FRIDAY's death in VisionQuest: is she really gone, or will the November 10 finale bring her back?
Marvel spent a decade keeping FRIDAY as a voice in Tony Stark's ear. VisionQuest finally gave her a face, then sent her off a balcony one episode before the finale.
VisionQuest episode 7, "Immolation," ended on a cliffhanger with too many pieces to count, and one of them is a fall that the camera never finishes showing. The finale, "Forever," arrives on Disney+ on November 10 in the US and November 11 everywhere else. Until then, the show has left exactly one question about FRIDAY open, and it's laid out its own rules for answering it.
FRIDAY has been in the MCU since 2015, when Kerry Condon started voicing her in Avengers: Age of Ultron. VisionQuest recast the role with Orla Brady and put her in the room, as one of the Stark AIs living in Vision's head.
What happens to FRIDAY in episode 7
By the end of the episode, everyone is in trouble at once. Guards surround Vision and Paladin and Vision powers down, Jocasta is ambushed and taken at the grave, and a mercenary's rocket hits Paladin's van in the real world.
FRIDAY's scene plays out in the mindspace:
- Where she'd been: FRIDAY had been hiding inside Jocasta's neural network to learn her plans, and she was there while Jocasta recovered memories at the old Phineas Horton house.
- What she spotted: She noticed that the same loft appears in Jo Carrington's memories and in Vision's mindspace.
- Ultron's confession: He tells her he knew all along that she was hiding in Jocasta's mind, and that he'd been covering for her.
- The fall: Then Ultron throws her off a balcony. She disappears before she hits the ground.
That's the entire event. Nobody erases her code on screen, and there's no body, which in a show about AIs isn't the same as an ending.
FRIDAY spent episode 3 confessing she was there when Tony Stark died. In episode 7, the show cut away before she landed.
The case that she's gone
VisionQuest has already killed one Stark AI, and it played that death straight. J.A.R.V.I.S. gave up his energy and his code in episode 2 to keep Vision alive, and the show buried him in a funeral in episode 3. If FRIDAY's fall is the same kind of goodbye, the finale has no reason to undo it.
Ultron also has form here. He has spent the whole season goading Vision and cracking jokes in the attic, and by episode 7 he has taken over Vision's body once already. A villain throwing the AI who knows too much off a balcony is a pretty standard villain move.
The case that she's coming back
The show's own rules work against a clean death. Ultron is the proof: other characters have tried to remove him over and over, and he keeps returning, which suggests that destroying an AI's avatar isn't the same as deleting the AI. FRIDAY's avatar fell. Nothing on screen touched her code.
There's also the matter of the confession right before the push. Ultron admitted he'd been protecting FRIDAY, and the episode never says why he suddenly stopped. With the Client finally revealed and wearing Ultron's face, throwing her out of the mindspace could just as easily be a way of getting her out of the building.
"So there's always a way back."
— Paul Bettany, on J.A.R.V.I.S., to TheWrap
Bettany was talking about J.A.R.V.I.S., whose code lives on inside Vision, not FRIDAY. But it's the closest thing the show's star has said to a rule about AI deaths, and it's not a gloomy one.
Our read
FRIDAY disappearing mid-fall is the show leaving itself an exit. A season that spent this much time on how Stark modeled his AIs on real people, and on FRIDAY's guilt about Tony, doesn't usually end her arc with a shove from the guy who keeps coming back himself.
If she does return, the setup is already on the table: FRIDAY was the one who connected the loft in Jo Carrington's memory to Vision's mindspace. That's a clue the finale still has to pay off, and she's the one who spotted it.
Previously we wrote: Stranger Things Day: still no secret ninth episode — Netflix answered the theory with a prequel instead