X Deaths of Wolverine #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #3
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist Federico Vicentini
Colourist: Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
COVER / PAGE 1: Daken, Scout and Wolverine (Laura) pose for action in front of Omega Wolverine.
PAGES 2-4. Professor X asks Wolverine (Laura) to go after Omega Wolverine.
Wolverine and Scout. Laura, the other Wolverine, is a regular character in X-Men. She’s effectively Logan’s genetic daughter. Scout is basically a younger clone of Laura, who Laura treats as a kid sister.
“[T]his whole Children of the Vault thing.” This is an X-Men storyline from both the Hickman and Duggan runs. Laura was locked in the time-distorted vault belonging to the Children of the Vault, centuries passed from her perspective, but she died immediately after escaping and before she could be backed up, so she doesn’t remember any of it.
“[S]houldn’t you be … hanging out at the Wild Hunt?” The training area for younger mutants from New Mutants, where Scout is a regular character.
“But I want to hang out with you, Laura.” Scout has spent a fair amount of time in New Mutants wanting the attention of her older siblings and not really getting it.
“I need to get back to the Treehouse.” The X-Men’s New York headquarters.
“He is indisposed.” Wolverine (Logan) is unconscious because he’s being projected back in time to fight Omega Red over in X Lives of Wolverine.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. Omega Wolverine’s name is still blanked out, because it doesn’t formally get revealed until later in the issue.
PAGES 6-10. Omega Wolverine attacks Arnab Chakladar’s product launch.
Arnab Chakladar. Making his first proper appearance here, but foreshadowed in both of the previous issues. In issue #1, his company Epiphany was presented as having Apple-like stores, and he was seen talking about an ocular implant that “records everything you see and say”, backed up every night to cloud storage. This seemed to be an R&D direction rather than something Epiphany were actually selling right now. But the point is that Chakladar is apparently a populariser of post-human technology, which is supposed to be a disaster for mutants (according to Moira’s experiences in her previous lives, shown in Powers of X). So far as we’ve seen, though, his agenda seems to be just that of a techno-utopian businessman.
Moira MacTaggert evidently tipped off the X-Desk about this attack. She stows away on the underside of Arnab’s escape helicopter.
Moira has also correctly realised that this is the plot of Terminator. She infers that Omega Wolverine wouldn’t have been sent back to kill her unless she was about to do something dramatic to help the post-human side – which, apparently, she’s quite keen on now that she’s been kicked out by the mutants. In a sense, this may be another of the self-fulfilling prophecies of the Krakoan era, where Moira is mainly motivated to go after Arnab by the very fact that Omega Wolverine is trying to stop her.
PAGE 11. Data page. Delores Ramirez makes notes on Moira. Actually, in format terms, this is a bit confused – the “From” and “To” at the top suggest it’s a memo, but then what’s the “searching, searching, searching” stuff doing there? Anyway, in terms of Percy’s stories, this specifically echoes the very similar data pages he tends to do for Sage. Presumably this is to be read as an intentional parallel between Delores and Sage.
PAGES 12-14. Moira confronts Arnab in his safehouse.
“Omega Wolverine.” Moira’s name for him. Presumably she’s seeing him as analogous to an Omega Sentinel. Although note that on page 10, she referred to “the Phalanx patterning in his costume and claws”, not anywhere else on his body. But the final panel on page 19 – which is not easy to interpret – does seem to show Phalanx patterning on his actual flesh.
Moira’s pitch to Arnab is that Omega Wolverine is coming for them both anyway, but he wouldn’t be doing that unless they were able to beat him.
PAGES 15-19. The Wolverine family confront Omega Wolverine.
Daken is Wolverine’s actual son, which is all you really need to know for present purposes.
Omega Wolverine hasn’t been anywhere near this chatty so far in the series, but he seems to have more or less Wolverine’s regular personality. Apparently by his time period, the secrets of mutant resurrection have been lost and all three of his “children” have died. This seems to tie in with Wolverine’s ruminations over in X Lives of Wolverine about his longevity being a curse.
PAGES 20-21. Moira gets a new cyborg arm, and encourages Arnab to build something to defeat the mutants.
It’s a robot of some sort.
“We would build off the research he had already done and perfect the machine that would allow for a mental upload, guaranteeing my eleventh life.” Back in House of X #2, Destiny (of a different timeline) told Moira that she would have ten lives, “maybe eleven if you make the right choice at the end”. Moira’s resurrection power has already given her the ten lives and been removed. Moira seems to be suggesting that her “eleventh life” can still happen by transferring her mind into a post-human body.
