VisionQuest Reboot Easter Eggs, From Ultron's Mug to a Keats Poem

VisionQuest episode 3, Reboot, is packed with Easter eggs, from 12 Monkeys nods and an 80s robot sitcom to a John Keats poem and a hidden off switch behind a portrait. I went through it frame by frame, and along the way Terry Matalas confirmed several details to me in our interview, including who is not on the other end of Paladin's mysterious phone calls.

Ultron's red paint and the stolen Stark drones

The episode opens on an extreme close-up of red paint floating faintly in water as Ultron rinses his paintbrush. Red paint drops on the floor beneath the canvas, and I read that viscous fluid as the blood the Butcher Bird is shedding, blood that is on the hands of her victims.

We learn that Paladin and his handler hacked Vision specs from SWORD. Their three drones, nicknamed Bing, Bang and Boom, all appear to be former Stark drones that they would have had to steal from the DODC and give darker paint jobs. They seem to be connected to Paladin's glasses, similar to the way the Stark drones were linked to the EDITH glasses.

Rather than have a heart to heart with Thomas, Vision lectures him on driving. Ultron sips from a Father of the Year mug. But if he only exists in Vision's mind's eye, is that mug a quirk Vision imagines Ultron having, or does Ultron's code insist Vision sees him with it?

Thomas's stolen car belongs to a blip truther

The car Thomas stole has dashboard ornaments of a hula dancer and a cactus, plus stickers reading This Is Not Our Earth and Blip Truther. The back bumper and side windows carry even more conspiracy decals, and when they park later there's one on the left reading Passenger Princess. Whoever this driver is, I love them.

The car clearly belongs to an MCU conspiracy theorist who believes the blip never happened, and who I suppose might think they were transported to an alternate Earth where history simply recorded a blip event. With alternate Earths about to collide in Doomsday, is that even the craziest theory one could have right now? Samuel Sterns was able to predict Doomsday with his big brain. Did Mr. Blue have a podcast this person in the UK listened to? This is also the car where Thomas finds a shirt in episode 4 reading Get a Grip, Don't Believe the Blip.

The backseat fills with Tony Stark's AI

Vision again denies paternity to Thomas's face, saying that if his being a parent were even remotely possible, it would have everything to do with Wanda Maximoff. In fairness, Wanda did a lot of the work there, but Vision did play a role.

Thomas says his life was normalish until Vision and Wanda entered his head through his new Tommy Maximoff Hex memories. When EDITH interrupts with "Dummy thinks you're overprocessing," Thomas responds, "What did you call me?" That sudden rage Thomas shows means he's definitely his mother's son. I love how fast the backseat gets crowded with AI forms only Vision can see. Ultron calls Dummy dumber than a bag of hammers but says he's quiet, and that's why he's Ultron's favorite. So it's confirmed: when Ultron said JARVIS wasn't his first or second choice of sacrifice, he wasn't talking about Dummy or U. He was talking about FRIDAY and EDITH.

The motel's name is another 12 Monkeys reference

They arrive at a motel whose name is another 12 Monkeys Easter egg. In the Syfy series, the Emerson Hotel was where James and the others often stayed as a base of operations while time traveling. Thomas, a noted terrible driver, parks in the accessible spot and does a bad job staying in the lines, even though he pulled directly into it.

Vision's hiccuping causes electromagnetic interference. The lights flicker, food falls from the vending machine and cash spews from the ATM. Ultron tells him, "You Avengers were always so wishy-washy with the morality of it all. Just take the dough." Money truly was of trivial consequence to Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron, where he transferred 1.285 billion to Ulysses Klaue for his vibranium supply.

Thomas gets triggered by a sign for the hotel pool as he recalls his origin moment 18 months earlier, roughhousing with kids in the pool when Tommy Maximoff's soul arrived. We hear a woman scream at the end of that memory, which interests me, because in the post-credits scene where Wanda listened to her sons in another universe, she heard Billy and Tommy screaming.

