VisionQuest Special Edition: Goodbye to all that

What is Doomsday, if not Endgame persevering (and everything in between being wiped from continuity)?

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So MCU TV ends as it began: with a mini-series about the adventures of those kooky Maximoffs. There’ve been three of them now: the inaugural event, WandaVision; the extraordinary sequel, Agatha All Along; and starting this week, the “conclusion of the trilogy,” VisionQuest. Gross title, btw.

And of course in and around this trio of stories about Wanda Maximoff’s reality-altering grief over the death of Vision in the third Avengers movie — grief which begat two (?) additional versions of Vision along with two (?) incarnations apiece of the witch and the robot’s magically-invented children (don’t ask), Tommy and Billy; and then of course, Wanda’s death(?)-by-mountain — there have been all the other television projects in the Disney+ era of the MCU, which (off the top of my head) are Loki, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, What If…?, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, Secret Invasion, She Hulk: Attorney At Law, Werewolf by Night, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, Echo, Daredevil Born Again, Ironheart, Wonder Man, and The Punisher: One Last Kill. The fact that even I, reader, cannot say without Wikipediaing whether I captured ’em all in that list tells you all you need to know: woof, it’s a lot.

Caveat a): There were also some out-of-continuity or next-to-continuity animated shows in there, like a Spider-Man show and X-Men ’97 and Eyes of Wakanda. I watched some of them.

Caveat b): the Disney+ MCU TV era is obviously not ending, being as that (after Avengers: Doomsday comes out this Christmas) there are at least two more future TV projects and a few animated shows that we know about, still coming: a final season of Daredevil, which repatriates all of the Defenders into the MCU proper; more Marvel Zombies stuff; and something called Zodiac.

But it sure feels like VisionQuest arrives promptly in time to give us, appropriately enough, the sound of an old CRT television turning off: that delicious snap-hissss as the power goes out of the thing, and all the electrons go back to doing whatever it is electrons used to do, when we weren’t actively using them to make funny pictures in our living rooms.

A lot of folks would argue, with varying degrees of fairness, that the power went out of the thing a long time ago; and again, if even I find it laborious to call up any sense memory of half the series in Phases IV, V, and VI, I also think the baby was long since tossed with the bathwater on the premise of Marvel doing television at all: there were several great shows in here, with most of the rest falling comfortably between “watchably entertaining” and “unevenly produced.” Only a couple of them were actually bad.

But if the recent theatrical release of It’s Avengers Endgame But With a Bunch of Mid-Credit Scenes Added told us anything, it’s that Marvel’s take on the many disasters of the Multiverse Saga — only a handful of which are actually within the company’s scope of control, on which a reminder in a moment — is basically “forget everything (except maybe Spider-Man: Brand New Day), and just pretend we’re back in 2019.”

Regarding that scope of control: 2019 was before the pandemic, before the Streaming Wars, before the strikes, before Chadwick Boseman died, before the CHUDs learned how to review-bomb Brie Larson movies, before Jonathan Majors was arrested, before supremacist “conservatism” fully overthrew the United States (though it was already well on its way), none of which I think we can tacitly call “Marvel’s fault,” except in the usual ways, i.e. re: Hollywood being a laundering machine for American cultural propaganda, which is its own form of supremacy, and for which — even given all of Marvel’s dominance in the 2010s — I don’t think we can fairly say is something Marvel “did” any more than merely holding it all up, like every other movie studio has done since time immemorial.