Five years after Wanda dropped the hex on Westview, Marvel is finally giving us the Vision show nobody quite knew to ask for, and the one WandaVision fans have been waiting on since that gutting finale.
VisionQuest will be closing out the trilogy that started there and continued through Agatha All Along, and this premiere wastes no time reminding us exactly why we fell for this character in the first place.
I went in cautiously optimistic because a show done entirely around Vision (Paul Bettany) processing his own fractured identity could easily tip into navel-gazing, but "No Strings" mostly avoids that trap by giving him somewhere urgent to be within the first 20 minutes.
Vision is living quietly, a shadow of his former self
We see Vision, who is keeping a low profile working at a dive bar, helping its owner Fiona (Polly Frame) close up for the night. He's awkward with her in that familiar, endearing Vision way, and when she invites him to Sunday dinner, he turns her down, insisting he's just not good with people. It's a small, lived-in opening, and it does a lot of work establishing how far he's drifted from the person he used to be.
There's a quiet, aching detail too, a heart carved into one of the bar's tables with W plus V inside it, that he can't help but notice before retreating inward.
We are then taken into the Mindspace, a mansion built inside his own head that houses the other surviving Stark AIs. Jarvis (James D'Arcy) runs security, Edith (Emily Hampshire) handles fun, Friday (Orla Brady) manages socialization, and Dum-E (Henry Lewis) and U (Jonathan Sayer) cover maintenance. Jarvis is worried about a possible data leak, but Vision brushes it off, confident he's stayed far enough under the radar that nobody's looking for him anymore. Famous last words, honestly.
Ultron is locked away but not quiet
The one member of this strange little family everyone's actually afraid of is Ultron (James Spader), confined to a loft and kept isolated from the rest of the household. Vision insists he has it handled, that he understands Ultron in a way the others simply don't.
He settles into his personal movie theater to rewatch some of his restored memories, trying to locate whatever feelings are supposed to go with them, before Dum-E and U, egged on by Ultron, sneak in forbidden footage from Westview. Furious, Vision storms up to confront him, catching Ultron mid-tirade at a food delivery driver while in his full robot form, and orders him to only present as his human avatar from now on.
Vision's reasoning for avoiding the Westview footage is that none of it was real, so it shouldn't matter to understanding who he actually is. Ultron isn't buying it for a second, accusing him of hiding from real emotion by surrounding himself with AIs he can control instead.
What's also interesting and surprising here is how much more fluent Ultron seems in actual human feeling than Vision does. Ultron even admits he's not sure what he'd do if he were ever set free—visit every museum on Earth or burn the whole species down—and warns Vision that he can't keep merely observing life from a distance forever. Eventually, he says, the world starts watching back.
Fiona is shot dead and Vision jumps into action
That warning turns out to be prophetic almost immediately. The next night, Fiona is shockingly shot dead at the bar. Vision fights off the mercenaries responsible with Jarvis talking him through it and chooses to become White Vision to end the fight quickly instead of responding with his usual restraint. Grieving in the aftermath, Edith has to gently steer him out through a skylight before people come.
Outside, we meet Paladin (Todd Stashwick), the mercenary behind the attack, furious with his own snipers over the botched job and the civilian caught in the crossfire. While he's on comms with his handler (Diane Morgan), the actual client behind the bounty hijacks the line using stolen S.W.O.R.D. encryption and tears into him, making it clear that Vision needs to be captured alive.
Back in the Mindspace, Jarvis tries to get Vision to actually sit with his grief over Fiona, but he's deep in denial. Edith offers a read on the situation that the mercenaries weren't the real threat, just hired muscle. Vision pulls Ultron out of the loft to help think through who's really behind this, and Ultron, characteristically blunt, points out that the rest of the household isn't actually there to counsel Vision, just to make him feel listened to.
Ultron pushes him to stop hiding and actually get out into the world, even if it means running for his life, arguing that's at least a form of living. That's when it clicks for Vision that Ultron knew Paladin was already hunting him. He confronts him directly, and Ultron owns it completely, no regret at all, framing the leak as simply accelerating the inevitable and handing Vision some much-needed purpose.
Vision is devastated, admitting he only ever kept Ultron alive because some confused part of him saw him as a father figure. Ultron tells him to just kill him already, like he should have years ago. Instead, Vision strips every form of entertainment out of the loft, judging boredom a far crueler punishment for Ultron than death. I mean, wow!
Paladin's handler finds a name buried in S.W.O.R.D.'s files: Tommy
Elsewhere, Paladin's handler keeps digging and uncovers S.W.O.R.D.'s official cover story for Westview filed away as a training exercise gone wrong. In the process, she stumbles onto records belonging to someone named Tommy!
The show jumps to London, where Tommy Shepherd (Ruaridh Mollica) and his partner, Lisa Molinari (Lauren Morias), are mid-con in a pub. The two of them clearly used to working together, though they disagree on method; Lisa prefers simple, invisible pickpocketing, while Tommy loves the theatrics of a longer grift.
Their playful banter is interrupted when Tommy spots Vision on the news and visibly reacts, getting flashes of memory he can't make sense of. Their mark realizes he's been had and chases them down the street. They get away barely, but Tommy's left shaken and Lisa has to talk him down.
It doesn't last, though. Paladin ambushes them in an alley and takes Tommy, then sends Vision a message letting him know exactly what he's holding, along with old footage of Tommy once testifying to police about memories of Wanda and Vision that shouldn't exist at all.
Verdict
This is a very confident, well-built premiere that had to reintroduce an entire fractured character and set up a whole new mythology around him, and it manages to do that without ever feeling like pure homework.
James Spader is exactly as good as you'd hope, coming back to Ultron after all these years; the mix of cynical wit and philosophical quirk gives the whole episode its best moments. Ruaridh Mollica makes a strong first impression as Tommy, even showing up this late in the hour, and that con sequence with Lisa was very fun and a nice tonal change of pace from everything happening around Vision.
Fiona's death lands hard and fast, which does exactly what it needs to, making it immediately clear nobody around Vision is safe, including people he'd rather pretend he doesn't care about. The Mindspace itself is a terrific piece of world-building, full of small, clever details of Vision's inner life while also bringing back some of the fan-favorite entities we wanted more of.
Overall, "No Strings" is a strong, confident start that earns its place closing out this trilogy, and it leaves me very ready for episode 2.
Episode grade: A
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