VisionQuest Recap: Puzzle Pieces

VisionQuest
Reboot
Season 1 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★
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At this point, we really should talk about Ultron, the snarky spark VisionQuest is built around. He’s having most of the fun in this show, and providing most of the fun for viewers. But he’s also doing most of the narrative work, stabilizing everyone else and counterbalancing their flaws. He’s confident and self-assured where Vision is vacillating and confused. He’s snarky and sly where the other AIs are achingly perky and sincere. He’s wise and knowledgeable when the others are scrambling for information or direction. He keeps pushing the story forward, creating dynamic situations where Vision wants stability and isolation.

Does Vision recognize how much he needs Ultron as a foil? Even though Ultron purposefully destabilized Vision’s quiet, well-ordered life, causing Fiona and Jarvis’s deaths and Vision’s near-destruction, Vision still treats him more like a bristly colleague than a dangerous enemy. And while Vision spends a lot of “Reboot” too incapacitated to resist, reject, or re-incarcerate Ultron, he doesn’t even mention Ultron’s escape from mind-prison. Maybe he doesn’t think Ultron’s mildly enhanced freedom as a persistent hallucination matters that much. But given how much of “Reboot” Vision spends trying to survive the aftermath of Ultron’s schemes, it’s alarming that Vision isn’t more alarmed. 

“Reboot” starts with Ultron watching another news report about the Butcherbird Killer, with clearer information: Someone’s murdering tech moguls and carving stylized wings around their bodies. Elsewhere, a man in a high-rise apartment panics over that news report, pulling out a 12-gauge shotgun. But someone shuts down his security system, and a robed, hooded figure with glowing red eyes similar to Vision’s emerges and stalks in, unfazed by his shotgun blasts. 

On the road away from Saint Mabyn’s, Thomas tries to help Vision, who addresses a particularly bad wound, passes out, wakes up, malfunctions, then mostly seems fine. The two check in at a hotel together, hiding from Paladin’s pursuit, but Vision breaks down again and needs Thomas to restart him. 

This all plays out with a lot of frequent jarring tonal mismatches, and some bafflingly overwrought dramatic beats, especially around Vision’s makeshift self-repair. It’s not enough for him to be badly damaged: His AI crew says he’ll die if he doesn’t seal the wound within 183 seconds, and he cauterizes it with battery acid with just 20 seconds to spare. Then the Greatest American Hero theme kicks in, turning his last-second survival into a gag. Similarly, at the hotel, Vision and Thomas are joking about humans and poop when Vision glitches, then abruptly says, “I only have minutes of life remaining.” That’s ridiculously melodramatic already, but to compound the drama, he says if he dies, he’ll explode, vaporizing Thomas and a lot of London. These rushed, outsized threats are so over-the-top, they feel like jokes, especially as they’re sprinkled between actual jokes.

The sidebars with the rest of Vision’s AI peanut gallery are similarly all over the place tonally. Friday, Edith, and the maintenance bots are sometimes goofy comic-relief clowns. But “Reboot” also gives them each a central, personal moment, which feels like loose puzzle pieces randomly crammed into the big picture. Edith’s musing on death and Friday’s monologue about failing Tony Stark have obvious resonances with Vision’s struggles for survival, and hint at how they’ll react as the stakes continue to rise. But they feel like clunky foreshadowing — especially when Friday reveals, as a complete non sequitur, that she, Edith, and Jarvis were all based on real people Tony Stark knew. Friday seems to think it proves Edith meaningfully understands death, but it really doesn’t. What it does do is raise the question of whose human DNA Ultron is carrying.

The bots hold a funeral for Jarvis, where DUM-E speaks for the first time, quoting Keats’s poem “On Death,” and U sings “Danny Boy.” Vision and Ultron argue about love, death, and grief. This is sweet, but it interrupts the episode’s flow significantly: All this mindscape stuff takes up no real-world time for Vision, who can instantly run a quintillion theoreticals right before a conversation. But it takes up our time.

“Reboot” can’t find a consistent tone for Thomas and Vision’s evolving relationship, either. Thomas keeps trying to discuss their shared illusory history, but Vision is distracted by everything from Paladin’s pursuit to Thomas not using turn signals. Vision is dodging any discussion of Westview and Tommy Maximoff, though, because he doesn’t know how to comfort Thomas. When he does finally try, the emotional stakes seem high, until it turns out he’s just running one of many simulations of how that talk might fail. In his sims, Thomas is fragile and high-strung — but that’s because we’re watching Vision play out his anxieties about being awkward with people and bad at emotions. Ultimately, Vision punts and suggests recuperating before any conversation. 

