Marvel Studios and Disney+ are about to debut their newest MCU series, VisionQuest, which seems like a good time to look back at Vision’s quest so far.
In the new series, which is described as the conclusion of a trilogy that also includes WandaVision and Agatha All Along, Vision is spending time inside a virtual world, where he is in contact with AI personas we’ve met before in the MCU, most notably the dreaded Ultron. And at the same time, in the real world, Vision comes into contact with a teenager who’s the reincarnation of one of his sons, Tommy.
It’s been a wild journey for the Vision and those he’s closest to, filled with birth, death, rebirth, and sitcom recreations. So let’s look back at the story so far for Vision, Ultron, Tommy and other VisionQuest characters - and potential characters.
You can watch the full video above, or read the full story below... or just jump to the parts you're most interested in!
In the Beginning, There Was JARVIS
JARVIS was a powerful AI system created by Tony Stark to assist him in his work. The persona for the witty, British accented JARVIS was modeled after Edwin Jarvis, who served as the butler to Tony’s father, Howard Stark, for decades, clearly making an impact on young Tony in the process.
After Tony became Iron Man, JARVIS was a crucial part of testing and controlling the many iterations of the Iron Man suit. JARVIS would eventually also run Tony’s Iron Legion robotic army and be of service to the Avengers at large after Tony helped found that team.
And Then Came Ultron
Tony and his fellow Avenger Bruce Banner began to develop the idea for Ultron, intended as an incredibly advanced AI system that could combine with the Iron Legion to form a formidable global peacekeeping force, and believed the complex neural network found within the scepter once wielded by Loki could be the key to Ultron’s creation. Upon awakening though, Ultron immediately had his own ideas on how to proceed, believing humanity was their own worst enemy and should be destroyed. Ultron seemingly destroyed JARVIS to stop him from hindering his plans, before inhabiting the first of many robot forms.
Ultron would recruit superpowered twins Wanda and Pietro Maximoff to help him, who already had a vendetta against Tony Stark because their parents were killed by a Stark-built missile. But even as Ultron was putting his consciousness into ever more powerful robotic bodies, he wanted something more permanent. He used the object that had actually been powering Loki’s scepter the entire time, the Infinity Stone known as the Mind Stone, as a crucial element to power a new synthetic body that utilized the nearly indestructible, Wakandan-honed substance known as Vibranium.
The Birth of Vision
The Avengers managed to capture Ultron’s intended new body before he could finish uploading his consciousness to it, assisted by Wanda and Pietro, who had come to realize their new pal’s genocidal intent. Tony discovered JARVIS had in fact survived, hiding from Ultron while working to stop him from gaining control of nuclear weapons systems. Tony decided to reconfigure JARVIS’ matrix and place it within the very body Ultron wanted for himself, which Thor ended up giving the final power boost to, creating an android, or Synthezoid to use the proper Marvel vernacular, who came to be known as the Vision. And while he retained JARVIS’ speaking voice, and desire to protect humanity, he considered himself as something new entirely.
Along with Wanda and Pietro, Vision teamed with the Avengers to face off with Ultron in Wanda and Pietro’s home country of Sokovia. His formidable abilities, including super strength, flight, intangibility, and a beam he could shoot from the Mind Stone, all helped him make an impact, as did the fact that he’s one of the very few beings who could actually lift Thor’s hammer. (Though whether this is because he is a living being deemed worthy or an artificial being outside of the parameters of the hammer’s enchantment remains up for debate.)
After all of Ultron’s robot sentries were destroyed, Vision then faced his robotic “father” of sorts, stopping Ultron from escaping by destroying his final body.
Wanda and Vision
With several of the original Avengers departing at this point, Vision was then recruited for a new incarnation of the team, alongside Captain America, Black Widow, War Machine, the Falcon, and Wanda - the latter of whom had just lost Pietro in the fight against Ultron. In their time together as Avengers, an unlikely but palatable spark between Wanda and Vision grew, as he helped her process her brother’s death, complete with one hell of a great observation: “What is grief if not love enduring?”
After Wanda accidentally caused the death of innocents in the midst of a mission, the announcement that the United Nations were planning to ratify the Sokovia Accords caused a huge rift within the Avengers, who split over those who sided with the Accords’ intention of an outside group having oversight over the team vs. those who worried it could hinder them or be used for nefarious purposes. While Wanda was, like Steve Rogers, ultimately firmly against the Accords, Vision backed Tony Stark’s support for them, believing that the existence of the Avengers and superheroes in general were causing new, more dangerous threats to rise against them.
While Vision fought with Iron Man’s forces, Wanda ended up joining Captain America’s rogue group. Attempts to not actually cause lasting harm to those who were mostly friends and allies on the other side failed though, with Vision rushing to a wounded Wanda’s side only to inadvertently badly injure War Machine, who was permanently disabled as a result.
After Cap’s group, Wanda included, went on the run as fugitives, Vision and Wanda couldn’t resist their strong connection, periodically sneaking away for what turned into a romantic relationship, during which they lived as normal a life as they could, as he masked his true form to the public.
