Rise of the Powers of X #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
NOTE: This post has been revised now that the digital edition has been corrected to include the data pages at the right places.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #1
“Data Pages”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: R. B. Silva
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Associate editor: Lauren Amaro
Editor: Jordan D White
Editor-in-chief: C B Cebulski
THE RISE OF THE POWERS OF X is the companion series to The Fall of the House of X, mirroring the House of X / Power of X twin minis that launched the Krakoan era. And yes, according to the credits pages, the titles have a THE in them.
With the original books, the titles were supposed to be pronounced as “House of X” and “Powers of Ten”. Presumably the same goes for this, but you never know.
COVER / PAGE 1. The near-future X-Men team, of whom more later. They’re surrounded by foliage but in front of a mechanical portal showing what looks to be the sun.
PAGE 2. Recap and credits. The recap basically covers the plot of Immortal X-Men, and then explains that we’re ten years in the future, following the fall of Krakoa. The story title refers to the Krakoan era’s signature device of including text pages in the middle of the story rather than as back matter. It used to be a Jonathan Hickman signature device but it’s ours now.
PAGES 3-5. Nimrod celebrates victory over the mutants.
“The Tower of Nimrod the Lesser, the Human-Machine Monolith, Earth.” In Powers of X, Moira’s ninth life was a robot-dominated world ruled by “Nimrod the Lesser”, with Omega Sentinel at his side. The establishing shots for those scenes showed the same tower, captioned “The Tower of Nimrod the Lesser. The Human-Machine Monolith.” Evidently, ten years down the line, Nimrod and Omega Sentinel have steered history in a similar direction.
In that timeline, mutants were nearly wiped out, and humans were subordinate to machines. That timeline ends with the surviving X-Men recovering vital information that would supposedly help Moira to avert Nimrod’s creation, and then killing her to reset the timeline so that she can try again with that knowledge.
“They did where I came from. The mutants burned down the machine firmament with Phoenix fire.” Inferno vol 2 #3 revealed that Omega Sentinel is possessed by the mind of herself from an alternate future in which the mutants wiped out the Dominions using the Phoenix Force. She’s come back in time to prevent that from happening. It’s an inversion of Kitty Pryde’s role in “Days of Future Past”.
Specifically, here’s what Omega Sentinel claims in Inferno #3, because it sounds like it’s going to be important:
“Soon, the Children of the Vault – post-humanity – should emerge. They will appear to be dominant. A threat to supplant humanity and mutantdom alike. But fractured and warring on two fronts, they would eventually fall to Krakoa. [The art shows Apocalypse, Genesis and the original Horsemen.] Post-humanity – it was believed – had arrived too early and would have to wait its turn. You [Nimrod] were born in the year that followed. Lesser than you are now, but still a marvel of marvels. A great machine. But your emergence – the threat of you – did not go unnoticed by the mutant nation and your makers sent you back in time to fight mutantdom in its infancy. This Nimrod – this flawed you – failed.
“Earth – the entire Sol system – was lost to both human and machine. Mutants ruled. And all our machine hopes rested in the timeliness machine gods – Dominions – to save us… to take us in, so we could be. But the mutants captured the celestial powers – life and death – and, using the Phoenix blade, the child of the sun – who wielded it with vigour – destroyed Titan after Titan, Dominion after Dominion, and ended the machine future forever. Except for me. Omega at the end of the line.
“The trickster Titan – betrayer and coward of its brother and sister machines – downloaded my mind and pushed it through a black hole to infect and overwrite the me who lived in the past but had not yet awakened. I closed my eyes in mutant hell and opened them years ago – here, on earth. All my days of a future past.”
Omega Sentinel then goes on to explain that she created Orchis, apparently to prevent mutant domination, but ultimately in order to guarantee machine ascendance. It’s tempting to assume that the “trickster Titan” is Enigma, the Dominion based on the Nathaniel Essex AI from Immortal X-Men, but the closing data page doesn’t equate them.
“It’s as if the Terminator had a happy ending.” Nimrod sees this as a story where history has been successfully changed, although obviously his idea of a happy ending may differ from yours.
“Tomorrow, we meet our new god. Tomorrow, we become our god.” This calls back to Moira’s sixth life, in which she and Wolverine survived as prisoners into the distant future while post-humanity attempted to summon the Phalanx in order to ascend to godhood. The post-human Librarian specifically flagged the point that Moira couldn’t be allowed to die before the ascension occurred, because that would reboot the timeline – but he believed that once they had ascended, they would be beyond time and space and, by implication, escape the endless loop of Moira’s reboots. However, Wolverine then kills Moira before the ascension can happen.
Emma Frost is the hapless corpse that they’re standing over. Mystique refers in the next scene to her “sacrificial distraction.”
