'VisionQuest' Ends With Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom Reviving Wanda

Showrunner Terry Matalas says the sitcom showdown was a big swing that scared his team, and Marvel's Kevin Feige wanted 90 more minutes of it.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom brings Wanda Maximoff back to life in the post-credits scene of the VisionQuest finale, which landed on Disney+ on Tuesday.

Press screeners didn't include that scene, The Hollywood Reporter noted Wednesday. It caps an episode that already gives Paul Bettany's Vision both of his sons back. Showrunner Terry Matalas told THR the ending was a swing that scared his team. In interviews with THR and Deadline, he and his crew described how much of it came down to short shooting days and smart, cheap fixes.

In the finale, called "Forever," Virgil Horton, the human who inspired Ultron and who's also played by James Spader, shoots the AI Jocasta (T'Nia Miller). Ultron kills him and sends a deadly nanobot swarm into London. Vision traps them both in UltraVision, a sitcom in the style of WandaVision, and makes Ultron face his grief until both of their systems give out. Then the twins Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) and Billy (Joe Locke) bring their father back.

Matalas, who wrote the finale and directed it, told THR the sitcom ending had guided the writers' room from day one, because a last chapter should reach back to the first one. When he screened it for Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, he asked whether UltraVision ran too long. He said Feige cut him off: "It could go on for another 90 minutes, and I would've watched every minute of it."

The crew didn't have that kind of time. Matalas told THR they had maybe two hours to shoot Billy's last-minute rescue. The twins' first psychic connection was filmed on another day, in a small room he said got blazing hot from about 800 lit candles.

Deadline's The Process series found the same make-do spirit across the season. Bettany played both Vision and Jim Hammond, the Synthetic Man, and the role had him on fire at England's Hatfield House, in a room full of paintings hundreds of years old. VFX supervisor John Haley had the lighting department build LEDs into the costume. A battery on a skateboard trailed Bettany around, so the walls glowed wherever he went before any digital flame was added. Matalas told Deadline he cast Bettany as Hammond because "I needed Paul to play against his favorite actor, Paul Bettany."

Then there's the episode Matalas pitched to Marvel as a black-box play, partly to keep VFX costs down. In it, Spader and Todd Stashwick, who plays the mercenary Paladin, read their characters' emails out loud, and one of Ultron's emails includes the four letters Matalas figured the actor might pass on. "Hearing James Spader say 'LMAO' is the thing I'm most proud of," he told Deadline. The effects team added an emoji afterward.

As for Wanda, she was kept out of the finale's main story on purpose. Matalas told THR that he and Bettany tried a moment with her as Vision was dying. He said it pulled too much attention from the father-and-sons story. What made the cut was a shot from WandaVision that his editor, Drew Nichols, found, with Wanda looking over and smiling.

Before he ran Star Trek: Picard, Matalas got his start as a PA on Star Trek: Voyager, he told THR. One day he was pulled onto the movie Star Trek: Insurrection to drive Patrick Stewart around the Paramount lot and bring him coffee and orange juice. Years later he wrote and directed Picard's last scene, and he let the cast play a real game of poker. Stewart died Oct. 28 at 86. Matalas said he wants to remember him the way that scene left him, "at that poker table surrounded by his friends laughing."

Source: The Hollywood Reporter, retrieved November 12, 2026. Other sources: Deadline.