate piece. Two at once forces a combined review, and episode 3 got dragged into this one for it. The season ends in November, weeks before Avengers: Doomsday reaches theaters in December, which looks like the reason for the compressed run.
With four episodes left, Ultron holds the controls and has his arm around Thomas. Does Vision take his body back in episodes 5 and 6, or does Marvel let Ultron drive until the finale?