James Spader’s Ultron Is Back — And VisionQuest Just Got a Hell of a Lot More Interesting

Marvel finally released the first full trailer for VisionQuest, and there is a lot going on here. White Vision is trying to figure out who the hell he actually is, we’re wandering through what appears to be a massive mansion inside his mind, and J.A.R.V.I.S., F.R.I.D.A.Y., E.D.I.T.H. and several other pieces of Marvel’s artificial-intelligence history have somehow become actual people. And then James Spader walks into the room.

Spader is back as Ultron for the first time since Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Marvel isn’t hiding him behind a metallic face and asking us to be satisfied because we recognize the voice. The trailer gives us the Ultron we remember and James Spader himself, appearing inside Vision’s mind as a human manifestation of the homicidal A.I. that helped create him.

The Vision we’re following isn’t exactly the Vision who died in Avengers: Infinity War. This is White Vision, the reconstructed version introduced in WandaVision and eventually given the original Vision’s memories before disappearing to figure out what any of that actually meant. It looks like he still hasn’t figured it out.

The trailer has Vision questioning whether those memories actually make him the same person. He remembers being an Avenger, remembers the life another Vision lived and carries his name, but there’s a pretty enormous difference between remembering someone’s life and believing it belongs to you. That identity problem appears to be the whole engine behind VisionQuest.

Marvel has turned that internal conflict into something physical, with Vision entering an enormous mansion that appears to exist inside his own mind. The place is populated by human representations of the various A.I. systems that have existed throughout the MCU, turning his damaged memory into an actual place he has to navigate.

James D’Arcy appears as J.A.R.V.I.S., Orla Brady plays F.R.I.D.A.Y., Emily Hampshire is E.D.I.T.H., Henry Lewis is D.U.M.-E and Jonathan Sayer is U. It is exactly the kind of strange idea that made WandaVision work when that show was at its best. Instead of giving Vision a computer screen full of corrupted files and making Paul Bettany stare dramatically at it for six episodes, the series is giving those pieces of his past faces and voices.

Waiting inside that place is the guy responsible for a fairly significant portion of Vision’s existence: Ultron. Spader’s return goes way beyond Marvel finding another familiar face to bring back, because Ultron created the synthetic body that eventually became Vision. Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, J.A.R.V.I.S. and the Mind Stone all played their parts in what followed, but Vision’s origin and Ultron’s are permanently tangled together.

Now Vision is wandering through the architecture of his own mind while the man who essentially represents one of his creators is standing there talking to him. That’s a much better use of Ultron than simply rebuilding a robot and giving the Avengers someone else to punch.

This time we actually get James Spader, and his voice was one of the best things about Age of Ultron. He made the character sarcastic, arrogant, funny and unsettling at the same time. Ultron didn’t sound like another emotionless computer calculating humanity’s odds of survival; he sounded irritated by us.

The movie gave us pieces of that personality, but the giant CGI robot standing in front of it inevitably created some distance between Spader and the audience. VisionQuest gets to remove that distance completely, and seeing Spader standing there as Ultron—with the beard, glasses and that unmistakable delivery—may turn out to be considerably creepier than another eight-foot robot ever could.

The trailer doesn’t abandon the robot, either, and we get the familiar red-eyed Ultron form moving through the footage. Whatever is happening inside Vision’s head has room for both versions of him, leaving the series room to decide whether this is literally Ultron surviving somewhere inside Vision, a representation created from Vision’s memories, or something stranger.

That is one of the questions the series is clearly keeping for later, and it should. I don’t need another trailer explaining the entire damn show before October.

There’s another piece of the WandaVision story coming back into play as well, with Ruaridh Mollica appearing as Thomas Shepherd. That connects VisionQuest directly to the unresolved story of Wanda and Vision’s children, while Agatha All Along brought Billy Maximoff back through Billy Kaplan. In Marvel Comics, Thomas Shepherd becomes Speed.

The new trailer puts Vision and Thomas together, which means this identity crisis isn’t only going to be about who Vision used to be. It may also force him to confront who he was to somebody else: a husband, an Avenger and a father.

Marvel has described VisionQuest as the final part of the trilogy that began with WandaVision and continued through Agatha All Along. Terry Matalas, who ran the final season of Star Trek: Picard, serves as showrunner. That gives this series a bigger job than simply explaining where White Vision flew off to five years ago, because it has to finish a story.

After years of Marvel projects occasionally feeling like advertisements for three other Marvel projects, I like that VisionQuest appears to have a very specific question at its center: what makes Vision Vision? Is it his body, his memories, the people who created him, the people he loved, or something he has to choose for himself?

There’s plenty in this trailer worth talking about, but I keep coming back to Spader. Marvel could have brought Ultron back as another piece of digital MCU continuity: red eyes appear, robot says threatening thing, everybody points at the screen because they recognize him. Instead, they brought back the actor who made Ultron interesting in the first place and put him face-to-face with Paul Bettany.

That’s the version I want, because White Vision wandering around his own screwed-up head while James Spader sits somewhere inside it being James Spader sounds considerably more interesting than the Vision spin-off I thought Marvel was making when this project was first announced. VisionQuest premieres October 14 on Disney+. I was already curious, and Ultron just got me interested.