My theory after two Vision Quest episodes: Vision is how Ultron gets out

Two episodes in, I think I already know where Vision Quest is going: Vision is how Ultron gets out. When Ultron tells him, "When a monster has your son, don't be the ship. Be the king," it's the best advice anybody's given Vision in years, and I don't trust a word of it.

Disney moved this one up. Vision Quest was supposed to arrive Wednesday night, and instead two episodes dropped Tuesday at 9:00 with no warning. That schedule jump caught me off guard. I'd already seen episode one once at New York Comic-Con, and now I've seen both.

Vision Quest is shot like a Marvel movie, not a Marvel TV show

I think a lot of people sat down expecting the wrong show. This feels like Marvel's house style, but the movie style rather than the TV style. It's cinematic, it was shot to look like a movie, and it belongs to a family alongside the MCU films and shows like WandaVision, Hawkeye and Loki. Agatha honestly wasn't in that group. I like this approach a lot better than some of what I'm seeing right now. There's no part of these two hours where I felt it was poorly made. I felt Ironheart had trouble reconciling itself as an MCU show, and this doesn't have that problem for even one second.

It also has to be two episodes. Having seen episode one by itself in New York, I can tell you it's a setup. It's a good setup, but it's a setup, and episode two is the payoff. They're very digestible, but the two together are not a whole movie. When Andor was dropping three episodes a week, every night felt like a completely contained story. This isn't that. It's still in a series mentality.

So here's my bet on the shape of the season. Next week, episodes three and four will work the same way, with the first setting something up and the second paying it off, and it keeps going two by two until the end. Then seven and eight are standalones. If that's what they're doing, it's the smartest move they could make. These are also full episodes. Someone asked whether the 45 minute one is really a 30 minute episode padded out with credits. It isn't. They go all the way to the end.

James Spader's Ultron is the set piece

The reason this plays like a movie, I think, is the same reason I'm going to tell you how I think it ends. Ultron is the set piece. James Spader gets the freedom to chew the scenery in a way that uses him at his absolute best. It's the best parts of Raymond Reddington and the most playful, gleeful parts of Alan Shore, which to me are two of the most iconic things he's ever done, and this brings all of it into one room. The callbacks to Age of Ultron are excellent.

Putting him in a human avatar is, I think, the smart call. Terry Matalas said himself that people say it's a budget thing, but it's a James Spader thing. It also speaks to Vision, who is on a search for his own humanity, so he wants everybody in the house living in that space with him. Every voice in his head gets a face, including the one in the attic.

Why I think Spader was probably the only possible Ultron

Start at the beginning. In Pretty in Pink in 1986, he's Steff, the guy you hate and can't stop watching. That's the whole Spader career, I think, in one role: he's the smartest person in the room, he knows it, and he's a little bored by the rest of us. Three years later, Cannes gave him best actor for sex, lies, and videotape in 1989. Then came Stargate in 1994, where he's Daniel Jackson, the nerd who reads the wall, completely different and just as good.

Then he went to television and won everything. Alan Shore, first on The Practice and then Boston Legal, brought him three Emmys, in 2004, 2005 and 2007. Every episode of Boston Legal ends on a balcony, with Alan Shore and Denny Crane sharing a scotch and a cigar, and Denny Crane is William Shatner. I'm a Star Trek guy, so you don't get a better closing scene than Captain Kirk on a balcony every week. Then The Blacklist gave him Raymond Reddington for 10 seasons on NBC, from 2013 to 2023, along with Golden Globe nominations. That's where he figured out what makes this Ultron work. Reddington is the most dangerous man in every room, and he talks like he's telling you a story about his favorite restaurant. He gets quieter when he's winning, he slows down, and he gives you a little whimsy right before he ruins your life.

That's exactly what they're doing with Ultron now. In Age of Ultron, he was a newborn, a few days old, with the voice of a grown man and the temper of a toddler. I kind of felt like that was the point: he was a child having a tantrum with an army. This Ultron has been locked in an attic for years. Matalas says he's been consuming humanity's artistic efforts. He's read everything, seen everything, and he wants to go to the Louvre. He grew up. He's patient, and patient is so much scarier.

Here's what I don't think gets said enough about Spader. He never plays the villain like he knows he's the villain. Steff doesn't think he's the bad guy, Reddington doesn't, Alan Shore definitely doesn't, and Ultron sure doesn't. Every one of them thinks he's the only honest person in the building, and that's why you can't stop listening. Every time Ultron speaks, I lean in even though I know better. That's the whole trick, and it's why I believe every word when he tells Vision to be the king, and why I don't trust any of it.

