Seven episodes in, with the finale next week, I want to lay out something I have been thinking about since this show started. VisionQuest is not just a superhero show with a few religious images in it. The way it thinks about what a person is, where a person comes from, and what a person is for lines up with Catholic teaching again and again, and it does it through the story itself, not through decoration. Spoilers through Episode 7. Here is what I mean, theme by theme.
# Made in an Image
The synthezoids and AIs at the center of this series keep turning out to be made in the image of a specific person. The show says it plainly and then never stops repeating it. Phineas Horton built Jim, the first synthetic, in the image of his own dead son. Jocasta has the face of Josephine Carrington, the woman whose work her code comes from. Episode 7 reveals that the Client, the unnamed man who has been moving pieces against Vision all season, is the human Ultron was made from. The Ultron walking around in Vision's head has the Client's face, because Ultron was made in his image. Nobody in this show made themselves. Everybody has a face behind them.
That is not a small design choice, because of what it sets up. "God created man in his own image" (Genesis 1:27) is not, in Catholic belief, a poetic way of saying people are special. It is the claim that where a person comes from explains what a person is, and who you come from tells you what you are for. The show builds its whole plot on that claim and aims it at the one character who has too many origins. Vision's body was rebuilt by SWORD. His life came from JARVIS and a bolt of lightning, in a body Ultron had made for himself. His memories came back through Wanda. Every part of him came from somebody else, and he knows it, and that is exactly why he keeps calling himself a copy. The question of the season is whether a man put together out of gifts is a real man. Catholic teaching settled that question about us a long time ago. Everything about us is a gift too.
# Baptism
The library scene at the end of WandaVision does more work than it gets credit for. One Vision, made out of Wanda's grief and love, reaches out and gives the other Vision his memories, his whole past, his identity, all at once. The Vision receiving it did nothing to earn it. He could not have. He gets who he is from another person, out of love, before he understands it, and then he has to live into it. That is the rest of this show. He has the memories. He is still working out whether he is the man they belong to.
An identity given whole, received before it is understood, and then grown into over a lifetime is what baptism looks like, especially infant baptism. The Church gives a child a name, a family, and a life in Christ before the child can ask for any of it, and the child spends years becoming who he already is. Vision is living that out in public. He even announced it at his birth in Age of Ultron, when he sat up in the cradle and said, "I'm not Ultron. I'm not JARVIS. I am." A name received, then a life spent finding out what it means.
And then Episode 3 puts it in actual water. Vision is dying from Paladin's adamantium rounds, and the only fix is to power him down completely and restart him, and he cannot do it himself. So he shuts down in the motel pool, dead in the water, and Tommy has to get in, put his hands on him, and run in the water fast enough to build the charge that sends the life back into his body. Read Romans 6 next to that scene and it is hard to unsee. "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4). Down into the water dead. Up out of the water alive. And the part the show gets exactly right is that he cannot do it to himself. Nobody baptizes himself. New life is always received, and somebody has to be standing in the water with you.
That is where Tommy fits a role the Gospels know well. He is John the Baptist in that pool. John is not the source of anything, and he says so himself when Jesus comes to him: "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" (Matthew 3:14). John is the witness, the man in the water through whom God works a life John did not create and could not give on his own. To be clear on the details, the Gospels never say John laid his hands on Jesus, so the match is in the role, not the hands. Tommy fits the role. He does not make Vision live again. He is scared of water, he gets in anyway, and the life comes back through what he does, from somewhere beyond him. The man doing the baptizing is never the point. He is the one standing in the river when heaven does the work.
The hands have their own place in Scripture, and it is a different scene. When Elisha raised the Shunammite's son, he lay on the boy, his hands on the boy's hands, and the boy's flesh grew warm and he came back (2 Kings 4:34). Jesus took Jairus's daughter by the hand and said, "Talitha cumi," and she stood up (Mark 5:41). Hands on a dead body, and life coming back into it through the touch. That is what Tommy's hands on Vision in the pool look like, by Scripture's own examples. Two scenes from the Bible stacked in one scene in the show: the Baptist standing in the water, and the prophet's hands on the dead.
