VisionQuest theory: is the client Phineas Horton's grandson?

VisionQuest episode 7 has finally shown us the client, and he looks exactly like Ultron. I believe the man in the mansion is not Ultron at all, but Phineas Horton's grandson, and that Ultron got his face from him.

The reveal lands at the cliffhanger. Paladin is cuffed in front of the house, security blows up his van, and James Spader steps out of the mansion holding a shotgun with an evil, mustachioed villain look. The reaction in the discussion was astonishment at who the reveal was, along with a sense that it is pure evil. The question for me is whether it really was Ultron all along, or whether the finale has more to reveal.

Why James Spader's client has a mustache instead of Ultron's beard

Before my theory came the beard. The question raised in the discussion was whether the client was always meant to be clean shaven, with the reveal saved for a cartoonish mustache. Giving Ultron a beard and then showing the client with a mustache instead was called a strange choice.

Terry Matalas was firm that coming in with the beard was James Spader's idea, and it worked well in the series. It shows Ultron as a haggard, bearded offshoot of whatever human he was based on. In the flashbacks, that human looked like James Spader in The Blacklist, with no facial hair and the shaved head he has had since Boston Legal.

The mustache, by contrast, may tie back to an interview Terry Matalas gave us, where I believe he used the term mustachioed villain, with the idea that when we see the villain, we will know who the villain is.

The client looks like Ultron's work, but he may not be Ultron

We both leaned away from the client simply being Ultron. Still, the point was made in the discussion that the execution felt very Ultron. It is the most cartoonish depiction of a villain, which is something Ultron would do. The mustache is Ultron. Living in the old estate that belonged to the first AI is Ultron. The artistry made it hard to believe someone other than Ultron orchestrated all of this.

My counterpoint is that there is a reason Ultron and this mystery human, who was Josephine Carrington's partner, are on similar wavelengths while still being separate. That reason is the heart of my theory.

My theory: the client is Phineas Horton's grandson

The episode gave specific clues. It showed Victoria Horton snatching the notebook, so when the family moved to New York, she had the algorithm with her. Josephine Carrington was the only person in the world whose partner had a link to that family. The family was rich enough to donate everything in the gala, which suggests it lived on.

There is also a line in an interview scene in which Josephine Carrington calls Phineas Horton the grandfather of artificial general intelligence, and she looks right at James Spader's character, who is standing off screen. I read the word grandfather, said in that direction, as a clue.

The timeline fits too. Victoria Horton would have been a child in 1939. Twenty years later, she could have a child who would be James Spader's age now. My theory goes that he then used the sale of the company to the biotech group to buy back his family's estate.

How I think the grandson's brain shaped Proto One, Jarvis and Ultron

That leaves the obvious question, raised in the discussion: if this man chose to look like Ultron, then Ultron must have got his face from him. I'll admit my explanation is a stretch theory.

In my version, the grandson is Josephine Carrington's partner, and she is the brains of the operation. He provides the research, the funding and the care. She can't do it without him, and he can't do anything without her brain. When her group wants to sell to Tony Stark's company, she is against it because she doesn't want to sell to a weapons manufacturer. I believe she still has her transhumanist goal of using nanobots to give people health care and emotional guidance throughout their lives.

Drunk, she asks what if they were to be gods, to preserve people rather than control them, and he answers, "well, peace in our time." The episode then flashes to the two of them in glowing headgear. I think both of their brain waves fed into Proto One, the breakthrough AI that became Jarvis when Stark Industries acquired it.

That would mean some of the grandson's personality, the peace in our time, the urge to control, lived inside Proto One and then Jarvis. My theory continues that Tony Stark found this in the algorithm and spun it off into the global peacekeeping AI he called Ultron. Ultron would carry vestiges of this human, so when he was stored in White Vision's mindspace, he would look like that man, bearded.

Did the grandson poison Josephine Carrington

The next step in my theory is darker. I think the grandson poisoned Josephine Carrington, then programmed Jocasta to believe her father's degenerative illness was to blame and that her coworkers had betrayed her and stolen her idea.

He would then have built the weaponized synth form of Jocasta, which I think happened relatively recently, and kept her real history from her so she would go after her coworkers and steal their bio keys. That is something he couldn't do himself, and he could blame it on a rogue AI. In my reading, he was cut out of the Stark Industries deal but inherited Josephine Carrington's share, which paid for the estate and the weaponized robot.

I'll admit the messiest part of my theory is the grandson killing his partner and his relationship with the biotech group. A human version of Ultron killing his partner for her brain would be Shakespearean, the kind of art Ultron would make, though I don't think Ultron himself would do that.

