Vision Quest Episodes 3 and 4: Ultron's Best Advice Is the Trap

For two episodes, the best parent in Vision Quest is Ultron. He tells Vision how to talk to his son. He tells him when he's being an idiot. He's wise, he's funny, and he's the guy with the answer every single time. I ate it up. It's satisfying, but it's also a trap, and I think the show built it that way on purpose.

So much happens in episodes three and four that I'm not doing a recap. I want to get at what the show is doing, because these are very good episodes. This is where Vision Quest stops setting the table and starts eating.

Vision starts speaking as himself after Tommy restarts him

Start with Vision, because Vision finally moved. The moment I loved is the reset. Vision is dying, his system has to be restarted, and Tommy is the only one who can do it. Right before that, Vision tells him that all his simulations were flawed, because he never considered that inside him is Tommy Maximoff. Tommy is real. He is who he thinks he is. That's the one thing Vision never considered, and I was sitting there going, oh, okay. Wow.

Then later comes the big one. Vision says, "Wanda used to remind me that saying sorry and being sorry aren't equal subroutines." He talks about it as if it was him, as if he was the one standing there. Tommy catches it, pointing out that it's the first time he's heard Vision say that without referring to himself as the old me. Vision stops and admits that, yes, he thinks Tommy is right. He guesses he did.

So little by little, they're letting him become himself. And it happened after the shutdown. I don't know if resetting his system did something. I really don't. But it's interesting that the first time he turns all the way off is the first time he comes back as himself. You could call two episodes of Vision asking who he is repetitive, and I did previously. This is where the patience starts paying out, one sentence at a time, and the sentences are "You are Tommy" and "Wanda once told me."

Ultron's sitcom wisdom is beating Vision at being a dad

Meanwhile, the guy in Vision's ear, Ultron, is being his bastion of wisdom. Every time Vision gets stuck, Ultron has the line. There's even a joke in here that I think is Terry Matalas lampshading his own writers' room. Ultron shows up with his advice and Vision wonders aloud which TV show this teachable moment will come from: Family Ties, Who's the Boss? Then he notes he can't recall a sitcom where two children have their faces melted off by a killer synthezoid, and Ultron is pleasantly surprised by that and laughs it off.

Producer hat on here, because this is where my brain goes: I think that joke is true. I have a feeling that when that room got put together, Matalas sat everybody down and said, here are all the old TV shows that shaped how I think about family. It carries over from WandaVision and, in a smaller way, from Agatha. Tommy even says it. He doesn't know why, but the old shows comfort him, and the older the better.

Vision has been running every simulation in the world, trying to learn how to be a dad. Ultron learned it from reruns, and Ultron is beating him at it. That's the trap.

Vision hands Ultron the wheel out of fear for Tommy

Then you get to the end, the gala. Vision is fighting something he can't beat, his son is right there, and Ultron makes his pitch. He tells Vision his operating system is emotionally compromised: "You're flailing like a father who's afraid he'll lose his son. I'm not. Give me the wheel. I'll get us out of here alive." The minute Vision did it, I went, oh my goodness, really?

I said before that Ultron isn't arguing about the ship, he's talking about the king. Well, here's the king. Vision hands over the wheel, and Ultron is standing at the helm of a ship, literally. Look at why it worked. Ultron didn't hack a machine. He used the first real feeling Vision has had for his son in this whole show: fear.

Two episodes ago, this Vision didn't feel anything. Now he's so scared for Tommy that he hands his body to the guy who dropped a city out of the sky. That's the first fully human decision he makes, and it costs him everything. Vision, buddy, he told you in episode one that burning humanity to ash was on the table. He told you.

Then Paul Bettany gets to chew the scenery as Ultron, which is awesome and fun, and he does something horrible and dastardly right out of the gate. Katarina Wells is gone before he's even stretched his legs. So I owe people one. Plenty of you called it: Ultron ends this two-parter in the driver's seat. I had said that wasn't likely. I said Ultron gets out. Well, he got out through Vision, which was the whole title of my premiere review. That doesn't mean he isn't jumping ship later, but for the time being, he seems to have moved in.

