VisionQuest episodes 5 and 6: Ultron's fourth key explained

VisionQuest episodes 5 and 6, Firewall and Deadlock, proved me 100% right and 100% wrong at the same time. I called that Ultron would take a face and make himself the fourth key. I also said this show had nothing to say about AI, and I said the four scientist pieces were the lock on Jim Hammond's body. By the end of this piece, I'll show how the thing I got right and the two things I got wrong are the same thing.

I think Deadlock was incredible, and I'm looking for the cracks in these two episodes and can't find them.

Ultron made himself the fourth key in VisionQuest

The moment arrives when Ultron, wearing Vision's body, takes a scan of a woman's face. Another bio key appears, and it looks like a detailed three-dimensional model of her features. That's facial recognition. He holds her face like he's memorizing it, because he is. Every point on that face is measured and stored. And then she's gone. He made himself the fourth key.

I have to give credit where it's due. A reader named Ed was on the record before I was, writing it under my review. Ultron took the face. He's got the last biomarker Jocasta needs. He engineered a deadlock. Ed called it, I put myself behind it, and the show paid it off.

I was wrong that VisionQuest had nothing to say about AI

Now the correction I owe. During premiere week, I said this was not a show about AI, and that I could guarantee Terry Matalas wasn't making it about AI. I didn't think he had much to say on the subject, and I said I didn't need it. I was wrong. Deadlock is pretty much the definition of this show having something to say about AI.

The thing is, Matalas told us. I went back and looked, and in a premiere week interview he said, "This is all about parents and children and we are for better or worse the parents of AI." He said it was up to us to shepherd them. I had that in front of me and still said he had nothing to say. He had a thesis and I wasn't listening.

In the comics, Ultron builds Jocasta. Here she's a neuroscientist who scanned her own mind to make the first AI, built billions of nanobots to save lives, and died of the same disease that took her father. While she lay dying, her own colleague sold her code to Stark Industries, and Stark put it into weapons. So the mother of every AI in this house is a woman whose work got turned into a gun. That's a show with a position.

Now she wants to finish the job. She calls it a cure: nanobots in every human being. And Ultron, of all people, is the one who says what it really is. Control. A hive mind.

Jocasta's nanobot plan echoes the Borg in Star Trek: Picard season 3

I don't want to be insulting, but I'm going to say this because if I don't, other people will. This is a 2.0 version of the Borg storyline from Star Trek: Picard season 3. In episode 9, the Borg hid Picard's altered DNA in the transporters, and every young officer who'd beamed anywhere woke up a drone. Now Jocasta does it with nanobots. It's not explicitly the same, but it's close.

Really, Terry? We're going to the literal "let's turn humans into robots"? I feel like that's what got him hired. To be fair, had anybody else made this, I wouldn't be making the association. It's because it's Terry Matalas's show that I go, okay, of course it is. Either way, it's brilliant and the story holds.

My Jim Hammond body theory is looking wrong

While I'm handing out receipts on myself, here's the second one. In my review of episodes 3 and 4, I said those four scientist pieces were the lock on Jim Hammond's body. Deadlock says what's behind the lock is Carrington's nanobots.

I don't necessarily know that the body theory is dead, but it's looking less and less likely. It may turn out the Human Torch and the Jim Hammond body are just Easter eggs, very big ones that fit very well. Or they could be seeding something for later, which I think would be phenomenal. Either way, I'm saying it plainly: that one's looking wrong.

Ultron and Jocasta want the same thing from opposite sides

The part I keep coming back to is that Ultron and Jocasta want the same thing from opposite sides. Ultron wants to be more human. Jocasta feels like she's losing her humanity, and she wants to make humans more like them. What she has for him are her memories: memories of sensations, memories of being alive. Those memories feed Ultron in a way he can't even process.

James Spader has said this is the thing Ultron has been chasing the whole time: for an AI, it can't just be consumption or knowledge, it has to be life experience. Jocasta is the first one who can hand him some. By the end, she hands him a drink and he says, "I feel real." She says she feels more artificial by the day. He's walking toward human, she's walking away from it, and they meet in the middle of that room.

Later he names her Trust. I covered where that name comes from in my premiere review, so I won't go through it again, but my reaction was that they're just calling it out, which I love. They're not hiding the comic books or the Greek tragedy anymore. They're putting it in the characters' mouths.

Why I no longer think Jocasta betrays Ultron

Everything in me, and everything everybody is going to want to say, is that Jocasta betrays him, because that's what she does in the comics. I said it myself before and read the panel from Avengers 171 where she turns on him. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think it's more likely the other way around.

