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

EXCALIBUR vol 4 #26
“The Fantasy is Over”
by Tini Howard, Marcus To & Erick Arciniega

COVER / PAGE 1. Saturnyne, with Betsy as her knight, and her sword in a scrying pool that shows the rest of the cast. Unusually for 2021, we get a very old-school piece of lettering trailing the climax. In three mismatched fonts, none of which fit well with the logo, and all of which feel squeezed into a space in the corner. I’m really not sure what it’s doing there, since the cover as a whole doesn’t evoke anything retro, and it drags down a perfectly nice piece of art.

PAGE 2. Merlyn briefs his troops.

Merlyn captured the Starlight Citadel and renamed it the Lunatic Citadel last issue. Those are his siege engines in the background of the first panel.

Aside from Arthur himself, Merlyn is addressing groups from the various factions allied with him in previous issues: the Sevalith (the vampire guys), the Furies (the robot thing) and the Colony (the bees people). There are some more generic soldiers around as well. Saturnyne’s aide Ryl is still there, standing by Merlyn’s throne and apparently being accepted by him. Presumably she’s loyal to the throne rather than its current occupant.

Merlyn’s speech about the importance of driving all the mutants back through the gate to Earth, because even one would be able to take root and rebuild, is obviously foreshadowing the climax.

PAGES 3-4. Betsy and Saturnyne arrive back at Castle Avalon.

As a child with the mind of an adult, Maggie Braddock is normally a comedy character, but it’s wisely played down in her conversation with Meggan. The colouring seems more subdued as darkness spreads across the land.

The previous issue ended with Betsy and Saturnyne stranded in the Sea of Secrets, and Saturnyne about to explain how she deposed Merlyn to become Majestrix of Otherworld. We’ve skipped over that bit, because Saturnyne’s about to repeat the exact same story to the rest of the cast, though I think it reads a bit oddly to skip the revelation scene that was actually trailed.

Betsy tells us that Saturnyne was able to bring them back using her previously-hidden power to “drop through reality”. The problem is that literally two pages later, Saturnyne tells us – as a plot point – that when she uses this power, “[t]here’s no way of knowing where you’ll land”. So either there’s something more to the explanation, or it’s a plot hole. Perhaps the idea is that she didn’t know how to use the power when she used it last time round, but if so, that’s not very clearly explained.

Merlyn’s conquest of the “diplomatic ring” (the area around the Citadel) was established last issue.

PAGES 5-8. Flashback: Saturnyne’s story.

The Fall of the Captain Britain Corps was previously shown in flashback in New Avengers vol 3 #30, as per the footnote. This was part of Jonathan Hickman’s storyline building to Secret Wars, in which different universes were colliding with one another (“incursions”) until only one was left. In the original flashback – which only lasts a page – Brian explains that the Captain Britain Corps began investigating the incursions. “Eventually we captured a mapmaker as well, but instead of following the harmonics, Saturnyne had us construct a beacon. The Ivory Kings sent everyone. The Starlight Citadel was overrun and the Corps was destroyed in a matter of hours. I should have died there, but after embedding me with the Citadel’s secrets, Saturnyne cast me out, returning to this Earth.”

Saturnyne’s picks up from the end of that. The Mapmakers were part of the incursion plot, and were basically agents of the Beyonders who travelled the multiverse documenting it in advance of the Beyonders’ plan to destroy it. According to Saturnyne, she escaped with the Mapmaker by using her reality-dropping powers to take him to the world that became Blightspoke. At this stage Blightspoke isn’t yet a graveyard of failed realities, though Saturnyne says it was “a terrible, broken place, even then”. Presumably it got worse thanks to the collapse of the Multiverse.

The Mapmaker was largely destroyed in the escape, leaving Saturnyne with access to its power. According to Saturnyne, she used that power to kill Merlyn and Roma, who (as legends) were reborn in the same sort of style seen in books like Thor. She then took the role of Omniversal Majestrix and rebuilt new realms for them, which is where we find them in “X of Swords”. Saturnyne claims that this was a specific deal she made with Roma, who was the previous Majestrix, but apparently believed that she was only nominally in charge while Merlyn was still around. I don’t recall Merlyn being much of a presence in Roma stories over the last, what, thirty years or so? So this doesn’t really work, but maybe Saturnyne is lying about that bit.

Saturnyne seems to imply that she herself is responsible for the particular versions of Merlyn and Roma that returned, by framing the sort of worlds (“provinces”) they would run. This is presumably why Betsy accuses Saturnyne of having doomed them; her new version of Otherworld proves unstable.

It also begs awkward questions about how these worlds actually work and where their populations came from. Did the populations of Roma and Merlyn’s domains exist before Saturnyne created these worlds? Are they even real in any meaningful sense? Do they remember anything else? These questions matter because the story goes on to have Betsy pushing back against the idea that Otherworld is less real than Earth… but everything Saturnyne says in this scene strongly suggests it is less real.

The remains of the Mapmaker remain buried in Blightspoke. For some reason, Betsy says this has contributed to the fall of Otherworld, but I don’t understand how that works at all. Saturnyne points out that the Vescora, who were sent to mine Blightspoke at the end of “X of Swords”, would have found it in the end. She mentions that she had planned to get Excalibur to stop that at some point, all of which sounds a lot like a dropped plot.

PAGE 9. Recap and credits.

PAGES 10-12. Excalibur return to Earth.

