At the beginning of VisionQuest, I was concerned that it would be hard to relate to any of these characters, since all of the AIs seemed pretty flat and wholly defined by their simple characteristics and motivations. That meant that Thomas was going to have to carry all of the emotional weight of the story, and since even his initial narrative beats were pretty straightforward (or, you know, as straightforward as “my dad is a copy of a fake dad who was a copy of a dead robot and he doesn’t love me enough” can be), it seemed like the whole show would just be little more than flat, occasionally interesting spectacle. But I really shouldn’t have doubted Paul Bettany.
The gradual emotional breakdown he’s been playing as Vision throughout this series finally came together in last week’s episode, and this week he finally got to play a more pure and self-assured version of Vision with thoughts and doubts and desires that all felt more or less genuine. I don’t know if anyone else in the whole series lived up to that, even the actual human characters (maybe especially the actual human characters, since it was kind of silly how often Paladin was just kind of hanging around dumbstruck in the last few episodes), but hey, it’s called VisionQuest. He’s the guy the show is about.
As for this finale, it leaned into what VisionQuest has been mostly good at it, which is making characters confront their emotions through layers and layers of comic book wackiness, and it was pretty effective at it. It started with Vision and Jocasta waking up in the mansion of Human Ultron, a.k.a. The Client, who first appeared in his full John Hodgman-esque physical form at the end of the previous episode. He is eventually revealed to be Virgil Horton, the grandson of Phineas Horton, the inventor of the artificial mind that all the other synthezoids are based on.
He’s the real guy that Ultron’s human model was based off of, but he has no patience for his genocidal progeny: Ultron is stuck in a little hard drive that looks like a miniature version of HARDAC from Batman: The Animated Series, and Virgil even questions where Tony Stark and Bruce Banner came up with his name (“Those boys played with too many GoBots or something,” he says, which is obviously a vicious insult since GoBots were stupid and were rightfully defeated by a vastly superior line of robot toys from the ‘80s).
From his various supervillain monologues, we find out that Phineas Horton’s daughter died penniless and alone with nothing but a notebook full of her father’s mad scribbling. She left that to her son, Virgil, who deciphered that mad scribbling and used it to develop true artificial intelligence with the help of his girlfriend, Josephine Carrington. When she got sick, he sold their work to Stark Industries so he could buy back his father’s old mansion and try to restore his family’s disgraced legacy. (The tech was then used to develop J.A.R.V.I.S., which led to Ultron, which led to Vision, yadda yadda.)
Later, Virgil took a job at S.W.O.R.D. and was in charge of building White Vision from original Vision’s corpse, and he took the opportunity to steal spare parts and use them to build Jocasta. Unfortunately, she was super-powerful and scary, so he erased himself from her mind until he could enact his true master plan: Put his brain in the Vision body and then use Jo’s nanodrones to take over the human race, then the two of them could rule the world as immortal gods.
Meanwhile, Paladin survived his truck getting blown up because E.D.I.T.H. warned him, and though he wants to run away, she convinces him to help save Vision. After all, he has the ability to change his programming, so to speak, and if he doesn’t learn and grow from his experiences, then he’s just obsolete. So he decides to help. Tommy and Lisa are still watching clips from the WandaVision reality, and he figures that, if he’s still alive, then his brother Billy must be out there somewhere as well. He allows himself to be submerged in a bathtub, which somehow sends him to a dream reality where he can communicate with Billy, who we know from Agatha All Along. He’d love to help and is happy to see Tommy and find out that he’s Scottish now, but—prompted by a suggestion from an unseen person with an unheard voice (Agatha’s ghost!)—he’s bad at portals and can’t get to the UK from New Jersey in time. Oh well!
So Tommy and Lisa (who has embraced her robot powers) show up to help Paladin, and they all raid Virgil’s mansion. Superhuman speed has now been shown many, many times in superhero movies and TV shows, but VisionQuest surprisingly came up with a fun new gag for it: Tommy goes so fast that nobody can see him, until Vision speeds up his processors to a high enough level that time slows down, at which point it’s revealed that he’s just kind of limply jogging and trying not to lose his breath. It’s funny, and a nice subversion of super-speed expectations, and it remains funny the longer the sequence—in which he and Vision, and later Jocasta (who renounces the evil scheme), discuss the best way to quickly take down Virgil and his goons—goes on.
They successfully do that and the good guys win, but the Virgil uses one of his fancy anti-robot guns to blow a few holes in Jocasta’s chest. As she collapses, she grabs the hard drive that Ultron is in and throws it at the pod containing her nanodrones. Ultron’s mind is then absorbed by the drones (it’s never explained, but that seems like how it would work, right?) and he’s able to use the cloud of tiny robots to make himself a new physical body. He promptly squeezes Virgil to death in a pretty gnarly death scene, and then Jocasta dies in his arms.
Furious with grief, Ultron declares that all humans want is death and destruction, so he’ll give it to them by releasing millions of drones and murdering every single person in London. Vision and Ultron fight, with Ultron pretty easily getting the upper hand since he can now turn into an invincible cloud of nanomachines. Vision figures that even if they could destroy Ultron’s intelligence, the robots are still programmed to attack, so their only hope is to convince him to call it off. As Tommy points out, he’s become trapped in his grief, just like Wanda was.
The next sequence is the big standout from this finale, other than the thing we’ll get to later, and it is a nice way to tie up the trilogy’s theme of using pop culture to understand emotional trauma. Vision brings Ultron back into his head and creates a new simulated reality, this time of a spin-off called UltraVision. There’s a funny theme song and funny opening credits (“Based on characters created by Anthony Stark and Bruce Banner” is cute), and Ultron quickly figures out that Vision’s plan is to force him to recognize how evil his idea is by running him through sitcom-friendly moral lessons.
