X Deaths of Wolverine #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #3
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist Federico Vicentini
Colourist: Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
COVER / PAGE 1: Daken, Scout and Wolverine (Laura) pose for action in front of Omega Wolverine.
PAGES 2-4. Professor X asks Wolverine (Laura) to go after Omega Wolverine.
Wolverine and Scout. Laura, the other Wolverine, is a regular character in X-Men. She’s effectively Logan’s genetic daughter. Scout is basically a younger clone of Laura, who Laura treats as a kid sister.
“[T]his whole Children of the Vault thing.” This is an X-Men storyline from both the Hickman and Duggan runs. Laura was locked in the time-distorted vault belonging to the Children of the Vault, centuries passed from her perspective, but she died immediately after escaping and before she could be backed up, so she doesn’t remember any of it.
“[S]houldn’t you be … hanging out at the Wild Hunt?” The training area for younger mutants from New Mutants, where Scout is a regular character.
“But I want to hang out with you, Laura.” Scout has spent a fair amount of time in New Mutants wanting the attention of her older siblings and not really getting it.
“I need to get back to the Treehouse.” The X-Men’s New York headquarters.
“He is indisposed.” Wolverine (Logan) is unconscious because he’s being projected back in time to fight Omega Red over in X Lives of Wolverine.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. Omega Wolverine’s name is still blanked out, because it doesn’t formally get revealed until later in the issue.
PAGES 6-10. Omega Wolverine attacks Arnab Chakladar’s product launch.
Arnab Chakladar. Making his first proper appearance here, but foreshadowed in both of the previous issues. In issue #1, his company Epiphany was presented as having Apple-like stores, and he was seen talking about an ocular implant that “records everything you see and say”, backed up every night to cloud storage. This seemed to be an R&D direction rather than something Epiphany were actually selling right now. But the point is that Chakladar is apparently a populariser of post-human technology, which is supposed to be a disaster for mutants (according to Moira’s experiences in her previous lives, shown in Powers of X). So far as we’ve seen, though, his agenda seems to be just that of a techno-utopian businessman.
Moira MacTaggert evidently tipped off the X-Desk about this attack. She stows away on the underside of Arnab’s escape helicopter.
Moira has also correctly realised that this is the plot of Terminator. She infers that Omega Wolverine wouldn’t have been sent back to kill her unless she was about to do something dramatic to help the post-human side – which, apparently, she’s quite keen on now that she’s been kicked out by the mutants. In a sense, this may be another of the self-fulfilling prophecies of the Krakoan era, where Moira is mainly motivated to go after Arnab by the very fact that Omega Wolverine is trying to stop her.
PAGE 11. Data page. Delores Ramirez makes notes on Moira. Actually, in format terms, this is a bit confused – the “From” and “To” at the top suggest it’s a memo, but then what’s the “searching, searching, searching” stuff doing there? Anyway, in terms of Percy’s stories, this specifically echoes the very similar data pages he tends to do for Sage. Presumably this is to be read as an intentional parallel between Delores and Sage.
PAGES 12-14. Moira confronts Arnab in his safehouse.
“Omega Wolverine.” Moira’s name for him. Presumably she’s seeing him as analogous to an Omega Sentinel. Although note that on page 10, she referred to “the Phalanx patterning in his costume and claws”, not anywhere else on his body. But the final panel on page 19 – which is not easy to interpret – does seem to show Phalanx patterning on his actual flesh.
Moira’s pitch to Arnab is that Omega Wolverine is coming for them both anyway, but he wouldn’t be doing that unless they were able to beat him.
PAGES 15-19. The Wolverine family confront Omega Wolverine.
Daken is Wolverine’s actual son, which is all you really need to know for present purposes.
Omega Wolverine hasn’t been anywhere near this chatty so far in the series, but he seems to have more or less Wolverine’s regular personality. Apparently by his time period, the secrets of mutant resurrection have been lost and all three of his “children” have died. This seems to tie in with Wolverine’s ruminations over in X Lives of Wolverine about his longevity being a curse.
PAGES 20-21. Moira gets a new cyborg arm, and encourages Arnab to build something to defeat the mutants.
It’s a robot of some sort.
“We would build off the research he had already done and perfect the machine that would allow for a mental upload, guaranteeing my eleventh life.” Back in House of X #2, Destiny (of a different timeline) told Moira that she would have ten lives, “maybe eleven if you make the right choice at the end”. Moira’s resurrection power has already given her the ten lives and been removed. Moira seems to be suggesting that her “eleventh life” can still happen by transferring her mind into a post-human body.
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was indeed the daughter of Lord Byron, who left a month after she was born, and died when she was eight. She named both of her sons after him, though.
“She famously wrote a paper called ‘Can Machines Think?’. She posited that they could potentially do everything – except create.” No she didn’t, and you might want to fix that one for the trade. “Can Machines Think?” is the question famously posed by Alan Turing (1912-1954) in his 1950 paper “Computer Machinery and Intelligence”. Lovelace was perhaps the first person to write about the question of artificial intelligence, in her translator’s notes to Sketch of the Analytical Difference Engine, published in 1842. Strictly speaking she doesn’t make any claims about the theoretical limits of machines; she’s talking specifically about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, not about some other machine that might be created in principle. On one reading, she’s just making the obvious point that the Analytical Engine is a glorified calculator. But it’s fair to say that Turing takes her to be advancing an objection to the possibility of artificial intelligence and spends a few paragraphs responding. Her claim to fame lies more in her status as a pioneering programmer than her passing comments about artificial intelligence, making her a rather odd person to be cited here.
