VisionQuest: new Marvel TV series (1st trailer).

Marvel has released the first trailer for VisionQuest, the forthcoming Disney+ series starring Paul Bettany as everybody’s favourite synthetic philosopher, Vision. Or, more accurately, the pallid replacement Vision who currently possesses the memories of the old Vision while remaining slightly uncertain whether any of them actually belong to him.

Which is the sort of existential difficulty most of us encounter only after three glasses of wine and an unexpected Facebook photograph from 2009.

VisionQuest picks up the dangling thread left by WandaVision, where the original Vision was dead, Wanda’s magically constructed Vision was temporary and S.W.O.R.D. had helpfully built another Vision in white, because government agencies in superhero universes have never encountered an immensely powerful artificial intelligence without immediately wondering whether they could point it at somebody.

The two Visions eventually settled their disagreement not with the customary sky-beam, but by having a surprisingly civilised philosophical discussion. Hex Vision restored White Vision’s memories and White Vision promptly flew away, presumably because discovering that you have been married to the Scarlet Witch, killed twice, resurrected by bureaucrats and formerly employed by the Avengers requires at least a long weekend somewhere quiet.

Now he is back.

The trailer suggests that Vision has spent his absence trying to determine exactly who and what he is. His difficulty is that he remembers being an Avenger without necessarily feeling that he is the man who performed those heroic deeds. If somebody copied every photograph, email and embarrassing teenage diary entry from your old computer onto a new laptop, would the laptop actually become you?

Please do not answer that within earshot of your laptop.

Marvel has given this identity crisis a rather tasty visual device. Inside Vision’s mind appears to be a huge mansion occupied by human manifestations of the various artificial intelligences lurking around his programming. It is essentially Inside Out for people who consider firmware updates an emotional event.

James D’Arcy appears as J.A.R.V.I.S., Orla Brady is F.R.I.D.A.Y., Emily Hampshire plays E.D.I.T.H., while even Tony Stark’s less sophisticated mechanical offspring D.U.M.-E and U seem to have acquired places in Vision’s peculiar internal household.

Unfortunately, one other resident appears to have forgotten to move out. Ultron. James Spader returns as the homicidal AI last seen attempting to exterminate humanity in Avengers: Age Of Ultron. He turns up here in human form as well as his familiar metallic incarnation, presumably because Vision’s subconscious has decided that ordinary therapy was simply not expensive enough.

This gives the series a rather juicy central relationship. Vision was created partly from Ultron and spent much of Age Of Ultron demonstrating that having a terrible parent does not necessarily mean you have to follow them into the family business of planetary genocide. Now dad is living in his head.

Christmas should be magnificent. The other important newcomer is Ruaridh Mollica as Thomas Shepherd. Anyone who successfully completed Marvel’s increasingly demanding Continuing Professional Development course will remember that Wanda and Vision had magically created twin sons, Billy and Tommy, during WandaVision. Billy subsequently turned up in Agatha All Along, his soul occupying the body of teenager Billy Kaplan. Tommy appears to have undergone a similarly complicated piece of supernatural immigration paperwork.

Vision therefore has to investigate whether this mysterious young man really is his son while someone has also placed a bounty on Vision’s shiny white head. Nothing brings a family together quite like armed mercenaries.

Todd Stashwick is among the cast, alongside T’Nia Miller, Lauren Morais, Diane Morgan, Polly Frame, Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and the aforementioned collection of returning artificial intelligences. Terry Matalas, whose involvement with the third season of Star Trek: Picard demonstrated a certain talent for taking elderly bits of beloved science-fiction continuity out of storage and making them work again, created the series for television.

That makes him an interesting choice for this particular job. Vision is one of those Marvel characters who becomes more interesting the less he behaves like a conventional superhero. He can fly, punch through walls and shoot energy beams from his forehead, certainly, but his best stories tend to involve the awkward question of whether a machine that remembers love is actually experiencing love, and whether the distinction matters to anyone except philosophers and warranty departments.

The title itself is a substantial nod towards the comics. John Byrne’s Vision Quest storyline in West Coast Avengers saw Vision abducted, dismantled and reconstructed as the emotionless white version of the character. It did considerable damage to his relationship with Wanda and helped send the pair down several decades of increasingly peculiar comic-book history.

The MCU has already borrowed heavily from those ideas, so don’t expect this television version to be a straight adaptation. Marvel adaptations regard the comics rather as pirates regard maps. Useful indication of where the treasure might be, but nobody feels especially compelled to follow the dotted line.

More encouragingly, VisionQuest is officially being described as the conclusion to the loose television trilogy begun by WandaVision and continued through Agatha All Along. That gives it an actual dramatic job beyond servicing another six hours of MCU continuity before pointing viewers towards the next thing.

There remains, naturally, one enormous scarlet-coloured question hovering above proceedings: Wanda Maximoff.

Elizabeth Olsen isn’t among the announced cast, and Marvel would presumably prefer its executives to be attacked by actual Ultron drones before casually revealing whatever plans they have for the Scarlet Witch. Given that her husband is rebuilding his identity, one son has returned, another has apparently returned and practically everybody in this family has already survived death at least once, declaring Wanda permanently deceased would seem extraordinarily optimistic.

Here at SFcrowsnest, however, the most promising thing about this first trailer is that VisionQuest looks pleasingly weird. Not merely another superhero programme in which stern people stand around glowing computer screens explaining why the purple beam must not reach the atmosphere. We appear to be getting haunted artificial intelligence, metaphysical family problems, homicidal software masquerading as James Spader and an android wandering through the architecture of his own consciousness.

That is considerably more interesting.

VisionQuest streams on Disney+ from 14 October 2026. Until then, perhaps resist looking too closely inside your own operating system. There are folders in there best left unopened.