The characters waiting by the lighthouse are S.T.R.I.K.E. (Alison Double, Vicki Reppion, Kevin Mulhearn and Tom Lennox), Pete Wisdom, Prestige (with her Warwolf pup Amazing Baby), Professor X and Emma Frost. Ambassador Reuben Brousseau and a bunch of hooded guys from Coven Akkaba are also visible in the background of one panel.

The UK government helicopters circling the lighthouse are apparently worries about incursions from Otherworld, which is fair enough, really. The idea that the UK and Krakoa are on the brink of war comes entirely out of nowhere and again looks alarmingly like a dropped plot, particularly as Pete Wisdom and S.T.R.I.K.E. show up to say “Um, are we going to get to do the thing we’ve been trailing for several issues” and are told “No, you’re not”. It’s all a bit clumsy.

The stuff about Betsy having “abandoned the real world for the fantasy” also feels like a theme that’s suddenly barrelled in from nowhere, and doesn’t really work in the light of the flashback we’ve just had about the nature of Otherworld. At any rate, there’s an angle that aside from Excalibur, nobody really cares about what happens to Otherworld. It’s something of a U-turn from the whole angle of Avalon being mutant territory, and presumably it’s lack of space that prevents Rictor joining in to vigorously side with Betsy. This is everything his beloved Apocalypse worked for collapsing, and the guys in charge don’t care.

The idea that mutants who die in Otherworld can’t be resurrected in the normal way was established in “X of Swords”. Rictor separated Braddock Isle from the mainland UK in issue #21. Prestige’s line about “a hundred people bummed they didn’t get to grab a sword and go in last time” is a reference to the plot of “X of Swords”, where all of the competing champions had their own sword.

Betsy gets a page to tell us that she finally feels in control of her destiny now that her choices are the ones that matter. There’s something to this; certainly, Betsy now has a defined agenda which isn’t just about getting over the trauma of stories published in the late 1980s. And that’s nice.

PAGE 13. Data page. A journal by Sir Lirio Ironsights, one of the soldiers in Merlyn’s army. We saw him last issue – he was the one speaking to Arthur on page 10.

Broadly speaking, Lirio tells us that the Arthur of Otherworld is not the Arthur of any individual world, but rather an amalgam of assorted Arthurs from assorted worlds, all of whom end their story by coming to Otherworld. Thus, his back story literally encompasses all different versions of the Arthurian myth and his relationship with Modred. Lirio suggests that by focussing so much effort on avoiding the versions of the tale where Modred defeats him, Arthur is in fact bringing those versions to the foreground which, in the logic of Otherworld, will actually make them the more canonical versions of the story, and thus the more “real”.

PAGES 14-16. Excalibur join Merlyn’s forces in battle.

Well, Excalibur plus Shatterstar and Bei. Kind of confused about what the point was of bringing them into this arc, to be honest. The whole thing really does read like a change of plans, maybe not as regards the core plot, but certainly as regards second-tier plot threads.

This scene opens by plugging the obvious plot hole: why doesn’t Jamie just rewrite reality to get rid of Merlyn? The basic answer is that reality is now too unstable to risk messing with in that way, which is fair enough.

Rictor and Shatterstar get a scene about wanting to stay and fight together for a cause in Otherworld. Perhaps they’ll show up in the next volume as part of the reinforcements that Betsy asks for.

PAGES 17-20. Excalibur retreat back to Earth, and the gate is destroyed

Basically, Excalibur are driven through the gate, and then Merlyn’s forces use magic to destroy it. The two characters in page 17 panel 4 are Morgan Le Fey and Coven Akkaba co-leader Marianna Stern.

Betsy is obviously planning to stay and make a last stand, but Brian pulls her out of it at the last minute.

PAGE 21. Data page. Reuben Brousseau’s “remarks to Parliament”. This isn’t how Parliament works. Since he isn’t an MP, he wouldn’t address the House of Commons, though he might well give evidence to a select committee. And he is addressing the House of Commons, he isn’t going to say “my lords”. And he can’t be addressing both, because he says he’s informing “the House”.

The idea that Brousseau is talking up outright war with Krakoa in public – and is openly part of a weird magical coven, and still taken seriously in British politics – is real parallel universe stuff and frankly impossible to take seriously.

PAGES 22-24. Betsy uses her sword to return and fight alone.

Having been persuaded by Brian to escape to Earth just a few pages ago, Betsy changes her mind and uses the sword to go back alone, in order to lead the Captain Britain Corps. She does ask for reinforcements, though quite how anyone’s  supposed to get them to Otherworld isn’t made clear. The External Gate which previously connected Krakoa to Otherworld presumably ceased to exist after bringing Arakko to Earth in X-Men vol 5 #16. Nonetheless, Gambit’s in the promo art for the next issue, so apparently a way back is found.

The cats have been pets of Rogue and Gambit since Mr & Mrs X.

Rachel says that Betsy “once led the X-Men”. Unless there’s a period I’m forgetting, that’s a reference to a handful of issues in the run-up to the team splitting in Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #250, when most of the big guns had disappeared. But it’s technically true.

PAGE 25. Trailer for the next season, Knights of X. The art is an obvious reference to “Days of Future Past”, showing Captain Britain, Prestige and Gambit in front of a poster of banished teammates, and a Fury coming round the corner. At any rate, I assume that’s Prestige based on the jacket and her prominence elsewhere in the issue; it doesn’t really look much like her, but the all-red colouring doesn’t help there.

The small print reads “Ten Realms, Ten Knights”. So maybe it’s pronounced “Knights of Ten.”