Thanos and the Death of Vision
But their peace was interrupted by Thanos and his forces, who were now on the war path in an attempt to gather every Infinity Stone, including the one that sat within Vision’s forehead.
As attempts to remove the Stone from him while keeping him alive ran out of time, and realizing the cataclysmic consequences if Thanos were to succeed in getting all the Stones, Vision asked Wanda to destroy the Mind Stone, despite knowing that it would kill him.
Though in anguish over it, she agreed and took his life, only for Thanos to make an awful situation much worse. He used the Time Stone to reverse the last few moments, bringing Vision back to life just so he could tear the Mind Stone from his head, killing Vision once again in front of a distraught Wanda.
Thanos then used the combined Infinity Stones to complete his plan to eliminate half of all life in the universe, with Wanda among those killed by the dreaded snap. Five years later, the remaining Avengers managed to reassemble the Stones and bring back everyone who the snap had killed, including a vengeful Wanda, but that didn’t help the Vision, who’d been killed in a different manner.
WandaVision
After Thanos’ defeat, Wanda, who had returned to life having skipped over those five years, and still feeling the raw loss of Vision, discovered his body had been dismantled and analyzed by the organization SWORD, who had tried to resurrect him without success.
Overwhelmed with grief, the increasingly powerful Wanda – whose natural affinity for magic had been amplified by Hydra’s experiments on her – retreated into an idyllic world of her own creation, conjuring a massive magical hex that transformed the New Jersey suburb of Westview. Using the American sitcoms she grew up watching as inspiration, she put all of Westview’s residents into an ever-evolving TV scenario, where she lived as the newly married wife of her great love, the Vision - who was in fact a replica created by Wanda herself.
Tommy and Billy
Going even further, Wanda used her magic to cause herself to get pregnant and rapidly give birth to twin sons for her and Vision, Tommy and Billy, who continued to age years in a moment. However, the version of Vision she created was so true to the original that he began to realize something was wrong with Westview and its entranced populace. Eventually, despite Wanda continually resetting things to try and keep him oblivious, he was horrified to discover the dark nature of what Wanda had done, even as it also became clear that Vision and the twins could not physically exist outside the hex they were a part of.
The White Vision
With the government aware of the bizarre situation inside Westview, SWORD sent a weapon to kill Wanda in the form of the original Vision, rebuilt and finally reactivated thanks to SWORD using Wanda’s own magic to do so. Crucially, he was blocked off from his memories and the attached emotions of all he had experienced, including his love of Wanda, acting cold and genuinely robotic in a way he never had before.
The hex-created Vision leapt to Wanda’s defense, with the two Visions initially having a furious fight. However, the Hex Vision was finally able to reason with the original Vision, convincing him to let him unlock the memories of the life he’d forgotten as an Avenger and his time with Wanda.
Overwhelmed, he flew off to parts unknown… and his own series we’re finally about to get five years later!
Rise of the Scarlet Witch
Meanwhile, in the midst of a confrontation with the centuries old witch Agatha Harkness, who was attempting to take Wanda’s powers for herself, Wanda unlocked her full potential as the long prophesied Scarlet Witch, said to have a mastery of chaos magic above all others. After defeating Agatha, she finally decided to free the town from her thrall, even though ending the hex also meant the end of the lives she’d created inside it that she loved so much, the replica Vision and Tommy and Billy. But the replica Vision, glad she was doing the right thing, and recalling all the incarnations of both Jarvis and the Vision so far, told her he felt that somehow they’d be reunited.
However, in the aftermath of yet another massive loss, Wanda proved unable to accept the absence of her children. Her ensuing attempt to steal counterparts of Tommy and Billy from a powerless version of herself in another part of the multiverse would ultimately lead to more regret and to Wanda sacrificing herself in order to destroy the source of the dark magic she had used.
Agatha Harkness and Billy
But what Wanda didn’t realize was that her Tommy and Billy actually still existed, because as it turned out, as the hex fell, Billy – who’d inherited both his mother’s telepathy and magical abilities – was able to pull his and his brother’s souls from their bodies. Billy sent his own soul into the body of a 13 year old boy who was simultaneously dying in a car crash.
Now living that boy’s life, as William Kaplan, a confused Billy couldn’t recall his real history, but investigating the events of the Westview anomaly, gradually came to realize who he was in the years that followed.
Billy was determined to find Tommy, and with the help of an unlikely ally, in the form of Agatha Harkness, he was able to pinpoint Tommy’s still adrift soul and place it into the body of an ostracized boy who had just drowned thanks to a cruel prank, though Billy couldn’t perceive the specifics on where this took place.
When Death herself came to claim Billy, whose resurrection had defied her will, Agatha – having come to truly care for Billy – sacrificed herself instead. However, resisting being pulled into the afterlife, Agatha continued on as a ghost, now accompanying Billy on the mission that mattered most to him.
Next Up: VisionQuest
Will Billy and Agatha be successful anytime soon? That remains to be seen, as they haven’t been announced as being in VisionQuest, but considering Tommy is definitely in that show, it certainly seems possible we might get an appearance.
Regardless, we’ll find out what exactly both Billy’s brother, Tommy, and their father, The Vision, have been up to when VisionQuest debuts on Disney+.