Joss Whedon’s Greatest Folly – SPOILERS!

by Rob Smat

I saved this article for when I felt it was safe to discuss a pretty major Avengers Age of Ultron spoiler: the good guys win. Now that that’s taken care of, let’s discuss a specific part of how they won…

The city of Sokovia has exploded and Ultron is attempting to flee with what’s left of his Iron Legion. Each robot member of the Iron Legion houses Ultron’s ultra-intelligent artificial self.

All of these robots have been picked off, except for one. Even the main Ultron-bot himself has been mitigated. So when the last robot encounters the Visionary in a distant glade, and attempts to offer a few parting words of evil, he is destroyed and Ultron’s artificial intelligence with him.

So here’s the real question, Joss: Why didn’t Ultron use the Cloud?

I don’t pretend to know anything about the Cloud, or the Internet, or appropriate birthday presents, but I think I can wrap my head around a network of information that doesn’t require cables to operate.

If my Compaq ‘96 is intelligent enough to back up its data (and trust me, that computer is one piece of chitauri), then why doesn’t it ever strike Ultron to download himself onto a flash drive? I get that he might take up too much memory for the average piece of hardware, but still, the Cloud doesn’t have too many limitations on size. (Maybe he’s short on bitcoins and didn’t want to pay for extra cloud space?)

Maybe Ultron just has a lot of trouble with the notion of a .zip file. I still have no idea how to properly compress most types of data, much less operate the Microsoft Office Suite. But hey, if he can build an entire robot army, there’s no reason he shouldn’t know how to use Excel or Word or WinRar.

Bottom line, if I ever become an A.I. that can rule an entire planet, you’re going to have to destroy the Internet to rid yourselves of me. Then I’ll build my own Internet, and you’ll have to destroy that too. So good luck.