X-MEN vol 7 #28
“Danger Room, part 3”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: John Dell & Sean Parsons
Colourist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER. Psylocke and Greycrow in action, which isn’t a scene from the issue. There may have been a change of plans, or at least of pacing – this issue was always solicited as part three of “Danger Room”, but the solicitation also mentions that “help comes from an unexpected direction”, which doesn’t happen either.

THE X-MEN. 

Psylocke. She only appears right at the start and end of the issue – the Danger Room soldiers believe that they’ve shot down the Marauder and killed everyone on board, but presumably she uses her telepathy to trick them. You’d have thought that they’d be prepared for that.

Kid Omega and Temper. Colton’s plan is specifically targetted at both Kid Omega and Temper, whom he correctly identifies as sharing anger and trauma. The plan is apparently to get them to do something stupid enough to give O*N*E a pretext to take them down by force.

Quentin blames the human townsfolk in general for Glob’s shooting, despite Magneto’s attempts to warn him that he’s walking into a trap. Interestingly, Quentin argues that the X-Men made a mistake moving into the Factory in the first place – as he reminds us, this is a factory town that used to be based around the Sentinel manufacture industry (something that was established right at the start of the series). Quentin regards the entire town as complicit in murder and thinks it was insane to move to a location where everyone hates them.

It’s Idie rather than Quentin who shuts down Magneto’s voice-of-reason speech and dismisses him. Although she presents as much calmer than Quentin, she clearly sees the “real Magneto” as the mutant radical and rejects all of his arguments for a more measured response as sophistry. She sees parallels between the attack on Glob and her own origin story, where humans tried to burn her alive (in Uncanny X-Men #528).

When the two of them are headed into town, Idie talks about Glob being part of their class at the Jean Grey School in Wolverine and the X-Men, but also makes clear that she intends to kill the gunman in revenge. When there aren’t any adults around to yell at, Quentin is the more cautious of the two, asking how far Idie is planning to go and talking in terms of finding the killer. Basically, there’s a general sense here that Quentin takes out his anger by yelling at authority figures but that Idie is the really dangerous one.

Cyclops, Juggernaut and Magik all get taken down fairly quickly by the mechanical creature on the ship.

The Beast. He seems frustrated by the fact that the rest of the team are just looking for him to come up with ways to kill the creature that’s attacking them – possibly because this seems to him like the Chairman’s behaviour. Despite Paula’s protests, once the rest of the team have been taken down, his approach is apparently to throw himself into the creature and attempt to reason with it. To be fair, despite his speech to Paula about the importance of trying to reason with his opponents, he only resorts to this once it’s clear that simple force has failed and in a situation where he doesn’t have any better ideas.

SUPPORTING CAST.

Xorn. He’s with Psylocke at the beginning of the issue and she mentions him being with her at the end (though we don’t see him). He doesn’t do anything much.

Greycrow. He doesn’t appear, but Psylocke evidently saves him from the soldiers who are sent to kill him, and she’s talking to him (off panel) at the end of the issue. Presumably Xorn healed him between scenes.

Magneto. He correctly recognises that Glob was shot in order to provoke a confrontation and that Kid Omega is walking right into the trap, but isn’t able to talk him out of it. Temper dismisses his arguments as cowardice driven by his current lack of power, but it’s something he’d have said at pretty much most points from the mid-1980s onwards. He can get out of his chair and grab Quentin in an attempt to assert his status, but seems to have to sit down again quickly.

Animalia and Ben Liu are seen in the Factory, but don’t get any dialogue.

Paula Robbins. She’s still with the X-Men on the ship.

VILLAINS.

The Beyond Corporation. Leaving aside the named characters listed below, the soldiers under Jackson’s command seem to be regular soldiers wearing combat gear and balaclavas and using basically normal weaponry. This is unusually conventional stuff for the Beyond Corporation, which normally goes in for crazy experimental technology even in its sanest incarnations. The living ship is the only real example of that sort of thing here.

Maxine Danger. She’s obviously a psychopath and only cares about winning. She congratulates the Danger Room members for their successes and gets impatient with the one member whose plan takes a little more time to get anywhere. She’s already thinking about how to market the Danger Room’s services for other hit-man work – she’s quite keen on the idea of killing the Avengers for money. She regards Jackson’s homicidal tendencies as amusingly endearing. Obviously, this is her “pride comes before a fall” issue, because things aren’t actually going quite as well as she assumes.

Charlene Jackson. As in the previous issue, while she isn’t officially meant to be killing Psylocke as an objective, she’s clearly very keen to work it in there if she can. It remains unclear whether this is because Beyond are straying beyond what the Crimson Commando hired them to do, or whether it’s simply deniability for public consumption. She lobbies to have Greycrow killed on the basis that he’s a “loose end”, though it’s obvious that this is a pretext and Maxine approves it anyway as a reward. She claims not to experience happiness, though she does get some satisfaction from her plans working out.

Colton Colton. As we established last issue, his plan is to provoke Kid Omega and Temper into going on a rampage in search of the person who shot Glob, and thereby damage the X-Men’s relations with the Town. He’s the one member of the group who doesn’t get approval from Maxine because his plan is taking too long for her tastes.

Grigos and Marquez. While they’re responsible for the living metal thing in the ship, they don’t really say much beyond that. According to Maxine, nobody at Beyond could figure out a profitable use for the creature (which is weird, if Beyond is up for hiring itself out for this sort of work).