Binary #3 annotations
BINARY #3
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Annalise Bissa
COVER: Um… well… it’s a woman running away from Phoenix. I assume she’s meant to be Carol Danvers, but she looks absolutely nothing like Carol Danvers beyond the fact that she’s white and blonde (as far as you can tell given that she’s coloured entirely in grey-blue, which means there’s a murky shape as the centre of focus). Her expression doesn’t seem scared, but more like she’s leading the Phoenix after her. I have no idea what it has to do with the story.
This is the final issue of Binary, which in turn was a continuation of Phoenix. That book isn’t returning in January, so the series truly does end here.
PAGES 1-7. Binary realises that she’s dealing with Madelyne Pryor, and Jean Grey manifests.
The basic plot so far is that Carol Danvers inherited the Phoenix Force after Jean Grey apparently burned herself out while containing the X-virus on Earth; that Carol has been using the Phoenix Force to protect her home town of Beverly, Massachusetts by shielding it from the X-virus in a psychic dome; that she started seeing Jean again last issue, since Jean and the Phoenix are one and the same as per Rise of the Powers of X; and that Madelyne Pryor has been scheming against Carol in an attempt to get the Phoenix powers for herself.
Carol doesn’t immediately recognise Madelyne Pryor as a clone, but apparently decides that she’s returned from the dead with a drastically revamped fashion sense. She has, however, heard of Madelyne Pryor – I don’t think they’ve had any significant interaction, but Madelyne must have had some degree of public profile via the Limbo Embassy, and no doubt the X-Men have filled in the Avengers on the general details.
Carol’s recap of Madelyne’s back story is high level but covers what’s relevant to this story, which is essentially that Madelyne is a clone of Jean who doesn’t want to exist in Jean’s shadow. Of course, chasing the Phoenix Force just helps to continue defining her by reference to Jean, but Madelyne hasn’t always been rational in this regard.
Jean seems to suggest that she literally cannot die because she will always be resurrected via the Phoenix – which, to be fair, is something we’ve pretty much seen in present day stories, such as Phoenix Resurrection. In this one, she seems to have been using Binary as a kind of incubator while she prepared to return. For some reason, it seems that Binary is still controlling the Phoenix power even though Jean has returned; we’re told later on that the Phoenix Force is now split between them.
PAGES 8-10. Hank’s followers turn on him.
These are the people who Hank roped into attacking Binary last issue, achieving absolutely nothing. Hank is allied with Madelyne Pryor and, as he says here, he’s been spreading propaganda to try and turn the population against Carol. (Professor Bill Hanover, referenced here as someone that Hank had manipulated, previously got a mention in issue #1.) Madelyne explained in issue #1 that the idea was that this would crush Carol’s spirit and weaken her.
Hank doesn’t suggest that he actually got anything personal under his deal with Madelyne – it seems he may genuinely have been trying to get the population safe passage out of Beverly because he believed that Madelyne would be able to deliver it when Carol couldn’t, although he also seems to take umbrage at having a woman in charge.
PAGES 11-19. Madelyne is defeated.
The upshot here is that the townsfolk, having realised that Hank tricked them, rally around Carol after all. The Phoenix Force then needs to be reunited in order to keep the townsfolk safe from the virus, and Carol heroically sacrifices herself so that Jean can be the sole Phoenix again.
PAGE 20. Abigail and Cecilia visit Carol’s grave.
Cecilia was one of Hank’s disillusioned followers, Abigail is the mayor from issue #1.
Jean has apparently decided to stay and keep the virus out of Beverly for the moment, but this sits oddly with issue #1, where Carol said that the Phoenix Force was pressing her to leave. That would make sense, since protecting one town seems like an underwhelming use of the Phoenix power in these circumstances, but for some reason Jean has decided to stick around anyway. Perhaps this is simply a choice to honour Carol – and of course it’s hard to see how Phoenix can leave the town to participate in the wider event without breaking the plot immediately.
Three issues of “Where’s Jean while Doug conquers the world…”
Utterly pointless except to make sure she/the Phoenix power is sidelined for the duration, and not even all that fulfilling as a solo piece.
Carol and Maddie were working together against Doom in the early issue of One World Under Doom. They didn’t have any significant interactions, but Carol should have known who Maddie was and what she looked like.
Hank’s sudden sexism felt shoehorned in so the audience knows he’s a bad guy. And that’s necessary, because his evil plan was that he wanted to leave.