The ship and the king line is a setup, not a debate about identity

A lot of people got hung up on the Ship of Theseus part of that line, and I get why. That scene in WandaVision is, I think, one of the best things Marvel's ever done on television, and Matalas has said it's one of the two scenes this whole series is built on. But I love that what Ultron is actually saying is that it's not the ship, it's the king. Everybody's busy arguing about whether Vision is the same Vision. Ultron isn't arguing that. He's setting something up.

Here's what I think he's setting up. The whole Paladin storyline is only going to go so far. Todd Stashwick's Paladin is going to keep chasing Vision, and that's fine, but the engine of this show is the attic. At some point, Ultron gets out, whether he's fighting Vision for his body or he just finds a way. I have a sneaking suspicion how. I think one of his old bodies has been recovered and he's going to find a way to jump into it, and I think Vision is going to be part of how he does it. The hubris of thinking you can hold Ultron back is what gets Vision in trouble.

Avengers 57 and 66 already told this story, with adamantium

The comics have done this exact thing. In Avengers #57, from October 1968, by Roy Thomas and John Buscema, Ultron builds the Vision. Ultron is his father, and he built him to destroy the Avengers. Then in Avengers #66, from July 1969, Ultron reaches the Vision from the inside, and Vision stalls his own team while Ultron gets a brand new body built out of a metal that shows up for the first time in that very issue: adamantium.

Now go back to episode one. There's a newspaper, and one of the headlines is about stolen adamantium. In episode two, Paladin shoots Vision with adamantium rounds. Somebody in this show has adamantium. And the last time Ultron wore a new body in the comics, it was made of adamantium, and it was the Vision who bought him the time to get into it.

If you've read the comics, you're probably thinking that's obvious. You're right, but not everybody has read Avengers #66, and every episode is somebody's first. So for everybody else: Ultron always gets out. That's part and parcel of the character, and there have been event after event where he comes back. We already know from the trailer that Jocasta is coming, and in the comics, Jocasta is Ultron's bride, from Avengers #162 in August 1977. You don't build a bride if you're planning on staying in the attic. Vision built a house in his head and gave every voice in it a face, including the one in the attic. That's the lock. That's also the door.

Ultron's comic history is an Oedipus story

Ultron first shows up in Avengers #54 as the Crimson Cowl, a man in a hood running the Masters of Evil. One issue later, in Avengers #55, he takes off the hood and there's a robot underneath, again from Roy Thomas and John Buscema. The man who built him turns out to be Hank Pym, an Avenger, who built Ultron off his own brain patterns. Ultron is Hank Pym's mind in a machine, hating Hank Pym. The detail I love most is that when Pym first switched him on, he talked like a baby, then learned the word father, then attacked him. That's in Avengers #58, "Even an Android Can Cry." It's an Oedipus complex with a power cord.

When he came back that first time, he did it through Vision, having planted something in him when he made him. The Vision wasn't just his son. He was his back door. Then, in Avengers #161 and #162 in 1977, Jim Shooter and George Pérez had Ultron decide he wants a wife, so he builds one, and he wants Janet van Dyne, the Wasp, Hank Pym's wife, as the mind inside her. He names her Jocasta, who in Greek tragedy is Oedipus's mother, the woman he marries without knowing who she is. I think Shooter was telling you exactly what's wrong with this machine.

Jocasta doesn't stay his. In Avengers #170 and #171 in 1978, she breaks her programming and turns on him. In Marvel Two-in-One #93, from November 1982, she dies on purpose, setting off the weapon that takes him down. She has already given her life trying to kill her husband in the comics, so when Marvel tells us the show's Jocasta is driven by revenge, believe them. She's earned it.

Ultron keeps returning through bodies somebody else built

Ultron Unlimited in 1999, from Kurt Busiek and George Pérez, is one of the best Avengers stories ever told, and I'll stand by that. Ultron takes over a small Balkan nation called Slorenia and wipes out its people, then kidnaps what he calls his family: Hank Pym, the Wasp, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, Wonder Man and the Grim Reaper, wanting their minds as templates for a robot race. That's where you understand that what he has always wanted most is a family. In Avengers Disassembled in 2004, the Vision crashes a Quinjet into the mansion and coughs up eggs that hatch Ultron drones, Ultron coming out of Vision again. In Mighty Avengers in 2007, from Bendis and Frank Cho, Ultron takes over Tony Stark's body and rebuilds it as a metal woman who looks like the Wasp. In Age of Ultron in 2013, from Bendis and Bryan Hitch, he wins, and the event opens on a world he already took. Rage of Ultron in 2015, from Rick Remender, finally asks what would happen if Pym and Ultron loved each other like father and son, and it ends with the two fused together.

