Dead X-Men #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
DEAD X-MEN #2
“Army of Me”
Writer: Steve Foxe
Artists: Peter Nguyen, Bernard Chang & Guillermo Sanna
Colour artist: Frank Martiin
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. The X-Men surrounded by Ultron Sentinels.
Not only are three very different artists credited for this issue, but issue #1 also credited three artists, and only one (Bernard Chang) worked on both issues. Nonetheless, these are the originally solicited artists.
PAGES 2-4. The cyborg Moira arrives in her eighth life.
Last issue, the X-Men visited one of the abortive timelines created by Mr Sinister’s Moira Engine and met that world’s version of Moira MacTaggert, a cyborg who was building a weapon to “cut a path” back to her first life with a view to altering her entire history. The issue ended with her getting the last component that she needed (a shard of mysterium).
As confirmed on page 4, cyborg Moira has now arrived in her eighth life; this is the timeline where she allied with Magneto and helped him to conquer America. In this world, Magneto is apparently still based on his Island M base, but he doesn’t seem to be home right now. Instead, Moira gets to tear through:
- The Toad, Magneto’s regular lackey dating back to the Silver Age.
- Mentallo, a telepath whose mainstream counterpart has been a regular character in X-Men Red.
- Tower and Stinger, both members of Apocalypse’s Alliance of Evil alongside Frenzy (who is actually on the team for this series, but nothing seems to turn on that).
- Quill, who in the mainstream universe was a minor background character at the X-Men’s school – he was on Cyclops’ squad.
This version of Moira is keen to stress that she is not a machine, the implication being that she is very much not on board with Orchis’ AI contingent.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
PAGES 6-9. The X-Men press to be sent after Moira.
Rachel appears here during Rise of the Powers of X #2, where the attack on the No-Place is seen. That issue also clarifies that from the No-Place – which is outside the regular timeline, but anchored to it – Rachel is able to transport people from the White Hot Room to other timelines. She can’t, however, transport people back to the world where she’s anchored. The communications link between the No-Place and the White Hot Room is achieved using the link between Mother Righteous and her homunculus, as previously seen in Immortal X-Men.
According to Rise of the Powers of X, Professor X’s plan is actually to use the information gathered by the X-Men to go back in time and kill Moira, altering history so drastically as to avert the events that allow Enigma to become a Dominion. Rachel doesn’t know this, and believes that the plan is just to speak to Moira for some reason.
Rachel’s argument that Moira’s earlier lives might be impossible to reach doesn’t make much sense – she argues that the Engine timelines “branch off from ours”, while Moira’s past lives don’t. But they do – they all split off from the same shared history, at the point where her powers emerge. (Quite how this works with people travelling back in time to the past has never really been explained.) Maybe Rachel just means that they branch off at a much more distant point in the past. At any rate, she can do it.
The jewel in Prodigy’s chest is a shard of the M’Kraan Crystal that he picked up in an abortive Moira Engine timeline last issue. The X-Men left that timeline before Moira completed her weapon, because they’d completed their mission – hence, they don’t know that Moira is potentially travelling back through the timelines. Prodigy did say in that issue that she had “a full map of Moira’s past”. He seems to be telling Rachel that they should just go back in time and randomly hope to discover something in an entire universe, but that comment might suggest that he has something more concrete in mind.
PAGES 10-14. The X-Men arrive in Moira’s seventh life.
According to House of X #2, Moira spent her seventh life trying to wipe out the Trask family in order to prevent AI from being discovered. (Page 14 panel 1’s flashback is a deliberate echo of that page.)
It doesn’t work, because artificial intelligence turns out to be something that is inevitably discovered at a certain spot in human history. House of X #2 shows her being killed in that life by a quite familiar looking Sentinel, which had just come along anyway. In this world, however, the Sentinels all look like Avengers villain Ultron. We’ll see why shortly, but the implication is that cyborg Moira has already changed history – or at least that ripple effects from people travelling to these past timelines are causing problems.
PAGES 15-17. The X-Men encounter Emma Frost.
The local Emma Frost is apparently just a teacher, working at the Massachusetts Academy, but with no connection to the Hellfire Club or the X-Men. The flashback in the next scene suggests that in this version of the Academy, the students are openly mutants. Her dialogue here seems to suggest that her secondary mutation (turning to diamond) is a surprise to her, but in the next scene she seems to use it deliberately to shield her students, so that’s probably not how it was meant to come across.
Judging from the purple hair, the girl she’s holding in her arms is the local version of Catseye, of the original Hellions.
PAGE 18. Flashback: Cyborg Moira kills Henry Peter Gyrich.