PAGES 6-7. Gambit and Mystique die heroically.
The Henry Gyrich Memorial Detention Center is the Orchis New York base seen extensively in X-Men.
As we establish over the course of the issue, Gambit and Mystique have stolen a file containing a copy of Feilong’s personality, including his knowledge of the whereabouts of Mr Sinister, who’s imprisoned on Phobos. Gambit sacrifices himself in order to buy Mystique time to relay that location to the X-Men.
“Irene. I’m coming.” Mystique is expecting to die and be reunited with Destiny.
PAGE 8. The X-Men receive the location from Mystique.
“The Broken Sword.” Apparently, whatever remains of the S.W.O.R.D. space station, the Peak.
The future X-Men are:
- The Professor. A future Synch, taking the Professor X role. That ties to his current role in X-Men. The idea that his powers cause him to age and wear out is another X-Men subplot.
- Iron Man. An AI copy of Tony Stark, animating the “final” Iron Man suit – i.e., the one he switched to immediately after the Hellfire Gala.
- Captain Krakoa. Ms Marvel, in the role of the teen hero who’s ascended to leadership. She’s wearing a version of the Captain Krakoa costume that Cyclops wore in X-Men to disguise his resurrection, though it also points to her embracing her role as a mutant symbol.
- Shadowtiger. A transformed version of Shadowkat, thanks to a “Death Seed” – a plot point from Rick Remender’s X-Force, where it was a sort of Celestial artefact that brought out a Death persona.
- Wolverine, because of course Wolverine’s still around.
PAGES 9-10. Moira, Nimrod and Omega Sentinel discuss the impending Dominion.
The graphics all reflect the design of Hickman data pages.
Worldmind. A term more often used in Nova stories, to describe the AI that preserves Xandarian culture. Basically, Omega Sentinel has come back in time with the information from the far future that will allow the machines to build a Worldmind AI and summon a Dominion to absorb them, a thousand years ahead of schedule.
“Finally safe.” Moira seems to see absorption into a dominion as something that will get her out of space and time and prevent her being stuck in her endless loops – though this ought to be her final life anyway, so perhaps she also sees this as her last chance to escape death.
Dr Stasis has gone back to wearing his helmet, which is interesting – he hasn’t worn it much in X-Men of late. We’ll come back to what he’s doing as an ally of Orchis at this point.
Feilong apparently did stand up to Nimrod once he figured out what was going on – he’s a post-humanity true believer, after all – and it didn’t go well for him.
PAGE 11. The X-Men arrive on Phobos.
Phobos is a moon of Mars, and has an Orchis base on it thanks to Feilong. In the mainstream timeline, it’s actually now under the control of Genesis and her remaining Horsemen, as seen in X-Men Red.
PAGE 12. Nimrod and co head to Phobos to fight the X-Men.
Fearing that the X-Men might be able to stop them after all, Nimrod tells Moira to activate the Worldmind early, risking rejection by the Dominion that he hopes to attract. Moira complies.
PAGE 13. Dr Stasis visits the Vault.
Stasis has apparently been biding his time waiting for an opportunity to move against Orchis, which makes sense – his whole thing is that he doesn’t like things changing. Quite why Orchis continue to trust him might be debatable, but presumably they buy his position that he’s making the best of the situation that presents itself.
Anyway, Stasis approaches the top tier post-humanity option of the Children of the Vault, who have evidently been biding their time making plans within their time-distortion vault.
PAGES 14-16. The X-Men fight Nimrod and co.
The Dominion duly arrives ahead of schedule.
PAGES 17-19. Dr Stasis and Cadena.
Since they’re in a time bubble, they’re in no particular hurry. Stasis basically tells us that the AI are ultimately just a giant ChatGPT who can only recycle existing elements. Stasis, in contrast, has created a “Supreme Intelligence” of geniuses, similar to the Kree, who can create new ideas. It doesn’t exactly look as if they’re in prime thinking mood, but apparently they have indeed created a weapon to destroy the Dominion. We’ll see in a bit how that works.
As Cadena points out, if you interpret the concept broadly enough, post-humanity can never lose. (In the X-books, though, it normally means humans enhanced by technology rather than natural mutation.)
PAGES 20-23. The X-Men rescue Mr Sinister.
Sinister has been kept alive because “They couldn’t risk me having a failsafe.” But Sinister can’t resist bragging about his failsafe, and having had its existence confirmed, Wolverine kills him. As we see later on, the failsafe is that it triggers a Moira reboot once Sinister is detected as dead.
PAGES 24-26. Dr Stasis tries to hijack the Dominion.
