Marvel reanimated a dead robot and called it a big swing

Marvel killed Vision years ago. On camera. It was a whole thing. And this week they dig him back up one more time and ask you to clap. VisionQuest lands on Disney+ Wednesday, Paul Bettany back inside the maroon synthezoid he's been playing since 2015, James Spader back as Ultron, the whole band reassembled for a tour nobody requested. Bettany's out doing press calling it "a big swing" that's "weird and out of left field," which is the exact phrase you reach for when the swing is at a corpse. It's billed as the final chapter of the WandaVision trilogy. A trilogy. For a supporting character who was already dead when the first one started. And forty miles up the 405, Aaron Sorkin opened a sequel to a 2010 movie about a website, recast Mark Zuckerberg with Jeremy Strong because Jesse Eisenberg took one look and declined, and watched it track for a soft open under ten million. The whole town is just digging. Same shovels, different graves.

The Drops

VisionQuest (Disney+). Paul Bettany is back as Vision — a rebooted one this time, hiding out after escaping the people who tried to weaponize him, which is also more or less Bettany's professional relationship with Marvel. Terry Matalas runs it. James Spader returns as Ultron. Bettany says the show is about intergenerational trauma, fathers and sons, the denial of pain, which is a heavy syllabus for a program about a man-shaped kitchen appliance learning to feel. Premieres Wednesday the 14th. I'm not ruling on it, because it isn't out and I don't review trailers. But a Disney+ show about a dead android's buried grief being the good kind of weird — I'd want to see the money first.

The Diplomat, season 4 (Netflix).

Back Thursday the 15th, eight episodes, Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell and Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford all furrowing their brows at each other over some Russian nuclear emergency. We already ruled on this one. West Wing but hornier, an airport paperback with a Netflix budget, and nothing's changed enough to reopen the file. You will not remember a single plot point and you will watch all eight hours anyway. That's not an insult. That's the service it provides, and it provides it well.

Love Is Blind, season 11 (Netflix). Eleven. They filmed this one in Boston, which is the only genuinely new fact about the eleventh season of a show where strangers get engaged through a wall. Five episodes drop the 14th, then it dribbles out weekly through November 4, because God forbid you finish it in one night and get your life back. The retention team has a mortgage. Nick and Vanessa Lachey still hosting, still narrating each pod like they're witnessing the first sunrise.

Oh, and the new Skydance behemoth — the Paramount-Warner thing that closed last week — spent part of this one quietly filing Turner Classic Movies under its film group. The one channel whose entire reason for existing is showing old movies with a little dignity, now a line item inside the conglomerate. Scorsese had to fight to protect that network once. Sharpen it up, Marty.

Pick of the week. Thin week, and I won't lie to you about it. The two headliners don't land until midweek and I haven't seen them, so anybody telling you what to watch Saturday night is guessing. If you need something that already knows what it is, take The Diplomat season 4 when it drops. Not because it's great. Because it won't waste an hour of your life pretending to be art, which this week puts it comfortably ahead of a grieving robot.

Prediction. By this time next year there's a standalone WandaVision streaming hub, a limited series about the toaster Vision used to own, and a fourth Social Network where Jeremy Strong plays an entirely different tech guy. Hollywood ran dry somewhere around 2019 and has been living off exhumation ever since. The graves are the content now, and business is good.