PAGE 22. Data page – a closing quote from Moira. But wait, there’s more.
PAGES 23-24. Omega Wolverine relates how Phalanx Moira killed Wolverine in the Preserve.
This calls back to Powers of X, which contains parallel story threads at various points in time that were symbolically (but seemingly figuratively) labelled as Year Ten, Year 100 and so on. The “Year 1000” timeline, set in Moira’s sixth life, featured Logan and Moira as the final two mutants, living in a Preserve as humanity prepared to ascend to post-humanity and be absorbed into the Phalanx. Having finally learned all that, Moira allowed Logan to kill her in order to restart reality with all the knowledge she had learned.
This is not the same timeline – apparently, this is now the current far future, with Wolverine surviving as the last mutant and a post-human Moira likewise making it to the end of humanity. As in Life 6, Logan has apparently been biding his time waiting to learn what is happening. Presumably Logan is “the last mutant” because Moira has been depowered, though it’s possible that she’s just no longer in a biological body at all. Moira’s murder of Logan, and the way she does it, is a more violent echo of the way she died in Powers of X #6.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: WAR STORIES.
Omar-Yes, it would be fun for a writer like Al Ewing to play with these types of concepts in a series, rather than actually touch on any of the themes from Hickman’s run proper.
As far as the diary, I believe it still exists.
I think that because Destiny is older than Moira and was already alive and living her life before Moira was born, that was how she knew how Moira’s powers worked. She kept foreseeing future timelines and recording what she saw in her diaries, but then she’d see the future changing. So, if you see her diaries, she foresees Apocalypse going to war with humanity and losing to Nimrod. Then, she sees a different timeline where all mutants are living together on an island instead. She knew something was going on and that the future kept changing, but she couldn’t figure out what was happening until after Moira was born and she was able to sense Moira’s existence. That’s when it all fell in to place. So, based on what she had foreseen and recorded in her diary, she realized that Moira had a limited number of possible lives.
I think that the interaction between Moira’s powers and Destiny’s works better as food for speculation than as actual plot material.
Alternate timelines are always a bit tricky, and I don’t particularly expect that Destiny’s diaries would apply to this timeline being shown in current stories. For one thing, that would imply that at some point Destiny would predict her own death and Krakoa-sponsored ressurrection, which would be tricky to write about if not entirely pointless.
Who knows where Hickman wanted to go with the diaries.
She did predict resurrections though. Sometime before her death, she told Mystique, “If they refuse to bring me back, burn the island to the ground”.
The problem with precogs is that you either adhere to their prophecies* or say there’s something interfering with their powers. With the latter, it makes story sense that a temporal anomaly (e.g, Kate Prude’s mind traveling back in time and inhabiting her younger self) can mess with Destiny’s power. Unfortunately, fidelity to predictions and changing creative teams mean you get stories like “The Twelve.” I think we might end up with another mess, but the “temporal anomaly” out is right there on the page.
* including prophecies that stick to the letter of the prediction rather than what characters& audiences expect, e.g. “no man born from woman can kill MacBeth.”
“What happens if someone travels from Earth-10067429 to Earth-616 “before” and “after” a Moira reset? For that matter, what happens to someone who leaves Earth-616 and then returns “after” a Moira reset?”
The way it would make sense to me is that for an outsider to 616, there is no ‘before and after’ a reset – there’s one single timeline where Moira is born for, from her POV, the last time, but for the outsider’s POV the ONLY time, then she dies, and there’s no reset.
For somebody leaving 616, if Moira dies then her life resets and that person never left, because the reset goes back to before they left. They probably do still leave when the timeline reaches that date again, unless Moira’s new actions sufficiently change things.
Then again, if writers WANTED to make things more complicated than this then they could, as with Hickman’s whole Avengers run where time was reset at the end but the collapse of the multiverse still happened somehow.
As for AoA being negated but still existing as an alternate reality, that has an easy out too – in 616 Bishop and the X-Men succeeded in restoring the regular timeline, but on other Earths they didn’t.
Dave-The paradox happens if Moira’s actions prevent a traveller from leaving Earth-616, as they previously did, but their actions were important in another reality.
So, Reed travels to Earth-710 during the events of Moira’s Life Seven and helps them prevent an invasion from the Skrulls which would have otherwise led to that Earth being destroyed.
While Reed is on Earth-710, Moira dies and resets the timeline.
So, Reed never left Earth-616 to help Earth-710. However, this is Moira’s Life Nine when Apocalypse killed Reed early in the Marvel Age of Heroes. Meaning Reed could never travel to Earth-710 in order to help their Earth.
So, what happens?
Earth-710 is outside of the effects of Moira’s mutant power.
Reed once travelled to Earth-710 and saved their Earth, but in Moira’s ninth life was unable to make this journey, so now Earth-710’s Earth is destroyed, even though Earth-710’s Earth wasn’t destroyed.
I think, metaphysically speaking, this would have to be solved by splitting the original Earth-710 in to two realities…one where the Earth on 710 was destroyed and one where it was not destroyed. Then, the timeline would need to correct itself, making sure that Moira’s final timeline would be one where Reed would be able to travel to Earth-710. This negates the concept of free will pretty definitively though, by arguing that the Multiverse will make it all work right in the end.