The weapon is designed to erase the Dominion’s intelligences so that something else can be uploaded in its place. Since they’re destroying the sun in the process, the Children of the Vault presumably expected that to be them. But of course, Dr Stasis has his own plans and uses a back door to shut the Children down. Stasis then tries to ascend to Dominion status himself, but it doesn’t work because another Dominion – Enigma – comes along to consume the first one.
“Helped a lot with Bella’s early work making you.” Bella Pagan, the scientist credited with creating the Children of the Vault in X-Men #191. Stasis is suggesting that his back door has been there all along.
Rasputin IV is evidently from outside the timeline, since there wouldn’t be much point in her trying to “get out of there” otherwise. More of this in a bit.
PAGES 27-28. Enigma destroys Nimrod and Omega Sentinel, and reality ends.
This is not the Dominion that Nimrod wanted – he wanted a superhuman AI, and he’s got a single human who has turned himself into an AI. Enigma repeats the “new gods” motif from House of X #1, where the mutants were asserting their untouchability.
As per the last issue of Immortal X-Men, Enigma’s forehead symbol is a crown, which also appears in his captions. Page 28 recaps the “Moira engine” which Sinister used to test timelines and reboot them, and which was a central plot point of Immortal X-Men.
PAGE 29. Data page, attempting to explain the confusing mess of repeated lives and timelines. It’s mostly recap. The world where Stasis succeeded in ascending is the one we saw in the first part of the issue. Orbis Stellaris’ ascension remains a mystery. We’re also told that Mother Righteous’ attempt at ascension has “mortally injured” the White Hot Room, whatever that might mean where Phoenix-related dimensions are concerned.
PAGES 30-31. Professor X, Rasputin and Cypher.
Apparently, this is what Professor X called Rasputin away to deal with in The Fall of the House of X #1. As we learn on the following data pageNo-Place X is Moira’s No-Place, developed by Cypher and Krakoa so as to exist outside time and space. In other words, they’ve created a pocket where they can’t be monitored by a Dominion.
Cypher hasn’t been seen since he was spirited away by Krakoa in Immortal X-Men #13. Presumably this is where Krakoa took him. (He certainly wasn’t in the Pit when we saw it in other books.)
“The X-Men’s attacks against Orchis.” The fight-back shown in Fall.
PAGE 32. Data page on No-Place X. Other than confirming the nature of No-Place X itself, this is mostly recap, but it does indicate that when Cypher said “I’ll let the rest know the bad news” on the previous page, there were two people in mind – identities as yet redacted.
PAGES 33-34. Professor X explains his plan to Rasputin.
“I know where blindly following someone leads you.” In her home timeline, “Sins of Sinister”, Rasputin IV blindly followed her creator Mr Sinister for most of her life before being betrayed.
Professor X’s plan is to go back in time, kill Moira before her powers emerge at puberty, and invalidate everything to do with Moira. The Krakoan nation will then be retroactively removed from continuity (presumably, along with all other stories depending on the existence of Moira MacTaggert), and the opportunity for ascension will not arise. As data page 35 makes clear, Enigma needs all four component Sinister clones to succeed in their ascensions, at which point he “harvests” them and diverts their success to himself. Without Krakoa and Moira, Sinister and Mother Righteous would never have managed it.
I don’t think we’re actually doing a partial reboot of Marvel continuity at the end of the Krakoan era, but that’s certainly what this is teasing.
PAGE 35. Trailers. The Krakoan reads FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X.
Gillen did not disappoint. This is much more what I wanted to see for a finale based on Hickman’s House/Powers.
I’m pretty sure that the “Trickster Titan” was the evolved state of the Warlock/Krakoa merger, from after Krakoa developed into a world mind. “Betrayer and coward of its brother and sister machines” certainly doesn’t sound like Enigma. It does sound like it describes Warlock. The term warlock comes from a term that translates as “traitour, liar”, which sounds like Hickman’s wordplay for a “trickster”. Gillen seems to be playing fair with Hickman’s original intent for the ending of the Krakoa-era. Granted, no one may return to this idea and it may stand as a dropped plot-thread.
I think it was the “trickster Titan”’s goal was to set up events as they are currently progressing so that Moira is stopped before the founding of Krakoa in order to end the entire cycle. I was wondering if that was what was redacted from Doug’s entry on the data page, something related to this “trickster Titan”.
I don’t understand why killing Moira stops Enigma from coming into being. Isn’t he beyond causality now that he’s absorbed Mother Righteous’s dominion? Didn’t the blue posthumans of Moira’s 6th life seek ascension with the Dominion because being beyond time and space would make them immune to time travel shenanigans and universal resets?
I have finally called it quits. This is just too convoluted, too pyrotechnic, much too set on creating an atmosphere of grandiosity at the expense of clarity or even a clear plot.
