What the Philip K Dickens is Marvel up to with VisionQuest?

Looking back, it’s clear that WandaVision was an unlikely success. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first Disney+ series, from 2021, formed around two of the least-renowned members of the Avengers – Wanda “Scarlet Witch” Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and the Vision (Paul Bettany) – was a genre-defying oddity, each episode depicting its heroes “trapped” in a different flavour of sitcom parody, from chintzy 1950s fare such as I Love Lucy all the way up to 2000s-era offerings such as Modern Family.

It was smart and funny and won critics over with a sharp, witty script that cannily teased out its bonkers premise – that Wanda had created this facsimile of family life, including Vision and their two children – to a satisfying, even moving, conclusion.

At the time it seemed as if the MCU’s foray into television might herald a chance to tell stories too big, too small, too bloody weird for the conventions of a three-hour blockbuster. Nearly 20 shows later it’s hard to argue that expectation has been fulfilled.

In the plus column we could place the time-travel romp Loki, the colourful ebullience of Ms Marvel and the retro-exactitude of X-Men ’97. I’d go to bat for Hawkeye, Moon Knight and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law – three shows that I greatly enjoyed and that everyone else seemed to vehemently dislike.

As for the rest, especially the dreary dregs of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Echo and Secret Invasion, we shall abide time-honoured tradition and speak of them no more.

Occasionally, Marvel’s latest TV offering, VisionQuest (Disney+, two new episodes each Tuesday), reminds us of the scope and scale of its progenitor.

It is, as the name suggests, a direct sequel to WandaVision, following the titular android superhero reeling from the loss of his love Wanda and wrestling with who he is. (This is literal. After a series of events that I’d be reckless to try to unpack here, this Vision is the original’s clone, resurrected by a grieving Wanda and implanted with memories to which he now has no emotional connection.)

Unmoored in his new reality, he does what anyone would: acquires some shift work in an Edinburgh pub and spends his off-time in an elaborately constructed Mind Palace where a coterie of Tony Stark-created AIs help him uncover the secrets of his past and teach him how to act like a human being.

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As always with Marvel projects, a vast catalogue of lore must be parcelled out before one gets started. The MCU had this issue even in its earliest outings, as a decades-long backlog of comic narratives had to be made explicable on screen.

Now those screen offerings themselves form the problem, with their unwieldy plots, their baffling array of heroes, villains, creatures and worlds, their overlapping timelines and their multiple universes.

To engage with every named character in VisionQuest’s first episode alone requires at least passing familiarity with six films and two previous Marvel shows. (I did not have to compile this list myself, as Disney+ cheerily provided these homework instructions on its website ahead of broadcast.)

Marvel’s onboarding process was laborious 10 years ago, but it’s doubly so now, as its biggest hits recede deeper behind the veil of time and its newer outings remain lesser seen and even lesser remembered.

One among those shows mentioned, Agatha All Along, is a series I watched in full two years ago, and whose campy thrills I seem to recall passably enjoying – without, however, a single plot point lodging in my brain.

There’s a temptation to call Vision’s wranglings, as an AI that seeks humanity, “timely”. I do not find this to be the case. The machine-longing-to-be-human trope is the main subject not merely of just about every piece of fiction about robots ever written but also of just about every Pinocchio-style fable of the puppet, automaton or mechanical creature that holds within its unbeating heart dreams of becoming a real live boy.

And at a time when every fleece-wearing goon on Earth is tripping over his feet to tell us that the word-guessing algorithm he has built has gained consciousness, the show’s “Am … I … alive?” moments risk feeling more tedious and annoying than ever.

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This is not helped by long stretches of dialogue between Vision and his AI companions. Watching Bettany, Orla Brady, James D’Arcy and James Spader, all innately watchable and interesting actors, trade comically wordy dialogue about humanity, artificiality and the boundaries between the two is often grating.

When Vision tells Spader’s Ultron that he wants to know more about his former self, he says, “We are forever entangled, but he is a stranger to me and therefore I am a stranger to myself.”

That this is how two robots would converse is likely textually accurate, but the result is multiple scenes that resemble those viral videos in which people force a pair of competing LLMs to interact with each other in an infinite loop of inane verbosity.

This sense isn’t helped when human characters so frequently speak arch and heightened dialogue themselves. There was a brief and mortifying clamour among well-meaning Marvel heads to regard one particularly purple quote from WandaVision – “what is grief if not love persevering?” – as one of the greatest lines of poetry ever written. It is, therefore, hard not to cringe when it’s repeated here by another character, verbatim, as a dramatic plot point.

The degree to which viewers can look past the abstruse chatter and the homework will rest on how much joy they can extract from the rest of the show – which is, thankfully, a perfectly engaging action thriller.

Vision is being hunted by a master bounty hunter called the Paladin – aided, in a gloriously unexpected casting turn, by Philomena Cunk’s Diane Morgan – who wants to deliver him to a shadowy figure known as the Client.

To do this they’ve kidnapped – dramatic music – his son, Tommy. Yes, the son who shouldn’t exist because he was a figment of Wanda’s imagination, deleted the second she was apprehended at that show’s conclusion.

He’s now a Scottish man living in London who balances life as a pickpocket with his own psychological struggles about the impossibility of his existence, rendering his backstory an odd melange of Oliver Twist and paranoid science fiction that I am forced to call “Philip K Dickens”.

As a genre caper it more than acquits itself with well-helmed set pieces, some knotty moments of intrigue and able turns from its younger cast, most notably Ruaridh Mollica as the impossible Tommy.

The plot is consistently surprising, as should be expected from an adaptation of Tom King’s seminal comics run. (It may be notable that the year’s great comics telly hit, HBO’s Lanterns, is also a Tom King joint.)

And VisionQuest is simply better shot, with better sets, than many of its peers, suggesting that Marvel has at least heard criticism of the eye-scorching CGI and muddy drabness that have characterised much of its late period fare.

It’s just that, for all its charms, the show still bears a weightlessness that begs to be forgotten. In its first episode we watch as Vision blankly peruses his carousel of implanted memories, scenes from a life he’s not sure he truly lived. In a year or two’s time I expect to read this very review with the same curious, baffled distance. Did any of this, I’ll ask myself, even happen at all?