VisionQuest, S1E4: Malware

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STV033: Season 1, Episode 4 of VisionQuest, “Malware,” opens with the Butcherbird Killer inside Vision’s head and ends with Ultron walking off with Tommy. In between, the AIs work a murder case, Vision and Ultron hack Interpol, and a gala goes very wrong.

Patrick Mason, Jeff Haecker, and Rob Leonardi start with the scene a Catholic podcast can’t skip: E.D.I.T.H. casting the killer out of Vision’s mind with lines from The Exorcist turned into computer commands. None of the three is a priest or an exorcist, and all three read it as a send-up of the movie rather than a jab at the faith. Ultron gets the best line, too.

Then comes the reveal. The Butcherbird Killer is Jocasta, a synthezoid carrying the mind of Markridge Biotech co-founder Jo Carrington, and she is hunting the team that built her. Rob, fresh off a rewatch of Avengers: Age of Ultron, points out the “Jocasta” chip Tony passes over when he picks F.R.I.D.A.Y. He sets Jocasta, a human mind moved into a machine, against Vision, an AI grown into something close to a human body, and hears an echo of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. Patrick traces the line of synthetic life from the first synthetic man, built by Phineas Horton, through Jocasta and Ultron to Vision, each one struggling with human emotion.

At the gala hosted by Katerina Wells (Mary McDonnell, still dealing with artificial life years after Battlestar Galactica), Tommy figures out that Vision has been hiding Ultron all along. The panel talks about Vision’s Freudian slip, his lie by omission, and whether Lisa Molinari is a love interest or a hero in waiting.

The best conversation of the series so far, Patrick argues, is Ultron’s talk with E.D.I.T.H. about Edith Marks, the widowed crash tester she was modeled on. Edith Marks kept living after a loss that could have stopped her, and Ultron tells E.D.I.T.H. that being modeled on someone does not mean she has to become her. Patrick connects that to a world that keeps handing people labels to live inside, and to the One who knows who we really are.

Rob notices how fatherly Ultron has become, handing Vision advice about raising an impulsive teenager. Then Vision gives up control, Katerina dies, and Ultron tells Tommy to call him “Pop-Pop.” Along the way: DUM-E and U as Sherlock and Watson, a CAPTCHA that stumps Ultron, and Tommy learning to use his speed on purpose.

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