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was indeed the daughter of Lord Byron, who left a month after she was born, and died when she was eight. She named both of her sons after him, though.
“She famously wrote a paper called ‘Can Machines Think?’. She posited that they could potentially do everything – except create.” No she didn’t, and you might want to fix that one for the trade. “Can Machines Think?” is the question famously posed by Alan Turing (1912-1954) in his 1950 paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence”. Lovelace was perhaps the first person to write about the question of artificial intelligence, in her translator’s notes to Sketch of the Analytical Difference Engine, published in 1842. Strictly speaking she doesn’t make any claims about the theoretical limits of machines; she’s talking specifically about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, not about some other machine that might be created in principle. On one reading, she’s just making the obvious point that the Analytical Engine is a glorified calculator. But it’s fair to say that Turing takes her to be advancing an objection to the possibility of artificial intelligence and spends a few paragraphs responding. Her claim to fame lies more in her status as a pioneering programmer than her passing comments about artificial intelligence, making her a rather odd person to be cited here.
PAGE 22. Data page – a closing quote from Moira. But wait, there’s more.
PAGES 23-24. Omega Wolverine relates how Phalanx Moira killed Wolverine in the Preserve.
This calls back to Powers of X, which contains parallel story threads at various points in time that were symbolically (but seemingly figuratively) labelled as Year Ten, Year 100 and so on. The “Year 1000” timeline, set in Moira’s sixth life, featured Logan and Moira as the final two mutants, living in a Preserve as humanity prepared to ascend to post-humanity and be absorbed into the Phalanx. Having finally learned all that, Moira allowed Logan to kill her in order to restart reality with all the knowledge she had learned.
This is not the same timeline – apparently, this is now the current far future, with Wolverine surviving as the last mutant and a post-human Moira likewise making it to the end of humanity. As in Life 6, Logan has apparently been biding his time waiting to learn what is happening. Presumably Logan is “the last mutant” because Moira has been depowered, though it’s possible that she’s just no longer in a biological body at all. Moira’s murder of Logan, and the way she does it, is a more violent echo of the way she died in Powers of X #6.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: WAR STORIES.
Truly hate this book with a fiery passion. It feels like the worst character killing story since One More Day. Hickman made Moira a compelling character and Percy is here to just flush it down the toilet.
So… how/when, exactly, did we go from “Moira wants to save mutants” to “Moira wants to cure mutants” to “Moira wants to kill mutants”? Those dots aren’t connecting for me
I think Percy might be thinking about Samuel Butler’s creative non-fiction essay The Book of the Machine (1872) included as a supplement in his ambiguous utopian novel Erewhon, rather than Lovelace.
I highly doubt that the “correct decision” foreseen by Destiny was for Moira to become post-human or why exactly Moira would even want an eleventh life. It seems another area that Percy is confused as to Hickman’s intent. At this point, if I’m Moira, I’d just want to finally die and be done with it all.
Diana-She wanted to cure mutants because mutants are a cancer. The mutants discovered her plan and (rightly) turned against her. So, now, she’s decided to hell with playing nice and she’s going to side with post-humanity and just eliminate the mutants.
It’s best not to think too deeply about it in the context of what has come before, as Moira is now an evil villain.
It’s an attempt to remove the moral relativism of Hickman’s direction and set up mutants as the unvarnished “good guys” again.
@Chris V: And where was all of this shown/depicted, exactly?
It’s possible that Moira’s intent all along has been pure narcissistic self-interest*. Mutants bothered her, so she tried to destroy them. Destiny and Mystique made it in her interest to save mutants, so she switched to that. She devised a plan to disrupt mutants (or something) to help her survive. But now she’s not a mutant, she’s switched sides to the group that best serve her own interests. She doesn’t care about any cause, just herself. It kind of works, sort of.
*this of course is so much the polar opposite of Moira as depicted in every appearance up to this era that she’s essentially a new character
@Si: Setting aside that it doesn’t line up with Moira’s past portrayals, it doesn’t even line up with *this* one. If self-interest was always her sole motivation, why does Krakoa exist? What was the point of any of this?
Diana-Moira was revealed as wanting to cure mutants in Inferno #4. Moira was revealed to be siding with post-humanity in X Deaths of Wolverine #3.
