VisionQuest Recap: Movie Marathon

VisionQuest
Malware
Season 1 Episode 4
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Time for some backstory and some answers! Episode four of VisionQuest digs into Butcherbird’s origins and identity, while raising fresh questions about her. It also addresses a mystery from episode two, about a painting of a blazing figure Vision called “the first of us” and “a cautionary tale.” There’s a lot of exposition to swallow this time around, so to keep things spicy, we start the episode in a horror movie, segue to a true-crime feature, jump to a heist film, and wrap up with an action movie. It’s an entire movie marathon in just 48 minutes!

The horror movie takes place in Vision’s mind-mansion, which Butcherbird has filled with red light, dark shadows, and ominous imagery. She says she wants to change the world, and demands he stay out of her way, or she’ll hurt Thomas. Vision assumes she’s a new S.W.O.R.D. synthezoid, and she doesn’t correct him. She just implies humanity will always keep making new AIs. “These are not people who understand the word enough,” she snarls.

Edith treats Butcherbird like a horror-movie demon, dressing up as a priest to exorcise her by reading from Programmer’s Bible: Vision Testament: “I break thee from thy loop with batch command, end function! I sever thine process with backslash body in all targeted nodes!” Ultron clearly finds this hilarious: “The power of code compels you!” he shouts, and they boot Butcherbird out of Vision’s head.

They also boot themselves straight into the kind of crime procedural where the villain’s threats helpfully direct the protagonists toward a conspiracy instead of away from it. Ultron smugly briefs the AI crew on Butcherbird’s murders, since they haven’t been following human news. Ultron and Vision sneak into Interpol’s servers for more information about Butcherbird’s victims, in a light, jokey sequence that spoofs security programs, AI bots, CAPTCHAs, and social media. These two supposed enemies make a surprisingly natural mismatched buddy-cop duo. 

The Interpol files reveal that Butcherbird is probably collecting biometric keys from her victims: She’s taken blood, fingerprints, and an eye. The AI crew connects the victims via string boards, amusingly labeled “map with pins” and “human murder board.” The victims were all on a five-person team that created the original architecture for stable AI consciousness at a company called Markridge Biotech. Stark Industries later bought that architecture, using it to develop our AI cast members. 

The team co-lead, Dr. Josephine Carrington, died of natural causes in 2008 — an immediate red flag in a crime drama that’s missing an obvious mastermind. The team’s final member, Katerina Wells, is now Markridge’s CEO and Butcherbird’s probable final target. And surprise, Katerina is throwing a big transhumanist charity gala that very night! And who has the skills to infiltrate it? Grifter supreme Thomas Shepherd! 

Meanwhile, in the real world, we learn that Vision’s superpowers are all offline until he has time for significant repairs, so he can’t just phase or zap his way through whatever comes next. It’s also clear a confrontation is looming, since Thomas keeps asking pointed, suspicious questions about the “imaginary friends” Vision talks to. He doesn’t know Ultron is one of them, but he’s clearly going to figure that out. 

But first, cue the heist movie! Thomas brings in his partner Lisa, who steals fancy clothes and gala passes for herself, Thomas, and Vision. Just as the previous segments lampooned horror and crime movies, the heist veers into meta humor, as Vision and Thomas divert attention from Lisa’s pickpocketing by having a screaming fight in Italian. Briefly, they roleplay as a boss and his hapless assistant. Soon, though, they’re just yelling whatever comes to mind: “Angrier! We gotta give Lisa time!” “Too loud! Now it’s weird!” 

Their heist-craft is terrible, between Vision and Thomas immediately breaking character and Lisa gleefully waving her stolen passes at them while she’s still two feet away from the original owners. But that doesn’t matter: This episode is mostly a breezy, fluffy connect-the-dots puzzle. Whenever the lines between dots are scribbled in hastily, it’s intentional, for comedy value. Less funny: When Lisa gets Thomas alone, she points out how completely and uncharacteristically he came to trust his new synthezoid father figure. Thomas gets defensive — and brutal. “Why are you trying to ruin this for me?” he snaps. “Maybe it’s because only one of us is an orphan now?” Ugly! Sure, Thomas is juggling abandonment issues, a ton of recent trauma, and a ghost in his head only Vision believes in. But he still doesn’t get a free pass to weaponize everything he knows about Lisa in order to hurt her more effectively. 