Also, I am not liking all this casual killing any, either. It was bad enough that Hope killed Selene early in Immortal X-Men for barely any consequence.
Also, I’m not sure if Marvel intends to reboot the Krakoan era, I do think it seems likely now. I’m guessing that instead of killing Moira though, it will end so that Moira gets depowered in the past and is shown that her actions with Xavier and Magneto lead to the futures she wants to avoid. Moira will change her stance, and the Moira we remember from the pre-Hickman stories will be preserved. I think that was Hickman’s plan to “put all the toys back in the box”, although that doesn’t figure in how this will impact the past four years of Marvel continuity.
The thing with the Trickster Dominion is weird. Gillen has Nimrod state that the Trickster that sent Karima back was a Dominion, not a Titan as Karima originally claimed in Inferno. However, the data page talks about the Trickster Dominion and Enigma as if they were separate entities. What’s the point of establishing that the Trickster was a Dominion if it’s not Enigma?
Note that “the Broken Sword” was the title of one of Destiny’s visions in Immortal X-Men 3.
Note that Gillen changed the idea of how Dominions operate in order for Stasis to win his victory over one. In Powers of X ,Hickman established that the Dominions stayed safe in a black hole while the Phalanx went to consume planets for them. In this issue, the Dominion personally comes to consume Earth.
Note that Enigma explains that he ensured Sinister “would never remember timelines where he discovered his peers or their Dominion attempts”. This explains why Sinister couldn’t remember discovering the other Sinisters in Immortal X-Men 18. But it also explains why Sinister was surprised in issue 1 when Selene attacked with power granted her by Mother Righteous. Presumably in other timelines when this happened, Sinister discovered Mother Righteous’s role before he rebooted the timeline, so Enigma wiped those timelines from Sinister’s memory.
Note the explanation of how No Place-X was created seemingly makes no sense- it was supposedly created by combining Doug’s and Krakoa’s powers. But Doug’s power is to translate languages while Krakoa’s power is the ability to form structures out of itself. So if you combine Doug’s and Krakoa’s powers you should get a building with signs in different languages, not a base outside of time and space. Also note that Xavier points out that blaming Rasputin for failing to stop Enigma is out of character for Doug and portions of Doug’s data page are blocked out. So clearly something’s up with Doug. Maybe he’s been infected with the transmode virus somehow and is becoming a Magus-like creature?
Xavier: Clearly we should travel through time and kill someone to prevent a great evil from arising in the future. No X-Man has ever tried something like this before and have it backfire on them.
Legion. Wolverine and Bishop: We’re standing right here.
I’m surprised that Xavier is willing to erase Proteus from existence and change Rahne’s history for the worse to stop Enigma and Orchis.
@CitizenBane- the way that Sinister explained it in Immortal X-Men 18 is this: “It is reliant upon bringing itself into being… so it can’t change that causality. It’s out of time, so maybe it would survive… but it won’t take that risk.”
The one thing I really don’t like about this story is that they haven’t really explained why these characters are so scared of Enigma, or why he’s such a big threat. So the Beyonders are scared of him, whatever, why does anyone who isn’t a cosmic entity have to worry about this? Is it just that he’s a Nathaniel Essex and therefore deserving of suspicion? He’s supposed to be timeless and eternal and capable of wiping out these X-Men in the crib if he wanted to, and yet he hasn’t done anything of the sort, or really done anything worth worrying about despite gaining unfathomable power. Let him gloat about how clever he is in his celestial wonderland. It’s like being a bacterium and panicking over the existence of Godzilla.
@CitizenBane I think it’s because Enigma is reliant on the Moira clones to form (since it’s all four attempts by each Essex clone) that it’s a weakness of a sort. A Dominion *could* survive its formation being undone, but a Dominion’s formation being undone hasn’t happened before even as a test so no one knows.
CitizenBane-It’s the idea of a temporal paradox. The mutants realize exactly how Enigma comes to be, and if they change history so that it’s impossible for those events to occur, then it creates a paradox so that Enigma cannot have ever existed.
Post-humanity in Life Six say that if they achieve Ascension, they will exist as a part of the Dominion outside of space and time. They point out that their knowledge of Moira will make the Dominion aware of Moira’s existence and that a Dominion would not allow Moira to interfere with the rise of post-humanity.
The “machine god” Dominion referred to by Nimrod and Omega Sentinel must have an origin point in the far future (the end of Life Six was occurring a thousand years in the future). Hickman seemed to be saying that the Dominion was the endpoint of evolution, that evolution naturally leads to machine ascension. Based on the Librarian’s words to Moira, the rise of post-humanity was necessary to the evolution of the Dominions. The Librarian was saying that the Dominion would stop Moira from halting the rise of post-humanity.
