How This Line From Age Of Ultron Foreshadowed Vision's Creation

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a strange place. It houses Asgard, a pocket dimension — or Realm — full of self-proclaimed gods, as well as eight other Realms to boot. There's magic to be harnessed, if you have the right training and mindset to do so. Shapeshifting aliens could be anywhere at any time, ready to help or hinder depending on their individual and collective objectives. It all makes an android like Vision (Paul Bettany) seem almost ... normal. Maybe his powers are a little out-there, but artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly common in the real world, so an android doesn't seem too far-fetched, relatively speaking.

What makes Vision unique even among all this MCU craziness, however, is his origin story. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the titular villain forces Dr. Helen Cho (Claudia Kim) to create a new-and-improved body in which to implant its A.I. — one powered by the Mind Stone. She does so, but the vessel is later whisked away by the Avengers before Ultron (James Spader) has a chance to enact its plan. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) wants to upload J.A.R.V.I.S. to the body, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has other ideas, and Captain America wants to shut the operation down altogether. As they all scuffle, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) leaps in and overcharges the machinery with lightning, giving birth to Vision for good and for all. He's a hero born from internal strife.

Pay close attention earlier in the film, and you may catch a line that foreshadows the whole shebang of Vision's creation, even if the details are left until later.

It's hard to say who exactly Vision's creator is, since Ultron commissions the body, Dr. Cho creates it against her will, Tony and Bruce tinker with her work, and Thor imbues it with energy. Calling it a group effort is one way of resolving the question, but what's indisputable is that J.A.R.V.I.S. serves as the basis to Vision's personality. Up until that point, the A.I. program was an integral part of Tony's life in and out of his Iron Man armor; now, Vision is J.A.R.V.I.S. incarnate. His personality develops over time as he forms emotional bonds with the Avengers — especially Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) — but J.A.R.V.I.S. is where it all begins. Indeed, something Tony says early on in Age of Ultron hints at this.

Investigating Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) scepter — which houses the very Mind Stone that will later power Vision, and which Thanos (Josh Brolin) will eventually take from him — Tony and J.A.R.V.I.S. trade ideas. And at one point, Tony says, "Look alive, J.A.R.V.I.S." 

In a vacuum, that bit of dialogue is just a way of getting J.A.R.V.I.S.'s attention, but a film is — to no one's surprise — not a vacuum. Looking at bits and pieces like this as part of a greater whole is part of what makes watching movies so fun. Analyzing that line in particular with a retrospective lens, one can easily to see how it may have been written that way on purpose, foreshadowing Vision's conception.

The MCU is chock-full of little tidbits like this, and Disney+'s WandaVision is no exception. It's a storyteller's way of making a finite universe feel infinite, expanding upon what we see on the surface. It's what great stories — and characters — are made of.