Early in VisionQuest, the final entry of a trilogy that started with 2021’s WandaVision and continued with 2024’s Agatha All Along, bounty hunter Paladin (Todd Stashwick) says, “I have been hunting long enough to know that if anything dies within whispering distance of words like ‘witch’ or ‘spell’ or ‘hex,’ something always survives.” It’s one of those wink-wink, nudge-nudge jokes this multimedia franchise loves to indulge in, but I’d go one step further: Replace those three words with “Disney,” “Feige,” or “diminishing box office returns,” and you’ve got one of the main problems with the post-Endgame Marvel Cinematic Universe.

When death is a mere multiversal suggestion, consciousnesses can be uploaded into cybernetic machines willy-nilly, and A-list actors will gladly re-don the cape once their agents show them all those zeroes, you start to wonder just what is at stake for any of these superpowered specimens. It’s a question that nags VisionQuest, an eight-episode miniseries that sports flashes of MCU greatness but can’t overcome its pervasive inconsequentiality.

Creator Terry Matalas seems at least aware of just how convoluted this timeline has become, opening the series with a helpful spoon-feeding of exposition. After being reanimated and escaping the S.W.O.R.D. operatives who sought to weaponize him in WandaVision, Vision (Paul Bettany) is now in hiding, working as a barkeep in an Edinburgh pub by day and receding into a psycho-digitized home of his own making by night. This cyber-headspace is where he consults other artificially intelligent programs: J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy), F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), and the dastardly Ultron (James Spader)—yes, that Ultron. All appear in human avatar form to help re-acclimate Vision to our species’ behavioral patterns and (ostensibly) give viewers a tangible way to visualize and sympathize with these AI creations.

You see, this is blank-slate Vision: a version that looks like Vision, remembers like Vision, and quacks like Vision but lacks the feelings and virtue that made the original human-adjacent. So when Paladin, backed by a mysterious client, pokes a few hundred bullet holes into Vision’s sense of domestic tranquility, Vision goes on the run alongside Thomas Shepard (Ruaridh Mollica), a young grifter who may or may not be his reincarnated son and who forces Maybe Dad to ask himself difficult questions about his own identity.

Fittingly, there’s some dad humor in the way Matalas envisions the digital realm, where emails are carrier pigeons and image-based CAPTCHAs are Kafkaesque nightmares. The dialogue is often sharp, and Bettany’s and Spader’s performances keep it all from feeling didactic. Vision and Ultron’s warring philosophies afford VisionQuest some of its most drolly thought-provoking material about humanity’s self-destructive impulses.

And yet, despite how much spirit the actors inject into their artificial characters, VisionQuest struggles to pull off the tricky tonal feat of getting viewers to relate to machine-generated entities. It doesn’t help that the show’s folding of the material and digital worlds into one another leaves it unclear why one character can die or “get deleted” from, say, a bullet to the processing system while another’s consciousness can exist forever on a far-off data server. For all its heady ruminations on man versus machine, the series stops short of truly villainizing the megalomaniacs and corporations responsible for our current AI anxieties.

There’s a sense that VisionQuest doesn’t know how to chew its way out of its own franchise’s trap. Vision’s existential crisis is unintentionally accentuated by the show’s visual language, which is stiffer (and its sci-fi imaginings of cyberspace more clichéd) than the sitcom fever dream of WandaVision or the theater-kid fantasia of Agatha All Along. Because so much of the story depends on viewers having seen earlier MCU projects, it’s a bit deflating that this entry feels insulated within the wider “phase” in which Marvel is operating—a paradox that makes big character reveals fall flat and Easter eggs ring hollow.

But the show’s most glaring issue is that, just as Vision struggles to connect emotionally, it can’t grasp what makes for emotionally resonant TV. Grief is the engine that drove Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda to enslave the town of Westview in WandaVision, making her antiheroine arc one of prickly, deeply felt complexity (which was ultimately nullified when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness reduced her to a one-note monster and—potentially?—killed her off for good, but I digress). Vision, by contrast, is a far simpler protagonist, a fella who’s easy to root for and whose inability to feel is shown as a clear hindrance to his survival and that of his compatriots, rather than something that makes him more volatile, challenging, or human.

While it’s hard to say more on this matter without getting into spoilers, Vision’s Pinocchio-coded journey toward becoming a real flesh-and-Vibranium boy is a plea for everyone—but especially men—to avoid self-isolation and keep feeling in an age that rewards stoically distracting ourselves from real pain. Nevertheless, this message is undermined by VisionQuest’s lack of catharsis and by the MCU’s insistence that hardly anyone in this multiverse is ever really gone. What is grief if not Disney’s executive team persevering?