GENERATION X-23 #5
“A Numbers Game, part 5”
Writer: Jody Houser
Artist: Marco Renna
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Just an action shot of Laura.

WOLVERINE:

Five issues in, this still feels more like a Wolverine solo title with an extended supporting cast, rather than a team book. So we’ll stick with that for now. Nonetheless, while she’s the lead character, there’s more to say this issue about the rest of the cast than there is about her.

She says that her healing factor is a little slower after it’s recovering from being suppressed – apparently this has happened often enough for her to know.

She’s surprisingly judgmental about X-Infinite having helped Facility 23 to give the Generated their extra powers and seems unimpressed by the suggestion that he could have felt that he had no choice. She seems to see both him and X-66 as pretending not to have a choice in order to duck their responsibility. X-80 is noticeably more sympathetic, so we’re not necessarily meant to be completely on Laura’s side here; there’s a definite sense that she feels that anyone in her position who didn’t resist successfully is showing a lack of backbone.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Scout. She seems supremely confident that Laura will rescue her, and regards her imprisonment by X-Infinite as simply boring. She doesn’t get much to do in this issue – mostly, she’s there so that X-Infinite can move on to threatening to experiment on her.

X-80.  The previous issue ended with her showing up to rescue Laura. When Laura points out that she died in issue #1, X-80 assumes (presumably correctly) that this must be an event that has already happened for Laura, but has yet to happen for her. Unfortunately, she seems to assume that it was a long way into the future, and Laura doesn’t have the heart to tell her.

Her original power was “energy blades”, which were later copied for X-Infinite. She says that she “never liked using them much.”

She’s got better at using her time powers after making physical contact with Laura. Presumably that refers to her meeting Laura in issue #1, even though it hasn’t happened for her yet – she says that she’s “not living linearly”, so conventional causality may not apply. She can view past events but can’t alter them – or at least, if she can, she hasn’t worked out how yet. (But wouldn’t the obvious ending for her storyline be for her to figure out a way to avert her own death?) She can also use her powers to accelerate time and make things decay, but it’s exhausting and makes her glitch out.

While recapping X-Infinite’s origin story, she says that “He was the one I wanted you to save.” It’s not entirely clear what she’s referring to there. She did say “You can save them” in issue #1, but that’s an event that she doesn’t remember because it hasn’t happened yet (and otherwise, she consistently refers to X-Infinite as “he”, not “they”).

X-66. That’s the bird one, if you’re struggling to keep them straight. X-Infinite has secretly told her that, unlike the others, her powers are stable. This actually seems to be true, and we’ll come back that below. She hasn’t told the others, and there’s a sense that she feels slightly superior about it, but also guilty when it comes to light. She’s clearly conflicted about her boyfriend X-Infinite – she does demand to be released, and broadly stands alongside the others, but tries to save him from being killed by X-74. X-Infinite sees her as having returned to him after a moment of weakness, but also seems genuinely grateful for it.

X-74. The relatively normal one with the white hair. She’s horrified at X-Infinite’s actions, and at X-66 having kept the story quiet. Out of nowhere, she surreptitiously tries to kill X-Infinite with one of her energy bombs – everyone seems to think that this would have worked if X-66 hadn’t saved him.

X-92. The silent one. He doesn’t have much to do in this story.

X-99. The shapechanger. She successfully impersonates Laura as a distraction.

VILLAINS:

X-Infinite. X-80 shows Laura seems from his childhood. He was originally X-39 and renamed himself X-Infinite, presumably after the Facility staff all died. (Laura assumed this to be the case in issue #2.) They were numbered in order of creation, so as X-39, he’s the oldest of the survivors by some margin.

X-80’s flashback shows him several years younger. She says that he used to stand up to the guards, protect the younger ones, and generally act as a self-sacrificing protector. In his own mind, he still seems to think of himself in the same way. The scientist in charge of Facility 23, Dr Chiles, seems to have sold him on the idea of helping to give people extra powers both by appealing to his ego and by telling him that he could use these new powers to stand up to the guards.

On seeing this flashback, Laura grumbles that “He told me he didn’t have a choice,” prompting X-80 to argue that “Maybe he thought he didn’t.” Laura’s reaction here plays oddly, since the flashback is largely sympathetic about him. To be fair, though, what he actually said in issue 3 was that he was “forced” to help, and in fact he’s clearly being talked into it. Laura and X-80 essentially disagree about whether he really did have a meaningful choice, or whether he’s just rationalising his actions to himself.

Obviously, Laura is on firmer ground condemning him for experimenting on the other Generated without their consent – though since he also has extra powers, he must at least have experimented on himself as well, despite knowing that he could kill himself.

Facility 23. The flashback sequence show the guards being predictably abusive, but appearing like normal humans. Dr Chiles, the scientist in charge, presents herself to as a pragmatic but vaguely kindly mentor figure.

According to Dr Chiles, the purpose of this project was not to create weapons, but rather to develop a technology for giving people superpowers, which could then be sold to rich people. This may explain why the younger Generated in particular seem much less brutalised than you would expect from previous versions of the Facility – the kids were purely scientific experimental subjects and weren’t expected to actually do anything, other than be harmlessly institutionalised. There may also have been a limit to how much they were willing to risk alienating X-Infinite, who was crucial to the project. He may have been willing to experiment on his fellow Generated, but he also seems to have been genuinely minded to defend them against violence.

Unfortunately, X-Infinite didn’t succeed in creating a marketable technology. Everyone died other than the handful of survivors and all but one of them are unstable (including Infinite himself). The one exception is his girlfriend X-66, but her appearance seems to be tied to her bird-like appearance. Chiles regarded this as unmarketable to billionaires. In issue #2, X-79 said that the scientists were upset about X-66’s appearance, but she thought it was because it would stop her “blend[ing] in for jobs and stuff”.

It’s not stated outright, but there’s a definite implication that X-Infinite thought that Facility 23 were going to kill X-66 on the grounds that she was useless to them, and that this is what prompted him to engineer the deaths of all the humans in the complex (as previously shown in flashback in issue #2).