X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #2
“Welcome to Krakoa”
by Leah Williams, Lucas Werneck & Edgar Delgado
COVER / PAGE 1. Magneto fights the Avengers.
PAGES 2-4. Professor X and Hope try to read Magneto’s mind.
They’re trying to put him at ease, presumably to lower his psychic defences in order to make it possible to scan his memories. Obviously, this is trying to close the potential plot hole of “how can there by a mystery when you can just read the subject’s mind”?
Despite what Hope says, this process is quite plainly not torture. Torture would be extracting a confession by inflicting, or at least threatening, pain and suffering. What Professor X is trying to do here is the exact opposite. That may be an invasion of privacy or an unacceptable violation of the right to silence, but it isn’t torture. In fact, if Hope has ethical problems with this, she should really have problems with most of the telepaths on Krakoa.
PAGES 5-6. The X-Men greet the Avengers.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t actually the newly elected X-Men, but rather Cyclops and Phoenix (who are on the team) and Wolverine (who isn’t). But they’re a natural trio to act as ambassadors to the superhero establishment. It’s also a somewhat retro-classic Avengers group, rather than the current regular line-up: Captain America, Iron Man, the Vision and the Wasp.
Note that Hope asked on page 4 why Jean and Emma hadn’t been asked to help with the psychic search. Xavier claimed that they were both “busy with an urgent matter of diplomacy”, but that seems to be true only of Emma. It also doesn’t really explain why Xavier is turning to the relatively inexperienced Hope in place of, say, one of the Stepford Cuckoos – or indeed Exodus. Is there some reason why he wants to carry out this scan without the rest of the Quiet Council knowing?
The mutants watching from the trees seem to be generics, though one of them is obviously Glob Herman.
Krakoa sure seems to have a lot of fir trees today.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGES 8-9. The Avengers receive their tour of Krakoa.
The Avengers’ tour is a callback to the scene in House of X #1 where Magneto gives various ambassadors a tour of Krakoa; the same locations appear.
Wolverine (Logan) has gone, to be replaced by Synch and Wolverine (Laura) from the current X-Men line-up.
The main point of this scene is just to establish that the Krakoans are very sensitive about concealing resurrection.
PAGE 10. X-Factor chronoskim Magneto’s home.
We did see Prestige use this power last issue to view the murder, if you’re wondering, and it’s not exactly clear why that didn’t show us who the killer was.
PAGE 11. A data page, sort of – but without the standard font, and with a mock folded paper effect. Wanda (presumably) tells us about magic as a force that can be used but not ultimately controlled. A similar design of circle and arrows appeared on the final page of the last issue.
PAGE 12. Wanda in limbo.
Last time, we saw Wanda appear in a white costume, get killed by a hooded figure with a knife, and then apparently bleed flower petals. This version adds white wings to the iconography.
PAGE 13. Hope wakes Magneto.
Apparently Hope has decided that the Five are just going to resurrect Wanda anyway, and they want Magneto to cover for them while they do it. Plainly, Wanda’s return at this stage is going to be pretty difficult to explain… but stranger things have happened.
Hope’s decision here is foreshadowed in New Mutants #21, where the Five resurrect Scout without permission (in breach of the rules about clones). Chronologically speaking, both of those stories seem to take place on the day after the Hellfire Gala, so it’s been a busy day of rebellion for Hope. There’s maybe a bit more scope to push Trial of Magneto a little further back, but not by much.
PAGES 14-24. Magneto attacks the Avengers, and the Scarlet Witch returns.
“We met at the Hellfire Gala, actually.” Captain America spoke to Kyle Jinadu – very briefly – in X-Factor #10.
Quicksilver has always been written as protective of his sister; in the Silver Age X-Men stories, that was to an unhealthily obsessive degree, though it was partly a reflection of how feeble Wanda was in her early appearances.
“Shields up, mom!” Rachel isn’t Jean’s daughter, but she is the daughter of Jean’s counterpart from her world. Or possibly Phoenix impersonating Jean. Stories conflict on that.
“Is this what you were doing instead of finally finishing your geophysics degree?” That is indeed Lorna’s established field of study, which she was supposed to be working on after leaving the X-Men in X-Men vol 1 #94. Apparently she finally completed her doctorate while on Krakoa.
“Chain of custody.” It’s not obvious that Krakoa’s rudimentary legal system (if it even merits the term) would care about such things, but chain of custody is the term used for (basically) proving that the evidence you have at the trial is indeed the same stuff that was collected at the crime scene. Needless to say, it’s especially important when it comes to things like forensic samples. It’s not exactly about just protecting the evidence from being destroyed, as Aurora seems to think. But Prodigy’s use of the term is at least consistent with him using it correctly.