I like my solution that alternate realities are outside of the effects of another reality. So, Reed travels to Earth-710 in one of Moira’s lives, no matter what happens on Earth-616, and his actions on Earth-710 still occur. He can exist on Earth-710 no matter what happens on Earth-616, but if Moira resets reality before Reed returns to Earth-616, that Reed will cease to exist as soon as he attempts to return to Earth-616.
There is a paradox, but it’s tidier than removing free will and basically saying that the Multiverse is purposeful.
I had a random thought today, that if Marvel ever wanted not only to abandon Krakoa, but also retcon the retcons, Proteus is right there in the center of everything. Moira is alive! No she wasn’t, Proteus made it so. Moira lived 10 lifetimes! No she didn’t, Proteus told a lie. Some telepaths checked her mind! No they didn’t, Proteus made false memories for them to find.
It even connects to recent continuity, with Proteus being the enemy in Soule’s Astonishing X-Men that ends with Xavier – then, and for about three random issues on, called simply ‘X’ – proclaiming he ‘has a new dream now’ shortly before Krakoa.
And right before Krakoa there’s the whole pocket dimension reality swap where everybody got false memories – that was X-Man, but it’s so easy to say ‘nope, that was Proteus as well’. Laying groundwork for the X-Men to more easily accept the altered reality of Krakoa, after having broken out of the much more altered reality of Age of X-Man. The old ‘you thought you woke up but you’re still dreaming’ trick.
…honestly, ‘Proteus did it’ works better than Hickman’s original, what with Krakoa springing out of nothing and everybody being led by Xavier despite the fact that they all thought was dead at the time. And in the wrong body. (Screw that ‘he was in Fantomex’s body up to his assassination’ explanation, that was clearly made up after they realized the inconsistence).
… Reed travels to Earth-710 during the events of Moira’s Life Seven … While Reed is on Earth-710, Moira dies and resets the timeline …
There is no “while.” Time isn’t passing in parallel. Reed leaves and is in a divergent reality. His return could be to the very instant he left, or to a time after he left measured by the same subjective days he experienced in the other reality, or to a different later time, or to an earlier time.
Say Moira-7 dies on 1/1/2030. Say Reed travels outside the 616 to Earth 710 on 12/31/2029 (arriving on the same date and time, for simplicity’s sake).
Accepting Hickman’s conceit, that Reed who left on 12\31 doesn’t exist anymore, because Moira’s death a day later rebooted the reality from which he left. He never existed, he never left, and he never went to Earth_710.
Now, maybe the new Reed from the life of Moira-8 will still go to 710 on 12/31/2029.
But what if he doesn’t? What is the effect on Earth 710 if 616 is rebooted?
I would assume Earth-710 is also rebooted back to 12/31/2029. You can’t have divergent timelines from 710, one where Reed come and one where he doesn’t, because the Reed who came never existed.
That doesn’t mean every life of Moira reboots every reality. Only those which were touched specifically by the events of 616 during her lifetime.
Which raises the question, what happens to realities which branched from 616 during Moira”s life? All those What If stories were the result of divergences during the history of the MU, most while Moira was alive. I guess they all diverged from her current life X, which is the 616 we know, but what about the ones that diverged while she was living Life 1? Are they gone?
if a timeline that ostensibly gets wiped out has popular enough elements, someone will eventually find a way to bring it back
Oh, suddenly I want a What If issue from Moira’s first life, showing that if she had never rebooted the universe the first time humans and mutants would have naturally lived in harmony.
It’s also kind of hard to see how Hickman’s own Secret Wars and its lead-ups would work with Moira’s powers.
How could the incursions where parallel Earths collide actually happen. If those worlds had Moiras, the wouldn’t things just reset when the Incursions happened, so the actually mutual destruction never occurs?
Now, that can be gotten around if we say that only Earth-616 Moira has this power. Maybe she’s a multiversal singularity.
But then, did 616 Moira somehow survive the seeming destruction and reboot of Earth by Doctor Doom and the Molecule Man?
If Life X Moira dies while her powers are working, does the rest of the multiverse get reset, since Secret Wars (2015 series) ended with the FF going off to recreate all of it?
I guess all timelines must converge on a state in which Moira is depowered and then dies. Moira losing her powers is the multiversal constant.
Nu_D-OK, yes, that makes sense. Only the Life Ten reality matters. If Reed went to Earth-710 in Life Seven, went in Life Eight, but could not go in Life Nine is all immaterial. What matters is what Reed does in Life Ten.
I thought that about Moira’s first life also. I thought that was going to be Hickman’s revelation at the end. Moira was the unintentional catalyst for “mutants always losing”. In Moira’s first life, Xavier’s dream succeeded.
I don’t believe that was ever Hickman’s intent though. It would have made his story much less depressing. Destiny tells Moira that humans always send Sentinels to kill mutants. Since Destiny could foresee that Moira had ten or eleven lives total, I’d have to assume that she was able to see Sentinels killing mutants in Life One.
Then again, Moira does mention the observer effect at one point. Perhaps Destiny simply realized that path was gone and there was no reason to mention it. That makes the story even more tragic. The one chance Xavier’s dream had was destroyed by the existence of one mutant.
I don’t believe that was ever Hickman’s intent though. It would have made his story much less depressing.
It would? How?
To me, the idea that the entirety of human-mutant strife emerges from Moira’s bad choices is way more depressing than the idea that it’s a Hobbesian state-of-nature against which we’re engaged in a Sisyphean struggle.
Maybe that’s because I actually see the world as a Sisyphean struggle against a Hobbesian state-of-nature, and that’s where I find meaning.
Somehow it looks like most people discussing Moira’s power here feel secure that they involve some form of reality reset.