@Michael Part of Cypher’s abilities is to learn and speak *every* language including arcane ones, so I’m guessing that Doug essentially used a spell to take the No-Place out of time and space which *could* be done
The data pages are misplaced in digital edition, as pointed out by Gillen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kierongillen/status/1745193911264432577?t=78e_5sm-aJ06G0SYxu6CvQ&s=19
@CitizenBane- Enigma’s last line of dialogue in immortal X-Men 18 was “Every part of you will become part of me.” That implies that it’s planning on absorbing the Earth into itself.
@Michael – but doesn’t that still raise the question of why he hasn’t just done it already? All 4 Sinister ascensions were complete by the end of Immortal 18. Shouldn’t he have just done it a nanosecond after that, or a thousand years prior, since time doesn’t matter to him anymore?
If he did it a thousand years prior, that would also create a temporal paradox. He would be preventing his own creation, so he then couldn’t exist a thousand years ago to assimilate everything.
I guess there’s a question as to how Enigma plans to assimilate everything into itself. The “machine god” Dominions used the Phalanx as a go-between: turn matter into information, upload everything worth keeping, download the information to the Dominion.
How does Enigma operate?
Xavier mentioned “a timeline where Stasis did something terrible to the sun” in Immortal #18.
I cannot imagine that this is going to end with Krakoa retroactively never having existed, just because this is a story, and in particular a Gillen story; has there ever been a story in which the shocking-and-sorta-disappointing goal announced by the protagonists at the end of the first act is what actually comes to pass at the end of the fifth act?
Wow! I loved this one. I just needed Gillen and Silva to bring me back in the fold. This feels like the real follow up to HoX/PoX. Gillen seems to be wrapping up stuff from the very beginning. Moira acting out of self-interest as opposed to being a raving lunatic was much appreciated. Bringing the focus (finally!) back to Omega and Nimrod was great. I can’t wait to see the rest of the No Place X team. A small part of me hopes that Gillen keeps Wolverine just to keep the “he’s always in these things” jokes going. I had a big grin the whole time.
Michael-I think Marvel editorial called an audible on the Titan/Stronghold/Dominion distinction from Hickman. Perhaps they considered it too confusing. In Hickman’s classification, everything we’ve seen post-Inferno would relate to Titans, not Dominions.
A Dominion is a collective of ten or more Titans. A Stronghold is 2-5 Titans working together and confined to a galactic cluster. A Titan is a singular, hermetic intellect.
@Chris V- yeah, but there’s got to be SOME significance to the Trickster Dominion if they mentioned it twice this issue. Plus in Children of the Vault 3, Serafina said a Dominion wears Orchis “like a glove…a mind behind comprehension forces their every move”. It’s hard to see where they’re going with this if the Trickster isn’t Enigma.
I don’t see Marvel completing undoing the entire Krakoan era, simply because “it never happened” would have too many ripples throughout their continuity for the past few years. Same justification as to why Sinister didn’t reboot back to pre-Judgement Day, it’s asking too much to rollback the entire MU (or otherwise play “here’s what really happened so the greater MU still wound up in the most recent status quo…”)
Likewise, erasing Moira would have too many ripples. It can be -done- but it might be too messy.
No, we’ll see some sort of reset to wipe Moira’s powers off the board once and for all, and almost certainly take resurrection away to reintroduce actual consequences for death (after introducing enough ambiguity to allow anyone who’s died lately to return on or off-screen).
Ideally, my post-FOX/ROX status quo would have Moira depowered, resurrection disabled, Krakoa still extant as a viable nation-state in some fashion, Orchis defeated for now, Sinister (and clones) removed for the time being… and sure, why not, a return to a more traditional X-Men team operating out of Xavier’s School.
I wouldn’t mind seeing Arakkoa continue to hang around, though I also wouldn’t be surprised if something happened to take them off the board as well (kind of like when all the Morlocks got zapped into another dimension for a while…)
I’ll actually miss the Krakoa era, but mainly for the missed potential.
Michael-As I said above, I’m sure Hickman intended the “Trickster Titan” to be the evolved form of Krakoa merged with Warlock. I don’t see Gillen changing that. He’s been playing fair with Hickman’s ideas in RoPoX, so far. Like, he bothered to explain the discrepancy between his Enigma and Hickman’s “machine gods”. I think it’s just confusing because everything is a “Dominion” now, and Titans/Strongholds are off the board.
Doug seems to be Hickman’s one true hero of the Krakoan-era. The idea that Warkoa (or Kraklock) is the one truly manipulating events for a better ending would fit with Hickman’s use of Doug/Warlock/Krakoa.
As I postulated, the reason to send Omega Sentinel back in time was to set up the scenario we are seeing now where the mutants attempt to stop Moira before the founding of Krakoa.
