Warning: This article contains spoilers for the VisionQuest finale.
>PROGRAM: VISIONQUEST [FINAL SEQUENCE COMPLETE…]
Marvel Television’s VisionQuest ends with an unlikely — and emotional — family reunion.
All season long, Paul Bettany’s Vision has been grappling with his past and his programming, facing off against his father-figure Ultron (James Spader) and reconnecting with his son Tommy Shepherd (Ruaridh Mollica). The eighth and final episode (streaming now on Disney+) has Vision coming face to face with the mysterious client who’s been haunting his steps all season: Virgil Horton. Played by a flamboyant and mustachioed Spader, Virgil is a wealthy tech entrepreneur and descendant of the inventor Phineas Horton, who built the original Synthetic Man, Jim Hammond. Pieces of Jim’s code live on in Ultron, Vision, and every A.I. that shares their programming, making for a complicated family legacy.
“Terry [Matalas] and I talked a lot of about Virgil, right up until the last minute,” Spader tells Marvel.com. “We knew a couple of things that were crucial, and that was that he should be nothing like what you would expect. He should be the opposite of what your intuition would tell you. He should be as dichotomous as Ultron, just as dangerous as Ultron, just as childlike and mercurial as Ultron, and yet completely different from Ultron. The one thing he’s completely lacking is any sort of gravitas, and Ultron is just oozing gravitas.”
“Virgil’s also not really the final obstacle,” Matalas adds. “He really couldn’t be because the story is about Vision and Ultron and Tommy. So what’s great is you meet this mystery villain, and then Ultron squashes him like a bug and then becomes the real final boss, if you will.”
In the end, Ultron easily dispatches Virgil, and what tips the genocidal android over the edge isn’t his hatred of mankind or his maniacal desire for power. It’s the loss of Jocasta (T’Nia Miller), the fellow A.I. he’d developed feelings for. Ultimately, the finale sets up a showdown between Ultron and Vision, as Vision tries to convince Ultron to reconnect with his humanity — with an assist from Vision’s reunited sons Tommy and Billy (Joe Locke, reprising his role from Agatha All Along).
“Emotion is the catalyst to Ultron becoming the ultimate bad guy again and the battle with his own son,” Spader adds. “How do you get there? It wasn’t through violence but because of emotion and the loss of this person who he’d fallen in love with.”
Of course, this is VisionQuest, so the show couldn’t end without a few final surprises — including a trippy sitcom journey into Ultron’s mind and a wild dance sequence set to Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Below, Matalas unlocks the secrets of the finale, from Spader’s dance skills to the emotional reunion between Vision, Billy, and Tommy.
MARVEL.COM: We’ve gotta start by talking about “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Tell me everything about how that scene came together and why that was the perfect song choice.
TERRY MATALAS: You know, a lot of the music in the show were songs that my father used to play on road trips. There was “Rhinestone Cowboy,” there was John Denver’s “Calypso,” “The Last Farewell” by Roger Whittaker, which ends the show. To channel that father and son energy, I was putting that in.
Also, it’s an unexpected song to have an action scene to. It’s unexpected and a little weird, and I think unexpected and weird is definitely me. Then, it was getting to get Spader to do a little dance to that song with T’Nia. Hopefully the audience will like it because we had fun making it.
MARVEL.COM: What do you remember most about shooting that dance sequence?
TERRY MATALAS: Just how much we were all laughing behind the monitors. Getting Spader to dance was not something we ever expected to do. But at that point, he was having so much fun, and we were like, “Let’s try it and see what happens.” We ended up burning almost half the day just shooting that dance. And T’Nia is actually a wonderful dancer, so filming her as she was being controlled, it was just great.
MARVEL.COM: There’s an amazing sequence in the finale where Vision pulls Ultron into a sitcom world called UltraVision, and it’s a great callback to the fake TV world of WandaVision. Why did you want to incorporate that sitcom element into the finale?
TERRY MATALAS: I think all good endings always touch upon the beginning in some way. Certainly, WandaVision was the beginning of all this. It was also a way to get these characters in a room to talk about their feelings in an unexpected way, which is really what television is all about.
There’s the expected final conflict, which is like Rock’em Sock’em Robots, which we had to deliver. I wanted to give the Marvel popcorn there. But I also wanted the final conflict to be something really unexpected. It hasn’t aired yet, so we’ll see what people think of it.
