For a long time, it felt like VisionQuest, the final chapter of the trilogy that began with WandaVision, was a figment of our hopes and dreams. It’s been five years since Vision (Paul Bettany) sparred with his colder, more naive counterpart, the White Vision (also Bettany), eventually transferring his memories so he could make the ultimate sacrifice in WandaVision. The 2021 series left a lot of questions unanswered; some were addressed in Agatha All Along, but mysteries remain about the new incarnation of Vision and the fate of Tommy Maximoff, one of two children the OG Vision “had” with Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen).
VisionQuest has quietly been in the works for some time, but this October it will finally address all of the above, plus a little extra. Marvel has kept details incredibly close to the vest: the show hits Disney+ in exactly two weeks, yet we’re only just now getting a sense of the plot. The latest VisionQuest trailer takes all the vague details of past updates and lays them out in a way we can understand. It also sets up the series to untangle WandaVision’s most confusing twist, and even give Ultron (James Spader) a new lease on life.
VisionQuest catches up with White Vision years after he inherited the original Vision’s memories. Now, it seems, he’s assumed his identity, too, although he says he inherited none of “his virtue” when taking on the Vision mantle. He’s been studying Vision’s life and striving to live up to his heroism, but that’s not easy with the vestiges of Ultron still hanging out in his psyche. Ultron is technically Vision’s dad: he created him to be the ultimate weapon in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. We can thank the Avengers’ timely intervention for preventing that, but the new Vision is still struggling to reconcile those origins with Vision 1’s expectations.
That struggle gets harder when he discovers his son, Tommy (now played by Ruaridh Mollica), is in trouble on the island of Madripoor. As the trailer shows, Vision unleashes Ultron to help rescue Tommy, but since Ultron never fulfilled his goal of enslaving humanity, that’s an absolutely terrible idea. Vision faces a very Freudian ordeal as he fights Ultron for what’s probably the final time. “This is a fight I likely won’t win,” he admits in the trailer. But in reconnecting with Tommy, who’s dealing with a similar memory dilemma, VisionQuest will finally address this trilogy’s weirdest paradox.
Do the memories make the man?
When the two Visions faced off in WandaVision, they resolved their conflict with a heady debate about existence and identity (and with lasers). The OG Vision walks his counterpart through the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, which asks whether a ship is still the same ship if every rotting component is replaced. “Secondly,” Vision asked, “if those removed planks are restored and reassembled, free of the rot, is that the Ship of Theseus?”
“Neither is the true ship,” White Vision proposed. “Both are the true ship.”
Vision went on to theorize that the “rot” in their situation might be his own memories, which kinda made sense until he gave those memories to White Vision. Though the latter claimed “I am Vision” after receiving that parting gift, VisionQuest pokes a major hole in that theory. The new series seems poised to solve this paradox once and for all, and it’ll likely address the Blade Runner Easter eggs we got in WandaVision along the way.
It’ll be interesting to see Vision’s struggle paralleled with Tommy’s: this isn’t the original Tommy, after all, but a reincarnation of sorts. When Wanda dissolved her hex over the town of Westview, the constructs she’d created — including her own children — were seemingly destroyed. Her magic was so powerful, however, that their spirits found new vessels. We saw Billy (Joe Locke) unlock the memories attached to that spirit in Agatha All Along, and Tommy will face the same issue in VisionQuest. It took five years, but Marvel is finally closing the loop on this trippy saga, and in a properly compelling fashion.