Man, there’s such an element of Calvinball to all this stuff.
If the titan assimilates the moira machine to the power of 10 to become an enigma dominion, then the trickster stasis resurrects a stellaris cerebro creating a krakoa arrako no-place inferno of lesser nimrod proportions.
*slaps side of Galactus’ helmet* “this baby gets ten titans to the dominion.”
Age of Ultron was one of the worst crossovers Marvel as done why are we repeating it. Marvel is not going do a flashpoint so why even pretend.
Moria impacts so much – Magento’s Baby care, The missing X-team, Rhane, Porteous, Maddrox, Excalibur, Charles may not even set up the X-men with out her. Banshee’s love life, Legion, the reavers Massacre, the muir island X-men, shadow king, no evil sexy moria, no Banshee skin suit. who looks after the mutant massacre victims. Are Tom and Sharon still going be race switched if they don’t help Moria
Unless we are getting an age of Apoclypse followed by a reset.
The problem I have with this notion that the Trickster Titan is Warlock is… our Warlock? Kind, compassionate, silly Warlock? Sent a Sentinel back in time to build Nimrod, and exterminate mutantkind? That scenario would have to work very hard to convince me, and we’ve had enough character assassination in the Krakoa era as is.
I don’t know, I would kind of like Sentinel to say “your will be done, my eternal master”, and bow to her machine god, who currently looks like a black and yellow cartoon duck.
This issue was simply phenomenal. It manages to pull off the sense of gravitas of HoXPoX while also meaningfully applying the narrative parallels in service of characters – I’m still elaborating my thoughts on it, but basically it all makes me think a lot about many of these characters being stuck in self-fulfilling prophecies.
One thing I don’t get, or maybe will be elaborated more in the future: why did Essex die shortly after being imprisoned in Immortal #8? why did his Enigma self show up in prison at that moment? There’s a lot of talk on the causality that leads to the Dominion creation, but it was manifesting itself on the past century with no problem and Essex calls it “a ghost”.
So are we dealing with misdirections, is this also about the self-fulfilling prophecy theme, or am I missing something?
@Miyamoris: I think the notion there is that Enigma killed Nathaniel to cover up its own existence, presumably for the same reason it killed Sinister back in 1919 when Irene tried to tell him the truth. It’s trying to hide its origins in order to prevent anyone from tampering with it
This seems waaaay too easy so I’m sure it’s not the direction they’ll actually go; but instead of KILLING Moira, couldn’t they just go back in time and remove/turn off her X-gene before she hits puberty? If you do that, she’s not dead, she’s just… exactly what we thought she was all along before HoXPoX started. And continuity essentially resets to what it was pre-Hickman.
I’ve largely checked out of all the Dominion stuff, but I loved this issue. Like others have said above, it really feels like the spiritual successor of HoX/PoX. And I don’t care if the logic tracks as long as everyone’s story arcs come to a satisfying conclusion. (I realize YMMV on that point.)
One thing I’ll never get tired of is seeing a small band of alterna-X-men fight and die for the cause. It’s Lorna as the Emerald Witch! It’s Illyana if she were an angel instead of a demon! It’s Logan with the charred remains of the Infinity Gaunlet! It gets me every time.
It doesn’t hurt that the art is absolutely gorgeous. I hope Gillen and Silva can keep it up for the next four issues because they might pull off a feat I thought was impossible: a satisfying conclusion to the meandering mess that was the Krakoa era.
@Diana: that’s plausible but… was that necessary in that given moment? If anything it raises questions, an insane man dying ranting in his cell like that.
Or maybe that was the moment his system activated and absorbed the original. That ghost quote, though.
@Drew: That wouldn’t work. Moira without her x-gene is essentially going to be the Moira of her first life, with no motivation to ever get involved in mutant research. Her absence changes a fuckton of X-Men continuity since the earlier points of the Claremont run.
Though honestly, I highly doubt Gillen is giving the whole game away here – really feels like Charles self-sabotaging under the assumption that he killed everyone so all these timelines branches are doomed.
@Thom H: I loved the alternative versions too, and some of these seems so loaded – Kate taking the Death Seed implies a desperate measure, while Kamala has remained more or less the same (her thanking Synch feels so bitterweet).
@Miyamoris- I think that Charles has figured out that he didn’t kill everyone- he mentions trying to stop the other Essex clones’ ascension attempts, so presumably he knows what Mother Righteous did. The problem is that he has no way to get the 250,000 mutants out of the collapsing White Room.
This issue gave me the “I have no idea what’s going on in some scenes, but I like it anyway” feeling I associate with Hox/PoX. Silva and Curiel are killing it on the art, and Gillen is unwrapping and rewrapping Hickman’s concepts effectively.
