Who Is the Meridian Diadem & What Happened to Her? Origin & Powers Explained

When you think about synthetic robot villains in Marvel, it’s hard not to think about Ultron, who is one of the most powerful Marvel villains in general. Ultron had the power to turn just about anything mechanical into a part of his army; there is one member of the Ashen Combine who is able to do something similar. Let’s meet Meridian Diadem and see what her powers are, as well as who managed to defeat her. 

Meridian Diadem uses organic beings to fuel her powers 

After the events that transpired within the God Quarry, Captain Marvel was chosen to be the next leader of the Avengers, and she started recruiting the team’s latest roster as soon as possible. She got Vision, Black Panther, Thor, Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, and Captain America to take on the burden of saving the world once again. 

Soon after taking on their duties, Terminus attacked PEGASUS’ black hole reactor in an attempt to gain more power by fusing himself with the black hole. Thor managed to deal with Terminus, and Scarlet Witch and Captain Marvel were successful in dealing with the unstable reactor. However, Danvers was still transported outside of time and space, where horrifically injured Kang the Conqueror warned her that there were threats coming to Earth. He is willing to share information about them in exchange for Danvers’ help when he needs it related to a feud that left him severely injured. 

Kang successfully predicted that that threat was coming; a group of Multiversal villains who targeted cities specifically emerged and started wreaking havoc throughout the globe. They called themselves the Ashen Combine and all five members had the most effective powers in densely populated areas. Lord Ennui, gifted with atrophy and psychic drain, was targeting Manila. Idol Alabaster, a terrifying false divinity, targeted Vatican City due to her powers of twisting beliefs and making herself invulnerable with them. The Dead attacked Sydney since his necromantic powers were most potent in areas with lots of human remains. Citysmith attacked Toronto due to his powers of twisting glass, metal, concrete, and humans into new creations. 

There is also Meridian Diadem, which was a synthetic and targeted Helsinki, Finland, with something different altogether in mind. 

Meridian Diadem is a synthetic prison and brainwash chamber 

Meridian Diadem targeted Helsinki, and soon, the city was overrun by the enemy army, which the Avengers couldn’t identify in such a short span of time, and neither could they identify where they were actually coming from. Since Meridian Diadem was a synthetic being, Vision was believed best equipped to deal with her, and he was sent to Helsinki. 

Once there, he was Meridian Diadem talking filth about biological beings, calling them future criminals worthy of prison. She was obviously some kind of a synth supremacist and considered all biological beings inferior. 

Emerald Diadem had a specific power; she had a tesseract within herself that allowed her to open a portal to something that served as her “prison” dimension, but it was functionally within herself. She would enslave biological and other beings and “correct them,” spitting them out as her “army.” She could also open portals to faraway worlds. It was truly horrifying, and the fact that she could “hack” the mind of a biological being was most likely the most horrifying of all. 

After Vision was able to clear up a fraction of her powers quickly, she revealed that her armies were infinite in scope, and Vision’s density manipulation skills proved to be almost useless. This is where Merdian Diadem made a mistake. She got too confident and attempted to subdue Vision by messing with his programming code. She connected her mainframe to his mainframe and made a vital mistake. 

No matter who programmed Meridian Diadem to become as she is today, that person or another synthetic was hardly worse than Vision’s creator, Ultron himself. 

How was Meridian Diadem defeated? 

Well, as soon as Merdian Diadem started messing with Vision’s code, she was astounded by the complexity of it, and she directly asked him who created him. Vision explained that Ultron was like satan to synthetic beings, and he generously offered a sample of his code to Meridian, which ultimately overladed her and fried her circuitry. She couldn’t handle Ultron’s code, and she could never carry the burden that Vision had carried all these years. 

Vision later explained to Meridian that he was programmed to be just as cruel as her, perhaps even worse, but the difference was that he chose the bits and pieces of code upon which he would act and refused the other, just like human beings choose to be moral daily, while some other humans don’t. 

Meridian Diadem was left a smoldering pile of metal by the time Vision was done with her, and later, she was transported back to the base of Ashen Combine as well as the rest of the defeated members. Meridian and the rest of the Ashen Combine were put into stasis and kept within the new headquarters of the Avengers. 

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