Oh Vision. Manipulated into giving up the controls to Ultron with a simple appeal to your burgeoning emotional attachment to Thomas. I expected more of you. And yet, that might just be the surest sign that White Vision is slowly but surely morphing into something much closer to The Vision – helped along with malicious intent, naturally – by Ultron himself. But I’m getting ahead of things. Let’s start back at the beginning of this double episode,* where parallels began to emerge between Paladin, Thomas, and Vision.
*If I have one major complaint about this season, it’s that it’s being released in such a strange manner. We have three weeks where we get two episodes – annoying for those of use posting episodic reviews, as we need to decide if we go individual or combined – while the final two weeks are a single episode each. Personally, I love a weekly episode drop – it keeps people talking about the show longer, it creates a sense of community around the show, and the wait makes folks get hyped for their weekly dose (you know, like in the olden days). But this hodge podge release schedule tries to have it both ways, offering a mini-binge and then a wait, losing three additional weeks the show could be airing.
I’m usually a firm believer that spending time getting into the backstory of a show’s antagonist is only worth the time if you have the time to pay off that knowledge. I trust Terry Matalas a great deal – and I know how great Todd Stashwick can be when dealing with a dark character backstory from his stellar turn on Picard – so I am hopeful that the flashback into Paladin’s history will payoff down the road (I suspect either in finding the identity of his mysterious client or in saving Vision and Thomas from something or someone). But even if it doesn’t, I appreciated the parallels to both Thomas and Vision. Paladin isn’t a Paladin by blood; rather he was taken under the wing of a true Paladin and assumed the mantle. So, while he believes himself to be a Paladin, in the lore of the order, he’s not. Similarly, we have Vision, who tells himself he isn’t The Vision, that he’s just an echo stored in the body of a weapon. Yet he’s been doing a heck of a lot of things to try to understand not only The Vision, but what it was about those he surrounded himself with that made him more human than machine at times. He knows he’ll never be The Vision, but he’s taking steps to become something much closer to that version of The Vision we saw in WandaVision. And Thomas? He just wants to fit in and understand himself. He might not be a Maximoff by blood, but with Vision’s blessing, he now sees himself much more in the vein of Tommy and less as the lonely young man without anything worth living for. All three of these men want to be validated – they want to be “real” in their identities, even if others might never see them that way. And really, that might be the most human of all wishes – that those around us will recognize us as we want to be perceived.
And this idea was further driven home with the realization by the Stark AIs that they were all patterned on people from Tony’s past. Their physical appearance mimics people who meant something to Tony – something worth immortalizing in technology. While most of the work of the AI characters comes in the form of helping explain Vision’s actions, choices, and state of being (they’re our little Greek chorus), offering each of them an identity to help reconcile their existence was a nice choice. Their role in the series and in Tony’s life was to serve, but a better understanding of who they are in addition to what they are might help them to develop more as “real” identities as well – not that any of them will have a life outside of Vision’s own psyche. (Although, one assumes, once Vision has accepted himself and better understands the emotions he’s developing, he will be a real boy and no longer need the AIs to live in his head.)
Speaking of synths and emotional upheaval, we now know just what was in the picture of the burning man in Vision’s home – it’s JIM, the first synth, the father of them all. He was destroyed when all of the emotions he held within himself caused his circuits to overload, setting him on fire – a synthetic destroyed under the mass of his emotions. See some parallels here, folks? Who was buried under a mountain after giving into her deep grief which in turn manifested itself in violent tendencies? Yup, Wanda. Who nearly destroyed himself – and did get several women killed – by manifesting the Witches’ Road out of a desire to break through and learn more about his own identity? That would be Billy. And his desire to create his brother Tommy led to a bunch of boys in a pool presumably boiling alive (or at least getting severely burned). Then there’s Vision. From the first episode, Ultron has been trying to spark an emotional reaction from him – playing the twins’ birth scene, goading him with the delivery rant, and, finally, stressing that Vision’s need to protect Thomas was not a sign of deepening emotional growth but was a sign of emotional instability. You know, just like JIM.
Ultron preyed on Vision’s fears – that he might become someone who has emotions, that he might lose his AI family because he acclimates fully to the outside human world and finds a family he doesn’t think he deserves, that he might end up hurting those he’s starting to love because he is dangerous and cannot be controlled – and manipulated him into letting Ultron run the show. Of course his first move was to lock out the AIs and Vision. Of course he let Jocasta (the great T’Nia Miller from the Mike Flanagan team of players) kill Katerina Wells (a waste of Mary McDonnell). And of course he’s going to try to manipulate Thomas along the way. A note: In the comics, Ultron and Jocasta have quite the history – so I suspect he’s going to try to manipulate her as well before things are all said and done. After all, you don’t lure James Spader back into the MCU without the promise for a really juicy role – and this is turning out to be quite the role for him. How is Vision going to find his way back – back in control, back to Thomas’ good side, potentially back to the actual side of Wanda and Billy? We’re halfway through this final chapter in this saga – I can’t wait to see where things are headed.
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