In VisionQuest episode 2, we left Vision (Paul Bettany) and Tommy (Ruaridh Mollica) barely clear of Paladin's (Todd Stashwick) trap, with Jarvis (James D'Arcy) gone after sacrificing himself to keep the rest of the Mindspace running and Vision badly damaged from the fight at Saint Mabyn's.
It was also the episode where Tommy finally stopped flinching every time Vision said something fatherly and actually let himself lean into it a little, even while Vision kept insisting out loud that none of this makes him Tommy's dad.
Episode 3, which is titled "Reboot," picks up right where that left off, and it does something I wasn't expecting this early. It kills Vision again and uses it to force the one conversation he's been avoiding since the premiere.
This is easily the most emotionally dense hour the show's done so far, even if a couple of its other threads feel like they're being rushed to keep pace with it. It also had one of the best father-son scenes Marvel's put on screen in a while.
Vision tells Tommy his injuries are "mildly fatal"
Tommy tries to help Vision in the aftermath of the Saint Mabyn's incident, and things are not good. Vision tells him his injuries are "mildly fatal," and given that neither Iron Man nor Bruce Banner are around to fix him this time, his odds aren't great.
Tommy's not willing to just accept that, and neither are the rest of the AIs, who scramble to stop the power leak so Jarvis doesn't die for nothing.
Meanwhile, Paladin's in rough shape, too, and his handler (Diane Morgan) actually tries to talk him into retiring, pointing out he's slowing down and getting hurt more often. He ignores her completely and orders her to track the strange signature Vision's leaking using their drones instead. That little exchange told me a lot about who Paladin is underneath the menace and that he can't afford to stop.
Vision has Tommy pull the car over so he can cauterize his own wound with part of the vehicle, which is as grim as it sounds, and Tommy tries to use the moment to actually talk to him. Vision shuts it down fast, insisting that whatever connection exists between them is Wanda's (Elizabeth Olsen) business, not his.
Tommy's frustration boils over when Vision starts talking out loud to AIs that Tommy can't see, and he reasonably concludes Vision's both avoiding him and hiding things from him. Vision, for his part, knows exactly how upset Tommy is and still insists they need to keep moving, since Paladin's still somewhere behind them.
Vision spends the hotel scene running simulations of the conversation he can't bring himself to have
They finally make it to a run-down hotel to lie low, though Vision's still leaking enough power to mess with the electricity on the way in. Tommy steals some cash from the ATM despite Vision's disapproval, which Ultron (James Spader) immediately points out is more than a little hypocritical. I laughed at that one. Ultron's never going to pass up a chance to call out hypocrisy, especially Vision's.
On the way to their room, Tommy sees a swimming pool ad on the wall and has a lapse. Once they're safely in the room, Tommy turns on the TV to watch old shows, saying they calm him down, and it's a small, quietly sad tribute to Wanda given how much we already know about Wanda's own relationship with old sitcoms. It seems like the perfect opening for Vision to finally tell him the truth about Westview, but he can't bring himself to do it, not wanting Tommy to grieve a life he never actually had.
What follows is one of my favorite sequences the show's done yet. Tommy reveals he knows a little about who Vision and Wanda are from a book but has no idea how he could possibly be their son, and Vision tells him flatly that his memories aren't real, that he wanted a family so badly his brain invented all of it from what he'd read. Tommy gets angry and storms out, and it's only then that the show reveals the twist: this was all a simulation Vision was running in his head, trying out different ways to handle the real conversation before he actually has it.
Ultron tells him to just comfort the kid already, but no matter how many versions of this scene Vision runs, he can't quite land on anything that works.
After actually storming into the hallway for real, Tommy gets his food stuck in a vending machine, and in his frustration, his hand goes straight through the glass without breaking it, which clearly means his powers are kicking in without warning. Once they fade, he's left with a bloody hand that Vision bandages, trying and failing to smooth things over with small talk about boxing.
Tommy sees right through it, and Vision finally drops the act, admitting he's not afraid of dying but of never finding his purpose again. That honesty actually opens Tommy up in return, and he describes what happened at the pool like he felt every atom in his body moving too fast while he floated away from anything real, the same sensation that just happened again with the vending machine glass.
