Who is Butcherbird in VisionQuest? She has a 49-year comics history (and it started as Ultron's bride)

VisionQuest has spent its first four episodes building up the Butcherbird, a hooded killer with red robotic eyes who carves wing shapes into her murder scenes and shrugs off shotgun blasts. The credits are less discreet: T'Nia Miller is listed as Jocasta, per Wikipedia), a character Marvel readers have known since the Carter administration.

Showrunner Terry Matalas deliberately kept her out of the show's promotion.

"Chilling, nuanced, and even a little heartbreaking."

— Terry Matalas, showrunner, on Jocasta, via GamesRadar

The Bride of Ultron, 1977

Jocasta first appeared in The Avengers #162, cover-dated August 1977, created by writer Jim Shooter and artist George Pérez. The story was titled "The Bride of Ultron," SlashFilm notes, and it meant it:

• The build: Ultron constructs her in an abandoned aerospace research center in Nassau, New York, to be his mate.
• The mind: He bases her brain patterns on the Wasp, Janet van Dyne, and brainwashes Hank Pym into transferring Janet's life force into the new body.
• The rescue: The Avengers stop the transfer and reverse it, which leaves Jocasta an empty shell.

The name is the joke. In Greek myth, Jocasta is Oedipus's mother and his wife, and Ultron, Pym's creation, built his bride out of the mind of Pym's partner. The comics played the wife half of the myth.

What she became next

The bride didn't stay a bride for long. Over the next five decades, Jocasta went mostly heroic, per her Wikipedia history:

• The Avengers: Revived by Ultron, she betrayed him and joined the team as a provisional member.
• Machine Man: Hidden programming forced her to rebuild Ultron, then she helped the Thing and Machine Man take him down again, and she and Machine Man fell for each other.
• The Mighty Avengers: She married Ultron after all, to end a war with him, before Pym tricked him off-planet.
• Avengers Academy: She joined the school's staff and was a supporting character from 2010 to 2012.
• The Pym name: By The Unstoppable Wasp in 2019, she had taken Hank Pym's surname and calls him her grandfather.

The MCU has been teasing her for over a decade. Laughing Place points out that a chip labeled "JOCASTA" turns up in Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015, per its episode 3 recap. VisionQuest is her first live-action appearance.

How VisionQuest rewrites her

Spoiler warning: this section covers VisionQuest episode 4, "Malware."

Episode 4 unmasks the Butcherbird at a Sokovia Remembrance Day gala, and she isn't built from the Wasp. She's a synthezoid in the likeness of Dr. Josephine "Jo" Carrington, a researcher on a five-person team at Markridge Biotech, an AI company whose work Stark Industries later bought. Carrington died in 2008. Every Butcherbird victim sat on Markridge's board.

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When Vision tells her she was based on Carrington, she corrects him: she says she is Carrington. The show drops the comics' romance with Ultron entirely, and SlashFilm reads the name as coming from her human one, "Jo" plus "Ca."

The comics used the wife half of the Jocasta myth. VisionQuest uses the other half: a woman whose AI research led toward Ultron, making her closer to his mother than his bride.

Episodes 5 and 6, "Firewall" and "Deadlock," arrive on October 28. In 1977, Ultron built Jocasta to belong to him. In 2026, she's the one with the older claim.

Previously we wrote: Dune: Part Three won't move off Avengers: Doomsday's date — and Doomsday's presales just got scarier