What to watch before VisionQuest: only 3 of the 6 titles are essential — and you can skip Doctor Strange
Disney+'s catch-up list for VisionQuest starts with Iron Man in 2008 and runs to eight titles. The show itself needs a fraction of that, and it handles the one movie half the guides still tell you to watch in a single line of dialogue.
VisionQuest premiered on Disney+ on October 13 with two episodes. Paul Bettany is back as Vision, specifically the white, rebuilt Vision who flew off at the end of WandaVision. Terry Matalas, who ran Star Trek: Picard's final season, is the showrunner. The eight episodes arrive on Tuesdays, mostly in pairs: episodes 3 and 4 drop October 20, and the last two come a week apart, with the finale on November 10.
Strip out the deep cuts and the guides keep coming back to the same six MCU titles: Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, WandaVision, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Agatha All Along. Half of them do real work in the new show. The other half the show explains for you.
The three you can't skip
These are the titles VisionQuest builds on directly, with no recap to catch you up:
- Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) — the film where Vision is born, and the only place to meet Ultron. James Spader is back in the role, and Ultron now lives in Vision's head, in a mansion-like Mindspace he shares with Tony Stark's old AIs. The show's central relationship has no history without this movie.
- WandaVision (2021) — the Vision in VisionQuest is the one S.W.O.R.D. rebuilt from the body Thanos left behind, then argued into remembering who he was with a Ship of Theseus debate in the finale. It's also where Wanda's twin sons, Billy and Tommy, first exist, as children she conjured inside the Westview hex.
- Agatha All Along (2024) — the finale, at minimum. Billy, reborn in the body of a teenager named William Kaplan, finds his missing brother's soul and places it into a boy who is drowning. VisionQuest's Tommy Shepherd, played by Ruaridh Mollica, is that boy.
Matalas has said he doesn't see the show as the last chapter of a Wanda trilogy, which is how it's widely been described. He's been more precise about which series it actually follows, and it isn't the most recent one.
"It's definitely more of a sequel to 'WandaVision' in a lot of ways. But it really exists on its own," Matalas told SFX Magazine.
The "on its own" part holds up for anyone willing to accept a talking robot and a bounty hunter on faith. The sequel part is why WandaVision stays non-negotiable.
The three you can skip
The rest of the list is background the show either recaps or simply doesn't need:
- Captain America: Civil War (2016) — Wanda and Vision's relationship starts here, and the show nods to the quiet Edinburgh life they built afterward. You need to know they were in love. WandaVision makes that very clear.
- Avengers: Infinity War (2018) — Vision dies when Thanos pulls the Mind Stone out of his head. That's the whole reason his body ended up with S.W.O.R.D., and WandaVision covers it.
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) — the one most guides still rank as useful, because it's the last time Wanda appears on screen.
Multiverse of Madness ends with Wanda bringing a mountain down on herself to destroy the Darkhold, and Agatha All Along later left room to wonder whether she survived it. VisionQuest settles the question for its own purposes in the first episode, in a conversation with the landlady of the pub where Vision works.
Wanda, Vision says, was "crushed under the weight of a mountain." That's all the new show needs from a two-hour movie.
Wanda doesn't appear in VisionQuest. If you want to see how she got under that mountain, the film is there. If you just want to follow Vision, the line does the job.
Where the longer lists come from
The eight-title Disney+ list leaves out Multiverse of Madness entirely and adds Iron Man, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home instead. Inverse went further, threw in Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The First Avenger, and counted roughly 25 hours of homework before the first episode.
Most of that is there to explain the voices in Vision's head:
- J.A.R.V.I.S. — Tony's original assistant, introduced in Iron Man and the base Vision was built on.
- F.R.I.D.A.Y. — Tony's replacement for J.A.R.V.I.S. from Age of Ultron onward, now played by Orla Brady.
- E.D.I.T.H. — the security system Tony left to Peter Parker in Far From Home, now played by Emily Hampshire.
You need to know they belonged to Tony Stark. The show tells you that much.
What none of the lists include is the one series the show actually borrowed a face from. VisionQuest's J.A.R.V.I.S. finally gets a human avatar, played by James D'Arcy, who spent two seasons of Agent Carter as Edwin Jarvis, the butler Tony named the program after.
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