Back in the mind-mansion, Edith doles out more exposition about the Howard Stark employees Tony Stark used as his AI templates, and wonders whether her code includes the pain her template, test pilot Edith Marks, suffered upon losing her husband Edward. (Apparently it’s Edith’s turn to shoulder VisionQuest’s identity themes, though the episode itself does plenty of identity-switching.) Ultron is uncharacteristically kind to Edith, even when she diffidently asks why he chose, uh, that human avatar. He says he doesn’t know; it just suits him. Paired with Friday and Edith’s musings in the last episode, it does seem clear we’re headed for a reveal about the human origin of Ultron’s appearance and personality. Anyone have a picture of Edward Marks handy?

At the gala, an audiovisual presentation compares Vision and Ultron as the apex and nadir of AI possibility. Neither enjoys the comparison, though it’s a cool bit of production design to have their real faces hovering meaningfully in the background as they play at being human. Katerina, surrounded by security, fills in some guests on the history of J.I.M., a.k.a. Synthetic Man, first glimpsed in Captain America: The First Avenger, and mentioned as the mysterious “first of us” in episode two. He was the first automaton AI, and his source code inspired Markridge Biotech’s work. Katerina says J.I.M. was deactivated “due to a series of incendiary mishaps,” but Vision tells Thomas that J.I.M.’s clockwork body caught fire while trying to run fast enough to process his emotions. He “felt to death,” as Thomas puts it. Apparently, the first Vision escaped that fate because the Mind Stone helped him “navigate the complexities of the mind and the heart.” The Mind Stone is long gone, but current Vision says he has “enough of that power” to keep himself regulated. That sounds deeply improbable, and seems like a potential issue for Butcherbird, Ultron, and any other synthetic life that never touched the stone.

Three threads come to a head at once as we enter action-movie mode. Vision slips up verbally, and Thomas realizes he preserved an internal copy of Ultron. Butcherbird arrives. And Katerina, on stage, publicly admits her guilt over helping develop the AI that led to Ultron and the Sokovia attack. We’ve been hearing her deny any guilt over Sokovia in a TV interview all episode: Butcherbird sends Vision an audio clip, and the interview plays on TVs at the hotel and in Vision’s mansion. Hearing Katerina admit her sense of responsibility for Ultron feels significant, though most of the story is still missing. But Butcherbird interrupts her speech. The episode’s action-movie finale drops the rest of the episode’s spoofy meta humor, and aims at straight drama, as Butcherbird smashes through Katerina’s security detail and drops her disguise. She isn’t a Vision-like synth; she’s an Ultron-like metal bot with Dr. Josephine Carrington’s face. 

Katerina pleads that she’s changed, and she’s “finally trying to create the world that you wanted.” “Peace in our time,” Butcherbird responds — Ultron’s manifesto when he was trying to end war by exterminating humankind. But Butcherbird still vows to “take back what you took from me, starting with your face.” Thomas superspeeds Katerina to safety and Vision fights Butcherbird, but Butcherbird is faster and stronger. Vision calls out to Jo Carrington, who he presumes was Butcherbird’s personality template. “I am not based on her. I am her,” she snarls, beating Vision down again.

Vision admits to Ultron that he can’t win this fight, and Ultron offers to take over their body and ensure both they and Butcherbird survive. (His argument is terrible — essentially “You’re too worried about Thomas’ safety to win. I’ll be better at this because I don’t care whether he dies.”) But Vision still gives in. Ultron takes over his body, then tricks Butcherbird into disintegrating Katerina, intuiting that she wanted Katerina’s face as a fourth biometric key. With Katerina gone, he says they don’t need to fight anymore. 

“This isn’t over,” Butcherbird snarls, and she flies away. Ultron seals Vision and the AI crew into Vision’s mind-mansion, then wraps a controlling arm around Thomas to guide him into the wings for “a little chat.” With him taking over Vision’s body (though keeping his own voice!), we veer all the way back into possession horror again — a nifty little closed loop for an episode that otherwise often feels like the writers have been rushing past anything that got in the way of reaching exactly this point in the story. 

Loose Wires

• This isn’t officially part of the story yet, but the credits and subtitles now identify Butcherbird as Jocasta, a known Marvel Comics superhero created by Ultron.

• What’s up with Vision saying Thomas will be safer if he stays close to Vision, when just two episodes ago, he said the exact opposite? Is this just wishful thinking because he wants to be near his son? 

• “Incendiary mishaps” feels like a bit of a gag reference, given how the comic version of Synthetic Man connects to the Human Torch. 

• Sure enough, when Ultron “takes the wheel” in Vision’s head — an old-timey ship’s wheel, with a surging ocean in the windows behind him, for one more movie-esque visual — he starts singing “I’ve Got No Strings” again. Called it!