VisionQuest premieres on Wednesday, October 14 on Disney+, closing out a story that has been running, on and off, since WandaVision. Vision has been rebooted and is being hunted, and he is trying to work out whether the thing he is now has any real continuity with the thing he was.
The structural idea is the good one. Rather than sending him out to find people who knew him, the series has him consult the artificial intelligences embedded in his own programming. Among them are J.A.R.V.I.S. and F.R.I.D.A.Y., and, far less helpfully, Ultron. That turns the show into an argument with himself, conducted through voices he never chose to contain, and James Spader returning gives the argument real teeth.
Terry Matalas is showrunner and a director on it, which is the strongest signal here. He took the last season of Star Trek: Picard and turned a struggling series into a controlled piece of legacy storytelling. This is a similar assignment: a character several films past his apparent conclusion, needing a reason to exist again that is not simply nostalgia.
It runs as an eight episode miniseries, and the first two episodes screen at BFI IMAX on October 12, two days ahead of the streaming launch. That is an unusual move for television and suggests a certain confidence in how the thing looks.
Paul Bettany has spent a decade playing a character defined by not quite being a person. Wednesday, October 14 is when that finally becomes the subject rather than the texture.
