With a fortnight to go before VisionQuest arrives on Disney+, Marvel has released the official trailer, and the mood has shifted noticeably since August. The first trailer was mostly Paul Bettany working behind a bar and then wandering the corridors of his own head, watching his old Avengers footage on a projector like a synthezoid Krapp’s Last Tape. This one appears to have remembered that it is a superhero programme, and the punching has been moved rather further up the running order.
The headline moment, insofar as a two-minute trailer has headlines, belongs to Vision arriving at what seems to be the place where Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) is being held, and introducing himself with the cheerful announcement that he is there for the trap. It is a terrific line, and it neatly solves the Admiral Ackbar problem in advance. Nobody needs to shout “It’s a trap!” when the android has already read the briefing notes, highlighted the relevant passages and turned up anyway.
That knowingness feels very much like showrunner Terry Matalas, whose 12 Monkeys and third season of Star Trek: Picard both enjoyed characters who understood exactly how bad an idea was before committing to it with tremendous style. He has brought Todd Stashwick along again, last seen in a Starfleet uniform as the gloriously grumpy Captain Shaw, and here playing Paladin, a mercenary with designs on Vision’s rather valuable internal hardware.
Meanwhile, back inside the Mindspace, James Spader’s Ultron continues to sound like a man who has discovered that a genocidal agenda can be pursued just as effectively from the comfort of somebody else’s subconscious. Bettany has described Ultron as being kept behind “a pretty impressive firewall because he’s a psychopath”, and the new trailer has him working the bars of that firewall like a lag lobbying for parole, trying to talk Vision into setting him free. It is the father-son relationship from Age Of Ultron reheated as a prison drama, with the twist that the prison is the son.
Ultron also refers to Wanda Maximoff as “that dead witch”. That is a bold thing to say about the Scarlet Witch in a franchise where death is less a full stop than a semicolon, and where Elizabeth Olsen’s continued absence from the announced cast list is precisely the kind of silence that makes Marvel watchers lean forward.
Tommy, for his part, is trying to make sense of memories of a life he never actually lived. Which places him in the same leaky boat as his father, a white Vision rebuilt by S.W.O.R.D. who has the old Vision’s memories without being entirely convinced they belong to him. The Maximoff family tree now looks like something a Time Lord sketched on the back of a beer mat after a long night: one twin brother whose soul turned up in Agatha All Along, another whose soul has clearly taken the scenic route, a mother of uncertain mortality and a dad who used to be a corpse.
Against that background, the trailer’s closing line, in which Vision reminds us that family is forever, lands less as a greetings-card sentiment and more as a mild threat. In this household, forever has been tested repeatedly and keeps coming back.
The supporting cast remains pleasingly eclectic. T’Nia Miller plays Jocasta, the robot built in the comics as Ultron’s intended bride who sensibly defected to the Avengers instead; recent TV spots suggest she may have a darker job to do here. Faran Tahir returns as Raza, last seen shouting at Tony Stark in a cave in 2008, which counts as a deep cut even by MCU standards. Diane Morgan is also aboard, and anyone hoping Philomena Cunk will ask Ultron whether robots have feelings, and if so, where they keep them, will simply have to wait. James D’Arcy, Orla Brady and Emily Hampshire round out the household as J.A.R.V.I.S., F.R.I.D.A.Y. and E.D.I.T.H., the three most overqualified lodgers in fiction.
What is encouraging about this trailer is that it doesn’t abandon the strangeness of the first in favour of generic hero business. The haunted-house-inside-a-robot premise is still there; it has simply acquired a plot with somewhere to go. WandaVision was a sitcom pastiche, Agatha All Along a witchy road trip with show tunes, and on this evidence VisionQuest is a chase thriller wearing a philosophy jumper. As trilogy finales go, that is a more interesting proposition than another sky-beam over a city.
VisionQuest runs for eight episodes and arrives on Disney+ on Wednesday 14 October 2026, reportedly opening with two episodes before settling into weekly instalments. Vision, one suspects, has already worked out where the trap is.
Join the conversation (0)