I was unconvinced about that, and if anything I am even less convinced now. Even by the very generous and forgiving parameters of Marvel-styled mutancy, I don’t think that can be made to work unless somehow it turns out that Moira isn’t a mutant at all, but rather some sort of cosmic entity.
That is because, as some of you have discussed above, such powers of reality-resetting might have such far-reaching implications that Moira would perhaps have to be an unique anomaly in all possible alternate timelines. That is a pretty tall order for scope of what is presumably a power caused by sheer luck of the draw and entirely outside of her conscious control to boot.
I can hardly claim to have understood how her power works, but my best guess is that she is actually a reality-jumper whose power is activated by her own death. Reminds me of the Exiles series.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the last issue of Exiles (so far) was published in early 2019, the same month as Age of X-Man Alpha and therefore not too long before Hickman’s setup was established.
As a nice bonus, that would also tells us what ever happens if a second mutant with the same or a similar power ever turns up (the other mutant also jumps between realities and may well end up convincing himself that he is resetting reality).
Nu_D-I’m a follower of Locke, Kropotkin, Ellul, and Sartre myself.
It’s just a really depressing story for a “mainstream” superhero comic book. Xavier had his dream of peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants. Eventually, his vision would win out due to the moral superiority of his vision.
Now, there’s no purpose to anything in the X-Men comics. The cycle of violence and war will continue. Either mutants win due to simple genetic determinism or post-humanity rises leading to a cold, sterile, mechanical future. Neither future is one I would look forward and I don’t care which side wins because none of the sides are worthy of my support.
Hickman’s run ending with “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face-forever.” would be as uplifting. I do see this as a realistic vision for the future of humanity. It’s not what I pick up a X-Men comic expecting though.
most people discussing Moira’s power here feel secure that they involve some form of reality reset.
I feel secure that this is how Hickman wanted us to read the stories. He told us so, both in Moira’s dialogue, and in interviews.
I also feel secure that it’s easily retconned into the classic “divergent timeline” model that Marvel always falls back on. As far as I know, the only canonical discussion of how her power works comes from Moira herself. How would she know whether the universe reboots after her death. Until Uatu tells us otherwise, it’s not established canon one way or the other, as far as I’m concerned.
Xavier had his dream of peaceful coexistence between humans and mutants. Eventually, his vision would win out due to the moral superiority of his vision.
In November 2016 I was hit hard by the revelation that history was not going to inevitably progress to a more moral humanity. Racism isn’t going to die out just because diversity and tolerance are morally superior. There will always be some portion of humanity that is indifferent to the morality, or incapable of understanding it.
In the Hobbesian state of nature, that portion is high and it crushes us under its weight. Our job, as Sisyphus, is to lift the boulder of bigotry and roll it up the mountain. Working together, we can carry the weight for some time and reduce the power of bigotry to hurt one another. But it’s a ceaseless toil. If we stop, the boulder will crash down on us again.
What is uplifting is putting our shoulders to it together, knowing the task will never be done, but understanding that by doing the work the burden is shared, and lightened for those who are suffering the most. The indomitable will, the comraderie, the empathy and sacrifice are what make human stories “uplifting.”
To me, the idea that Moira somehow caused anti-mutant bigotry is far more depressing, because that’s a story of an arbitrary universe doling out a cruel fate. It means that just by living her life she created the conditions for deep evil and cruelty. It’s not a story of human sacrifice and striving. It’s a story of an arbitrary and therefore pointless existence.
It’s a fictional comic though. If even our most innocent of literature (which I consider superhero comic books) can no longer be bothered to even have a message about characters who act in a moral manner or pursue positive ends, then what does that say about the consciousness of the time? Nihilism on a large-scale is not often a positive for those suffering.
Well, that’s not a traditional definition of “Hobbesian”.
I’m not opposed to your viewpoint or what you are saying.
That’s exactly what is being taken away by Hickman’s vision though.
If you agree with Morrison’s interpretation of the X-Men that there is hope or with how Claremont left the book under the pessimism that “Days of Future Past” was probably inevitable didn’t matter. The X-Men were going to continue struggling and believing in Xavier’s dream because it was worth pursuing, it had a moral imperative. Even if they failed, they knew they had done what was Right.
Now, the comic is truly based in a Hobbesian state of nature where it’s a struggle of mutants versus humans versus machines for winner takes all.
Mutants are struggling to take the place once held by man because they are obviously genetically superior and deserve the future just by being born. Humans refuse to give up their position and are willing to give up what makes them human in order to have mere survival. Machines hate both for being inferior and their innate knowledge that they should be the future.
It’s not about fighting for any noble cause. It’s about fighting for dominance and to own the future, while the other sides will face extinction.
It doesn’t matter what any of them do because the future is bleak.
If humanity wins, mutants die.
If mutants win, humanity dies.
If machines win, everybody dies.
We’ve seen the possible futures and they are all dystopian.
I thought there would be a twist, that Moira’s pessimism was preventing humans and mutants from cooperating for a better future. No, we saw on the alternate Life Ten future that humanity and mutants joined together to fight post-humanity and afterwards, humanity betrayed the mutants leading to yet another war, which led to mutant ascendancy and the eventual extinction of humanity.
I’m not saying Moira caused anti-mutant bigotry, but that she was the cause of “mutants always losing”.
Moira wouldn’t really care because she saw mutants as a “cancer in need of a cure”.