Terry Matalas says the client is not Billy

The client calls Paladin again, warning that the legacy doesn't suit him and he has until the end of the night. Terry Matalas confirmed to me that it is not Billy on the call. "It's not Billy," he told me. He also made it seem like this wasn't something we should be hyperfocused on this early in the season, and that it's not meant to be a huge mystery, though he did say it is important.

The handler reports that the Horton cryoisotope coolant, again a 12 Monkeys reference, has been tracked by the drones. As we see later, it leads not to Vision but to Jocasta.

FRIDAY's boot loop fix and her grief for Tony Stark

FRIDAY says Vision is caught in a boot loop, a startup error where a computing device continuously restarts before loading its operating system. We see Vision's core as an old timey steam furnace behind the fireplace. FRIDAY tries to stabilize the loop by rewriting his core systems on a typewriter that uses old IBM punch cards, the kind used in early computing machines, as paper.

FRIDAY recalls replacing JARVIS once already, going back to her introduction in 2015's Age of Ultron. After Ultron destroyed JARVIS and JARVIS was used to run the synthezoid body that became Vision, Tony needed FRIDAY to run his Mark 45 suit. In that same shot of FRIDAY coming out of the drawer, we see Jocasta in the background for the first time.

FRIDAY then describes how friends became enemies, which refers to Captain America: Civil War, where Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Clint Barton and Wanda were allies she found herself forced to fight. We hear Thanos saying "I am inevitable," and she describes the Battle of Earth in Avengers: Endgame and being there when Tony died. She ran over a quintillion strategic calculations that day and still couldn't save him. Her line, "Half the world came back that day and I lost half of mine," is brutal. It reminds me of Nora Durst's devastating line in HBO's The Leftovers: "Over here, we lost some of them. But over there, they lost all of us."

Small Wonder chess and the book about the snap

In the hotel room, Thomas watches Small Wonder, season 1, episode 5, Sibling Rivalry, in which the robot daughter Vicki, whose name stands for Voice Input Child Identicant, mocks her dad Ted for not programming her to beat him even faster at chess. Between The Greatest American Hero and Small Wonder, sitcoms were weird in the 80s, and it rocked. Half the episodes of Family Matters dealt with robots and transformations into Stefan Urquelle.

Thomas says he finds old shows comforting, including being filmed before a live studio audience, which was the title of the first episode of WandaVision. It's odd that he finds a laugh track comforting when, in his psych evaluation, he described a laugh track like the air was haunted and mocking him. I do wonder if some of the more extreme parts of Thomas's monologue, shown across these two episodes, might have come from rewrites and pickups, which would explain why parts seem contradictory.

Thomas says he read about Wanda in a book about the snap, where she and Vision had their own chapter. I'm thinking the book is Scott Lang's Look Out for the Little Guy, though Spider-Man: Far From Home also featured a Paul Greengrass documentary about the snap, so many books and media seem to have covered the event. Scott's book is available to read in full, and while Vision and Wanda don't have their own chapter, its chapters do recount Natasha explaining Thanos killing Vision, and how Scott barely knew Vision.

Vision replays the conversation like a chess game

Vision summarizes WandaVision and tells Thomas he was a child so in need of a loving family that he created a familial delusion based on a chapter in a book. He's saying that just as Wanda created something unreal out of a need for family, Thomas joined that delusion by believing it was real for him too. As Thomas storms out, the Windsor Castle wall art goes askew. Vision's outer world is starting to look like his inner one.

Ultron asks why Vision doesn't skip to the part where Wanda crushed herself with a mountain because she was sad. An Ultron view of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness boils down to that, and he sounds like a WandaVision fan who's mad Marvel killed off the character in a movie that didn't understand her well. Ultron, whom I theorized in an earlier breakdown was a Disney adult, drops another Disney line: "Be my guest. Run it again."