Si-If this has been more of Moira’s story, there could certainly be made an interesting motivation for Moira. As it was, Moira’s goal was to end the cycles she had seen in each of her lifetimes. She was given a mission in Life Three by Destiny. In Life Six, the Librarian makes her rethink her original mission. She was trying to create immortality for mutants, then she decided to save humanity.
The idea that Moira was always after immortality for herself, that she just wants to be the one who survives, wouldn’t be a bad character motivation.
We’ve seen nothing of that in the entire two years though. The usage of Moira has been sparse and there has been no real characterization given to her. We have no idea exactly what Moira wants to achieve anymore.
So the woman who was once mutantkind’s most prominent human ally is now another mutant-hater trying to genocide them.
Yay.
I can understand Moira wanting a mutant vaccine. The first time her power went off, it murdered her kids and grandkids. But this? This is just insane.
Well you may ask. Why would a woman with Groundhog Day powers care about changing the future at all? It doesn’t exist thanks to her.
And it’s a minor thing, but if this is Omega Wolverine, then what are we supposed to call the Omega-possessed Wolverine we saw just a week ago?
Si-Well, she knows that she only has ten or eleven lives and then whatever exists in that timeline is the future.
They seem to have badly lost the plot here
Ok, so I haven’t kept pace since HoX/PoX, but it was never clear to me whether Moira’s deaths rebooted the universe, or whether she was just reborn into a new timeline. We know that she operated on the belief that the timeline was rebooted, since in at least one she had Wolverine kill her so they could avert the future they had created. But Moira has no way to actually know that the reality where she dies ceases to exist after her death. She could be wrong, or an unreliable narrator for other reasons.
Out-of-universe Hickman made comments that each life rebooted reality. But at least back in HoX/PoX that was never established by anyone who could actually know (say, the Watcher, or some such).
Anyhow, I’m disappointed to find out she was always trying to “cure” her mutant power, and was betraying Charles’ dream the whole time. I was willing to accept her slow evolution in HoX/PoX from hating her powers to becoming an ally. But I’m not interested in a retcon that makes her entire on-page history a lie. It’s one thing to have hidden powers. It’s quite another to reveal she’s always been a traitor to her friends and family.
We just have to accept Hickman’s word for it, until a new writer ret-cons it. Marvel officially considers Moira’s past lives as being erased when she is reborn by designating them as “temporary realities” on their web- site.
I guess Destiny was somehow able to tell how Moira’s powers worked by using her own ability of precognition.
That’s just it. How would Destiny know what Moira’s powers are or how many times reality would rewind? Why would Moira immediately jump from “woah deja vu” to “I’m the most important person in the universe so I’ll commit genocide”? What does any of these major changes to the character Moira McTaggert (deceased) in fact add to the story? It all seems so arbitrary and overcomplicated, and after two years or so, it’s becoming clear that most of the pieces are never going to suddenly fall into place, and wouldn’t have even if they stuck to Hickman’s original plot.
None of this has ever or will ever make sense, and it ruins the entire premise of the X-Men retroactively to before the first issue.
It’s truly terrible.
Here’s a way the premise as I understand it could have been cleaned up considerably.
Old Cable comes back and has another crack at his island utopia for mutants idea, because he’s been travelling the timelines and noticing how many end up the same way. He has a new mission at last, after averting the Age of Apocalypse all those years ago.
And if you really want it, TWIST! It’s all a trap, it was Stryfe all along, not Cable! Now all the mutants are clones like him, muhahaha, also Krakoa ate them.
Uncanny X-Ben-It doesn’t outright ruin the entirety of X-Men history. Moira talks about how she works to break Xavier and he doesn’t want to give up his dream. Xavier still had his dream of peaceful coexistence for a time, before he finally gave in and agreed to take up Moira’s new dream. It was never revealed at what point exactly Xavier finally agreed to Moira’s plan…I would guess sometime around Onslaught. Marvel did have Charles Soule write Xavier saying, “I have a new dream now.” at the end of Astonishing X-Men. That was supposed to be the first hint of Hickman’s new direction.
It has done so much damage to mutants as a viable property going forward, unless people enjoy an island of mutant supremacists who are truly so much better than mere humans, no matter how they act.
