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STV031: Vision has spent years pouring drinks in an Edinburgh pub he and Wanda used to visit, and spending his nights inside his own mind, in a white mansion he shares with Tony Stark’s old AIs and one prisoner in the attic: Ultron, played in person this time by James Spader. Then a bounty hunter named Paladin comes for him, and the bait is a young London grifter who says Vision is his father.

Patrick Mason, Jeff Haecker, and Rob Leonardi open their coverage of VisionQuest with the Disney+ series’ two-episode premiere, episode 1, “No Strings,” and episode 2, “Theseus.” The panel liked it a great deal, and they spend most of the hour on the question the show keeps asking: who is this Vision? The original ran on the Mind Stone. The Vision of the Westview Hex was Wanda’s memory of him, perhaps a better man than the real one, the way absence edits the people we miss. The white Vision has all the memories and none of the lived experience, and he will not watch the Westview ones. Rob argues the Mind Stone gave Vision a mind but never a soul. Patrick reads the yellow light running through the Mindspace as the Hex Vision’s mark on him, and the rebuilt Vision as a Frankenstein figure working out what he is.

The AIs get their due too. J.A.R.V.I.S., F.R.I.D.A.Y., E.D.I.T.H., DUM-E and U. each have a job in the house, and Rob raises a continuity complaint: J.A.R.V.I.S. now wears the face of Edwin Jarvis from Agent Carter, when Paul Bettany voiced him in the films.

Ultron draws the most debate. He leaks Vision’s location, mocks him, and then gives the pep talk that turns the Ship of Theseus, the thought experiment Vision argued over in WandaVision, into a story about Theseus himself, the hero who went to save the children from the Minotaur. Is Ultron the client who hired Paladin, a pawn for some bigger villain, or a monster on a slow turn toward something better? The panel splits.

They also take up Tommy Maximoff, living as Thomas Shepherd, newly out of the care system and headed for a psychiatric facility because he remembers a life in the Hex, and where his super-speed could come from: mutant genetics, magic, or, as Jeff suggests, the speed force. Paladin’s adamantium rounds lead back to Eternals and Captain America: Brave New World. J.A.R.V.I.S.’s sacrifice lands hard. A painting in Vision’s mind points to Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch.

They close with predictions. Billy will turn up, Agatha probably won’t, and it may all end with Vision and Ultron destroying each other to save the twins.

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