As MaakuJ pointed out, in One World Under Doom Carol worked with Maddie while she was wearing the same costume she was wearing this issue, so Carol has no excuse for not recognizing Maddie. This might be deliberate- Amazing X-Men 3 suggested that Age of Revelation might be an alternate reality and not a potential future. If it is an alternate reality, then Maddie might have never met Carol. Then again, it could just be more bad writing by Stephanie Phillips.
Similarly, Maddie and Jean came to a truce in Dark Web but there’s no mention of that this issue. And there’s no explanation how Maddie went from Queen of Limbo to searching for the Phoenix Force. Again, this could be more evidence that this is an alternate reality or it could just be more of Stephanie Phillips’s bad writing.
Is Maddie working for Revelation in this story? She says “In Revelation’s world, the powerful are rewarded”. Some people interpreted this as Maddie going after the Phoenix Force to get a reward from Doug. Others interpreted this as just a general statement of fact.
If the purpose of the virus was to create a new Ego the Living Planet with Doug’s mind in the driver’s seat, then why did Jean need to keep it from getting off-planet in the first place?
Hank is hypocritical complaining about taking orders from a woman when he was taking orders from Maddie.
I realize it’s irrelevant but did Maddie die at the end?
Maddie had no real personality in this story- she might as well have been a generic Evil Sorceress. A better writer might have remembered. for example, that both Carol and Maddie used to be pilots.
Phillips seems to have wanted to do a vaccine analogy where the people talking about “freedom” don’t have your best interests at heart. The problem is that nobody elected Carol and she was keeping the citizens in the dome against their will even though there was a small chance of surviving the virus.
Hopefully, Maddie’s next appearance in the Sorcerer Supreme series will be better written.
I still don’t buy this is Krakoa-era Beast. He may have been a genocidal lunatic, but he was no sexist. That’s a step too far in these enlightened times.
Also, if this Beast is the Chairman, there are two women in powerful positions with 3K. Sure, the Chairman is the chairman, but based on what we saw of how 3K is run, I wouldn’t say that Astra or Nova are in subservient roles.
This could be an alternate future with a Beast from somewhere on this alternate timeline, aka Sexist Beast. Which is even better, as we can never get enough evil Beasts. Of course, with his sexist attitude, we know he’s the evilest Beast of them all (a regular Aleister Crowley).
@Chris V
Uh, wrong thread?
Oh. I’m not following this comic. I saw the name Hank and thought it was referring to Hank McCoy. This is why fiction should try to not reuse names.
Also known as the One Steve Limit. (Where that Steve is Rogers, of course.)
Hank Pym and Hank McCoy always have trouble in the same room.
But Kitty will never live down having dated Peter Quill, Piotr Rasputin, Peter Wisdom, and in a different reality, Peter Parker.
Kitty likes re-Petes.
And Batman had two Harveys- Harvey Bullock and Harvey Dent, who, fittingly, is Two-Face.
If the bus in Cloak or Dagger is a representative sample size, the X-Virus has a survival rate of about 25%. That’s not great, but I can see why someone might want to roll those dice after being in forced quarantine for a decade. It doesn’t seem to be a case where letting someone leave would endanger everyone else, seeing how the dome is breached repeatedly in this series.
This entire plot could have have been avoided so easily.
This series has many problems (and only three issues, har har), but for me there’s one that makes this whole thing a nonstarter.
Why is Jean forced to put Earth in a TK bubble to stop the spread of the x-virus off-planet if gravity is already doing a great job? (That’s lowercase ‘G’ gravity).
And what does her TK shield even matter when there’s semi-regular teleportation between the Revelation Territories and Mars?
It’s just… it’s just weird. And switching the focus to Carol is extra weird – sure, she has history with the X-Men, but Jean was dead then. They’re acquaintances at best. If this mini is a coda to the ongoing, it would make more sense to put Sara in this role (and have her protecting the Greys’ hometown instead).
It’s the inverse of Azazel teleporting to Earth to sire a bunch of children to help him teleport to Earth. Symmetry achieved!
As soon as it was established that Jean stopped the virus getting off Earth I thought it was a pointless thing to add to the story. Even if you accept that a ‘virus’ was somehow going to spread across interstellar space and also somehow affect alien life, it raises the question of why Phoenix powers can create a barrier for the virus but not just destroy the virus. It doesn’t work at all.