Moira being the cause may not be the best option either, but at least it isn’t saying, “Mutants and humans will always hate each other and there’s no reason to try. Move to an isolated island and wait for one or the other to die out is the only solution”.
I’d rather have something, anything, that offers a way out…much like the claustrophobia you feel by the end of 1984. Orwell never meant to give the reader hope, but that was the vision of the X-Men from Stan Lee to Chris Claremont to Grant Morrison. Now, the message is genetic determinism will always win in the end.
@Chris,
What you’re describing are two different responses to the theory of history I described. The heroic one, which you attributed to Morison and Claremont, where they “continue to struggle” despite the “probably inevitable” failure, is the uplifting Sisyphean tale I described. There is no final destination of a harmonious future, there is only the moral journey to keep things from getting worse while we’re here.
The view you attribute to Hickman is more depressing because they’ve given up trying to do right, and instead are just trying to win. The abandonment of heroism for selfishness will bring about the dystopian future more quickly, rather than stay its approach. But that still presupposes a view of history where we’ll never reach a final goal of a harmonious future.
But that distinction doesn’t turn on the idea that Moira’s lives caused the breakdown in human mutant relations. If an alt-u story shows that harmonious human-mutant coexistence would have arisen in Moria’s Life I, that means the heroic response and the selfish response to history are both irrelevant. There is a possible end state of harmonious co-existence, but getting there is out of our control. The outcome is essentially arbitrary, because it turns on things we can’t know, such as what one person chooses to do with her life.
To me, that is way more depressing.
As an aside, while it’s true Hobbes didn’t envision the state of nature for humanity to look like modern racism, Hobbes didn’t know what we know about evolutionary biology. When I say a “Hobbesian state of nature” I’m referring to what we would be if we didn’t try to be civilized, if we allow our basic instincts to rule our behavior.
Bigotry, in my view, is just a manifestation of the adaptive trait of clannishness—an instinct to be loyal to our tribe, and fearful or hostile to others. It served us well as hunter-gatherers, but applied to the modern world it creates perverse outcomes. Our Hobbesian state of nature would allow that trait to prevail. It’s our moral duty to try to transcend it.
Though I think it’s also worth noting that many of Hickman’s epic, seemingly pessimistic Marvel stories end with the idea that the Great Figure of History needs to sit down and start talking to people around them.
Both his Fantastic Four and Secret Wars ended on the idea that it was Reed Richards’s capacity for humility and his emotional bonds to his family. Both the Council of Reeds and God Doom ultimately fail because they lack these traits, or because they can’t embrace them.
And his Secret Warriors and New Avengers/Avengers runs are about the big shots who think they can run everything or decide everything learning that they need to step down or hand things off. Secrecy, paranoia, mega-planning, and gamesmanship tend to come back and bite the characters in Hickman’s Marvel stories.
Some of that is the “toys back in the box at the end of the run” thing, which is driven by the realities of working on corporate IT.
But I also think Hickman likes to lean into the whole “the hell with prophecy, predestination, and determinism” thing quite often.
But I feel that a lot of Hickman stories have moments where bad things happen because of characters trying to hide what they know because they think others won’t be able to handle the truth or make the Tough Decisions, only for their own decisions to corrupt and break them and lead to catastrophes that only get solved by the folks they were keeping out of the loop, or at least by reconnecting and being honest with those folks.
As long as we’re talking about how Moira’s power works, can I point out how dumb it is that it’s supposedly genetic? What sequence of genes would allow a single individual to passively reset reality/ies upon their death?
I would much prefer that Moira fabricated her entire HoXPoX history and wasn’t a mutant at all. How funny would that be? Unfortunately, she has no agency or motivation or personality to speak of, so I guess that’s not going to happen.
Omar-I agree with you. I haven’t had this problem with Hickman’s other works. One of the main themes going through many of his stories is two sides refusing to see that they need to work together to prevent something horrible and the bleak future that results from this inability to cooperate and see common interests. I expected that was where he was going with his X-Men also. Moira’s pessimism was preventing her from seeing how the constant cycles of mutant/human violence were leading to a dark, dismal future for everyone. There was even a hint of that in Life Nine, where it mentioned how mutants were rescuing humans from Nimrod and working together with humans against the Machines, but that it had occurred too late to make a difference. Then, we get up the end, and no…that’s not the answer. Mutants and humans really are destined to be enemies and there’s no peaceful solution. Only one side can prevail at the expense of all other sides.
Maybe Hickman is dealing with issues which have made him feel particularly pessimistic. I can understand that. The fact that this is the status quo he’s left the X-Men, one of the most life-affirming superhero comics, is just depressing.
Thom-I thought about that reveal too. Moira is revealed to be a human who managed to trick and manipulate the superior mutants. The Quiet Council would be forced to keep this secret. What would it say about their mutant supremacist ideology to let Krakoa know that the whole project was being controlled by a mere human? How would the human world react if it discovered that the great and powerful Xavier and Magneto had been fooled by a mere human?
I think there is hope for the future, but it’s nothing stated on the page. Ultimately, humans, mutants, and machines have to live in relative harmony. In theory, the public X-Men are a bridge between humans and mutants. Despite Omega Sentinel, there are machine consciousnesses that are aligned to mutants: Warlock and Danger. I could see Forge and Wiz Kid also working to find common ground with mutants and machines. Maybe Madison Jefferies too, although he’s in the Pit in the Sabretooth comic at the moment. Vision and other benevolent AI work with humans and mutants. I think an end to major conflict between these factions is ultimately possible.
