Review: VisionQuest, “Deadlock” | Season 1, Episode 6

The MCU doesn’t have a great track record with Marvel’s fictional city-state, Madripoor. A trip there was the first sign that something was off with the storytelling of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and VisionQuest’s stopover in the Southeast Asian criminal underworld similarly feels like a detour the show didn’t really need. On the surface, this is an exciting episode with some flashy fight scenes, some major relationship shifts, the return of a minor player from the original Iron Man, and some big plot reveals that deliver more clarity on which questions we should still be asking this deep into the show’s run. Yet it feels like all that spectacle comes at the cost of some of the show’s driving spark.

For as exciting as it was to see Vision and Ultron part ways as frenemies in the previous episode, the result is that the show has now lost the core relationship dynamic that was anchoring it. James Spader and Paul Bettany get plenty of screentime this week, but they struggle to recapture the chemistry they have with one another with any of the other actors they’re paired with. Either because of that or just because of how this episode is written and directed, both performances are weirdly downbeat here.

On Ultron’s side, that’s partially because moving into Jo’s Apple Store-esque mind palace changes his narrative role on the show. He gets a big speech about how he’s an older code and therefore not susceptible to her tricks, and he’s technically the one who asks to get to know her and her pain. Functionally, however, he becomes a passive player there to receive all the exposition about her backstory and her evil plan, which boils down to—to quote The Office—a government-created killer nanorobot infection. Instead of a world where AIs strive to become human, she wants to create a world where humans are forced to become robots who think and move as one. In other words, she’s reinventing the Borg from first principles.