VisionQuest: why does Jocasta want control, not a cure?

Episodes 5 and 6 of VisionQuest finally give us Jocasta's grand plan: connect humanity through nanobots operating as a collective she can direct. She calls it improving humanity. From what Lisa went through in episode 6, I don't buy her method at all, and I think what she wants is control, not necessarily fixing humans.

So much for saving humanity. I don't know if robotizing a human counts as saving it. Getting a robot into Lisa was not pretty and certainly not cool. I'm not sure it's even right to call this sci-fi anymore, because these things are pretty real. Everyone thinks they know what's best for humanity, yet how they want to achieve it is often ugly, and they don't even seek consent from the test subjects.

Jocasta's plan in VisionQuest is a nanobot hive mind

In episodes 5 and 6, the Butcherbird mystery is taken to another level. The biological markers stolen from murdered scientists start making sense, and we get the motive behind why Jocasta was harvesting them. She has found that the best way to build a better humanity is to connect people through nanobots operating as a collective under her direction. Think of it as a hive mind.

She wants total control of all humans, because to her greed and chaos are defects that need to be removed. Unlike Ultron, who in Age of Ultron wants to destroy humanity and remake the world anew, Jocasta allows humans to survive, but remade in her own image. They don't get to remain autonomous or keep their consciousness.

I think VisionQuest is getting somewhere now. The ratings, especially for episode 6, look pretty good, because we have a named villain and her plan has been made known. Her methods are way more interesting. It looks like I'm beginning to love her more than when she made her first appearance, though not the way Ultron loves her. If she succeeds, at least humans get to live, which is so much better than wiping out entire populations. You can disagree.

She thinks she can make us better by reducing how much freedom we have to make the terrible decisions we make, and that makes a lot of sense. But then Lisa became the test subject. I don't know if she was the very first, but from what we know, she is Jocasta's first demonstration to Ultron. It's crazy that she picked Thomas's girlfriend for her experiment, and by the end, Lisa is barely left alive.

Why Jocasta believes human nature needs reprogramming

Jocasta is making the same mistake Ultron made, and that almost every nonhuman species, like aliens, makes. I've already taken Ultron's version of this apart: he throws every human into one bucket, and Jocasta has picked up the exact same habit. To her, the problem is built into our nature as humans. She believes there's no way to talk us out of it unless our programming is changed, and she thinks injecting machines into people is the answer.

Somehow I think she's right. Look at our world today. The majority of humans are into some form of evil, and people abuse power anyhow. So her thinking is: why not treat the problem at the root cause? But her solution is dangerous, to be honest. She appoints herself the person qualified enough to put humanity on the right path, and she builds the system for it, nanotech. To achieve perfection, she decides a hive mind is better than obedient humans scattered around the world.

So now we have a Pluribus kind of situation on our hands. Jocasta wants coordination, humanity thinking together under guidance. That raises the question of what comes next once the nanos are in everyone. She has to decide what everyone does at every given moment. Do they wage war against other species? Do they work? Whatever needs to be done, she gets to decide, with Ultron by her side.

Then the problem becomes how she handles resistance, because not everyone will gladly accept her miracle. That means she turns to force and possibly wipes out any opposition, and we know there's going to be a ton of it. When she mentioned peace in our time, Ultron understood immediately. It reminded him of himself, and now she has found her own version of how that peaceful world can be achieved.

The Butcherbird killings and Ultron's leverage over Jocasta

This gives us the evidence of why the killings were necessary to her. She wasn't killing those people for fun. They held biometric access, and she was gathering the markers she needed to unlock the nanobots stored at Josephine Carrington's grave. But having a motive, and convincing herself it was for the greater good, doesn't pardon the act. It's still very cruel. We can all agree, though, that she is not a random killer.

Smart Ultron saw through her. When it looked like the end of her dream, because Katarina died before Jocasta could get the facial markers she needed, Ultron scanned her face before she was vaporized, preserving the detailed facial information. Knowing Jocasta is after it, he uses that to negotiate with her, and her apparent setback becomes leverage for him. I guessed earlier that Ultron knew what those keys opened and would cash it in later. Well, here is the bill, and now they have business together.