Nothing on the page has led me in this direction, however. I can’t see a way out of the bad futures unless the characters try something new, eventually. X-comics as a whole might lose their central conflict and be broken, then, unless we the only evidence we get on page takes place in the far future.
can I point out how dumb it is that it’s supposedly genetic? What sequence of genes would allow a single individual to passively reset reality/ies upon their death?
It’s really the same as the time travel conceit in movies like Back to the Future. Moira travels back in time and changes the future. The fact that the pseudo-science is genetics and not technology seems neither here nor there.
In fact, it’s been done before in the original Days of Future Past. Using her genetic talent, Rachel sends the consciousness of Kate Pride back in time to her younger body in an attempt to erase the future by changing the past.
Mike-There’s also the hint that Warlock evolves in to the “trickster” Titan in the future and sends Omega Sentinel back in time to stop the dystopian future where mutants have dominance. Omega Sentinel, who hates both humans and mutants, then founds the anti-mutant Orchis as a way to prevent the rise of Krakoa. So, I don’t think Hickman intended for Warlock to be seen as hope for the future either.
As I mentioned, I haven’t kept up with the stories issue-by-issue, but as far as I know the specific mechanics of Moira’s power have not been explained. It’s just been called “resurrection.”
Would it be more believable if she was simply psychically casting her consciousness into her past self at the moment of her death? Maybe it’s just that she has the power to send her own consciousness back in time to an earlier stage of life, but hasn’t learned how to control it. So it only manifests at the instant before she dies, as a reflex, and without being controlled it just casts back as far as possible.
That’s basically the same power as what Rachel did in DoFP.
Thom H: yes, it strains credulity for Moira’s power to have control over a timeline. At the same time, I accept it as a given. I’m of the mind that no super powers make sense, so I just go with it. The powers that annoy me are the incredibly vague ones that can be used to justify deus ex machina moments. Moira’s could be used that way, but at least I’ll know what’s going on in the story. My theory is that Marvel is holding her 11th life back in case they decide to restart continuity when the X-Men become a part of the MCU.
Chris V: Warlock could turn anti-mutant, sure. He has been having trouble adjusting to Cypher’s relationship with Bei in New Mutants, and his connection to Krakoa could push him to reject mutants if things go wrong on the island. I could also see him spreading his technoorganic virus throughout the island and taking over. With Hickman gone (for now), I wonder which direction other writers will push him toward. As a longtime New Mutants fan, I hope stays good.
@Nu-D: Fair comparison to Rachel in DoFP. Although that was explicitly in the hopes of changing the future, not in the certainty of erasing all that came after Kate’s possession of Kitty. DoFP simply became a divergent timeline in the end, if I understand correctly.
And I realize that I’m supposed to suspend my disbelief about the mechanics of mutant powers. I just find “reality altering” mutants more and more difficult to swallow. Proteus in his first appearance could have been explained as an incredibly powerful telepath/telekine. And that amount of power was supposed to burn him out physically. Now we have a handful of mutants who can create alternate timelines on a whim. Or passively erase them. Power levels increase exponentially over the course of the X-books, even as the genetic explanation for mutation becomes narrower and narrower.
And don’t get me started on “the X-gene,” as if it’s the same single gene that lets Scott shoot lasers out of his eyes, Ororo control global weather patterns, and Moira truncate entirely timelines. Can’t we make mutants a little more complicated than that?
I really like your idea that the full reset is just because Moira never learned to control her power. Although how scary would it be if she had control and reset to 5 minutes ago every time you did something she didn’t like?
I realize I sound like an old man shaking his fist at the clouds, and in many ways I am. But the explanation for mutation in the Marvel universe really bugs me. Rant over.
Moira MacTaggert in “It’s a Good Life”.
Xavier: “That’s a good thing you did, Moira. That’s an awful good thing. Now, don’t go resetting the timeline again.”
Moira’s power makes reasonable sense if you think of it as straightforward time travel. Every time she dies her mind travels back in time to the moment of conception, replaces the mind that was there before, and therefore alters the timeline. It’s just a straightforward case of “time travel alters history”, which used to be heretical in the Marvel Universe, but it’s been done plenty of times before (not least by Claremont).
It goes against Hickman’s own plot mechanics though. Omega Sentinel’s information was sent back in time by the “trickster” Titan to inhabit Omega Sentinel’s body before the formation of Krakoa. This split the timeline in to an alternate Life Ten Earth-616 rather than just erased the old timeline. So, Moira’s power still works differently than any other form of time travel.
Regarding the ethics of casting the mutants-humans-machines conflict as a zero-sum game:
Didn’t Hickman’s ‘Secret Wars’ also rest on a similar idea of equivalent forces facing off in an inevitable future where only one side can prevail? I didn’t read much of it, but that was my understanding of how the ‘Incursions’ worked: realities keep smashing into each other, which always results in one being eliminated, until they all get smooshed together in the end.
I think that can make for an interesting background plot element, so that we get to see the heroes rise up and fight, but like many of you, I’m more interested in that search for hope and the struggle to prevail in ‘which side gonna win’ plotting. This is what made the Omega Sentinel twist in ‘Inferno’ kind of boring and depressing, even though it was probably the plot point that was best executed in the book (except for being strung out over four issues when it only needed one).
not in the certainty of erasing all that came after Kate’s possession of Kitty.
I don’t think Moira’s power does that either. As far as I can tell, Moira only changes the timeline insofar as her actions have different outcomes. Fans talk about “rebooting” the timeline, but that’s inaccurate based on what was in PoX/HoX.
