🍿 VisionQuest (2026) First two episodes on Disney+ (Oct 14)
Rating: 7.5/10 ⚖️
Bettany finally gets the room. Spader steals it. The rest of the show never catches up.
Terry Matalas builds a 1950s mind-house where the Stark AIs actually have jobs and personalities. Emily Hampshire’s E.D.I.T.H. is the one who feels like she could start a fight just to see what happens. That space is the series’ real design choice, not just a VFX budget hack.
Paul Bettany plays a Vision who can quote the memories but cannot feel them yet. The Edinburgh pub shifts and the stiff smiles are the work. Spader’s Ultron, locked upstairs and allowed his whole face, is the better performance: funny, needling, and never safe.
Strengths:
- Bettany and Spader’s attic arguments give the show its only real voltage.
- Hampshire’s E.D.I.T.H. steals every scene she is allowed to enter.
- The mid-century mind-house is the sharpest visual idea here.
- Diane Morgan’s deadpan cuts through the heavier dialogue cleanly.
- The father-son tension with Mollica lands when the show stops explaining it.
Areas for Improvement:
- The Paladin bounty plot is standard MCU chase filler.
- Too much runtime is spent recapping WandaVision and Age of Ultron.
- Outer-world stakes feel lower than the internal ones.
- Ruaridh Mollica’s Tommy is underwritten outside the Vision scenes.
- The show keeps adding trauma layers instead of trusting the core pair.
Would you stick around for Spader’s Ultron even when the rest of the show gets in the way?