“He’s Krakoan!” The question of why exactly Kyle is on Krakoa – and why nobody else is allowed to bring their loved ones with them, or at least chose not to – remains conspicuously unanswered, despite Captain America asking it directly in X-Factor #10. Implicitly, Northstar is claiming here that you can be Krakoan without being a mutant, which Magneto would obviously disagree with.
Magneto wears his Silver Age villain costume here – obviously a conscious decision since he was in black last issue. He’s playing for time, of course, and wants to drag out the fight for as long as he can.
Mystique finds all this “interesting” because her primary motivation is to get her beloved Destiny resurrected. She knows that the Quiet Council voted against resurrecting the Scarlet Witch in the previous issue – she was there. So she can probably connect the dots to figure out that the Five have done this on their own initiative. That opens the door to getting Destiny back without Xavier’s approval.
The Scarlet Witch has been resurrected on the basis of a back-up that was taken back in the days when she was believed to be a mutant. But from the look of her behaviour here, and Vision’s surprised reaction, her memories have been reset to a time when she was still married to the Vision. If so, that’s long, long before she was exposed as a non-mutant, which is weird. Needless to say, it’s going to be very difficult to explain this away without revealing the resurrection system. It would also mean that Wanda doesn’t know about M-Day or about her status as a hate figure on Krakoa.
The fact that Wanda is alive again doesn’t mean that there’s no trial to be had. The title never said it was a murder trial. Magneto could still be tried for attempted murder or simply assault.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: HOW ARE YOU HERE.
Magneto can’t be tried for assault, as there is no law against that on Krakoa.
Most of the mutants who have left Krakoa are guilty of assaulting humans.
Perhaps the trial will now be as to whether there should be a murder trial if the murdered party is resurrected.
My favorite part:
“Ma’am”
Yeah, it’s strange for Hope to call it torture. I can see her having problems with it — Magneto’s supposedly a high part of the government and not some random evil minion, so rooting around in his mind as your opening gambit is fairly questionable. But while you could call what they’re doing manipulative, controlling, authoritarian, lacking due process, torture’s stretching it pretty far.
The part about the Cerebro helmet really confused me at first, until I had a vague memory that there were now more backup ones after the opening arc of X-Force. So am I remembering right and that was one a backup in Magneto’s care that was borrowed? The timing is still interesting then. Unless the scenes we saw this issue were out of order, Magneto had to have removed the helmet last issue. Does that imply that he was already intending to convince Hope to ignore the ruling and bring back Wanda using it? But then why not mention that when he was talking to Hope? Maybe just in trying to not spell out what Hope was doing while Magneto kept everyone busy.
Alternatively, that wasn’t Magneto at all in the time image, and Mystique took the opportunity to snatch one of the helmets for herself during the confusion.
I’m also curious about Hope’s own mindset here. With Wanda seemingly reset to a past self, it’s obvious that something happened.
Has she decided she doesn’t care about keeping the resurrection process secret, or did she give Wanda some quick lie about how Wanda reset herself to a past version to protect herself?
Was Hope objecting to torture, or was she just calling a spade a spade? She didn’t seem to have a problem with actually participating.
And yes, it’s not really torture. But it is “enhanced interrogation techniques”, which torture is a part of. I imagine this scenario is closest to the kind of thing MK Ultra got up to, pumping the subject full of LSD to weaken their defenses or whatnot.
And I like that Kyle hasn’t just been cast aside or fridged, even if it’s never justified in-story.
The one thing I really liked about X-Force is the art. Cassara draws Krakoa like an alien world instead of Vancouver.
That’s one of my big problems with a lot of the depictions of telepathy/telekinesis in superhero comics, especially in the X-Men where you can’t throw a rock without hitting an ultra powerful psychic. It’s just portrayed as too damn easy, so you need to jump through hoops to have plots work. Reading someone’s mind should be like reading all the books in a library.
Maybe I’m over complicating it, but I came to different conclusions about the ending. That’s Hope pretending to be Wanda to kill time until they can bring her back for real while still protecting the secret of resurrection.
Am I the only one that thought Emma hugging Jan was weird? They’ve never been close in-universe, and there’s bad blood between the X-Men and the Avengers for several reasons.
