Why Ultron Throws Friday Off a Balcony in VisionQuest

I knew from the beginning of VisionQuest that Friday's road would be a short one. But when Ultron covers for her while she makes a secret phone call to Vision, I thought there was hope for her after all. Then he picks her up and throws her off a balcony. It happens because she sees a man sitting with Josephine and realizes that he has Ultron's face. He sounds like Ultron, too, which means Ultron is not unique after all.

Of all the things Friday could have discovered while spying on Jocasta, this is the one that sends her over the railing. Earlier, Ultron was willing to let her scurry back to Vision's mind and tell him the old man maybe isn't as bad as all that. So what changed? What is so secretive about this man that Ultron couldn't let Friday escape with it? From all indications, Ultron wants to stop Friday from taking that discovery back to Vision, at least until he understands it himself.

Friday's secret call to Vision reveals Jocasta's billions of nanobots

The call comes while Vision is with Tommy, working on the nanobot inside Lisa. Pull the nanobot out and she dies. Rewrite it wrong and she may never move, remember or breathe again. So when Friday calls, Vision has to pause his conversation with Tommy and put her on.

Friday tells him she managed to disguise her code as a bot and get a limited look inside Jocasta's systems. In there, she found that Jocasta has billions of the nanobots locked away. She doesn't know where they are and can't give Vision a location. As far as Friday can tell, Ultron has helped Jocasta collect every key she needs to reach them. Look at how hard a time Vision is having deactivating one nanobot. Imagine if billions of them are unleashed on the world. Then we have an apocalypse on our hands.

Friday then asks about Lisa herself. She understands that Lisa could lose her memories and, piece by piece, her sense of who she is. As the woman on the inside, she promises to do whatever she can to help. That is when Edith tells Friday she is brave. And of course she is. It takes a brave woman to take on this task.

Why Friday followed Ultron into Jocasta's memories

Remember how Friday ended up here in the first place. After Ultron escapes his prison, she cannot let him go. She has to do something, and that is why she followed him into Jocasta's memories. Later, when Ultron imagines what she might tell Vision about him, remember what she actually spent her call talking about. She went in there to help somebody.

However, what nobody expected did happen. Just like Jocasta, Friday also got something wrong when she called Vision.

Jocasta's vault needs a passcode she never knew about

The biometric reader accepts one biometric key after another. When Jocasta recites Edgar Allan Poe, the system recognizes her voice and the fifth key clears. At this point she was probably dancing with joy, because she had passed all the tests and the vault would open.

That is where she got disappointed. The vault won't open because she has to put in a passcode. The irony is that she does not know the passcode. She did not even know it was part of the requirement. If she had, I bet she would have gone after the person with the passcode just as she butchered the others.

Ultron tells her the reason may be a sixth partner, somebody Josephine once knew and Jocasta has forgotten. Friday has already described holes in Jocasta's memory to Vision. Jocasta can't even account for how she became synthetic. Until the vault refuses her, those gaps sound like a problem with recovering her past. Now one of them might explain why her plan has ground to a halt. A whole person could be missing from her recollection of the work, and whoever that is appears to have had enough authority to put a lock between Josephine and her own invention.

The client is surprised to hear Ultron's name

Then comes the client. He tells Jocasta that she can recover what she has lost, while at the same time he is pitching another deal to Vision. Ultron isn't someone the client needs. Perhaps the client doesn't even know he exists. Nobody wants Ultron.

But then Ultron makes fun of the client's dramatic voice, and when the client asks who's speaking, Ultron needles him for having to ask. Jocasta mentions his name, and the way the client says Ultron shows how surprised he is to hear it. He says the name twice and says he looks forward to meeting him. I tell you, Ultron will definitely meet him, and when he does, the client should wish he never asked.

Ultron knew Friday was spying the whole time

Before Jocasta goes digging through her memories, she admits to Ultron that she's uneasy about becoming Josephine again. Ultron reassures her with a crack about the possibility that she might turn out to have hidden depths. Then he turns his attention to Friday and critiques her performance as a spy. Apparently that long distance call required him to cover for her.

She asks how long he's known she was there. According to Ultron, he spotted her the moment she followed him. So much for the disguise. It seems to have worked fine on the person whose head she entered, because Jocasta has never known there is a spy in her head. But Ultron is Grandpa. His code is from the ages, and he already knows Friday from Vision's mindscape, so it isn't surprising he saw her. I would have been disappointed in him if he did not know.

Friday catches something in the way he describes their predicament. Ultron speaks as if the two of them are in this together. She has a good objection: he handed Jocasta a biometric key. From Friday's end of the phone, it looked an awful lot like he was helping Jocasta get her billions of mind altering machines out of storage. Ultron says he believes Jocasta isn't even the threat, that somebody else poses the greater one, and that Jocasta's missing memories are where he expects to find that person. That doesn't excuse him giving her the key. What was he hoping to achieve? And since when did he know there was a sixth player on the board?

