As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbersgo by the digital edition.

PAGE 1 / COVER: Um… well, it’s the reality-distorting mutant Tashi Repina from the previous issue, wearing braces, with the faces of the New Mutants mounted on her teeth. It’s certainly surreal.

By the way, this isn’t really the sort of issue that requires much annotation, so these probably won’t be too long.

PAGES 2-3. Tashi begs for forgiveness while all the characters she already sucked in to her nightmare murmur along with her.

PAGES 4-5. Recap and credits. Not sure why it doesn’t name Tashi. The story is “Parasomnia” by Ed Brisson and Flaviano. Parasomnia is a term for disorders of the nervous system during sleep.

PAGES 6-8. Cypher’s squad arrive to help.

Other than Cypher, nobody seems to be particularly convinced about the merit of bringing Wildside along. Cypher gives the stock answer about Krakoa being a fresh start, and giving the villains a chance. More to the point is that Wildside has potentially useful powers here (though getting a high end telepath might have been a better bet). For whatever reason, despite his general snarkiness, Wildside does indeed seem willing to help, at some risk to himself.

PAGE 9. President Ivan Prokopovych of Carnelia is alerted to what’s happening.

He’s a new character. Prokopovych is a genuine family name, although it’s Ukrainian rather than Russian (despite the President being shown here speaking Russian). The highest-profile Prokopovych internationally is probably Petro Prokopovych (1775-1850), who invented commercial beekeeping. This seems highly unlikely to be relevant.

PAGES 10-11. Magik asks Glob Herman about the Nebraska incident.

That’s the disastrous shoot-out in Pilger, Nebraska which formed Brisson’s first arc. In the previous issue, Magik was defending the kids’ behaviour in Pilger to Cyclops, but apparently that’s prompted her to ask a few more questions about how it happened.

DOX. We’ve seen an extract from DOX before in issue #6, and it was basically as Glob describes here.

“Worse than Limbo even.” Limbo was Magik’s Hell-type dimension, where the X-Men hid out with their entire school for a while – the main way Glob would be familiar with it.

PAGE 11. Data page. It’s literally a recipe for laksa (a kind of noodle soup). Basically a joke about the data page format.

PAGES 12-16. The Carnelian President tries to have the New Mutants arrested, claiming that the whole crisis is actually a fraud to give them good publicity.

“Have you seen Poltergeist?” Poltergeist (1982) includes a child being sucked into a portal in her closet. Dani is presumably thinking of the scene where they try to rescue her by entering the portal tied to a rope.

PAGE 17. Data page. DOX reports on the preceding scene, essentially following the President’s line. This article basically consists of them reciting what they’ve seen on TV.

PAGES 18-23. In the nightmare void, things predictably go wrong. Armor succumbs and sees her mother and brother.

Hisako’s mother and brother are dead, but aside from that they seem quite welcoming, even in the nightmare context. Maybe that’ll change.

These two were reported to have died in a car crash in Astonishing X-Men vol 3 #36-37 (2011). Armor’s force field is supposed to draw power from her ancestors, and so she immediately became more powerful when her mother died. Other than that, we really don’t know much about these characters. Given that Armor is directly connected with their spirits, it’s possible that this is not a hallucination, and that instead something about this environment allows them to manifest. Or maybe not.

PAGES 24-25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: ADRIFT.