Bettany plays this part really well, laying on the sitcom ham while Spader’s Ultron just seems furiously annoyed, and then the tables start to turn and Spader starts having more wicked fun while Bettany becomes more and more dejected. Ultron takes over the simulation and we get spookier, meaner opening credits that fly through hundreds of episodes (and a ton of lovingly terrible TV show title puns). With some nudging from F.R.I.D.A.Y., Vision finally just has a regular conversation with Ultron about grief, offering a spin on the iconic scene from WandaVision in which they agree that, no, grief isn’t nice. It’s awful. “Grief isn’t love, it’s fear,” says Ultron, and Vision agrees. “Fear that, without them, you’re no one.”
Ultron throws out “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts” and reminds Vision that “the other you said that” (see: Avengers: Age Of Ultron). Vision says no, he was the one who said that (because, as we saw last week, he has embraced his various lives), and he said it because he didn’t want Ultron to think he was dying alone. “But you weren’t then and you’re not now.”
And therein lies the trick: Vision is dying, with his core being overloaded by the complex simulation, but Ultron is also dying. Vision piggybacked on the drones in order to orchestrate their chance to have this conversation, and regardless of whether or not Ultron kills everyone in London, they’re both going to die. With Spader seeming utterly broken and very sad, Ultron concedes defeat and destroys the drones, killing himself and Vision in the process.
But who’s that trying to help Tommy resuscitate Vision back in the real world? It’s Billy! He figured out portals! (No cameo from Agatha, though.) With their powers combined, they jumpstart Vision’s power core and he tearfully embraces both of his sons. It’s reasonably powerful, as far as reunions between magical sons and their sort-of dad go, if only because Bettany is putting in great work now that he’s playing a more fleshed-out character again (so to speak).
Some time later, Lisa and E.D.I.T.H. are working with Paladin, who now plans to get money doing nice(r) things, and they’re giving Tommy a lift in their jet so he can visit Billy.mVision is in the process of moving everyone out of his mind mansion, but before he can close the door for the last time, he hears the phone ring. It’s Ultron, obviously, who survived by saving some of the drones. Vision knew and didn’t go after him, because he wanted to give Ultron a second chance, which Ultron says he’ll use to visit museums and see art… and then maybe kill people and burn everything, depending on how he feels. “You be good, Ultron,” says Vision. It’s cute, it’s reasonably sweet, and everyone leaves happy… until the two post-credits stingers.
In the first one, we see Ultron (in James Spader human form, but fully shaven) holding a memory stick thing with Jocasta’s name on it. Straightforward, whatever. Who cares. In the second one, we see Wanda’s death at the end of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, but now there’s an added scene. After the mountain collapses and crushes her, Doctor Doom lifts the mountain up and brings Wanda back to life—seemingly undoing the end of Multiverse Of Madness and Wanda’s sacrifice.
I’m already seeing chatter on the internet that this is bad and stupid (on the internet? No!), but I think I dig it. A thing from the MCU TV shows is actually going to tie back into the movies, and even if Vis and Billy and Tommy are never seen again, there is some real continuity here that makes the MCU feel a little more full than it has in the past. Just look at Daredevil: Born Again, in which the mayor of New York is evil and outlaws all vigilantes, none of which is referenced at all in Spider-Man: Brand New Day even though the Punisher (a big part of Born Again’s first season) was there.
Born Again felt like a dead end for the MCU, but VisionQuest doesn’t. Does this stinger undo some emotional weight or render some storylines pointless? Maybe, but that’s what Marvel stingers do. That’s why they’re fun. They leave you excited to see where things go next, and thanks to this stinger, we have some idea of where things are going next: Wanda is back for Avengers: Doomsday, and she’s working with Doctor Doom. Are we so jaded or are our standards so high that we can’t be a little excited about that?
Stray observations
- -This is already a long review, so I’ll spare us all too many stray observations. I will say it’s nice to do one of these on a night when there isn’t big national news happening, though I haven’t checked in a few hours.
- -Here’s an incomplete list of UltraVision episode titles: Countdown To Human Massacre, Who’s The Boss (Of Ultron)?, Everybody Loves Vision, Home Screen Improvement, 3rd Data Port From The Sun, Edith The Teenage AI, M(AI)S*H, The Bot-Y Bunch, It’s Always Sunny In The Mindspace, How I Met Your Creator, Malware In The Middle, Parts And Recreation, Two And A Half Synths, Sherwood The Computer Mouse, Resistance Is Funny, The Late Hour, Edith Meets Her Variants, Turkey Bots Can Fly, Only Murders In The Mindspace, Call Me By your Username, Edith Gets An F, Edith’s First Kiss, Edith Makes A Unicorn, Ultron Does A Murder, Ultron Saves Christmas, Vision Gets The Flu, Vision Crashes The Car, Vision Goes To Jail, Vision’s Big Bake Sale, Terabyte Nova, The Gang Beats The Turing Test, Ultron Keeps Doing Murder, The Golden Gigabytes, La Bot Nikita, Synth And The City, AI Confidential, While You Were Synthing, MockingJPG, VeePN, A Glitch In Time, My Cousin Vision, Vision Bought The Render Farm, Love’s Labor Packet Loss, Varsity Bytes, and Long Live The King.
- -I think some of those are clever, but I also feel like everyone will get mad at me if I say which ones I like. I’ve been around you commenters a very, very long time.
- -The fan theory that one of the three “Latverian Witches” shown at Comic-Con would end up being Wanda was definitely on the money, huh? The other two are probably Sophie and… Clea? Or maybe they’re all Scarlet Witch variants?
- -Thanks for joining me on this VisionQuest journey, folks! My grade for the whole season: B+
Keep scrolling for more great stories.