I don’t get the motivation for becoming a dominion other than “ultimate power & knowledge.” If you can affect reality, why is 616 a universe in which the good guys usually win, in which mutants are usually persecuted, in which Galactus even exists (surely a Dominion can go back in time/already be at the beginning of the universe and mess with Galan’s future)? Why was the M’Krann crystal destabilized to the point where you need Phoenix and the X-Men to fix it? The concept is still too big and out there for me, but if Gillen and Silva make something entertaining out of it then I’ll just enjoy the ride.
Moira as we knew her was Moira X, but maybe Moira X is really Moira Enigma, creating Enigma bootstrap-paradoxically. This story will somehow prevent Moira’s Enigmaness, so that everything will have happened the way we originally thought it did.
Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, Schrodinger’s Krakoa which both will have and will not have existed, continuity both preserved yet undone.
Is my guess anyway.
Back in 2020 or so when HoXPoX began I thought the X-Books were getting so complicated that it would be better to put it in isolation from the wider Marvel universe.
They have certainly not become more isolated since, and definitely not less complicated either.
Now I sort of hope that this plan of changing the past will split Marvel comics into two separate continuities. I don’t see how a true reset could happen now without punching a lot of continuity holes.
For the Titan/Stronghold/Dominion differences, you can always say that Hickman’s vision and definitions are still there, but it’s that Nimrod doesn’t necessarily know the difference between them all.
Also, I refreshed my memory and there’s some wriggle room on the definitions. T/S/D all assume a natural evolution in a specific way. Yeah, Strongholds and Dominions are composed of groups of Titans, but that’s also because once the intellects hit Titan-size they naturally collapse into a singularity. So if you’re going about it in a different way, you could technically be a Titan (as far as being a single unified intellect) with the processing power of a Dominion. At that point you’ve got the power of a Dominion and can ignore any foolish mortals who want to argue definitions on you.
Case in point, Sinister’s attempted Dominion-hood used 8.6 quadrillion mutants who hadn’t collapsed into a singularity because they were spread through the galaxy. A Dominion’s intelligence rating was unstated, but a Titan was 10 million and a Stronghold 100 million. It’s not linear — that’s a multiplier of 10 but a stronghold is normally “five or fewer” Titans. Still, there’s enough orders of magnitude between the intelligences Sinister consumed and a Stronghold that he’d have had Dominion-level processing power. But *technically* he’d have done it as a singular intellect and be a Titan.
So the other possibility is that the Trickster Titan/Dominion was in the same boat. If it were Warlock/Krakoa, then possibly it ate parts of the Titans and Dominions that fell to the mutant attacks until it became Dominion-level. Presumably we’re going to know more about it before this series is over, based on the mentions.
One other thing that rereading the original description of Dominions reminded me of is that it did say that the “universal abstracts” were also things a Dominion feared. They just normally wouldn’t get in the way because they see Dominions as natural. That probably answers the question of why the Dominions don’t just destroy Galen before he emerges — the Living Tribunal might consider that cheating and messing with a needed component of the universe.
If I had to No-Prize it, I’d say it’s because Moira’s power is destroying and recreating the universe, not reversing time. Thus, everything in Moira’s lives did in fact happen at some point. The 4 Sinisters all made their ascension attempts, but Moira’s powers
erased all evidence except her memories and things outside space-time her power didn’t touch.
But really, the best explanation is just wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. The rules are whatever works for the story. And I’m fine with that.
If Moira can create and destroy universes, she is more powerful than Phoenix, Galactus and the like. We would have to expect the Shiar and many more to want to kill her ASAP once they found out.
Besides, it would be cheap, lazy writing. Biological mutation giving a human power over the whole of existence – several times?!?
This is more like it. I enjoyed this a lot and am looking forward to the rest of this series and X-Men: Forever.
I just went back and re-read HoX/PoX, the chronological version which follows Moira’s lives in order (which supports MasterMahan’s suggestion above). Gillen is clearly trying to tie together themes from the founding minis and create some kind of conceptual symmetry while also incorporating some of the dangling plot points from throughout the Krakoan era. But he’s also been consistent with his narrative since the first issue of Immortal, and like Sins of Sinister his take extends from Moira’s many lives, put applied on an even grander scale. Hickman’s interest in Dominions seemed to be motivated not just by machine learning but by questions of civilizational scale and the kind of general intellect that can manifest from different means of organizing society. The use of the Children and Stasis here made good sense. I suspect Stellaris will appear in one of the next issues further down the timeline, since he was written out of the SoS timeline so early on (whereas Mother Righteous made it up until the end of that timeline before being taken out by Moira).