Tony Stark's AIs turn out to be built on real people

So who built all of this? These episodes finally answer that, and I love every piece of it. Ultron is the one watching the news. He's tracking the Butcherbird killer, and I can't tell if that's the present, because they always show him standing next to Vision and the crew while they're dealing with everything else.

The Butcherbird is killing the people who invented AI, from the same company Tony Stark bought, whose code he used as the base for every AI he ever built. Then you find out every one of Tony's AIs is based on a real person. Jarvis is Edwin Jarvis. Friday is Howard Stark's girl Friday.

Friday gets a wonderful moment where she has to recode things and says that Jarvis did all the coding. This is the second time she's had to step in for him. She talks about the history they shared and what she lost when Tony died. I went, okay, got it, we're doing this. And it was good. It was really good.

Phineas Horton's first synthetic man burned up from feeling too much

This is where the names finally come out. Katarina Wells is one of the founders, one of the people who started all of this. And the show says Phineas Horton out loud. In the comics, Horton built Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch, from Marvel Comics #1 in October 1939: the first synthetic man Marvel ever published.

In this show, the reason the first synthetic man died is that he couldn't handle his emotions. He overloaded. He caught fire. I was floored, because think about who's standing in the middle of this story right now: a synthetic man who just started feeling things. The first one burned up from it. This one just lost his body to it.

It's a breath of fresh air to see how all these characters came together, carrying parts of the old characters in them. I don't necessarily know that we're going to get him back, though. I think they're threading that needle very finely, and mind you, I'm here for it. I really am.

Jocasta, Paladin and a showrunner cameo

Then there's Jocasta. We don't know her motivations yet. She does look like a female version of Ultron, which I found interesting, and they built her on a real scientist. To me, that's the crux of the whole thing. If she's based on a scientist's personality, that means you can take a person's mind and put it in something else, and that's exactly where I think Ultron's interest is. Either he's going to want Jocasta or he's going to want another body.

We also get Paladin's backstory, and I think that one is only weird to me because I want to know why. What motivates the creators to hand us his origin right now? What's it for? I feel like there's something there. I just don't know what yet.

The show continues to look gorgeous. Everybody is doing such a good job, and I'm forever enamored with the visuals. And Terry Matalas is in it, if you didn't catch that Easter egg. In episode four, five minutes and 48 seconds in, he's the FXN news anchor interviewing Katarina Wells. About time the showrunner got to have a little fun in his own show. Good for him.

My theory: four scientists locked Jim Hammond's body away

Here's where I'm going. Jim Hammond has to play a part in the ending. He really does. If he doesn't, that's a terribly missed opportunity. When you set up stuff this good, what are you doing if you don't use it? I predicted that Vision gets pushed out of his own body. I still think that holds: Ultron is driving now, and Vision is going to fight back. I think there's every possibility Vision ends up being the one who takes Jim Hammond's body.

Here's the part that made me pause. Across the episode, Jocasta takes something biometric from every person she kills: a retinal scan, an eyeball, a fingerprint lasered off, blood. Then Ultron does a switcheroo and destroys Katarina Wells, so whatever Jocasta needed from Katarina, she can't get anymore.

I stopped and ran down the hall saying I knew exactly what was going to happen. These four scientists, their pieces are what locked that body away, Jim Hammond's body, and Jocasta needs something from each of them. It feels a little flimsy now that I'm saying it out loud, but I'm sticking to it. Am I right about the lock? Four scientists, four pieces of them, one body behind the door, or is that flimsy?

These two episodes are really solid. Ultron is the best teacher in the house, and that's the whole problem, and I think the show knows exactly what it's doing with that. The first thing Vision ever felt for his son, Ultron used as a key. I'm giving Vision Quest episodes three and four a 9 out of 10.