@Uncanny X-Ben- But why would Hope think that Wanda and Vision were still an item? I think they’ve been split up since Hope returned from the future. Besides, I can’t see Hope kissing a man disguised as his ex- she was just complaining about using telepathy to invade Magneto’s mind a few pages earlier. I could see Mystique impersonating Wanda- but they were in the same place at the same time!
For some reason, I was under the impression that the resurrection protocols *only* worked on mutants, which is why Krakoa is so strict about the “don’t kill humans” rule.
Humans can’t be resurrected in practice because Cerebro doesn’t have recordings of them, unless it used to think they were mutants.
Michael- I mean you’re right, I just thought Hope was kinky. If it is meant to be a true resurrection it’s absolutely baffling to do it off panel. And yes, Mystique is there… so Hope can copy her shape changing.
There is no good reason they couldn’t resurrect all humanity, other than time and storage. Cerebro only downloads mutants because that’s who Xavier cares about.
Kind of throws a wrench in the entire premise of the franchise before Hickman took over.
Of course Cerebro itself has always been incredibly vague.
It’s either a magic mutant locator, a telepathy boosting machine, or both.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think Wanda and Vision have been an item since before Hope was born. The Busiek & Perez Avengers run, maybe?
I’m pretty sure it was a lot longer than that. I thought it was that horrible Byrne story-arc that carried over in to Thomas taking over on West Coast Avengers.
Somewhere in there I thought they broke it off for good.
Wanda and Vision haven’t been a couple for a long, long time. Early Byrne Avengers West Coast, before he gets dismantled, so that’s the late 80s/very early 90s. They tease a reunion every so often and they still have strong feelings for each other, but even in the Busiek run the story is that he’s telling her she’s a widow now and to move on with her life, and she’s dating Wonder Man as he secretly pines for her. Vision’s only romances during the Busiek era is a one-off date with Carol Danvers that could’ve been interesting but went nowhere, and he sleeps with Mantis during the Englehart miniseries, Avengers: Celestial Quest.
The MCU is obviously a huge factor nowadays, but that’s a remarkably enduring romance considering it’s been over for 30+ years. Young Avengers bringing their kids back helped too.
Thanks, folks!
So if this is actually Wanda, then the last Cerebro backup is from before she went nuts the first time. Of course, she lost it when she found out her kids weren’t real. Does that mean Xavier rewound her backup to a time before she gave birth to the twins to avoid a meltdown in the nebulous future or something? That would also mean he’d have to rewind her backup to before she knew about the pregnancy, so we’re talking back to 1984/1985.
Having said all of that, it’s probably just Hope posing as Wanda.
Of course if they can rewind the backups, then why is Rockslide stuck talking Matrix computer language?
I was thinking that the Cerebro records for Wanda couldn’t possibly be that outdated.
Then, I realized that it is probably only a week in Marvel time between Byrne’s WCA and “No More Mutants”. heh
Si-It was explained when Rockslide was resurrected that all of his backups were overwritten with the new version.
Well that’s just shoddy data management and storage.
Timing-wise, I think we’re two days out from the Gala both here and in New Mutants #21. It’s the evening of the day Wanda’s body has been discovered at the end of #20, and the first scene of #21 is right after that; it seems to be morning again by story page 6.
The second half of Trial of Magneto #1 is apparently the evening of the day after the Gala too, and #2 is the following day (after the space team from New Mutants #21 have returned to Krakoa).
That also checks out with the timing of “The Last Annihilation”: Wiccan is unavailable in Trial of Magneto #1 because of “some sort of space emergency,” and over in S.W.O.R.D./Guardians of the Galaxy etc., he doesn’t yet know that Wanda is dead (because Brand is blocking transmissions), much less that she’s been resurrected. The latter part of The Last Annihilation seems to be happening the same day as this issue and New Mutants #21, in fact.
I didn’t get the impression that Hope intended to resurrect Wanda. Given the White Room like stuff in this and the previous issue I thought she had spontaneously resurrected with magic. And the Vision stuff was because she had come back as some version of herself when she had been happy or something (as a pretext to make her more like the MCU). But who knows, I don’t think the story telling in this series has been very clear so far.
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It seems really stupid to have a prepared tour go through the resurrection room and rely on a telepath to block out the room. It’s not like they have to go through any specific physical locations to get from A to B as they are shown to use gates along the way.
Magneto’s outfit in the opening dream scene is a callback to Claremont/Lee’s 1991’s X-Men 1.
It’s the same robe and outfit he was wearing in that issue aboard Asteroid M.