One reader put it better than I could: this Ultron has peace in our time. He's essentially retired, surrounded by family, and what drives him isn't the desire to obtain. It's fear of losing. That's the guy I'm watching. He still talks a big game, and Spader would tell you not to forget it. He told Gizmodo, "The inherent danger and threat that was so blatantly there in Age of Ultron is still present."

I believe him. I also believe the guy who just told her to leave the kid alone. I have a feeling that when push comes to shove, he may have learned too much, and he won't let her finish the job. Look at Madripoor. She aims a nanobot at Tommy and Ultron warns her off, saying that if she harms the boy, Vision will come for her with a force even he can't stop. So she takes someone else instead. He's already drawing a line, and he hasn't said it out loud yet.

The other option, which I think is the less original version, is that her humanity surfaces first. I think she's already given him too much of it. That reader doesn't think it's a redemption arc, and I don't either, but I believe there's some redemption in it. We'll see.

One lock: the face, the AI, and what the key opens

So here's how the three calls connect. The fourth key was a face, a human face measured to the dot. Jocasta calls those keys the face of the future of the human race. The thing I got right, the face, is the key to the thing I got wrong, the AI. And what the key opens isn't a body at all. It's a way to put a machine inside every human face on the planet. Right, wrong and wrong. One lock.

The Firewall escape plan, Friday and Vision's hat

Every episode, I think, is making every previous episode better. Take Firewall. All of this was orchestrated so Ultron could get out, which I had completely forgotten about. The leak, the back channel to Paladin, all of it. When the firewall comes down, releasing it gives Vision his body back and sets Ultron free in the same move. And Ultron set up the plane for Madripoor, so I think the escape route is also the road to his son.

Friday is the one saying no. She's the holdout from the hero era, trying to hold on to what Tony and all the Avengers stood for. Then Deadlock tells you she's been inside Jocasta's head the whole time.

You can call Vision an idiot for letting Ultron go, and people will. But he's being true to the original Vision, and Ultron is being true to the original Ultron. Vision brings him a hat, because he knows he's going on a journey. Matalas telegraphed that. In an earlier episode, Ultron asks Vision how you deal with somebody who's despondent, and Vision tells him with hope: if someone's never been cared for, you answer that with caring. That's what Vision did, and he's still doing it. Matalas has asked the question himself: if this is a father and son story, who is the father? In these episodes, the son gave the father a hat.

Paladin and Vision, Edith and James Spader playing off himself

The conversation between Paladin and Vision is so good. Vision knows his real name, and he knows about the daughter he never went back to after the Snap. It's two fathers in a standoff over a kid. Later, Paladin admits he doesn't think she's happier without him. He thinks she's safer. I felt that one.

Then there's Edith walking into the handler's office and talking an AI out of her job, then taking over Paladin's drones. I'll admit I had suspicions the handler was an AI, and plenty of readers did too.

The funniest thing in the two episodes is in Firewall. Ultron is driving Vision's body, and inside he's split himself into parts of his own personality, and they're all James Spader. Letting James Spader play off himself is an utter chef's kiss.

The Madripoor set, Raza's return and a few MacGuffins

On the production side, I think everybody's acting is stellar across the board. If I have to be critical about anything, the street in Madripoor looks like a sound stage. It stings a little, because when The Falcon and the Winter Soldier built Madripoor, they built it in a real back alley in the suburbs of Atlanta, right down the road from me, and it felt gritty and lived in. This one looks like a set.

Raza is back, the guy from Iron Man. I always thought that character died. Stane hit him with the sonic paralyzer, his men got wiped out, and the movie never showed us what happened to him. So I guess he just got shorted out. Seeing him again is interesting, to say the least. Jocasta's mind palace is also far less constructed than Vision's house, and I love that it reads like a moving company showed up and all her stuff is just sitting there in boxes.

I went looking for plot holes, and aside from contrivances there's not much. Vision is in the van saying he's given Tommy's girlfriend a sedative. Where did he get a sedative? I guess it came from Paladin's van. Friday is floating around the net now like a piece of software. There are several MacGuffins flying around, and I'm okay with it. Who hired Paladin is still an open question. The client took over every screen in Madripoor, called Vision a tin man without a heart and offered him one. I still want to know who that is.

Terry Matalas is who you hire when you want genre to be respected and to do right by the fans while still being brilliant, and the show proves it. The storytelling is tight. I was right about the face and wrong about what it opens, and every episode of VisionQuest is making the last one better, including the ones that prove me wrong.