Marvel Television has spent two years telling us that “VisionQuest” would close out the story “WandaVision” started, and most of us assumed that meant a sad android wandering around looking for a woman who is not coming back. The first trailer, which Paul Bettany and James Spader brought to the D23 stage on Friday before it went up on Marvel’s own channel, is not that. It is a domestic comedy about a haunted house, except the house is a mind, the ghost is Ultron, and somewhere in the middle of it a character asks Vision to save his son. His son. Nobody warned us about that part.
The 125 seconds open somewhere far quieter than expected, in a bar, with a bartender making small talk. “Before you started working here, I remember when you’d come in all the time with that redhead,” she says, and the line does more work than any explosion could. That is Wanda, referred to obliquely by someone who has no idea what she was, to a man who is not quite the man she is remembering. “I was a different person back then,” he answers. Then: “How about now? Anyone waiting for you tonight?” And Bettany, flat and pleasant and completely hollow: “Oh, no. Home is — home is just me.” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “VisionQuest” trailer and for what it reveals about Vision’s family.
It is a domestic comedy about a haunted house, except the house is a mind, the ghost is Ultron, and somewhere in the middle of it a character asks Vision to save his son.”
The trailer’s spine is a question the show is clearly going to spend eight episodes on. “Who am I?” Vision asks. “I was an Avenger. But I’m not a hero anymore.” Then the line that tells you exactly which Vision we are dealing with: “I have his face, but not his virtue. All I have is his name.” That is White Vision talking — the blank, reactivated body S.W.O.R.D. built out of the corpse, handed the original’s memories in the last minutes of “WandaVision” and then allowed to fly off and be somebody else’s problem for five years. Marvel has finally come back for him, and the show’s whole premise is that he is a copy who knows he is a copy.
Then the trailer turns and hands the show its second lead. “Welcome home, Vision,” a voice says, and it is Spader, and he is in a body. Marvel is not doing a disembodied menace this time — Vision’s mindscape renders its occupants as people, and Ultron walks around inside it wearing a human face. “This house is getting crowded, Vision,” somebody complains. “Ultron!” “Human avatars only!” There is a genuine sitcom rhythm to these exchanges, which is either the smartest possible way to handle a genocidal AI living rent-free in your head or an absolute disaster, and the trailer is confident enough that we are betting on the first one.
Someone else in the mindscape is considerably less relaxed about the arrangement. “Sir, I cannot overstate the dangers of keeping him around,” a voice warns, and the phrasing and the deference point straight at JARVIS, the third piece of this particular Frankenstein and the only one of Vision’s component parts that was ever purely benign. If “VisionQuest” is really about a mind with several tenants arguing over who gets to be the person, then the trilogy that started as a sitcom pastiche about grief is ending as a story about a committee.
Visually the trailer is doing something Marvel television usually cannot afford. The mindscape scenes are lit like a stage play — deep shadow, hard key light, very little of the flat digital wash that makes so much of this slate look identical — and the “human avatars” conceit means Bettany and Spader spend their scenes as men in rooms rather than as effects. That is a budget decision disguised as a creative one, and it is the right call twice over. Two of the best actors Marvel has ever hired finally get to act at each other with their own faces.
And then the family material starts, and this is where the trailer stops being clever and starts being genuinely destabilising. A rapid-fire run of voices calls out “Dad?” “Papa?” “Peepaw?” — three different words, three different relationships, all aimed at the same synthetic man. “I’m a stranger to myself,” Vision says. Someone tells him flatly, “That family wasn’t real.” Somebody else answers, “You sure about that?” And later a voice says, “I had a father. A machine — called Vision.”
The obvious read is Billy and Tommy, the twins Wanda conjured in Westview and then unmade, one of whom has already turned up alive and rebuilt in “Agatha All Along.” But the trailer refuses to make it that simple, because it also gives you a maternity ward. “Mazel tov. It’s a boy,” someone announces. “How is this possible?” Vision asks — and that is not a man being reminded of a son he already had. That is a man being handed one. Then, over the back half: “Free us all. And save your son.”
Which son is the entire show. If it is Billy, this is the “WandaVision” finale finally getting paid off and Wanda’s absence sitting at the middle of it like a hole. If it is a new child — synthetic, or somehow physical, or something Ultron has cooked up inside the mindscape — then “VisionQuest” is doing something Marvel television has never attempted, which is giving an android a lineage. The trailer is deliberately cut so that both readings survive it, and we would rather sit with that than pretend we have solved it.
The absence hanging over all of it is Wanda. Elizabeth Olsen is nowhere in this trailer, not in a flashback, not in a voice cue, not even as a photograph, and the closest the footage gets is a bartender’s throwaway line about a redhead. That is either the most disciplined restraint Marvel has shown in years or a hole the show cannot fill, and there is no way to know which until October. What the trailer does establish is that “VisionQuest” is not waiting for her to walk back in. It is about the man she left behind, or rather the copy of him, trying to work out whether the grief he inherited is even his to feel.
It ends on the two of them, the copy and the killer, negotiating. “I wish to understand my purpose,” Vision says. Somebody, incredulous: “With a genocidal maniac inside your head?” And Spader, delighted, gets the trailer’s last word and its best one: “Nothing bonds a family together quite like mortal jeopardy.” That is the show. Two artificial intelligences who share a father, an origin and a body, trapped in one skull, trying to work out whether either of them counts as a person. “VisionQuest” premieres on Disney+ on October 14.
What Do You Think? Is the son in this trailer Billy Maximoff coming home, or has Marvel just quietly given Vision a brand new child nobody saw coming? Does putting Ultron in a human avatar and letting him land jokes make him scarier or defang him completely? And after “WandaVision” and “Agatha All Along,” can this actually close the trilogy without Elizabeth Olsen anywhere in the frame?
Catch up properly: every MCU movie and show in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s MCU timeline.
See you on the next binge!