I haven’t had a chance to go back and re-read this issue since Paul’s review, but I’m with Bengt, in that I read Wanda’s resurrection as some sort of magical resurrection instead of a Krakoan resurrection. Partially this is because of the data page about “magic ruling itself.”
@Michael: Emma hugging Jan was weird. Why not have Havok there to greet Jan and the Avengers? He led the Avengers Unity squad and they were married I think (in a vague timey-wimey way) and had a kid who was stolen by Kang if I recall. Hell, Rogue also led the Unity Avengers and would fit better for diplomacy than Emma.
Wasp is a fashion designer of some sort, and Emma is of course Emma, so it’s plausible that they know each other through those circles. But have they ever really associated with each other on-panel?
Also Rachel has called Scott “dad” in pre-Krakoa UXM issues, so it’s not strange for her to call Jean “mom” either.
You could argue Tony and Emma’s interaction is off – it was established in Civil War they used to sleep together. Then again, 1) he’s had at least a couple mindwipes since then, 2) it wouldn’t be out of character for Emma to erase someone’s memories like that, and 3) who cares about Civil War?
Speaking of Byrne’s WCA run, to this day I remain flummoxed as to how fifteen years passed (real time) between killing off Tommy and Billy, and Wanda’s breakdown at the beginning of Bendis’ Disassembled.
In my defense, the only Avengers story I’ve read that was published between 1991 and 2005 were the Bloodlines crossover issues.
But when I first picked up the Disassembled trade, I was immediately baffled by the fact that Wanda was having a meltdown over a story from an entirely different “age” of comic history.
@NS- I think the idea was that they were worried that Havok might revert to his evil personality in front of the Avengers and that might spook them. You’re right about Rogue, though.
@Nu-D- Bendis apparently thought that Wanda had never gotten her memories of Tommy and William back. In Avengers West Coast 52, in 1989, Agatha Harkness erases Wanda’s memories of Tommy and William. In Avengers West Coast Annual 7, in 1992, we learn that Agatha has restored them. Bendis apparently read Avengers West Coast 52 but not Avengers West Coast Annual 7, and assumed that Wanda’s loss of memories had never been addressed, when it had been undone 3 YEARS later.
@Michael: To be fair (“To be faaaaaiiiiiir!”) that mistake has gotta be lain on the editors.
@Bengt: I had the same thought but hadn’t even considered the use of portals. I don’t see why the Avengers would have even *expected* to see everything; the X-Men could just have told them certain areas were off-limits. That’s pretty normal on tours of important sites.
Is the purpose of this story to get a version of Wanda back into circulation that is innocent of House of M decimation, mother to the Young Avengers twins, and is in a relationship with Vision as per the MCU? As I could see that being the editorial & marketing objective behind the story.
But I think it’s going to be a bit more complex than that! I trust Williams to be interesting. Plus she throws in enough character beats to keep longer term readers satisfied (Lorna’s PhD, Rachel calling Jean ‘mom’… Though Jean doesn’t have a reaction shot!)
Also this whole discussion of Emma hugging Jan feels divorced from (at least my) reality. Women of Emma and Jan’s demographic often hug each other, sometimes after just being introduced. It doesn’t mean you’re besties, just that you’re friends—and only even that in the less demanding sense.
If Jan and Emma have met even once before, believe me, it’s plausible they hug now.
@Nu-D — Disassembled is a total mess, continuity-wise. The Busiek/Perez run of Avengers in the late 90s focuses heavily on Wanda, and is all about her coming into her own as a leader, putting her past behind her, tying off her baggage with Vision, etc. She clearly remembers her kids during that whole run.
That’s also the run in which Agatha Harkness helps Wanda discover that her powers come from chaos magic, which was completely retconned by Bendis. Disassembled seems to suggest that Agatha was already dead, and Wanda subconsciously resurrected her corpse for those Busiek/Perez scenes. None of this was ever adequately explained, and the Bendis story is clearly incompatible with Wanda’s entire arc from just a few years earlier.
I’ve sometimes wondered why retcons like Bendis’ have generally been met with disdain while retcons like Hickman’s in HoX/PoX are generally accepted. I think it’s because Bendis retcons stories in a way that suggests he doesn’t know or care about the originals, while Hickman goes out of his way to acknowledge the past (as Paul pointed out back in one of his Hickman reviews). And that’s plainly unfair to Bendis — large chunks of his Avengers run are rooted in the team’s history — but it’s how it often comes across on the page.