In a situation any father figure has felt, replaying a failed conversation with a teenage son, Vision reruns the simulation with the Small Wonder chess scene in the background, like a father trying new moves to outplay his child. He calls the soul transfer impossible, makes it about himself as a SWORD weapon built to kill Wanda, then as a copy of himself, and each time the door slams. Finally we see what he said in reality: that this is not a conversation for unstable systems. I love the implication. The cruel line about delusion was only something Vision considered, and what he said instead is cold and logical, leaving his teenager wondering if his father figure thinks he's delusional and didn't have the nerve to say it. That might cut the deepest, because while Vision means his own physiology, he's insulting this young man by calling his immaturity unstable.

EDITH's fearlessness and the real people behind the AI

In the mind space, EDITH wonders why she isn't afraid of anything, especially death. I think EDITH is the closest analog to Peter Parker's personality: the precocious joy and youth, the risk taking, the lack of fear of death. Ultron counters that she only faces death in simulations. FRIDAY reasons that all of Tony's AI are based on real people, with personality profiles or designs buried like birthmarks in their code, and we see that FRIDAY and EDITH were each based on a real woman.

The same was true for JARVIS, which explains why James D'Arcy was cast here. Tony based JARVIS on Edwin Jarvis, his father's butler, played by D'Arcy in Agent Carter and Avengers: Endgame. Ultron insists he's a one-off. He could be lying, but much of what made Ultron who he is was the Mind Stone, a beyond human cosmic force. Still, Ultron existed in some form before Tony fed it the Mind Stone AI, and I'm guessing Tony based it on someone who looked like a very bearded James Spader. Terry Matalas confirmed to me the beard was all Spader: "The beard is all Spader."

Boxing, Muhammad Ali and the truth about the pool

The vending machine gets stuck, and Thomas punches the glass until his hand phases through it, then tries to vibrate it and shatters it. Super speed and phasing are both Vision powers. Thomas says he's a southpaw, and EDITH appears in a full costume gag referencing Manny Pacquiao, who is right handed but fights in a left handed stance. Her boxing shorts read EDITH, manufactured in the mind space. Vision admires boxing for the balance of grace and power his other self found effortless, and bandages Thomas's hand like a dad fixing a boo boo. Thomas respects Muhammad Ali, which explains his episode one reference to float like a butterfly and sting like a V.

Thomas explains his fear of the pool. Other kids held him under, his soul started to leave his body, then Tommy's soul arrived and his atoms vibrated so fast the water began to boil. So it wasn't electricity that injured the other kids; it was the extreme heat. Vision realizes this sensation of particles drifting apart is something he thought only he felt as a synthezoid capable of phasing.

A motel fake out and Jocasta's vibranium wounds

The drone Bang floats outside their window, and it seems we might be in a No Country for Old Men scenario with a killer seeking his bounty in a motel. Thomas looks under the door for footstep shadows, and we see through the peephole just like Thanos actor Josh Brolin did looking for Anton Chigurh. But it's a Silence of the Lambs location fake out, because Paladin is at the London penthouse of a tech CEO.

The coolant the handler tracked was leaking from Butcher Bird Jocasta, wounded by the CEO's vibranium bullets. Paladin examines the scene with his own EDITH style AR glasses, and somebody call Killmonger, because a tech CEO got Wakandan vibranium for bullets. The fact that these wounded Jocasta makes me wonder if she might not be made of vibranium like Vision. When she attacks and asks Paladin who sent him, that question shows she's probably not the client.

Vision's grief and Paladin's hidden childhood

Back at the motel, Vision laughs that humans have to defecate, then has a complete emotional breakdown. The first emotion he names is grief, the one he defined so exquisitely after Pietro's death, as shown in WandaVision episode 8: what is grief if not love persevering? That's why I think Vision moves from grief to pain to loss to love, a love he says is gone, all for nothing.

Jocasta bores her fingers into Paladin's head, reminding me of Cassandra Nova and Mr. Paradox, to hack his buried trauma. I did not have a Paladin backstory on my bingo card. We see young Paladin in his father Edgar's truck with Naked Eyes' 1983 Always Something There to Remind Me on the radio. The dog plushie from his dashboard was a gift from his mother, which Edgar sees as weakness. As Edgar boasts about being feared, a gunshot goes through his head and a Paladin assassin offers the boy his hand.

