Is MARVEL/DISNEY+’s VISIONQUEST a shrink-wrapped wrap-up..?
The Vision was a synthetic ‘human’ whose personality came into being through the motivations and machinations of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and their creation Ultron. Vision may have sprung almost fully-formed, but it was through his love with another Avenger, the Scarlet Witch Wanda Maximoff that he began to find his place in the world.
However, the rise of Thanos caused great tragedy and Vision was murdered by the Titan and that plunged Wanda into a depression and a psychosis that would lead to a multiverse of madness. Eventually a new version of the being known as Vision formed, one that did not have all the ‘feelings’ of the original, but who managed to absorb all his forerunners memories.
Now that version of the Vision also seeks to find his place- both externally in the ‘real’ world and through the artificial assistants he has within his consciousness. And the avatar of Ultron him/itself.
The mixture of magic and technology can seem to do the impossible and that means that the Vision may, impossibly, have human offspring.
But now someone else knows that… and starts to use it against him…
This week Marvel/Disney+ delivered a double-helping of VisionQuest to get things started – and did so a day earlier than originally planned.
For the first half of the opening episode, it does feel like the show is running an extended, continuous ‘Previously on...’ intro. There are two obvious problems with that. Firstly, it speaks to the sheer complexity of the Vision / Wanda history and it’s hard to distill the back-story down into something coherent for a ‘newbie’, so much so that it ends up being a barrage of clips from the previous films and shows and endless exposition. Secondly, you’re probably not here by accident. Despite its qualities, VisionQuest would be an absolutely horrible place to jump into the story and few are likely to attempt it – this is a series for the already-invested, a virtual bookend to a volume of an even larger saga.
Most of that information is distilled by a VFX inner-monologue in which the various artificial intelligences we’ve met along the way are all saved and filed within Vision’s subconscious and seen as recognisable avatars who handle different aspects of his ‘personality’. J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy), E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), D.U.M-E (Henry Lewis), U (Jonathan Sayer) all play their parts. But just when you think this is going to be no more than an AI version of a transcendental group therapy session, VisionQuest starts to open up from its infinite Rubik’s Cube of an existence and raises the stakes out in the real world.
One of the people rallied against him is Paladin. Todd Stashwick has fun with anything he’s in (we’re still waiting for him to be resurrected for a much demanded Star Trek spin-off) and he instantly makes his Paladin a bad guy we’re going to like watching (even if his battlefield ‘costume’ looks like it was bought at Goodwill. Paladin, a title that Stashwick’s version has inherited from a long line of righteous bounty hunters, is a killer but he’s also a pragmatist (he bemoans the needless collateral damage of one of Vision’s associates thanks to a recklesss henchman, yet doesn’t even flinch in then terminating the offending henchman with extreme prejudice).
The loquacious James Spader is always fun to watch and to listen to. He’s played some superior anti-heroes and all-out villains over the years. After voicing the role of Ultron in the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, he’s now allowed to escape most of the motion-capture and be the human avatar of said bad guy…and the script gives him plenty of scenery to chew and banter to broadcast. He has the vocabulary of a dictionary and the weary tone of Dorothy Parker. He may or may not be planning to kill everything and everybody – but, hey, nobody’s perfect.
After the set-up, the second episode is better balanced, with perils inside Vision’s head and outside it, there’s some solid enough action to parse through the inner monologues and we get a sense that the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ are both up for grabs. After a brief glimpse in the first episode, Ruaridh Mollica makes an impact as Thomas Shepherd /Tommy Maximoff and we see how a life of fairly petty crime put him at odds with some rather nasty examples of supposed law enforcement, but also Lauren Morais’ pickpocket Lisa Molinari and gives us some real sympathy for his dilemma.
Terry Matalas (most recently at the helm of Star Trek: Picard) showruns proceedings and brings in a clear love for the characters. There are some stylistic, cultural frustrations. Much in the same way that British people know that all Americans wear cowboys hats, US audiences clearly still believe the quaintness of British locations and so Edinburgh is still pronounced ‘Edinbro’ to US viewers and the obligatory quaint thatched pub still has a haycart being driven past in the opener. At least it has electricity.
At this point, two episodes into an eight-episode run, there’s also the problem of knowing what the longer impact of the show will be. It’s caught somewhere between being the ‘last part of the trilogy’ – previously made up of WandaVision and Agatha All Along, an off-shoot of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and the active preamble for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. Given the likely board-sweeping events of the next Avengers movie, there’s a nagging feeling that this could merely be a fun but self-indulgent tidy-up rather than a natural springboard with real ramifications. Will the Vision finding his ‘self’ have import beyond the credits of the final episode and appear in the feature film ? In that sense, you just have to cross your digital digits and hope for the best, either way.
Marvel have a mixed televisual record and an oft-stated problem with pacing. So far, VisionQuest is fun but one mainly for the True Believers. However, just like the old maxim, it will depend how it progresses and whether its leaning into ROM or RAM…
8/10
VisionQuest is now available on Disney+