Wanda’s powers have been described and explained in various ways along the years. One of the most frequent is that they are a form of chaos magic.
That is probably why a variant of Michael Moorcock’s Symbol of Chaos is featured in page 11. Walt Simonson used comparable, just as assymetric variants when he illustrated “Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse” for DC back in 1997-1998. One of those can be seen in Duke Elric’s shield in issue #8’s cover.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_of_Chaos
https://www.comics.org/issue/64645/cover/4/
To be clear, Disassembled was very, very early into Bendis’s time at Marvel — beforehand, his work was mostly Alias, Daredevil and Ultimate Spider Man — so it’s very likely he became more fluent and respectful of history as time marched onwards. Disassembled partly left a sour taste because it was his first time in that toybox, and he trashed it.
>>Why not have Havok there to greet Jan and the Avengers? He led the Avengers Unity squad and they were married I think (in a vague timey-wimey way) and had a kid who was stolen by Kang if I recall.
Havok kidnapped the Wasp after his inversion, and I don’t know if that was ever resolved or if she just came back. Especially since he STILL has an evil personality, I think he’d be the last person you’d bring to meet her.
@Nu-D: It was especially jarring for those of us who jumped into the Avengers with Heroes Return and were only familiar with a perfectly sane, stable Wanda. I knew OF those past stories, of course, but Wanda had clearly dealt with her baggage and put it behind her, so where was this breakdown nonsense coming from?
Mathias X – It was about four years into his time there.
It’s not a particularly good storyline but it (and Bendis’ run as a whole) did what they wanted – it finally got people reading the Avengers again and excited about the team, something they hadn’t been able to do in many years despite having Kurt Busiek and Geoff Johns on the book for solid stretches (and a brief, terrible Chuck Austen run).
Busiek’s long run is pretty good, though hugely bogged down in continuity (Avengers Forever is nigh on impenetrable unless you’re absolutely soaked in Avengers history) and it loses something once Perez left the book for Crossgen.
Johns’ run is fine without being particularly outstanding or interesting. He never quite clicked with it and was gone within 18 months.
@Mathias: If superheroes abandoned a person every time they turned evil, there wouldn’t be any. She-Hulk and Captain Marvel have attacked the Avengers fairly recently and I doubt they will be welcomed back with open arms. Is her relationship with Alex maybe Jan’s most significant relationship outside of Pym? Weird.
Also, is he still evil? I thought Hellions implied it was mental health issues relating to his time flipped. However, in support of him being evil as far as the writing, they didn’t unflip him which would’ve required magic. They just used mind control which has failed in universe before. So, he could conceivably still be evil, but the writing just seems purposely vague at the moment.
>> Mathias X – It was about four years into his time there.
Right, but prior to that, he worked on Ultimate Spiderman and Daredevil. This was the first time he had worked on Avengers.
@NS- In the most recent issue, Empath, acting on Emma’s orders, turns Alex back into his evil personality to stop Sinister. It’s implied that this is something Emma had planned for a while, which is why she didn’t want Alex leaving the team in issue 7. What’s not clear is whether Emma CAUSED the emergence of Alex’s evil personality in Hellions or just took advantage of a situation that presented itself and whether this “evil”personality is Alex’s inverted personality or something else. Maddie’s coming back in issue 18, so we’re probably getting answers in that issue.
Bendis’ MO on team books seems to be shake things up with a big event to establish his new status quo. He doesn’t seem to care whether the mechanics of that big event are workable or not as long as they get him where he wants to go. (See also: bringing the O5 from the ’60s? to the present.) Not necessarily a bad way to start, but noticeably damaging to previous character work in Wanda’s case which is a real shame.
>>Mathias: If superheroes abandoned a person every time they turned evil, there wouldn’t be any.
Jan already has an off-and-on-again relationship with one blonde domestic abuser, a second is too much.
>> Also, is he still evil? I thought Hellions implied it was mental health issues relating to his time flipped.
He’s “not evil,” but that can flip at a switch at any time. He’s on the Hellions because he’s considered as unstable and unreliable as Wilchild. Fairly or not, Havok is being treated by the Council as a charity case, not someone you bring out to meet guests.
I’m sure if Jan wanted to see him, she’d ask.
>> Whether this “evil”personality is Alex’s inverted personality or something else.
Inb4 it’s Mutant X Alex.
Zeb Wells is fluent in continuity, I think the lack of on-screen speculation from the Council is indicative of the fact that Emma and Xavier probably do know what’s wrong with him/why he’s like this, but for some reason, can’t or won’t help him, or even feel comfortable telling him why.