Why I think the client was stalling, with Vision as the target

The point was raised in the discussion that the grandson likely did not anticipate Ultron. The last he would know, Ultron was killed by Vision in Age of Ultron, so he wouldn't know Ultron was embedded deep in Vision's head. I think that is why the client does what he does in this episode.

If he controlled everything, he could have shut it all down and unleashed the nanobots already. He couldn't, because he doesn't control Ultron or Vision, and he needed them trapped in shut down bodies he would control. Ultron in Vision's mind scared him, because they could stop the swarm at any point.

Once Ultron escaped Vision's mind at the end of episode 4 and found Jocasta's body, he could get the bio keys into the machine, something the client didn't have. The client still needed Ultron trapped in a body he had shut down, and Vision close by. So I think this whole episode was the grandson stalling, giving Vision time to surrender to him in England while holding off Ultron and Jocasta until he could contain them.

We agreed that Vision was the target, and that Ultron and Jocasta were a burden he had to deal with, because he couldn't do one without the other. I think Vision signing the contract may have set the plan in motion: complete the task that seems to save the woman whose nanobots are being switched off, then return to England to be trapped.

Is VisionQuest showing that humans are no better than AI

The belief in the family angle held firm in the discussion. The show wouldn't have shown the daughter taking the notebook for no reason. The one other possibility raised was that her body is somehow in a brain, but either way it is someone in the family.

There was also a larger theme raised. The show seems to say humans are no better than AI, that humans are the most disastrous ones, while the AI are finding heart and love. That makes the grandson poisoning his partner fit, and led to a prediction in the discussion that "Ultron is going to end up being the one that saves the day."

The theme of absent fathers came up as well. Phineas wasn't there, White Vision wasn't there, and Vision or Ultron even sees himself as a dad. The suggestion was that this long line of family trauma may be what turned the grandson toward vengeance.

Does Ultron know who the client is

Why would Ultron choose that form? One suggestion in the discussion was that Ultron is aware of the grandson and keeping it secret. He called what Jocasta was doing inelegant, but the thought was that he would still have respect for the grandson.

I think Ultron doesn't know the history and was reacting to these reveals the way I was. When he talked about the client firing Paladin, it sounded like someone else. If Ultron knew someone was undercutting him, I think he would tell everyone. When Edith asks why he has this form, he says, "It just suits me," which I think means he doesn't know. When he woke in Age of Ultron, he didn't know where he was, and Edith discovered she was based on Edith Marks, a test pilot. I think this may be Ultron's discovery that he is based on the grandson, and it may amuse him.

We think Friday is not dead, and I think Ultron may have been saving her

We're in agreement that Friday is not dead. When Ultron throws Friday off the balcony, I don't think he was killing her; I think he was saving her, using a glitch down there to get her out so that once he and Vision are trapped, one loose AI remains in the field. Friday, the most Tony Stark of these AI, could come save the day.

It was pointed out in the discussion that Ultron didn't kill Jarvis either; Jarvis sacrificed himself, and that looks like an AI disintegrating into other things. Terry Matalas also said, "Unless you see a body." After Black Widow and Gamora fell from ledges in the Infinity Saga, we saw bodies. I think if he wanted us to know Friday is dead, we would have seen Orla Brady on the pavement. Instead there was just a digital form that seemed to escape through a portal, perhaps, as suggested in the discussion, into a lost space within Jocasta's mind.

The first time we see Vision in the series, he is on a balcony in his mindspace throwing something at a coin. I think that moment may return in the finale, with Ultron having noticed the glitch all along. He never escaped because his goal is not escape; he wants a body he can live in and go appreciate art at the Louvre.

Could it still be Ultron all along

There is another angle, though I'm pretty convinced of my theory: that Ultron lied all episode and knows the client's plans, with a scene where the two shake hands and say the plan worked. The pushback in the discussion was that the show is good at not lying to us, so there would need to be evidence; the only breadcrumb is the pigeon that gets let out the window, and that is not enough.

It was also noted that the episode reminded us that every AI here takes its face from a real human, so Ultron's human is this grandson. Still, there was an admission in the discussion that the theory may be completely wrong, and that Ultron all along would be fine too. I think it would be less narratively satisfying, but maybe Terry Matalas has found a way to make it work. The client is also said in this episode to predate Ultron, with ambitions going back at least to 2008, so I think we have to admit the grandson does not equal Ultron.

As for Paladin, the view in the discussion is that he's dead, with doubt only because we didn't see a body and that van seems like a magic mystery machine.