VisionQuest - “Immolation” Review
“I am the Vision. I have always been the Vision. There is only one, and I am he.”
Paul Bettany says this near the end of “Immolation,” and it is the line the whole series has been walking toward. For six episodes Vision has been bound up in one identity crisis after another. This penultimate hour sends him on a vision quest into his own mind, making good on the promise of the title.
The episode opens in 1939, with Phineas Horton, another Bettany character and the apparent basis for Vision’s likeness, selling his family estate to build J.I.M., the Synthetic Man. His wife is frustrated that he is ignoring their living daughter while he makes a machine to replace their dead son. Like the Scarlet Witch in WandaVision, Phineas is so burdened by grief that he has given it a physical form and ignores the damage he does along the way.
In the present, Vision and Speed race to save Lisa from Jocasta’s nanobot as she wields a pair of additional robotic arms against them that evoke her comic book origins as Coat of Arms. Surgical removal will kill her, reprogramming might, and they have only hours before it rewrites her brain. Meanwhile Jocasta tries to free her billions of nanobots, but one biokey is missing, belonging to a secret sixth partner whose identity is buried in her lost memories. Then Paladin’s mysterious client appears as a flickering, deep-voiced silhouette. He offers Vision the chance to save Coat of Arms and reclaim his identity, and offers Jocasta her memories. Ultron mocks him as melodramatic. The client is amused once he realizes who Ultron is, which should worry everyone.
Then comes the quest. Vision signs the client’s contract and descends into his subconscious, where his memories of his progenitors teach him hard lessons. Ultron, watching WandaVision from a couch, reminds him he is still living rent-free in Vision’s head, and says that family is forever. A stern phantom of the original Vision accuses him of putting his predecessor on a pedestal, in his words, “not to honor me but to spare yourself the effort of the climb.” Vision blasts him in anger. Finally, he meets J.I.M. and Phineas locked in an argument that never ends. J.I.M. wants to feel everything, and Phineas thinks he is better off without it.
Here Bettany does his finest work. Vision understands that he has been denying his identity because it comes with painful truths. If he admits that he is the Vision, then he must admit that he lost Scarlet Witch. If he is Speed’s father, then he must face the loss of Wiccan. He weeps, and then ultimately claims his sense of self. Because he has inherited the memories of his earlier incarnations as though he experienced them, then he is the Vision, and by extension the father of Speed and Wiccan, with everything that implies. J.I.M. hands him the source code, and E.D.I.T.H. uses it to drive Jocasta out of Coat of Arms.
The ending is ominous. Vision has been programmed to turn himself in or self-destruct, leaves Speed and Coat of Arms a tablet containing the footage of WandaVision and a farewell letter, and Paladin delivers him to a brick estate with a clocktower. A man steps out, clearly the model for Ultron’s human likeness.
With his identity restored, I hope that Vision carries this newfound sense of purpose into next week’s finale, ideally bringing a satisfying close to the WandaVision trilogy as the last remaining piece to set the stage for Avengers: Doomsday.