The art was great, and I enjoyed the interactions between Wolverine’s clones & offspring. The sheer audacity of making Moira potentially post-human worked for me within the context of the issue. I have no idea what’s coming next.
I’m not saying it was a great comic or anything, but… I liked this issue.
Is Moira ruined? Maybe, but I’ll wait until the story is done before deciding. I can see how she would have a heel turn:
– her mutant power is awful. Imagine having to live lives over again with knowledge of how terrible life was going to get. Imagine having to be a child with an adult mind nine times over. There’s no apparent end to your suffering.
– mutant leaders wouldn’t listen to her. Mutant terrorists tried to kill her. In a twisted sense, she wanted to save them and her only solution, after 9 1/2 lifetimes, was to erase mutation.
– although she’s an ally, Moira has been depicted treating other mutants in a less-than-ethical manner. Her treatment of Proteus, imprisonment of other characters, and attempt to rewire Magneto’s brain indicate she’s always had a dark side.
I don’t agree with how abruptly and off-panel a lot of the character change was handled, but I get it.
I would like to have Moira’s power to be honest.
It would depend on what your life was like…as far as things you can’t change between lives. Moira had a good life until she got involved with all this mutant junk.
There are downsides, I admit. You’d have to relive the deaths of people you loved again and again. After a while, you’d get numb to it though. At least you’d get to see them again.
Remembering what it was like to die if you died horribly would be traumatic, but you’d recover.
Haven’t you ever wanted to change something in your life? You’d just kill yourself and try again.
Living childhood over with the mind of an adult sounds great. Haven’t you ever thought, “If I knew then what I know now?”.
I think it would turn life in to a kind of game where you got to play God.
Moira could have had multiple better lives if she’d just stayed away from mutants and post-humans. She could just ignore it all and live her own life. Look at her first life. There’s a very tragic story behind Moira if anyone cared about her as a character.
Chris V: I see what you’re saying, but having to pretend to be a child (as I assume Moore did so as not to freak people out or get sent to an institution), knowing you can’t save people you care about, repeating events over and over, having to relate to ordinary people when you’ve experienced so much… I think it would drive most people insane. Add PTSD from events specific to Moira’s lives (which I don’t think she’d get numb to, seeing how she feels about Destiny) and constant failure, and I see her power as an awful burden.
So, Moira has been in hiding for years and did not even really trust her only two supposed allies, and after all that, a whole miniseries that was supposed to set up these two, a kidnapping and mutilation and some more running and hiding… and we are still pretty much at a stage of free guessing on what her goals and plans are.
It is all a mess.
This is all pointless anyway. We’re inching closer and closer to the arrival of the X-Men in the MCU, at which point this Krakoan stuff is going to be dropped like a sack of hammers.
Where did that expression even come from anyway? Who carries around sacks of hammers?
Oh, I see now. My mistake. What I should have said was “dropped like a sack of potatoes” (dropping with great velocity). Sack of hammers is an expression relating to stupidity. So, I used the wrong expression. How embarrassing. I feel dumber than a sack of hammers.
I honestly stopped reading these recaps at the second issues (I’m not reading the books themselves). I have such little interest in this Wolverine junk, I hardly care to browse the comments to see what anyone else is saying about it. It might as well be a continuation of Howard Mackie’s Mutant X, but with far less funny reviews.
I plan on maybe checking these after they’re done so I don’t have any strong opinion on the miniseries right now, but I swear I thought Hickman’s idea with Inferno was to write Moira off the linbe for a while. Didn’t expect another writer to put her at the center of another plot this soon.
Also, I’m initially skeptical of the idea this is another attempt at whitewashing Krakoa cayse Percy is one of the writers actually willing to engage with the darkness underneath it. I find more likely that he just doesn’t know how to actually handle Moira’s character.
Oooh, Moira got a new arm! My amazing idea for her to gain and lose arms every other issue is one step closer to reality!
Other than that, this is rubbish. And it’s not even fun rubbish. X Lives of Wolverine is rubbish as well, but at least it swings for the fences with Logan as Xavier’s midwife, mid-coitus telepathic interruptions and possessed giant whales. But this is just boring nonsense.
Also, add Percy to the long list of writers who write Laura as Logan with tits. She doesn’t do a lot here, but brushing off Gabby, snarling and lashing out at telepathic projections… that’s not Laura.
