'VisionQuest' is small, strange and about grief. That's why it's the Marvel show worth your time.

The complaint about Marvel television for the past few years has been consistent: too much homework, too many characters, too little reason to care about any of them. VisionQuest, which premiered on Disney+ on October 13, is the rare entry that reviewers describe as the opposite — and the reason it works is that it’s about one person, or rather one synthezoid, and what it means to come back.

Forbes’s Erik Kain, reviewing the two-episode premiere, called it “a surprisingly thoughtful story about love, grief, identity and resurrection,” with Paul Bettany and James Spader both shining. By the time episodes three and four arrived, he was describing them as “brilliant, hilarious, exciting and wildly creative.” Forbes’s Tim Lammers tracked the critical consensus: an early Rotten Tomatoes count of 85% rose to 90%, with 84% from audiences.

Small is the point

The show is the third and final part of a trilogy that started with WandaVision and ran through Agatha All Along — the three series that have consistently been the most interesting things Marvel has put on television. What they share is scale. They are not about saving the world. They’re about one or two people and a feeling, told with enough craft that the superhero machinery becomes a way into the feeling rather than a substitute for it.

VisionQuest appears to follow that pattern: a character who died, came back as something else, and has to work out who he is now. That’s a story a novel could tell. The fact that it’s being told with a red android and a megalomaniac AI voiced by James Spader is the genre doing what it does well — making abstract questions concrete and a little absurd.

The reviews are a trend, not a blip

It’s worth noticing that the score went up after the premiere. That usually means a show is building rather than coasting, and it’s the opposite of the pattern for most recent Marvel series, which tend to open on goodwill and lose it. Forbes’s Paul Tassi, less effusive, places it around the middle of MCU projects by score, which is fair: 90% is very good, not legendary. But the direction of travel matters.

How to watch it

Eight episodes, two already out at premiere, the rest arriving on Tuesdays through the November 10 finale. If you watched WandaVision, you have everything you need. If you didn’t, you can probably still follow it, and you’ll have a better show waiting for you afterwards.

Our take: skip whatever Marvel thing you’ve been putting off and watch this one instead. A studio famous for building a universe has, three times now, made its best work when it remembered to build a person. Here’s hoping the finale remembers too.