They realize together that he's been phasing, something Vision himself used to be able to do. It's a lovely, quiet bit of connection, immediately cut short by Paladin's drones finding the hotel. They barely escape, and Vision starts malfunctioning badly in the process.
Butcherbird tears through Paladin's past, and his client fires him anyway
Elsewhere, Paladin's client is losing patience with him fast, and it's clear his own past is weighing on him just as heavily as Tommy's is on him. His hunt for Vision leads him to a luxury apartment building and a mysterious AI killer named Butcherbird (T'Nia Miller), who is not remotely pleased about him showing up uninvited and threatens to claw out of his mind whoever sent him.
While she's digging through his head, Butcherbird finds a childhood memory of his father calling him weak, like his mother, shortly before that same father was killed by an actual paladin, who then raised him. That's the detail that recontextualizes everything. He's not really a paladin by blood, just someone raised by one, and everything he's ever wanted boils down to wanting to feel real.
He manages to use his drones to distract Butcherbird and get away, only to get fired by his client for yet another failed job.
The AIs hold a funeral for Jarvis, and Friday breaks down over losing Tony
Back inside Vision's head, Edith (Emily Hampshire) muses that she doesn't fear death, and Ultron tells her that's only because she's never actually faced it. Friday (Orla Brady) chimes in with a detail I found weirdly moving: most of Stark's AIs are modeled directly on real people he knew, and their avatars are built from actual human faces.
Friday tries to stabilize Vision by rewriting his code. She reveals she is still haunted by watching Tony Stark die in front of her, convinced she should have been able to save him.
The AIs hold a small funeral for Jarvis to honor what he did. Dum-E (Henry Lewis) recites a Keats, and U (Jonathan Sayers) sings an unexpectedly gorgeous rendition of "Danny Boy." I didn't think I'd tear up over an Irish folk song, but here we are.
Vision has to die so Tommy can bring him back
Weakening fast, Vision lands on a genuinely risky plan: he has to die, and Tommy has to bring him back by rebooting his systems with his powers. Tommy doubts he can control his abilities well enough to pull it off, but Vision tells him he has faith in him admitting that every single simulation he ran had the same flaw, none of them accounted for Vision actually accepting that Tommy Shepherd really is Tommy Maximoff too. That's the moment, and it got me. Vision finally says out loud what he's been dodging the entire episode.
That acceptance is enough to send Tommy to the hotel pool, where Vision cools his systems in the water while Tommy conducts electricity and uses his own super speed to create enough friction to restart him. While he's dead, Vision sees fragments of memories from WandaVision flash by and assumes he's watching his life end, but Ultron tells him he's actually seeing his future and what's possible if he just holds on and comes back. The power goes out across London in the process, but it works, and Vision comes back.
The experience pulls Vision and Tommy closer than they've been all series. Vision tells him he saw hope while he was dead and tucks him into bed that night, admitting he believes love is real even though he's never personally felt it.
Ultron, never one to let a tender moment sit too long, reminds Vision that Tommy knowing a bit about him doesn't mean Tommy understands love either. Worse, the citywide power outage tips Butcherbird off to exactly where Vision is, and she breaches the Mindspace during the reboot, hijacking his body through the neural connection.
Verdict
The hotel sequence is the strongest stretch the show's done so far, and it earns every bit of the emotional payoff by the time Vision admits out loud that Tommy really is who he thinks he is.
Mollica continues to be the real engine of this show. Tommy's PTSD around the pool and his fear of his own powers made his decision to go back into that water for Vision land so much harder.
Friday's confession about losing Tony was a gut-punch delivered in under a minute of screen time, and I wanted more of it immediately, which says a lot about how good that beat actually was.
Jarvis's funeral was lovely, but losing him this early still stings in the wrong way, mostly because I adore him so much since his Agent Carter days.
Overall, this is the best episode of the season so far, carried almost entirely by Vision and Tommy.
Episode grade: A
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