“Inb4 it’s Mutant X Alex”
Except that Evil Alex went on about how Maddie loved his brother Scott more than him and the Mutant X Alex’s Scott died in childhood.
I do think that Mutant X is involved somehow. Maddie said that after Greycrow shot her, she went away, her mind had to find somewhere safe. And when she returned…
That sounds less like a coma and more like what happened to Alex in Mutant X. And Wells has constantly reminded us that, despite his current attempts to be a better man, throughout his life, the source of all the death and destruction always came from Greycrow.
We’ll see.
Just as an aside, if Maddie is going to return to the x-books, I’d welcome some kind of story where they save her soul or redeem the evil bit. She was tricked into a devil’s bargain before Inferno – surely some kind of team with Illyana, Havok and others could go on a quest to undo that?
Or tragically fail 🙂
As Bengt points out, the whole scene with them scrambling to not let the Avengers see the resurrection area is weirdly plotted.
Lorna and Jean act like the tour is taking the Avengers ‘behind the scenes’, but aren’t they the ones in control of the tour? Couldn’t they just divert them? It’s not like they’re on a pre-set route, and they don’t even seem to be close to the Hatchery when they realise that Hope isn’t there. But why even take them past the Hatchery in the first place, even if they expect Hope to be shielding it?
It only strikes me now that this is probably meant to emphasise that Hope isn’t where she is supposed to be. Maybe they had planned the tour to run past the Hatchery (for some reason), and had asked Hope to be there to shield it, which she agreed to. Presumably she doesn’t usually need to shield the Hatchery since there are usually only mutants in Krakoa.
That story beat might have worked, except that the art doesn’t sell is on the idea that Jean and Lorna are surprised that she’s not there. I figured they must have been in on Hope helping Prof X, but I guess that’s not established anywhere in the issue. It’s plausible that Prof X, Emma and Hope were collaborating and the X-Men were unaware of any of that. The plotting is not very clear though.
Williams was pretty good on X-Factor of setting up where everyone was and why things mattered to them, but that’s not a strength of this issue, which reminded me more of and issue of Howard’s run on Excalibur where there is lots happening but not enough connective tissue to figure out what it all means.
I thought Mystique was there just to establish that she wasn’t the one impersonating Wanda, so I liked Paul’s annotation about how she would see Wanda’s resurrection. But seriously, she is just lurking in the bushes?? Mystique of all people probably doesn’t need to creep around in the shrubbery …
“For some reason, I was under the impression that the resurrection protocols *only* worked on mutants, which is why Krakoa is so strict about the “don’t kill humans” rule.”
That’s how I’ve taken it. Cerebro detects/catalogues mutants/x-genes, and Egg’s eggs are for mutants, unless or until I see it stated otherwise.
That was how I thought about the resurrection protocols for most of the Krakoa-era.
Cerebro can only detect mutants, so resurrection would only work for mutants.
Now, it’s ambiguous.
Unless there was some sort of magic involved with Wanda and Pietro being disguised as mutants, it doesn’t make sense that Cerebro was recording Wanda and Pietro’s minds until it was discovered they weren’t really mutants, unless Xavier was controlling which people Cerebro records.
This would imply that Cerebro could record regular humans, but Xavier made a choice to not record non-mutants.
The “don’t murder humans” rule applies either way.
If it were possible to record humans, but Xavier chose not to record humans, then humans are still mortal, unlike mutants.
The law applies under either circumstance.
I thought Mystique was creeping in the bushes because it’s a murder mystery and Mystique was most likely a red herring.
Although, the review stating that Mystique was there to witness Wanda having been resurrected to fuel her scheming to get Destiny resurrected is probably a note likely explanation.
I probably just thought of her as a murder suspect for the reader because my first thought after Wanda was killed was that Mystique killed her disguised as Magneto as part of her revenge plan against Krakoa.
I’m sure it was stated somewhere official that humans aren’t resurrected as a simple matter of scale. They’ve got 5 million or whatever mutants to bring back, one at a time. If they included humans (and Atlanteans and Moloids and Inhumans and Savage Land mutates and … ), Google says 150 000 people globally die every day. It would be impossible to keep up. Plus you’d need exponentially more magic 1980s psychic crystals. And this is why they keep it a secret, if word got out, they’d be mobbed by grieving orphans and widows.
Now what they should really do is back up all the orangutans. Let them run free on Krakoa. That would be a fun bit of Utopian storytelling.