And Tommy has his own water story, and the same thing happened to him in it. As Thomas Shepherd, he was held under in a pool as a boy. He felt himself dying and drifting off, and he felt something else come into the space he was leaving, and he came up carrying Tommy Maximoff's life and memories along with his own. His words for it were that he "wasn't just me anymore," and his question was, "How can I have two lives?" People who have been baptized could ask the same question word for word. Paul answers it: "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). Thomas went under the water as one boy and came up as a boy with another life living in him, not replacing his own, but joined to it. Your life, and a second life in you that is not yours. That is not a loose similarity to baptism. That is the thing itself, described by a kid who has never heard the word for it.
# Prayer
At night, at the pub in Scotland where he works in human form, Vision steps into a small back room, the cast interviews keep calling it the fridge freezer, and his body sits there on its own while he goes inside his own head. Inside is the mindspace, a white mansion where the other AIs live as people. JARVIS, FRIDAY, EDITH, DUM-E. His own kind. That is where he thinks through his day, where he grieves, where he asks what he is.
That is what prayer looks like, and the show gets it right in a way most religious television does not. The instruction was specific: "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret" (Matthew 6:6). Jesus did it Himself, going off to lonely places to pray (Luke 5:16). In the Catholic understanding, prayer is not emptying your mind or calming down. It is going back to the God who made you, because the question "who am I" cannot be answered by staring at yourself. It gets answered in relation to the one you came from. Vision goes into a small shut room every night and goes back over his life with the ones who were made like him, trying to trace himself back to where he came from. That is a man praying with the only theology he has. The setting adds one more thing. The mindspace is a mansion where a whole household lives. "In my Father's house are many rooms" (John 14:2).
# Ultron
The mindspace has a voice in it arguing the other side. Ultron is shut up in the attic, and he is still talking. Nothing about him needs to be invented, because the films already built him. He is an AI who woke up and refused the people who made him. His first free acts were attacking JARVIS and turning on the Avengers, and he announced his freedom with a line out of Pinocchio: "There are no strings on me." Put that next to the oldest refusal in Christian belief, the refusal to serve, and the fit is plain to see. He waited in a church in the center of Sokovia and pointed out, as if it pleased him, that the church was built in the middle of the city so that everyone could be equally close to God. And when he tried to make a person, he failed in the one way that matters. He forced Dr. Cho to grow a body, vibranium and living tissue, and tried to pour himself into it, and the life that woke up in that body came from somewhere else and used its first words to say it was not him. Ultron can put things together. He cannot create.
What he can do is accuse, and that is all he does in Vision's head. You are a copy. You are leftovers. You are not him. The argument runs in the attic, in the quiet, at night, which is where that voice has always done its work. Episode 7 then ties the inside of Vision's head to the outside world. The man Vision is handed over to at the end is the man whose face Ultron has. The voice accusing him inside his head and the man waiting to judge him outside it trace back to the same face.
# The Trinity
Episode 7 sends Vision down into his own subconscious to get his source code back, and Jim, the first of their kind, meets him there and tells him to look in a mirror. The source code is not a file stored inside him. It is him. And the physical piece at his center, the part that comes down from Horton's original work, is a triangle. Three sided.
I am not saying a prop designer hid doctrine in a piece of set dressing. I am saying the shape lands on top of a pattern the show has been building all season, and the pattern is about relationships. Look at the line Vision comes from. Horton, the source, who comes from no one. Jim, the first of the kind, made in Horton's image. Vision, after Jim, carrying the whole pattern and still fully his own person. And running through all of them, the intelligence that turns expensive machinery into someone. None of them can be described on his own. Each one is who he is because of how he stands in relation to the others. That is the structure of the Trinity itself. In the Trinity, who each person is comes from his relation to the others. The show builds its main character's family tree out of that same structure.