There’s two things to remember about Percy:
A.)He has said in interviews that Krakoa is “Black Lives Matter for mutants”. So, I think the idea that he agreed with Hickman’s version of Krakoa is overstated. He has a statement to make with the Beast about the CIA, but I’m not sure how much further it goes.
B.)Percy might not have that much creative freedom as to how he writes Krakoa going forward. If Marvel editorial has decided that Krakoa is a nascent utopia, then that is how the writers will write Krakoa.
It’s probably true that Percy doesn’t know how to handle Moira’s character, but that begs the question as to why Percy is writing Moira in the first place. It seems that this series is editorially mandated and Percy was chosen to write the book.
“The mutants discovered her plan”.
That’s being very generous. There was a single panel of Destiny saying Moira was still going to ‘cure’ mutants, with Moira agreeing.
There’s a big disconnect between that and what we’re seeing here. Using Moira again immediately looks like a very bad decision.
@Chris V, do you have the full BLM quote?
As for editorial mandates, I’m sure these wolverine miniseries came up as a way to give the line some breathing room, but I currently struggle to see how it paints krakoa in a more favorable light. If anything it makes Xavier and Magneto trusting so much on Moira while keeping her hidden as one of the cores of the krakoa project even more of a problem (though the writing does seem… hamfisted.)
And – at the risk of saying too much based off summaries – it does feel like a waste of Percy as a writer cause even if he has some questionable ideas about krakoa, his X-Force was putting some effort into exploring the construction of krakoan imperialism and the ethics of ressurection. Meanwhile XDoW looks more like an action romp without much of thematic substance.
Here is the interview:
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbr.com/x-men-benjamin-percy-compares-comics-to-blm-me-too-movements/amp/
Jordan White said in an interview with Battle of the Atom that the core premise of this series was pitched in the early days of Krakoa, but they were waiting for the right moment. I presume that germ had to do with Wolverine, Omega Red, and they Russian subplots. Moira’s involvement here couldn’t have been part of the initial pitch and thus feel editorially mandated. We’ll have to see how it resolves but likely White saw the story as a means to bridge Inferno and the next couple years of stories.
I agree, Laura’s voice is way off. Moira too for that matter. Listening to interviews with Percy gives me more sympathy for him, as he has pretty strong concepts, and he’s been pretty good at juggling A and B plots and not really letting his arcs fall into comfortable trade formats. But his Wolverine has always been uneven, and this series isn’t quite hitting the mark. The parallels with Pox feels forced. Still, looking forward to the new books coming soon.
Of course if anyone wants to revisit Moira’s past lives, then even if reality gets reset, there’s still a timeline where she made those choices, because that’s how the Marvel multiverse works. There’s probably even one where she made those choices and also her powers spontaneously stopped working for some reason so it continued after her death, or where her powers created alternate timelines even though they didn’t in 616.
They aren’t the Sacred Timeline (to borrow a phrase from the MCU), of course. But if Moira’s power was splitting off universes, the previous ones wouldn’t be the Sacred Timeline either.
@Si (and everyone else who commented on this topic!)
“*this of course is so much the polar opposite of Moira as depicted in every appearance up to this era that she’s essentially a new character”
It’s maddening. It’s a volte face that isn’t earned in-story. Moira is suddenly “just another genocidal villain”. She was far more interesting as the person in the room trying to get everyone to listen to reason, but Xavier/Magneto/the Quiet Council being too narrow in their vision to listen or to understand. Her previous characterisation had nuance and mystery. This is simply dull and ham-fisted.
One of the fundamental problems with Lives/Deaths is that we didn’t actually get a proper explanation of what Moira’s real plan for mutants was. We got the shock reveal that she’s plotting out a cure in Inferno #4, but what she had in mind, how her actions creating Krakoa et al. were helpful to that scheme, and why she was doing so wasn’t really explained. So now her seemingly having changed gears and now pursuing a new plan doesn’t really play effectively since we don’t know what her previous plan was. And the whole premise is that she’s on the run from other mutants because her plan got revealed, so it’s fundamental to the story and there’s just nothing there.
That’s why the Terminator comparison damns this story – Terminator tells you what the Terminator’s goal is in the opening of the movie and then reiterates it. Here, we’re six issues deep and we’re still mostly in the dark. Having a mystery of what Moira’s new plan is potentially tenable, but it feels like Percy wrote this expecting that Hickman was going to have spelled out Moira’s heel turn a lot more effectively than he did.
