When WandaVision debuted on January 15, 2021, it blew people away. Up until that point, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been very successful, but it sometimes had been criticized for playing it safe with somewhat formulaic, “hero’s journey” stories. WandaVision was entirely different. Those first two episodes clearly laid out the idea that each episode would portray Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) through the filter of a different sitcom era, with episode 1 covering the likes the earliest shows including I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show from the 1950s and early 1960s. Episode 2 tapped into the high-concept sitcoms like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie from the mid-1960s.
A week later, episode 3 followed suit with a parody of 1970s sitcoms. And while episode 4 broke the format to explain a bit of what was going on outside of Wanda’s hex, episodes 5, 6, and 7 got back into the inventive sitcom formula with episodes in the style of ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s TV. Then came that eighth episode, which gave Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) a backstory, which was fine, but not as much fun as the sitcom stuff.
Finally there was the finale, which saw a show that had been really creative and interesting devolve into typical MCU fare, with cookie-cutter fight scenes like we’d seen dozens of times in Marvel movies. Given how unusual WandaVision had been up until that point, it was a major letdown.
Fortunately, tonight’s finale for VisionQuest finally did what WandaVision’s finale should have done, even if it was five-and-a-half years too late.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for VisionQuest episode 8.
What happens in the VisionQuest finale?
While VisionQuest is considered the conclusion of the story that began with WandaVision, showrunner Terry Matalas hasn’t delved into any of the sitcom stuff that WandaVision did so well. Instead, he’s been telling a supremely well-crafted sci-fi story about AI (and family) that feels closer to a classic Marvel movie than the form-breaking of WandaVision. The only real mention of sitcoms in the episodes preceding the finale had to do with Ultron (James Spader) harboring a surprising love for the medium. Having been trapped in Vision’s mind for more than a decade since the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ultron has mostly been watching American television in the virtual reality loft/dungeon Vision created for him.
In the series finale, Vision decides to use Ultron’s familiarity with that format to reach him at a pivotal moment. After Ultron’s love, Jocasta (T’Nia Miller), is killed by a human named Virgil Horton (also James Spader), Ultron is freed and immediately starts acting like his old self, which means he again wants to wipe out all of mankind. So Ultron launches a swarm of nanobots to kill everyone in London.
With just eight minutes until the nanobots reach their destination, Vision, with help from E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), crafts a simulation of a typical multi-camera sitcom to trap Ultron in the format and allow him to process his grief over Jocasta. Time is compressed in this simulation, with Vision explaining that it can last centuries with only minutes passing in the real world. No matter how much time it takes, Vision hopes that if he can reach Ultron on an emotional level, he can convince him to spare humanity.
The fake TV show’s name is UltraVision. It’s a typical family sitcom with Vision as the sitcom dad-type figure, E.D.I.T.H. as his daughter, and Ultron as Vision’s grumpy dad in a chair. It’s a really cheesy show with its own cornball catchphrase and a raucous studio audience. E.D.I.T.H. even says “Sitcom entrance!” when she enters the room to enormous cheers.
Vision starts the simulation with one of the most common sitcom tropes, where he says he was supposed to watch E.D.I.T.H.’s pet goldfish, Sparkles, while she was gone, but he forgot and it died. This kind of story was featured on countless sitcoms and it always ended up teaching a lesson about grief. Vision hopes to do the same here, so that he can spark a conversation about Ultron’s grief and begin to process things.
But once E.D.I.T.H. gets home and Vision is fumbling for a way to talk about the fish, Ultron just blurts out, “Sparkles is dead, roll credits,” and the simulation obliges, with the credits appearing on the screen.
Vision is confused. This is his simulation. E.D.I.T.H. explains that Ultron is trying to take over the trap, and he’s succeeding.
From there, Ultron zips through hundreds of episodes of UltraVision, with the seasons flying by at a dizzying pace and a fast-forward montage through it all. He finally stops at episode 500, where Ultron says they need some new castmates. Paladin (Todd Stashwick), Lisa Molinari (Lauren Morais), Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica), D.U.M.-E. (Henry Lewis), and U (Jonathan Sayer) come in, all under Ultron’s control. E.D.I.T.H. then says that Ultron has killed the fake studio audience.
The whole sequence is bonkers. It reminded me of the way certain sitcoms in the past have ironically roasted their own medium. For example, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show from the 1950s was breaking sitcom rules just as they were being written, with characters breaking the fourth wall and showing off that they were on a set. It’s Garry Shandling’s Show from the late 1980s also comes to mind, where the comedian was poking fun of the same cheesy sitcom tropes WandaVision and UltraVision do, with a rowdy studio audience, a self-aware lead and meta commentary on the whole format. The thing that it reminded me of the most, however, was Too Many Cooks, the viral Adult Swim short by Casper Kelly that began as a seemingly never-ending sitcom introduction sequence and devolved into a meta horror slasher that transcended a dozen different TV genres.
While the UltraVision sequence of VisionQuest wasn’t quite as absurdist — or gory — as Too Many Cooks, it was still a very meta deconstruction of the sitcom genre. And while it was a welcome aberration in VisionQuest, it’s the kind of thing WandaVision needed to do to save itself. Rather than abandon all of its originality in that final episode, WandaVision should have gone haywire through the sitcom genre, tearing down what the previous episodes had built up. Instead we got paint-by-number superhero stuff that took more than half a decade to make up for. Thankfully, VisionQuest is here to give us the ending we deserve.