Review: VisionQuest, “Malware” | Season 1, Episode 4

I’ve been so sold on the marketing that billed VisionQuest as a follow-up to WandaVision that it honestly never occurred to me that the show had ambitions beyond that too. Part of the reason the pacing of the first three episodes felt so fast to me is because they covered almost all the ground I expected the whole show would cover. Now, however, that feels more like a prologue to what VisionQuest actually wanted to be all along. This episode doesn’t drop any of the throughlines the show has established so far. In fact, to some degree it keeps building on them all. Yet it also reorients itself around so many new threads that it almost evolves into a whole new show. VisionQuest is done with its existential family drama era and now it’s onto its serial killing robot one.

It's a shift I found a little jarring, although that might have to do more with my expectations than with anything that actually happens onscreen. This is a stylish, confident series with a fantastic sense of humor thanks to James Spader’s work as Ultron and his great double act chemistry with Paul Bettany. That all continues in this episode so perhaps it’s unfair to say the shift is a massive one. I just wasn’t prepared for detective procedurals, fancy corporate galas, and the ethics of big tech companies to enter the mix in a show that seemed to position itself as the story of a father and son going on the run from a bounty hunter while dealing with their respective identity crises.