Ultron wanted humanity extinct in 2015, and now he gives VisionQuest's best parenting advice
Marvel's newest life coach has a body count and a grudge against the human race. Two episodes in, viewers would rather he kept the job.
The first two episodes of VisionQuest landed on Disney+ on 14 October 2026, and within hours the r/marvelstudios discussion thread had picked its favourite character. Not Paul Bettany's Vision, and not the teenager he spends the premiere trying to keep alive. It's Ultron, played again by James Spader, eleven years after Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) ended with him lifting a city into the sky to wipe out the human race.
He has had a career change. In VisionQuest, Ultron is the voice in Vision's head, and the main thing he does with it is tell Vision how to be a father.
The voice in Vision's head
The official synopsis sets it up plainly. Vision is in hiding after escaping the people who wanted to weaponise him, and he consults the AI personas embedded in his programming: JARVIS, FRIDAY, EDITH and Ultron. A bounty on his head forces him to go on the run with Thomas Shepard (Ruaridh Mollica), a teenager who may be Vision's reincarnated son. Vision has to work out who the boy really is while resisting Ultron's influence.
Spader explained where his character has been all this time:
"He's been in prison, where he's had access to the internet, television, history, and he's just been consuming."
— James Spader, in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes
So the prison is Vision's mind, and the inmate has spent a decade bingeing the telly. It shows. By episode 2, Vision keeps insisting that Tommy isn't his son but the other Vision's, the one who raised the twins with Wanda in WandaVision. Ultron, the robot who built Vision's body in the first place, has no patience for the Ship of Theseus philosophy. His advice boils down to: stop debating your identity and go and get the boy. Collider's recap put it in its headline: don't be the ship, be the king.
Read more: Vision has been an AI since 2015 — only now are critics holding it against VisionQuest
What viewers took away
The premiere thread reads less like a review section and more like a fan club for the villain:
- The advice: one of the most upvoted comments quotes Ultron's speech and asks: "Did we just catch Ultron giving genuinely solid advice?!"
- The worry: the same viewer expects a betrayal down the road and admits to hoping "Ultron could just be this mentor figure he's presenting himself as".
- The casting: "James Spader is fantastic as usual," wrote another.
- The short version: one of the top comments is just the word "ULTRON" followed by a word we can't print before the watershed.
- The guilt trip: "It is a sad realization that no one has looked for vision."
Fair enough. Vision was last seen in WandaVision in 2021, and viewers noticed that in five years nobody came looking. The only one who stuck around was the one locked inside him.
Bettany has called Spader's performance "delicious" and said he is "so funny in this". Tommy gets a protector. Vision gets a father figure who used to be the Avengers' biggest problem.
What comes next
VisionQuest runs for eight episodes, with episodes 3 and 4 arriving on 21 October and the finale on 11 November. The synopsis already warns that Vision has to resist Ultron's influence, so viewers hoping the mentor act is real are probably in for a rough month.
The most sensible dad on Disney+ this week once tried to end the human race.
Still, Ultron has had eleven years of television to learn how good fathers behave. The trouble is that he has also watched every film where the kindly mentor turns out to be the villain.
Read more: Jeremy Renner isn't in Avengers: Doomsday and already knows who to blame when the Avengers lose