VisionQuest episode 7: is the villain Horton's daughter?

Asked what we think of VisionQuest so far after episode 7, the verdict in the room was clear: "I love it." "It's so good." The episode sends Vision deep into his own code, flashes back to 1939, and overturns the theory we'd built about who has been pulling the strings. Only episode 8 remains.

The release has come in pairs: episodes one and two together, then three and four, then five and six. Now episode seven arrives alone, leading into episode eight.

The 1939 flashback reveals the first synthetic man

The episode jumps back to 1939 and shows the first synthetic. A man is selling his family's legacy to build a machine meant to replace a son he lost, James. He's also told, "I hope one day you build something that knows how to love you back." There was a question in the room about how this fits with Tony Stark building Vision. One guess was that the inventor sold his parts and work on to the family, though that stayed a maybe.

There was also an observation that parents and children are what the whole show has been about.

Friday is the bot, and we forgot

Friday turns out to be hiding in the system, disguising her code as a bot. How did we forget that Friday was the bot? People are probably yelling at us about that, and we owned the mistake.

Vision's trip through his subconscious

To get the source code, Vision descends into his subconscious, and the layered, jumping structure drew repeated Inception comparisons. The confrontation that follows, with Vision forced to face Wanda, Billy and Tommy, was called "Crazy psychology" and "a crazy therapy session." Seeing him break down got this response: "He's crying. I like this version of him." The sense was that it was a long way to get there, but a good way to get there.

The villain is not the daughter

The theory in the room was that the figure behind everything, whose knowledge of Vision's code predates Stark and Banner, was Horton's daughter. That was wrong. The reveal ties back to the father and to Ultron, and it was called a good reveal that ties it all together more and gives Ultron more to do. We were right that Ultron is bad. On redemption, the reading was that the AI program might still be trying to redeem him, while the human version is not good.

Then he throws Friday off a balcony, which raised the question of whether the AI Ultron is in on what the human is doing. Maybe he is. Either way, we have a lot to figure out with one episode left.