Terry Matalas confirmed the Latin on the Paladin crest from episode 2 means contracts and honor. Jocasta says this is not a true Paladin but a kid raised by one, since the order normally passes from father to son, and this Paladin apparently adopted an orphan. I appreciate the double meaning of code, as a way of life and as programming. But if he's not a true Paladin, can we take this to mean he's not that bound to his contracts? Under Jocasta's hood there's a third red glow where an Infinity Stone would sit. Paladin uses his glasses and the drones Bing and Boom to escape.

Vision dies and returns to hope

EDITH suggests turning Vision off and on again, the classic IT Crowd solution. When Thomas swears, Vision says "Language," evoking Steve Rogers. By the pool, Vision tells Thomas he is the very essence of speed, finally mentioning his superhero moniker. In one turn of his head, Paul Bettany shows Vision pulling a Doctor Strange, living through thousands of useless simulations before landing on the one thing that breaks through: considering that inside Thomas is Tommy, son to Wanda and Vision, brother to Billy who adored him. Vision holding his face is so powerful. The little boy inside Thomas is being held by the father who held him as a baby. That fraternal love is also key to Tommy's strength.

The blue pool light transitions to the projector of the mind space cinema, where Vision and Ultron view clips from Age of Ultron, Civil War and Infinity War. Seeing life flash before your eyes is a human sensation, not an AI one, so this is Wanda's magic imbuing Vision with a soul. FRIDAY, EDITH, Dummy and U lift a portrait of Jim Hammond to reveal the on and off switch, a cautionary reminder of how to take a malfunctioning android offline.

Ultron says, "The past doesn't make one want to live. The future does," and snaps to WandaVision episode 3, a very Thanos coded move. When Vision protests that this isn't the future, Ultron asks if he's sure. That line blew my mind. When it comes to quantum time, who's to say Westview can't be in this Vision's future? Could his Westview memories be a rehearsal for a real life with a still alive Wanda someday? It reminds me of Matalas telling me that James Spader calls the show "the beginning," and saying of a possible continuation, "All good endings are a beginning of some kind." Thomas boils the water, Vision resurrects in his white form, Jocasta detects the EMP, and Vision tells Tommy what he saw: hope, the four letter word.

A funeral for JARVIS and a red cliffhanger

The client fires Paladin, saying it was history itself that recommended him. After what happens in episode 4, the last of my client theories went up in smoke, leaving Sharon Carter, SWORD, someone connected to Justin Hammer, or some other AI ghost in the machine that wants Vision's body.

In the mind space, the AIs hold a funeral for JARVIS. Dummy, now able to speak, I assume from the reboot or JARVIS's programming, quotes John Keats's 1814 poem On Death, whose final line calls his future doom but to awake. It fits, because Vision's death, and Dummy's, brought this awakening. Is the coming Doomsday a transition that awakens us from this dream? A Countdown to Doom cartridge I missed in episode 2 was intentional, but according to Matalas it was not a Doomsday Easter egg; it's a real 1982 text adventure game. Dummy's rhyming verse says grief brings an inner fire reminding us that we were here, that we were real. Beyond love persevering, grief's function is to remind us we went through something real and can heal. Then U warms up his vocal cords: "The pipes are calling."

Ultron dismisses the funeral as pointless, but Vision insists love is real even if they've only felt it vicariously. That makes me rethink the pool speech: a synthezoid who wouldn't say he loved this boy still understood the power of letting him feel loved. Ultron calls this Vision a museum gift shop print, but as an AI he's in no position to define art, and a poster on a kid's wall can be as meaningful as anything. Then the sky turns red, Vision's network connects with another synth, Butcher Birds fill the sky, Dummy and U turn on Ultron and FRIDAY, Vision's body hangs frozen like a demonic possession, and over black, Jocasta's ghostly voice says, "Hello, Vision."