Say there’s someone living in Australia who dies three years after Moira is born. I don’t think that person’s last three years are affected at all by Moira’s powers. The timeline isn’t erased, and that person doesn’t have any variance in the Pat three years of life.
Moira changes the future only insofar as her changed choices and knowledge affect the world around her. Those things which she never affected don’t change at all.
Now, in some of her lives she becomes a key historical figure by allying with Apocalypse, or whatever. And from that point, her decisions affect the whole history of the world, and most people in it. But up until her changed decisions affect someone, their life remains the same no matter which resurrection it is.
Well, the timeline is erased in that the dead guy in Australia is alive again when Moira is reborn. Then, he dies exactly the same as before. If Moira knew this guy and went to help him or move him somewhere else to die then he did originally, she’d then begin to effect/change the timeline.
There is some ambiguity in HoX/PoX, however, in that Moira mentions the observer effect. She says that her very existence was creating changes in each life. Obviously, this wouldn’t effect every small detail…the guy in Australia is still going to die exactly the same as before. The question remains, if Moira chose to not act, would her mere presence still create changes in the timeline, and also how far would that ripple effect?
I recall that someone (I think it was Stan Lee) objected to the new character Storm, because it didn’t make sense that mutated genes could control something outside of her body. That was the moment the horse bolted the stable I think. Mutant powers have essentially been magic ever since (or arguably, even before). No use complaining that Moira’s powers don’t make sense now.
I’m pretty sure the premise of Secret Wars is that colliding realities destroyed both realities. So the 616 “heroes” were destroying other realities before they collided with theirs. Eventually it came down to just 616 and the Ultimate universe remaining, and that led into the Battleworld thing.
By the way, are they still using the premise that the mutant species is going to replace sapiens simply by each generation having a higher percentage of mutant children born to humans until there’s no humans left to breed?
The problem with Warlock being a trickster titan in the future and being integral to anything, is that he still spends most of his time being a sleeve. There was a bit of show-don’t-tell of him integrating with Krakoa, but very little in the way of character development in any way that would suggest he’ll suddenly become important.
This of course is no barrier to it actually happening this way, and is in fact a repeated problem with the Hickman run.
Si-About mutant population growth? Yes. That’s key to Hickman’s entire run. Humanity will eventually go extinct and mutants will be the dominant species. Humanity innately realizes that its genetics are exponentially disappearing from the gene pool, leading humanity to fight for survival.
@Si: I was actually thinking the same thing about Storm. Iceman, too, if we want an earlier example.
I realize that we’re well past the point that mutant powers make any logical, genetic sense, and I can suspend my disbelief when I’m reading. But it still bugs me when I stop to think about it. Especially when a new power breaks the way time works in the entire shared universe. I’ll drop the genetic stuff, though, even though it’s personally satisfying to complain about it.
@Nu_D: Yeah, that makes sense. I was imagining a world where people were constantly changing their futures by making decisions all the time, which is probably too granular a way to think about it.
I suppose we only really care about the alternates that involve our protagonists anyway. Not the one where the Australian guy decides to stop for a coffee on the way to work and avoids getting hit by a car and dying. Or loses his job at Trask Industries because the entire family has been assassinated, and doesn’t leave the house at all. Or stays home from work to watch the news about Apocalypse and his bride killing Iron Man. None of that — either his own minor decisions or decisions influenced by Moira — amount to anything important, so may as well keep him constant.
Thom-I mean, yes. There is going to be spillover. So, in Life Seven, Moira started killing the Trask family. This would have a ripple effect on other people. So, yeah, she kills one of the Trasks and his factory goes out of business and a guy who worked at that family killed himself, while in Life One he did not. There are a lot of little stories that could be told about the effects of Moira’s actions and how they changed that timeline. That also involves Moira taking action to cause the change. In the grand scheme though, that doesn’t really matter because Moira is going to restart that timeline.
It’s not a second chance for everyone in the universe though, no.
You have to think of it like the movie Groundhog Day. Everyone’s actions in the first life are static in each additional live. Everyone else is a puppet repeating the exact same movements and reciting the exact same lines from performance to performance. Only Moira is given agency. If Moira interacts with one of the puppets, that individual now also has agency to change the events of the timeline, although unknowingly, as they don’t realize that Moira’s power restarted the timeline and they’re just repeating their lives over again.
Depending on how impactful Moira’s actions are, the greater the ripple effect. When she aligns with Apocalypse and declares war on humanity, that is going to have far-reaching consequences compared to if Moira decided to try to help save the life of that guy dying in Australia.
An interesting slice-of-life story would be about a bored housewife in Iowa reliving her same actions over and over from lifetime to lifetime and mentioning that she is experiencing Déjà-Vu.
What is the observer effect for Moira’s existence? Because Moira is not the same from life to life. She has different experiences and thoughts in her mind based on previous lives. When Moira is born in Life One, she is a blank slate, like everyone else. By Life Four, she is thinking about what she was told by Destiny and she is aware of the mutant cause and she has memories from three previous lives. This means that even from the moment of Moira’s birth, the timeline is being changed by Moira’s very existence. How far do the ripples go from this?
One may argue, but it is worth remembering that she is unique in all the universe. As soon as she resets time, everyone begins to perform their routine actions they already performed from life to life, except Moira. She is the only one with agency, from the moment of her birth. In that sense, the ripple effects could be greater than one would presume based on the fact that the only difference between Life Three and Life Four (before Moira makes a conscious effort to change the timeline) are her knowledge, thoughts, and feelings.