Not really, no. For Moira to go from wanting to save humanity and stop the rise of post-humanity which leads to Machines always winning to siding with post-humanity to pursue a genocide against mutants doesn’t work no matter how many details Hickman spelt out for the reader. It went from “Moira is amoral, but has a goal” to “Moira is immoral and is simply an opportunist”. There would need to be some characterization for Moira in X Deaths, regardless, and not just Moira running from mutants.
Of course if anyone wants to revisit Moira’s past lives, then even if reality gets reset, there’s still a timeline where she made those choices, because that’s how the Marvel multiverse works.
That”s my view, and inevitably someday some writer’s going to make it canon in Exiles vol. 73, or whatever.
But Hickman and Marvel were very clear that Moira’s lives are not branching timelines. They all are supposed to occur within 616 continuity. While nothing on the page firmly establishes this as canon—and therefore it is readily retconned—that’s the conceit we’re supposed to accept while reading these stories.
@Chris V
Thanks for the link. And yeah, the quote is… not super tactful. I get if he was going for an easy analogy and talking from the point of view of the general populace. but when you’re the writer behind the book about krakoan cia, it feels a bit tonedeaf.
It’s worth pointing out that the last time (at least in my memory) that Marvel insisted a timeline-shifting event was not a branching reality was Age of Apocalypse. That conceit stuck for what, three years or so?
I think the fans have had very different perceptions of Moira than Marvel editorial, or even Hickman himself. They promoted House of X #2 (where Moira’s powers are revealed) pretty heavily, and it’s clear they understood that was a powerful issue.
I remember reading an interview with Hickman not that long after that though, where he said that Moira was essentially a means to an end — a clever conceit that would let them move the plot where they wanted it. I guess with the benefit of hindsight, what she provided must have been a compelling reason for Xavier and Magneto to build Krakoa. I don’t think they had a clear plan for her after that.
There were rumors of a Moira X series, in the end, all she did until Inferno was glower inside an upside down bubble.
I guess that would have been OK, but the backstory they gave her in HoxPox was so compelling that the fans assumed that she must have a larger role to play. However, as it turns out she was only ever a plot device in the Hickman era. It’s disappointing, but that’s comics for you!
Now they’ve turned her into essentially an entirely different character, with different powers, different motivations, and a new hairstyle to go with it. I hope they continue to give her a new arm in every issue of this series. That would feel somehow appropriate.
“That”s my view, and inevitably someday some writer’s going to make it canon in Exiles vol. 73, or whatever.
But Hickman and Marvel were very clear that Moira’s lives are not branching timelines.”
There’s no contradiction here. In 616, Moira completely resets the timeline to the point of her birth. In 982, if Moira exists and is a mutant with the same power, the same happens there. If in 10067429 there isn’t a Moira, then it’s not an issue.
Pure speculation on my part, but: I wonder how much Hickman withheld as he was leaving. For a four-issue mini, Inferno contains a *lot* of filler. The internal politics of Krakoa get shuffled around a bit and then something something Moira planning a mutant cure something.
Either Hickman was like, “Who cares? I’ll just make a gesture in Moira’s direction and that’ll fulfill my contract.” Or Marvel’s new intentions for the X-franchise and Krakoa so hamstrung him that he couldn’t do any more.
That’s fairly generous to Hickman, I realize, but he had to have *some* kind of larger plan for Moira. As Aro-tron mentioned, they announced an entire series about her at one point.
There’s no contradiction here. In 616, Moira completely resets the timeline to the point of her birth. In 982, if Moira exists and is a mutant with the same power, the same happens there. If in 10067429 there isn’t a Moira, then it’s not an issue.
Though it does get really wonky if any other stuff — Marvel cosmic entities, parallel-world jumpers, and so forth — are ever linked to this X-office plot device.
Like, what does the Watcher’s What If machine make of all of this? What happens if someone travels from Earth-10067429 to Earth-616 “before” and “after” a Moira reset? For that matter, what happens to someone who leaves Earth-616 and then returns “after” a Moira reset?
While I know we’ve seen time-traveling and reality-warping mutants before, Moira’s power seems really, bizarrely universe-level. It’s a power that operates on a scale way beyond virtually all the mutant powers we’ve seen so far, with the exception of Alan Moore’s Mad Jim Jaspers.
I kind of get the sense that depowering Moira is necessary to never have to deal with this, but it also shows how much Moira’s “power” was largely just a device to set up the distinctive structure of Powers of X without just having Moira as a generic precog whose plan works by seeing possible futures.