This episode creates some intriguing parallels. While Vision patches himself up from the Paladin fight and suffers through Ultron’s barbs, Paladin patches his own wounds and takes similar guff from his handler. Paladin even has his own AI crew: the drones Bing, Bang, and Boom, which he sends to track Vision’s coolant leak. Paladin thematically syncs up with Thomas as well: Both men have trauma flashbacks back-to-back, with Thomas reliving his drowning, and Paladin reliving a bloody moment from childhood. The creators seem to be telling us Paladin has more in common with the protagonists than with his mysterious client, who calls him yet again for some completely redundant threats. 

Vision’s simulated conversations may not give Thomas enough credit, but the kid is frustrated enough to freak out over a malfunctioning vending machine, which, like Vision, is broken and isn’t helpfully dispensing what Thomas wants. The freakout is a reminder that he doesn’t have conscious control of his powers: He winds up with one hand phased into the machine. That brief crisis leads Thomas to tell Vision (and us) how he ended up in jail: In the pool accident where he drowned, his speed powers activated and the pool water boiled around him. He was blamed for the other poolgoers’ injuries.

Meanwhile, Paladin accidentally tracks down the Butcherbird Killer, a female synthezoid who’s leaking coolant just like Vision. Paladin reaches the high-rise apartment from the episode’s opening and finds the shotgun-wielding man dead, with wings carved into the floor below him and one of his eyes ripped out. Butcherbird, who’s still there, attacks Paladin with Vision-like powers, entering his mind and revealing the traumatic past we saw flashes of earlier. A previous Paladin killed this Paladin’s abusive father, then raised our Paladin as his successor. With the job came a code: “My contract is my oath, my blood, my life.” 

Butcherbird says that means our guy isn’t a true Paladin, because he isn’t part of the bloodline. “All you’ve ever wanted is to feel real,” she says, further connecting Paladin and Vision. (And Pinocchio, who Ultron keeps evoking with his “strings” references.) Paladin escapes by setting his drones on Butcherbird. Before long, though, his client calls to fire him for failing to capture Vision. That’s a big problem, since we’ve just learned Paladin considers a contract an unbreakable vow, and keeping that vow makes him feel “real.”

Back at the hotel, Vision boots up his head-laser when Paladin’s drone approaches. Before the drone notices him, Paladin recalls it to help fight Butcherbird, but the damage is done. Vision has overclocked his failing systems and needs to shut down. Then he needs Thomas to overcome his trauma, master his powers, and reboot Vision with a power surge. Thomas is anxious, but with death looming, Vision finally nails the conversation he’s been practicing by investing it with real emotion, conviction, and support. He confirms that Tommy Maximoff and Thomas are both real, and puts himself in their hands. Vision’s life flashes before his eyes within his mind-mansion’s screening room, but Ultron redirects him toward WandaVision footage of Billy and Tommy, to make Vision want to survive. Ultron may be a genocidal villain, but he does have a heart! Or maybe, in spite of urging Vision to delete him in episode one, Ultron is having second thoughts after this episode’s many death discussions.

Thomas shocks Vision back to life, but this somehow alerts Butcherbird; Vision’s mindscape fills with oppressive red lighting, ominously circling birds, and TVs crackling with static. Vision, eyes glowing red, floats in mid-air in the classic “demonic possession victim” pose as Butcherbird psychically invades him. Clearly, if neither Ultron nor Paladin are going to be this series’ Big Bad — if they’re both headed toward reconciliation with the heroes — someone else has to be the real threat, and it seems like she’s finally arrived. 

Loose Wires

• This episode has more MCU fan-bait allusions than past installments: Paladin got his adamantium armor from the Ten Rings Syndicate, once confronted a thing “halfway between a man and a wolf” who was a “perfectly reasonable fellow by day” (a Werewolf By Night gag) and got a concussion from a billy club to the noggin in Hell’s Kitchen (Daredevil’s turf and chosen weapon).

• I know Vision’s summary of WandaVision’s finale is meant to be a little off because all his simulations are, but “she realized what she was doing was morally abhorrent, so she collapsed the hex” is a phenomenally generous read on how that show ended.

• Where are we on theorizing about Paladin’s mysterious, impatient, all-knowing client, who clearly isn’t Butcherbird? Tyler Hayward still seems possible, but surely there’s a more interesting option. 

• Fun little note on DUM-E’s Keats poem: The line right after the couplet he recites is “the transient pleasures as a vision seem.” Maybe quoting that would have felt a little too on the nose?