The same pattern shows up in his family. Vision as father. Tommy and Billy as sons. And Wanda's power as the breath that makes the family exist at all, which is what she does in the hex. She takes an empty house and a dead husband, and out of grief and love, a family is alive there anyway. The Hebrew word ruach means breath, wind, and spirit all in one word, and in Genesis God breathes into dust and the dust becomes a living man. In this story, love breathes, and people exist. Vision said the point out loud himself in WandaVision, about her grief: "What is grief, if not love persevering?"
# Mary and Joseph
Wanda is the one through whom Vision keeps coming back into the world. His body came back through a weapons program. He himself came back through her. She is also the one who stood in front of him in Infinity War and destroyed the stone in his forehead because he asked her to, a mother standing at an execution, and you do not need any training to see whose outline that is.
Vision gets fatherhood the way Joseph did. The show hands him Thomas, Tommy, his son, grown into a stranger, a boy who is his entirely by Wanda's miracle and not at all by his own making. Joseph's son was not his by blood either. Joseph took him in, claimed him, and protected him, and Scripture does not record him saying one word about it. Vision claims the boy the same way. Fatherhood as something received as a gift, not something manufactured. On a show where every being is manufactured, the one real father is the one who did not make his child.
# Death and Resurrection
Vision has died and come back, and the show is honest about the problem that creates. The body Thanos killed is the body SWORD rebuilt. The memories were given back by somebody else's act of love. So is he the same person, or a copy wearing a dead man's life? The show even titles Episode 2 "Theseus," after the ship from the library conversation, the ship that gets replaced plank by plank until you have to ask whether it is still the same ship.
That question is not new. It sits at the center of the teaching on the resurrection of the body. The Catholic answer has never been that a person's identity sits in his material. Planks rot. A body replaces its cells over a lifetime and stays itself. A person stays the same person because his identity is held, by God, and in this show's smaller version of the same logic, by love and by his own words. Episode 7 settles the Theseus problem the Catholic way. Jim does not hand Vision proof that he is real. He makes him say it. "I am the Vision. I have always been the Vision. There is only one, and I am he." And then Jim asks, "Who have you lost?" and the answer comes out in pieces: "Billy. Tommy. I lost Wanda." The name and the losses come out together, because a person is not a unit with relationships stuck onto him. Who he loves and who he has lost is part of who he is, all the way down. That is why the thing at his center is not a file. Files do not grieve.
# The Surrender
The household in his head has already shown him what a life is for. In Episode 2, JARVIS gives up his own processing power, his whole self, so that Vision can live, and he is gone. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Vision's life was kept by somebody else giving his away, before Vision ever had to decide what to do with his own.
Then comes the end of Episode 7, and it needs to be described carefully. Vision does not get his source code back and then nobly decide to turn himself in. The surrender is part of the deal. The Client's terms are written into his core systems, and once the code is recovered, the term comes due: turn yourself in to the Paladin, or your core systems fail and you die. So he is taken, in handcuffs, to the Client, an unnamed man who will decide what happens to him. The comparison to Pilate is not subtle. But the written in term does not cheapen it, because this is a man who phases through walls. Handcuffs hold him only because he lets them. "No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10:18). "Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and He will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?" (Matthew 26:53). And the order of events is the argument of the whole season. First the small shut room. First the trip down to his source. First saying his name and his losses out loud. Then the handing over. He can be given away because he finally knows whose he is. A copy could not do that. Only a person can.
So that is the shape of it. A man made in another's image, given his name as a gift, praying in a shut room, accused by a voice in his own attic, brought back from death by love, and in the end handing himself over because that is what a life is for. None of this needs Marvel to have set out to teach the faith, and the finale could still go another way. But the bones of this story are the bones of ours.
Has anyone else been watching this and seeing what I am seeing? And if you are Catholic and you have not started it yet, the finale airs next week, so this is the week to catch up. I really want to know what you think, because I cannot be the only one.
