I Have Seen Things You People Wouldn't be Interested In

I expected the last episode of VisionQuest to be underwhelming yet somehow it fell below my expectations. I remember now that I never even finished watching Iron Heart, it was so bland. I don't know what's wrong with Disney. Agatha All Along wasn't so bad. Andor was great, of course. Why can't they maintain or build on quality when they have it?

One of the chronic problems of the weak Disney+ shows is that episodes often don't seem to flow naturally from one to the next. The previous episode ended with Vision and Jocasta discovering that there's a human creator for Ultron also played by James Spader. This episode begins with Vision and Jocasta already enslaved by him, acting as waiting staff. And then the human James Spader is quickly killed so we can get a brief, movie quality special effects fight between Ultron and Vision, which seems to exist just to meet a quota. Then there's a kind of amusing sitcom parody in which Ultron ends up being the more sympathetic character because he's visually impatient with it.

Paul Bettany must really hate the Vision makeup because he's in it far less than seems reasonable. On WandaVision, he was wearing it whenever he and Wanda were alone together. Now it seems no makeup is the default Vision. It feels really cheap and sad.

The big cameo we get is from Billy, reuniting the two Maximoff brothers. I noticed they borrowed the jittery camera technique from Twin Peaks season three for Tommy's experience in the alternate reality. I appreciated the reference at least but Billy just being a cameo, without any chance of developing the relationship between the two, felt like the standard stunt appearances that we so often get in place of substance on these shows. When are we going to see these two together again? Four years from now? Ten? If they're in the new Avengers movies I can't see much time being spared for them. It's yet another pointless tease, more for the Island of Unfulfilled Characters along with Hulk's son, Thor's daughter, Harry Styles at the end of The Eternals, and probably a whole heap of characters I can't even recall.

Paul Bettany and James Spader both gave good performances on this series. Spader seemed to be amusing himself a lot. I wish they were working with better scripts.

VisionQuest is available on Disney+.