Review: VisionQuest, “Immolation” | Season 1, Episode 7

There’s something quite meta happening with this season of VisionQuest and I haven’t been able to put my finger on it until this week. On paper, this is a show about the emotions that make us human and the complex impulse to bury them or run from them when they get too hard. This penultimate episode opens with a flashback to 1939, where the grandfather of artificial intelligence sets out to replace the human son he lost with a robot son incapable of love and therefore incapable of pain. Most of the rest of the hour is about Vision learning to reject that impulse in himself and let in the grief that is his love persevering.

Yet, as a show, VisionQuest just isn’t making me feel a whole lot. It’s got stellar visuals, top notch performances, and interesting ideas, but as an experience it’s more cerebral than emotional. “Immolation” sets out to be the sort of big, moving, introspective episode that WandaVision delivered with “Previously On” (a.k.a. the Wanda flashback episode) and Agatha All Along delivered with “Death’s Hand in Mine” and “Maiden Mother Crone” (a.k.a. the Lilia and Agatha flashback episodes). The Client invites Vision and Jo to take spirit quests into their respective subconscious memories to understand who they really are—Vision to find the source code he needs to save Lisa, Jo to learn about her company’s mysterious sixth partner. But though I could mostly track the logic of their respective journeys, I didn’t feel the release the show is clearly aiming for. I’ve been approaching VisionQuest with a lot of optimism that it can reach the heights of its predecessors, but this is the episode where the bloom came off the rose a bit for me.