Gillen seems to be exploring similar themes as Hickman (both big picture and X-mythos) but with Enigma and the four Essex clones. This is interesting as it transcends the divisions of the human-mutant-machine conflict. “We always lose.” But he also ties back to the themes of PoX in other ways, again foregrounding the time traveling of Omega Sentinel, Rasputin, etc in ways that mirror PoX while drawing on everything that’s come since.
Sure it might be getting convoluted, but I don’t find any of these points of contention to be really detrimental to the story. Especially after Duggan’s tepid first issue, I’m glad to see Gillen taking big swings.
FYI, kindle version has been corrected. You have to remove download, you don’t get notified automatically like Comixology did
My thought was similar to Drews, but I think they’ll hit Moria with a neutralizer beam, Xavier (or another telepath) will muck up her memories but leave her scientific prowess untouched, and she’ll live and die thinking she’s a normal human, as per the pre-Hickman stuff. The last few years of the X-books will go poof in a cloud of unsatisfying retcon. Except maybe we’ll have some of the resurrected mutants in the White Hot Room come out to continue in the Brevoort-run line afterwards.
The solicits are out and this is interesting regarding our discussion of the Trickster Dominion being Warlock:
“Who is Traitor X? In the aftermath of the greatest betrayal in X-Men history, the Quiet Council in exile must act in RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #4. They have a plan. Can anyone, or anything, survive the experience? ”
My guess is that the traitor is Doug, not Warlock. Maybe Doug becomes the new Magus and the Trickster Dominion?
Nimrod sings “one more sleep until we meet our god!” I don’t know how common an expression “one more sleep until…” is in the UK, but the only time I’ve really heard it is in the Muppet Christmas Carol movie. He’s in a giddy mood here, which is in line with his almost childlike new personality.
I don’t have much to add other than I really liked it. It has the HOXPOX scale with the added benefit of the heroes acting according to what they’ve been doing up to now.
ALright, so it’s only Xavier who’s following an already established plotline. But it’s been five years and it still irks me how Hickman ignored everything from the past decade or more in his (lack of) set up for Krakoa.
Anyway. Rasputin’s going to be thrilled when she learns Chuck has Sinister in his brain, isn’t she?
I would assume “one more sleep until…” is a more common expression in the UK, since it’s a lyric from a Leona Lewis song. I assumed that’s what Nimrod was referencing.
I would have imagined “one more sleep until…” was ubiquitous, as a frame of reference for young children who understand the passage of time but don’t quite get the meaning of days and weeks yet. Is this not the case?
‘Tis indeed common parlance, down our way.
I wondered whether the Iron Man was a suit made of mysterium, unless the story in his own title ends up effectively being it’s own thing and at enough of a remove it doesn’t matter if people reading the Krakoa era.
@Michael, I don’t think Cypher did directly create the No-Place. Back in in HoxPox there’s a data page for the different flowers created on Krakoa, the last of those creates the No-Places and makes them undetectable by Krakoa, presumably so that Moira can hide in them. That they are also Dominion undetectable is a bit of luck.
The thing that I’m not sure about, and will need to re-read, is what is Stasis’ power source? Sinister blew up a galaxy of conscious life, Mother Righteous used the White Hot Room/Phoenix Force, he just kills the current occupant and intends to stroll in? I can’t help but think if it worked he’d be a very small pea rattling around in a very large tin.
I presume that teen Moira won’t be killed. A heel-turn by current Moira isn’t beyond the reach of possibility, it’s whether they use Forge’s neutraliser and forget that Moira’s first life was completely unconnected to the X-Men in any way, or use some trickery and, presumably, non-consenting Xavier mindwiping to reset her to more or less what she was at the start of this lifeline without knowledge of her other lives so things go on with the minimum of fuss.
I really hope they don’t undo the Krakoa timeline because I’m really enjoying a Marvel Universe in which Henry Peter Gyrich is dead.
The Children of the Vault’s/Stasis’s Weapon is powered by consuming the sun, isn’t it?
@Loz: Neutralizing Moira X would still leave her with the knowledge of her first nine lives, but I suppose it would also mean there’d be no need to isolate her during the start of Krakoa – maybe that would make a difference somehow?
If Stasis’ plan had worked, his mind would have essentially expanded to occupy the Dominion’s entire physical structure – basically what Enigma is now, I suppose.
@Loz- To clarify. the problem I have with No Place X is that it’s said to be “outside space and time”. How could Krakoa transport something outside space and time? At first I thought it had something to do with the gates but the entire point of the gates is that they only work if there’s a flower on both ends. So unless Doug somehow carried a flower outside space and time, Krakoa shouldn’t be able to transport our heroes outside space and time.
(For the record, I think that Doug is going to become the new Magus.Which would explain how he could bring a flower outside space and time.)