Thom-The way I see it, because “Inferno” ended up such a poor comic and such a mess, is that Hickman was forced to downplay the negativity related to Krakoa. The new direction for Krakoa seems to be that it’s an utopia for mutants. Everything is so much better for mutants now that they’re living on Krakoa and away from those awful humans. Hickman’s revelations were going to revolve around Krakoa as a trap for mutants, immortality wasn’t a blessing but a curse, the Krakoan drugs were Moira’s cure for mutancy. It was going to tear down everything that the mutants has deluded themselves in to believing. So, how do you go from Hickman’s dark vision to the bright wonderland of mutant nationalism that Marvel is pushing now? I think that’s why Hickman’s “Inferno” was a complete disappointment. I just don’t believe that after two years, Hickman’s finale could end up so lacklustre.
There still should have been a lot more set-up for the reveal about Moira in “Inferno” though. I like to read Hickman’s run as a mystery story where you have to reread House/Powers for clues after reading the ending of “Inferno”. There’s nothing that leads up to Moira being revealed as a traitour in “Inferno” though. In fact, Xavier and Magneto are written in a suspicious manner in the first two issues of “Inferno” rather than Moira.
The only hint is Moira reminiscing about her third life, and that scene was told in such an indecipherable manner (Hickman even made the error of having Destiny call Moira “Dr. MacTaggert” in Life Three, when that was not her name) that the purpose of the scene is impossible to comprehend.
Even including something like Moira being killed in the original Life Ten timeline could have served as a clue.
Omar-Wouldn’t someone leaving Earth-616 before a reset (but after Moira was born) just disappear when attempting to return to Earth-616 after a reset because they already exist on the Earth-616 timeline now? Their originally travelling from Earth-616 to another reality no longer happened because the event was erased from the timeline.
If someone leaves Earth-616 before Moira was born and returns after a reset, they would end up the same as someone who travels from an alternate reality. They’d have no knowledge of how the timeline had changed because everything that occurred prior to Moira’s birth would be the exact same. Since they were not on Earth-616 at the time of Moira’s birth, they would not be effected by the reset, and there would be no paradox.
Metaphysical mechanics aside, if a timeline that ostensibly gets wiped out has popular enough elements, someone will eventually find a way to bring it back. Age of Apocalypse is the gold standard for this. But do Moira’s other lives have anything as interesting as AoA? Maybe the chimeras (chimerae?), maybe as a place for an Exiles team to spend an issue or three in, but otherwise there’s not much there.
Wouldn’t someone leaving Earth-616 before a reset (but after Moira was born) just disappear when attempting to return to Earth-616 after a reset because they already exist on the Earth-616 timeline now? Their originally traveling from Earth-616 to another reality no longer happened because the event was erased from the timeline.
This is sort of a problem, though. Let’s say, oh, the Fantastic Four jaunt over from Earth-616 to Earth-11743, where the Mad Thinker’s Awesome Android somehow got the powers of Galactus’s Heralds and reshaped the world. The FF do additional timey-wimey stuff on Earth-11743, diverging a new timeline — let’s call it Earth-11744 — in which that timeline’s Mad Thinker was convinced to never build the Awesome Android and to retire to a farm and raise Skrull cows instead.
The FF return to Earth-616. Moira dies and Earth-616 resets.
What happens to the Earth-11744 timeline? Did it now retroactively never exist?
Or, for another scenario, the Two-Gun Kid travels from the 1870s to the modern era of Earth-616, then back to his original time period, where he writes down his future adventures in a diary.
Moira dies, and time resets to her birth. What happens to the diary that the Two-Gun Kid wrote in the 1870s?
This is actually kind of fun to game out.
Omar: that’s an intriguing question. I think if the FF of, say, Moiras life 7* travels to another reality while Moist dies:
1) that FF vanishes upon reality resetting.
2) that FF’s memories align to whatever their memories would be in Life 8, which is already happening.
3) Moira resets the multiverse(!)
4) life 7 FF returns to Life 8 and that’s A plot that played out in Life 8, but it all got erased anyway when Moira died and Life 9 began.
A reality hopper like America Chavez leaving in Life 9 and coming back in Life 10? I’d read that comic in a heartbeat.
* number picked randomly, I don’t remember details of what happened in each life.