VisionQuest: who inspired Tony Stark's JARVIS and FRIDAY?

Marvel's VisionQuest has told us more about Tony Stark's backstory than any other MCU title in 10 years. Episodes 3 and 4 reveal that most of the AI personalities Tony built were modeled on real people from his life, and that has me asking who he based Ultron on and what other AI secrets Iron Man kept from the world. It also has me completely rethinking the events of the first Iron Man film. It has me rethinking Tony's actual motivations for wanting to put a suit of armor around the world in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

From what we still understand, putting a suit of armor around the world is the same task the newly masked Doctor Doom takes on in Avengers: Doomsday. So there's a lot to connect here, from Tony's household growing up to how long he kept Ultron a secret from the other Avengers.

VisionQuest reveals Tony Stark modeled his AIs on real people

In VisionQuest episode 3, we learn that the AI forms within Vision's quantum processor mindscape were based on AI code that came to Stark Industries through its acquisition of a biotech group. The specific quirks of each of those AI forms were modeled on real human beings in Tony Stark's life. Aside from Dummy and a couple of exceptions, most of Stark's AIs are based on actual people he admired or held dear, either through uploaded personality profiles or replicated designs.

The show frames it as something hidden in their programming: "We share a birthmark, a memorial in our code." Dummy, on the other hand, gets the line "I'm a one-off." In episode 4, EDITH digs further into the Stark records to figure out exactly who each of them is based on. She finds that Stark used an AI matrix that a woman named Katarina sold him as the template for all of them, with real people as inspiration.

The names she turns up are Edwin Jarvis, the Stark family butler, and for FRIDAY, Howard Stark's "gal Friday," Allison Hogan, who kept his office and helped raise his son. We had already assumed this about JARVIS, especially with James D'Arcy returning to play the AI form of the character after playing Edwin Jarvis in Agent Carter and Avengers: Endgame.

FRIDAY's link to Allison Hogan points to Happy Hogan's mother

The FRIDAY reveal is the big one. Allison Hogan was Howard Stark's secretary and helped raise Tony. As I said in my breakdown of the episode, this implies she was the mother of Harold "Happy" Hogan, Tony's driver turned head of security turned love interest of Peter Parker's Aunt May.

There's some irony in that. Happy has his love and hate relationship with Dummy in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and that ended with Dummy living with him in Spider-Man: No Way Home. It sounds like young Tony grew up alongside a young Happy, who was sometimes brought to work at the Stark mansion in New York City, and that's how the two got to know each other.

Maria Stark becomes more of an absent mother

This revelation also relegates Maria Stark to more of an absent mother playing piano in the other room. Having Edwin Jarvis as a father figure while Howard Stark was out drinking, I get that. But based on how angry Tony was at Bucky Barnes for killing both of his parents, I figured Maria was more hands on than this picture suggests, where others did the heavy lifting as both father figure and mother figure in the household.

Still, all of this is giving us a much clearer picture of the Stark household in New York City. I've been suspecting that it will become the new Avengers Mansion, a location teased on Heroes and Villains shirts at New York Comic Con as a possible location in Avengers: Doomsday. If the new Avengers are in the new Avengers Tower, Sam Wilson's original Avengers are going to need a headquarters somewhere else, and I think the best option now is the old Stark household turned Avengers Mansion.

Stan Lee based Avengers Mansion on the Henry Clay Frick house on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Tony's BARF scene at the beginning of Captain America: Civil War is the one MCU title so far to show us the interior of this house. I'm now wondering if Vision's mindscape house might have even been subconsciously based on that architecture.

EDITH was modeled on a widowed Stark test pilot named Edith

Ultron jokes that EDITH was the family dog, but she turns out to be based on Howard Stark's crash test dummy, a test pilot in the mold of Amelia Earhart. One line sums her up: "There's someone who faced death. I wonder if she ever laughed at it." Old news clippings explain that this Stark Company test pilot lost her husband, a lieutenant named Edward, in a plane crash outside Pine Haven, New Jersey. The newlyweds were about to leave on a honeymoon to Italy before the accident.

There was a lot of odd information in these moments. Edward, a veteran of either World War II or the Korean War, died at age 51, just before he and his new bride, also a pilot, were set to head to Italy together. According to the headlines, this all happened in March 1964. I don't want to judge, but 51 is an unusual age for a veteran to get married in the mid 1960s. It's also weird that he died and not his risk taking test pilot wife, and that she seems to strike a thumbs up pose in every photograph.

These articles don't say when Edith died. Ultron says she "lived a long life wishing she hadn't." Tony Stark was born in May 1970, so for him to have known her, she must have lived on for years after her husband's death, something like another 10 years.

The theory that EDITH was secretly based on Peter Parker

There's some disillusionment and fan theorizing that Edith's story might be a false backstory cooked up by Doctor Strange's memory wipe spell. That spell had to alter reality, history, and physical and digital evidence to create a new backstory filling in for the now absent existence of Peter Parker. So some fans think the risk taking, thrill seeking, joyful EDITH must have been based on Peter.

It did seem in Spider-Man: Far From Home that Tony made EDITH specifically for Peter. Even the glasses EDITH wears in these episodes are the same frames Peter wears in Far From Home. But it's not clear if EDITH even knows the name Peter Parker. In an upcoming episode, she tells Vision, "My first boss was a junior in high school." She remembers being paired with a teenager, but that doesn't mean she knows that teenager was named Peter Parker and looked exactly like Tom Holland.