@Chris V: Yeah, the model in movies like Groundhog Day or Palm Springs (so good) is “everyone else stays exactly the same” unless somehow affected by the time traveler(s).
That’s a fun narrative conceit in small time loops like a single day. But if Moira lives for 40 years over multiple timelines, then I have a hard time believing every person everywhere would make the exact same choices the entire time. There have to be decisions that a) could easily go either way and b) seem inconsequential at the time but aren’t.
Whether those decisions are important enough to count is another matter. But maybe the guy from Australia has a loose shoelace in Moira’s 4th life that he didn’t have in her 3rd. He ties his shoe, which means he’s at the gym for a minute longer than he was in Life 3. Not only does he avoid the car accident that kills him on the way to work, but he sees his future spouse in passing for the first time.
Even if he gets married to that person and has kids, etc., that’s not relevant for our story so it’s easier to hold his life constant and focus on Moira, Xavier, and the rest of the X-gang. But that doesn’t mean things aren’t changing in small (and not so small) ways all the time over the course of repeated lifetimes. Or am I missing some reason why each timeline has to be exactly the same (with allowances for Moira’s presence/actions)?
If the timeline resets and begins exactly as before, then nothing should change between lifetimes, unless Moira acts which causes the change. It is the same formula as Groundhog Day, just writ large. There are books like Replay by Ken Grimwood and The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by Ouspensky which follows this path across an entire lifetime over and over, rather than just one day repeating like Groundhog Day.
Everything should repeat exactly from life to life if it’s outside of Moira’s actions, but as I pointed out there is the observer effect of quantum theory. This posits that the existence of Moira can cause changes in the timeline between lives. So, the existence of Moira, even if she doesn’t act, could cause ripple effects where maybe the guy’s shoelace is untied in Life Three when it was not in Life One. That’s a question of metaphysics though.
“As a nice bonus, that would also tells us what ever happens if a second mutant with the same or a similar power ever turns up…”
Hm, I can’t recall seeing any speculation about plot possibilities involving Moira and Mimic, or Synch, or Rogue, or Hope Summers, but there’s fertile ground for speculation.
For maximum convolution, introduce a character with mutant power duplication who has *already* mimicked Moira’s powers at some point, then died, and experienced a one-time reset back to the start of his life, with all his memories, and no one the wiser, not even Moira. Not sure where that story would go, but it sure would add another horizontal line on the Lives/timelines chart.
I am waiting for the revelation that Sinister found out about Moira years ago and has her DNA. He’s been keeping clones of her for decades. Xavier’s dream kept succeeding, so he kept killing Moiras. It reverts the timeline back to when he first cloned the Moira, so his memories of everything up until that point are intact.
Coming next year, Moira M: The Thousand Lives of Sinister! The first issue is a double-sized spectacular that is nothing except timelines charts.
Going back to the limits of semi-believable mutant powers, it seems to me that a frequent take is that many such powers are psychic in nature, variations of the “mind over matter” concept.
That of course applies to telepathy, telekynesis and IMO to various forms of energy projection and particularly energy control, including Iceman’s, Magneto’s and Storm’s powers. I could even accept teleportation, time travel and dimension travel in that package.
My pet peeve there is not nearly as much about the nature of those powers as their intensity levels. This connects to the abuse of “Omega Level” ratings. Labeling an otherwise biological power “psychic” should not be a license for circunventing the laws of physics, and certainly not on a literal universal scope.
The way I see it (which has had on-panel support at least some times, such as in the story where Storm and Emma switched bodies) the reach of mutant powers should be limited by the stress that their bodies and minds can take.
That is why I have an easier time accepting (early) Nightcrawler than I have with current takes on Wolverine’s regeneration, Iceman fighting Asgardian Giants just because, Lila Cheney’s space travel powers, and the claim that Moira has somehow reset reality several times in the whole universe. Those may or may not be interesting powers and power levels, but even taking “mind over matter” for granted can’t make them believable as results of unusual biology.
At that point they aren’t just magic, they are cosmically significant magic.
That power level inflation also causes plot problems: if Iceman is now going on a whim after trouble with explicitly Thor-level foes and bullying them seemingly effortlessly, shouldn’t Thor be asking for his help at some point? How do presumably awesomely powerful foes such as Exodus and Apocalypse measure up to him now? Are the likes of Wolverine and Sabretooth any challenge to him?
Chaos theory says that even if everyone’s lives play out the same way each time unless affected by Moira, even the simplest action she makes would ripple out, causing changes that then cause further changes and so-on.
@Thom H, hey complain away. It would be wonderful if there were hard rules about what the different types of superhero could and couldn’t do. One could argue that constraints would just limit the stories that could be told, but in my experience the opposite is true.
As for Iceman, he is indeed a bit iffy. I believe his power was originally that his “body’s thermostat was busted”, and all the ice was an effect of his body being really cold. But you’re immediately getting into magic territory when he directs it so that ice ladders form. Magneto too, for that matter. But you can see where Lee or whoever it was, was coming from.
“If the timeline resets and begins exactly as before, then nothing should change… ”
This is how I’d like it to be, but I suppose if you accept that quantum mechanics are absolutely random then each reset would allow for anything and everything to happen differently – but with big changes being incredibly unlikely.
Surely the original 5 X-Men broke any kind of possibility of a ‘rule’ of mutant powers not controlling anything outside their body – Jean’s TK, and Iceman controlling moisture in the air (as well as Magneto and at least 2 of the Brotherhood).