‘VisionQuest’ Finale: James Spader on That Dance Scene & Why Paul Bettany Still Loves Playing Vision

VisionQuest has come to an end. But for many of the Marvel characters, this finale was like a new beginning. (And yes, even for a certain formerly-dead witch, according to that post-credits scene.) Warning: Spoilers for VisionQuest‘s Season 1 finale, “Forever,” ahead!

At the start of the eighth and final episode, Vision (Paul Bettany) and Jocasta (T’Nia Miller) wake up inside a home, serving dinner. As they shift around the table filling glasses, it’s the most robotic the AIs have appeared all season. Viewers are quickly introduced to Virgil Horton (James Spader), the series’ big bad and the inspiration behind Ultron (though don’t ask him about that name). Virgil has brought them there to erase Vision and upload himself into his body, so he and his wife Jo — news to her! — can live for the next few centuries, controlling humankind. Too bad for him, Jo isn’t on board with that plan.

Antics ensue, with speedster Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) and, eventually, brother Billy (Joe Locke, reprising his Agatha All Along role), coming to Vision’s rescue. “My boys,” Vision says, as he embraces his sons in a tearful moment.

“I thought it was incredibly important [that the show brought back Billy],” Bettany tells TV Insider in the video interview above. “So much of the show is about ‘family is forever,’ we keep mentioning it, and where the source of [Vision’s] power is actually coming from. I feel lucky enough to say that this is actually true of me in my life, that my power, my strength, absolutely comes from my relationship with my family.”

Courtesy of Marvel

And Bettany’s not backing down from playing Vision anytime soon. “I didn’t understand what Vision meant to people until later, when I was meeting fans, and fans were coming up to me and I suddenly realized that the person I am making Vision for is me when I was young, and I was the bullied kid and the kid that felt like an outsider and didn’t know how to fit in and wondered whether they were going to find a place to fit into the world,” he says. “That is who Vision is for. As long as there are fun and interesting stories to tell about Vision, and as long as I’ve still got my knees, I’ll be playing Vision.”

Spader, too, would return to Ultron, he says. “Yes, absolutely,” The Blacklist vet tells us, when asked. “You couldn’t have a broader landscape, it’s almost an indulgent landscape.”

What’s really indulgent though, was Virgil’s dance scene in the finale. “That was really fun,” admits Spader. “Terry was very surprised because he, for two days prior to shooting that, was working himself up to approaching me about how that was going to play out. And the day before we were going to shoot it, he said, ‘You know, I really think you have an opportunity,’ and then he started to get into all of this sort of bulls**t about internet memes and things like that, knowing full well that none of those things would land with me at all.”

“He’d been very, very careful with picking his words and was incredibly respectful,” Spader continues. “I listened to all of it, and then I said, ‘You do know that that’s in the script, right?’ It says in the script that he puts on the record, and then, in the stage directions, starts to move to the music….so I’d already started to think about what to do as a dance. So I said, ‘Well, I was thinking of something sort of like this,’ and then, I started to do some of my signature moves, and then Terry said, ‘We’re going to be fine. We’re going to be just fine.’”

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And they were. Even ending with Ultron ultimately free — to explore the world, and all the art museums he’d like — was a calculated risk, notes the showrunner. “I always knew that was the last scene,” Matalas tells us of Ultron calling Vision. “[Ultron], back out in the world, having just gone through this experience, still uncertain about humans, but has had connection for the first time….the idea of Ultron inheriting an empire — we have a lot of ideas about where that could go.”

“Sounds like a beginning, doesn’t it?” adds Spader.

It sure does. Next up: Avengers: Doomsday on Friday, December 18. Don’t forget your hat.

VisionQuest, Streaming now, Disney+