Did Edith shape young Tony Stark's thrill seeking spirit?

The way I see it, there's Tony Stark's joy and thrill seeking energy as a kid, the mischievous little kid who showed up in the background of Howard Stark's drunken City of Tomorrow films in Iron Man 2. Did all that come from this widowed test pilot mentor who worked for his dad? Given the timeline, she might even have been at Camp Lehigh in 1970, when a time traveling Steve Rogers and Tony Stark snooped around there for Pym particles and the Tesseract during the time heist in Avengers: Endgame. She might also be there when Steve goes on his return journey to put the Tesseract back, part of a journey that could be part of the prelude to Avengers: Doomsday.

If Edith was that much a part of Tony's youthful spirit before he went to MIT early at 16 and started winning robotics awards for building Dummy, Tony might not have had many other friends his age besides Happy Hogan, his dad's secretary's son. He might never have met anyone like her again until Peter Parker. Isn't it interesting that EDITH is so interested in boxing, and Happy has a past as a boxer? I kind of feel like at some point in the early '70s, Edith, young Tony and young Happy were all sparring in the ring together.

Tony first met Peter without knowing who he was at the Stark Expo, as that little kid in Iron Man 2. He properly met him after seeing online clips of a kid in Queens doing the same kind of risky heroic stunts his mentor Edith would do. That's when I think he got the idea that maybe this AI would be best paired with this kid someday.

Stepping outside the MCU for a second, the idea of a young Robert Downey Jr. loving mentor figures from his youth and keeping their ghosts around reminds me of the first Downey performance I remember seeing as a kid, the 1993 film Heart and Souls. Downey plays a businessman followed around by four ghosts acting as his guardian angels, all of whom died in a trolley accident at the moment he was born. The movie bombed and almost nobody talks about it, but I wonder if Terry Matalas had it in mind at all for this show.

Who was Ultron based on? The Phineas Horton theory

These episodes leave Ultron's source avatar a mystery for now. He says only that he was "dreamed up in a lab at Avengers Tower," and when asked why he chose this avatar, he says he doesn't know, it just suits him. That's as far as episode 4 goes, but it does seem like a mystery this season will answer.

A popular theory is that since Vision's appearance seems to come from the look of Jim Hammond, the original synthetic man, Ultron's appearance could be based on Hammond's Geppetto, his creator Phineas Horton. I like this theory. The only issue is that if Ultron was Tony's creation, or maybe his creation with Katarina, every other personality Tony coded was based on someone he knew. Phineas Horton seems to be an inventor of the 1940s, decades before Tony was born.

It's possible Horton was still alive into the '70s. Maybe Tony has memories of old man Horton as an inventor colleague of his father, or even his father's mentor. I don't know. Horton just seems significantly older than the other personalities who charmed a young Tony enough that he wanted to keep them in his life in digital form. Then again, if Happy was Allison Hogan's son, maybe Ultron's personality came from the son of Howard Stark's mentor, Phineas Horton.

More Ultron theories, from a Stark bodyguard to Howard Potts

Here's another theory. If Ultron's original function was peace in our time and a suit of armor around the world, maybe he was based on a human bodyguard who died protecting the Starks from something like a Hydra assassin.

Or maybe Ultron is based on Tony Stark himself. Hear me out. The way Howard Stark always talked about the great Captain America, maybe there was another scientist Howard met in his past who gave him great advice about being a good father: Howard Potts. That's the fidgety beatnik, the visiting colleague from MIT in the S.H.I.E.L.D. jacket, whom Howard met at Camp Lehigh in 1970, the month before Tony was born. I don't know if that one works, though, because Howard would only have remembered Potts in a branch timeline that, in theory, Steve Rogers clipped by returning the Tesseract.

One final curveball: could Ultron be based not on a human at all, but on a digital voice in a computer system Tony had as a kid and didn't understand, Arnim Zola? Tony probably wouldn't base his AI on a digital ghost from his childhood computers, and there's nothing about Ultron's coding that screams Hail Hydra. I'm just trying to leave the door open for the other AIs in the MCU, like Miss Minutes, Zola and Karen. I want them to have forms on this show too. But I do think Ultron's source personality is going to be revealed in this series, and that it's going to be someone else interesting in Howard Stark's world from Tony's childhood.

Jocasta's history and a death date tied to Iron Man

For now, I think we'll get to know the history of Jocasta and a doctor who was part of the original biotech group. Tony had the Jocasta memory card in his drawer in the Age of Ultron scene where FRIDAY was introduced, so he must have been involved in the creation or maintenance of this AI for several years.

I shared my theory in last week's breakdown that Tony and Katarina might have built Jocasta together on the side as a potential spouse AI for Ultron. She would temper him and balance him, and serve as the queen bee of the original intended vessel for Ultron, Tony's fleet of Iron Legion drones. Many fans, though, are theorizing that the name Jocasta might be built from that doctor's name combined with Stark.

Her death date in episode 4 is officially listed as May 21, 2008, right around the final events of the first Iron Man film. And let's not forget that Faran Tahir is confirmed to be in this series. That's Raza, who died in the first Iron Man film. I'm wondering whether we're going to see a flashback that brings Raza in and reveals something else that happened to Tony Stark during those weeks of Iron Man.