Ultron's honest answer and his feelings about Vision

Friday asks what he intends to do once he finds whoever is hiding in there. This is her best question of the episode, because Ultron gives her a remarkably honest answer: it depends on who turns up. He entertains the possibility that he'll destroy Jocasta's nest himself. In that version of events, Friday gets to go home and tell Vision something nice about the old man for a change. That is soothing, because at least we can rest knowing he isn't going to kill her or expose her as a spy.

The only reason this makes sense, as Friday herself realizes, is that Ultron really does think of himself as Vision's father. When he asks what Vision sees in him, she doesn't answer, which shows that Ultron is interested in what Vision thinks of him. Friday has survived to this point. The question is what Ultron will do when he finally sees who turns up in Josephine's memory.

The Brooklyn apartment and the missing partner

The client's trail leads Jocasta back to a Brooklyn apartment. After all the ceremony at the vault, one of the first things that gets through to her is a chair she remembers finding by the roadside. There are two champagne glasses, a detail that begins to fill in the missing partner. Someone shared this place with her. She can remember the pleasure of a celebration even while the person who celebrated with her stays maddeningly difficult to place. For once, you can understand why she'd keep going.

In a news report, Josephine and a fellow researcher have won an award for their work in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. On television, Josephine gives credit to Phineas Horton, whose earlier work helped make theirs possible. The report describes a pair who have worked at the top of their field for years. Think back to the sixth lock. Ultron inferred a forgotten partner from a security system, and here is a public record of a partnership sitting in the middle of a very private memory. Other people knew about it. They didn't keep the relationship private, but because Josephine cannot remember, she has to get the answer from the television.

Friday recognizes the apartment for a completely different reason. She knows it as Ultron's loft in Vision's mindscape. How can a room she's seen there belong to a woman remembering her life in Brooklyn? Ultron suggests that the people who created these AIs somehow passed it down. It's a plausible answer as far as it goes. Josephine has just credited a predecessor on television, and ideas, code, even aspects of a personality can have a history stretching back further than the person who inherits them. The second champagne glass is more personal. Somebody sat across from Josephine in this room, and Friday is about to see who.

Josephine's argument about selling to Stark

What comes back to Jocasta is an argument about selling her work. The award was lovely. Letting a weapons manufacturer get his hands on the AI or the nest is another matter entirely. Josephine objects to what Stark might make with the nanotechnology. So far, it's easy to be on her side. This episode has spent a fair amount of time on people struggling to keep one of her creations from erasing Lisa, so Josephine had excellent reason to worry about what a buyer might do with a whole supply.

Then she offers her preferred arrangement. She and her partner could use it themselves, for the good of humanity. They'd become "gods, but loving gods," which means she wants him to see the good they could do with it. This partner has the same voice and face as Ultron. And when he recalls something Josephine said to Stark, "peace in our time," we know those are Ultron's own words from his history.

Why Ultron throws Friday off the balcony

The whole point of this investigation is for Friday to find out what Ultron intends to do with Jocasta, and to see the twist it brings. Now she has the full information. A little earlier, Ultron got to explain the familiar loft to her. He could offer a theory, leave details vague and let her make what she liked of it. Now she's seen the man for herself. She could describe his face to Vision. She could repeat the toast. Given the deal Vision has just made with the client, this is information Vision desperately needs.

Friday already knows how to reach Vision from inside Jocasta, and Ultron knows that better than anybody. He covered for the call. So, to protect his secret, he picks her up and throws her over the balcony. He doesn't explain why. He says nothing to Friday, but Friday understands the shape of it, and she knows it's the end of the road for her.

I don't think this was part of his plan at all. He did not plan to murder her from the time she was following him, because even he was curious about the missing partner, and seeing his own face in Jocasta's past came as a shock to him. If Friday got to Vision, she could tell him that Ultron helped Jocasta open the vault, went searching for a mystery man, and found one who looks exactly like himself.

Is Friday really gone?

When Friday falls, her form breaks into visible code, much like what happened to Jarvis. But maybe she is not entirely gone. Maybe Ultron just expelled her and she can resurface later. There are fan theories pointing out that Ultron did it to save her from danger. What danger that is, I cannot tell. Maybe he also wanted to conceal her call.

The theory may be right, but with what the show has given us so far, we cannot tell. Vision himself didn't get time to ask Friday again if she was all right. So maybe that's it for our old lady, or maybe there is still hope for her. We will have to wait until the finale to find out what this means for her.