The show seems to have used their comic history to tie them together. In the comics, she is Ultron's bride. Though the show didn't walk the comic path, it still gets them to the same destination: working together. I argued that she shouldn't be treated as just Ultron's wife, and then episode 6 gives us the kiss anyway. I have a lot to say about that kiss too.

Inside the grave, billions of nanobots are waiting alongside the identity she claims as her own. Humans buried Josephine Carrington together with the future Jocasta wants to impose. From what was done to Lisa, we now have an idea of what the nanos can do to humans if they get out of that grave.

Jocasta's grudge and how she compares to Vision

Jocasta carries a connection to a real person who worked inside the company, and she has a personal grudge. These people wronged her in some way. She has felt the heat of human ambition, because they turned scientific possibility into an instrument of power. The anger is there and it's real. Maybe the better course of action would be to take it out on those who hurt her. But when one human or a group of humans is at fault, the other species decides the fault lies with the entire human race. Jocasta stretches it into a verdict against all of us, and because of that, she is perhaps just as bad as those who wronged her.

She doesn't see this as vengeance. She sees it as correcting the fault in humans, and somehow the creators are responsible for the mess. Her colleagues sold her code to Stark Industries, and she built this body from the one nanobot that wasn't locked away. Given a chance at life, she reached a conclusion from the human world she knows: humans can't be trusted to govern themselves. I find that very ridiculous. The suffering she has faced is what she thinks makes her the best candidate to decide everyone's future.

Compare that with how Vision was built. His original creation brought Jarvis into a synthetic body, with the Mind Stone involved, and in the same way Jocasta gets a connection to Josephine. Their origins aren't the same, but both are walking around with a mind inside a body. Because of Vision, I don't think Jocasta is doing this just because she's a machine. Vision is a machine too, so being one doesn't explain her motive, and it sure doesn't justify it. Vision also sees the damage humans cause, but he doesn't settle on taking their minds to fix it.

So Jocasta's primary motivation is that she wants control, not necessarily fixing humans. She wants to be like a god. She wants power and recognition, and she thinks bringing everyone under her is how she gets her identity. Vision surrendered control to Ultron, just as Jocasta wants control over the world, and we saw what it cost when Vision let Ultron take the controls. That is precisely what she wants with everyone.

Ultron's motive, and why Jocasta is not the client

It seems like Ultron is doing the will of his newfound love, but what does he want now? He wants to find missing code and reach something he feels he lacks, and I think that's different from Jocasta's desire to reorganize humanity. Whether this partnership conflicts with their individual interests is yet to be seen.

Then there's the client who has terrorized our boys for a long time. Jocasta definitely isn't the client. I thought we'd get the reveal in these two episodes, but we're left hanging again. Episode 6 makes it clear, because while the client is hijacking screens and sending Raza and the Ten Rings after Vision, Jocasta is busy with Ultron somewhere else entirely. Everyone has their own agenda.

What Lisa's infection reveals about Jocasta's cure

When Lisa got infected, the shape of Jocasta's possession became clear. Lisa is made to act against Vision, which a clear-minded Lisa wouldn't do. She was being turned into a puppet by the nanos. Jocasta believes she is curing, but what she is doing is overriding a human's will and taking her control away. How do you define better? You're holding a remote to a person, so you can't claim you've made their life better.

Thomas can't accept that, so he does what anybody in his position would: he intervenes and deactivates the nanobot. He wants the real person back. But stopping it with electricity doesn't undo what happened to her, and with Lisa barely surviving, who's to say the nanos won't reactivate the moment she regains consciousness?

Did you notice the look on Jocasta's face? To me it suggested this may well be her first test subject. She looked disturbed, almost as if this wasn't how she expected the technology to work, uncertain about how Lisa's mind gets rewritten. She felt how Lisa suffered, but that hasn't become a reason to stop. If she perfects it and decides that's a better condition than the one humanity is in now, Vision has a big problem to solve.

I believe there's some part of us she doesn't want touched: love, loyalty, forgiveness. Those are valuable human traits. But if the human will is removed by this cure, who's to say those traits won't vanish along with our minds? Lisa shows that Jocasta is in for the long game, and I don't know what Vision can do to stop her. He believed these bots could be saved, but Ultron has proved to him that bad people are just bad people, and it isn't easy for them to change.