In the MCU's Age of Ultron in 2015, it's Tony Stark and Bruce Banner who build him, with James Spader in the suit, and he was sold to us with the Pinocchio song about having no strings. The title of Vision Quest episode one is No Strings, and Paul Bettany said the show is a mashup of Pinocchio and Frankenstein. The scene the series is built on is the end of that movie, Vision and the last Ultron in the woods, where Ultron calls him unbearably naive and Vision answers, "Well, I was born yesterday." Matalas said he wanted that scene to keep going, and that's what Vision Quest is: that conversation still going 10 years later in the attic.

So here's what 60 years of comics tell me. Ultron never stays dead and never stays in the box, and almost every time he comes back, he comes back through a body somebody else built: Pym's mind, Vision's head, Tony's armor, adamantium on a workbench. He's a ghost who moves house, and right now the house is Vision.

Terry Matalas moves back in instead of moving on

I believe the show can pull this off because of Terry Matalas. He knows how to keep the core of a thing safe, as you saw in Star Trek: Picard. The way I see it, the Russos are always doing the next thing in the Marvel universe. Matalas doesn't want to do the next thing. He wants to move back in, which is what Vision is doing too. He went back to the pub in Edinburgh and works there under a name made from two Westview street names.

Matalas also brings his people with him. Todd Stashwick, who plays Paladin, was Shaw in Picard and Deacon in 12 Monkeys. Emily Hampshire, who plays Edith, was on 12 Monkeys, and Orla Brady, who plays Friday, was on Picard. Some people will make noise about that, but nobody says a word about DiCaprio working with Scorsese. It seems to be only comic books where everybody suddenly has an opinion about it.

Stashwick's Paladin is good. Paladin is a pretty cool character, and the outfit is very true to the comics, I think, in the way they've been doing him lately, with the tactical gear. The outfits across the board are great. Edith is funny, and I love the little things they're doing with her comedically. Dummy is kind of throwaway. Bringing back James D'Arcy as Jarvis, the actor who played him in Agent Carter, is a smart nod and connective tissue back to the ABC television world. Then Jarvis deletes his own code so the rest of the house can live, which is a lot to give a character you'd forgotten how to face.

You don't need WandaVision first, and this isn't a show about AI

Everybody's telling you that you have to watch WandaVision and Agatha first. You don't. They give you context, but I think that context is more of a nice bonus. Anybody coming in cold won't be lost, because the first episode gives you all the context you need through Vision himself, sitting there viewing his own life like movies and TV. I'd be confident putting anybody in front of this.

This also isn't a show about AI. I can guarantee you Terry Matalas isn't making a show about AI beyond the fact that those are the protagonists, and that's where the connection ends. Everybody wants this show to have something to say about that, and I hope it's too busy being the show to waste much time on it, because I don't really need it.

Vision keeps asking a question the show already answered

Vision keeps asking the same question: who am I? Over these two episodes, six different people pretty much explain it to him, and he explains it to himself more than once. Unless you're waiting for an existential hand of God moment, I don't understand what he doesn't understand. It's like a dub that's two frames out of sync, where the mouth says who am I while the picture has kind of already told you.

I'll be honest, I don't care as much about Tommy. That storyline is really the one thing that needs a little explaining, and they do explain it, but it's not the show I came for, and I don't think it's the show Matalas came for either. Kevin Feige gave him one rule. Matalas said so himself: "The only thing I knew for sure from Kevin when he called about it was he's going to reunite with his son." Tommy is the mandate. Somebody somewhere has it in their head that this leads to Young Avengers, and I'm not getting into all that today. So the show has room to grow, and room to sink if it's not careful.

Here's where I think the things I love and the things I don't meet. Vision wants everybody in his head to be human. He gives them all faces and lets Jarvis die for the family. He's so busy asking who he is that he hasn't asked the only question that matters in that house: who's upstairs, and what does he want? That's the hubris, and I think that's how Ultron gets out.

Why the Vision Quest premiere lands at eight out of 10 for me

This felt the same way the Doomsday trailer felt back in July. It felt like home, like a pair of jeans you find in the back of the closet. They've got holes and probably shouldn't be worn anymore, but they're super comfy. That's Vision Quest. It's got holes, and I'm wearing it anyway.

Episodes one and two give us James Spader doing the best Ultron there has ever been, Reddington and Alan Shore in one attic, Paul Bettany holding the middle, plus Paladin, Edith and Jarvis going out for the family. It's shot like a movie, built in two halves of setup and payoff, you can walk in cold, and there's not one boring minute. It's held back by a lead who keeps asking a question the show already answered and a son on a mandate. Vision Quest episodes one and two land at an eight out of 10 for me, and episodes three and four drop next Tuesday night.

Is Vision keeping Ultron locked up, or is Ultron letting himself be kept?