While we were swooning over “WandaVision” back in 2021, we couldn’t have known Marvel was softening us up for the AI revolution. Well, some of us probably suspected something was afoot since, like Agatha Harkness, it was right there all along. Algorithms were already predicting our tastes, needs and desires and serving us options before we asked for them. Virtual assistants steered our daily lives and still do. But Alexa and Siri don’t have faces, bodies or plausible imitations of human emotions or empathy — not on the level that Paul Bettany’s synthezoid Vision provided for a grieving Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen).
One five-year time jump later, “VisionQuest” drops in on the android’s story where “WandaVision” left off. The Vision who lived, laughed and loved beside Wanda was an illusion, a delusion, really, brought to life by witchcraft. This one is very real: a kind of Vision 2.0, rebuilt by the intelligence agency tasked with saving the New Jersey town Wanda took hostage to shore up her classic family sitcom simulation. It – OK, he – has no direct connection to the life his predecessor shared with Wanda or the children they magicked into existence.