Hank Pym, the creator of Ultron, has built a whole load of them as this world’s version of Sentinels – apparently prompted by the local Moira’s assassinations of the Trask family. Ironically, Hank is actually right to blame “radical mutant terrorism” for the murders of the Trask family (choice of words aside), despite Emma dismissing it as a “fringe conspiracy theory”.
Senator Shaffran, in the regular Marvel Universe, was Ricochet, a minor villain from Peter David and Larry Stroman’s X-Factor (he debuts in #72 and dies in #75).
Henry Peter Gyrich is the Marvel Universe’s all-purpose awful US government official, back in that more traditional role here.
PAGES 19-21. The X-Men decide that they have to go back and stop Moira from doing further damage.
As Prodigy points out, if the details of Moira’s memories are radically changed, the ripple effects in her future lives could be huge.
Prodigy’s claim that “This is our fault. We changed the path” is a little difficult to follow, since clearly things were already off the rails before they even arrived. I think he means that if they hadn’t interfered in the course of events last issue, then Moira wouldn’t have been able to complete her weapon, but it’s not very clear why that would be.
PAGE 22. Trailers. The Krakoan reads LONG WAY FROM HOME.
I think he means that if they hadn’t interfered in the course of events last issue, then Moira wouldn’t have been able to complete her weapon, but it’s not very clear why that would be.
The team’s arrival drew Moiraborg’s attention to the battle with Orbis, where Smasher shattered the M’Kraan/Mysterium construct, allowing Moiraborg to get a piece of it and complete her weapon.
I appreciate the gimmick that each timeline is drawn by a different artist (with Chang recurring because he does the No-Place/White Hot Room sequences).
The plan to let Rachel randomly send them to points in Moira’s past lives and hope that someone they meet knows how to stop Enigma is just idiotic. Even if Prodigy has an ulterior motive, the others look like idiots for agreeing to a plan that probably won’t produce any useful information:
“Ouch, we just saw Moira doing a striptease for Xavier. I’ll never be able to unsee that.”
“We just watched Moira teach kids algebra. That was the most boring hour of my life.”
“Hey, look Dazzler, the you of this world is fighting Boomerang.”
“She should be able to beat him easily.”
“I can’t believe she lost to Boomerang. Now she’s fighting Hammerhead. This should be easy.”
“I can’t believe she lost to Hammerhead TOO. How is this helping stop Enigma?”
The annoying thing is that there were ways to make it work. Either Rachel or Prodigy (through the Crystal) could have sensed Moiraborg traveling through time. Alternately, the Dead X-Men could have gone looking for Pym because of his expertise with AI and found out about Moiraborg. It’s the same problem with the Cable series- the characters set off on a side quest on a flimsy rationale and it turns out there IS an immediate danger that needs to be taken care of. The editors couldn’t be bothered to make the writers have the heroes learn about the immediate danger BEFORE going on their quests.
This issue seems to confirm what many of us have suspected. Pym seems to have been motivated to create the Ultron Sentinels because of fear of Moira’s terrorism. In Moira’s first timeline, she worked as a teacher for decades and never heard of mutants ,suggesting there was no significant mutant-human conflict in her first life. It seems like Moira’s own choices were what exacerbated mutant-human conflict in her later lives.
I’m not sure that totally makes sense. I was considering that as the point of the Pym/Ultron Sentinels revelation also, but the point of Moira’s actions in that lifetime was to stop the creation of the Sentinels which had always occurred in Moira’s earlier lives, even when her actions tried to help humanity (making the X-Men akin to the Avengers, moving the X-Men to an isolated island).
Pym creating the Sentinels may just be to prove Moira’s original assessment that AI is something that humanity discovered not created, and that Sentinels are a natural part of machine evolution. If the Trasks aren’t around to fulfill the inevitable, someone else will; why not Pym?
I do think the observation about Moira’s first life are accurate, as I’ve said many times.
I like the character interactions and the alternate universe/timeline stuff is fun, but I am having a hard time with all the hand-waving during Fall of X. How do Moira-timelines differ from alternate universes? Why can she revisit previous lives? Why do characters want to meet with Moira pre-powers? What is up with all these spaces outside of time and space, Marvel doesn’t appear to have an inter-universe space a la the Bleed? What is the goal of the Enigma, and why doesn’t he interfere with most plots? I feel a real disconnect from what’s going on in the comics themselves. The creative teams need to put plot mechanics on the page and spell out what’s going on when events get too cosmic and timeywimey. It doesn’t even have to be an intricate explanation(see: Resurrection of Magneto 2 and its use of the key from Giant-Sized Magneto). I don’t want a return to the pre-Krakoa status quo, just more grounded plots.
How do Moira’s timelines differ? Because they end at the point where Moira dies.
What is Enigma’s agenda? I think there may be a surprise reveal still to come with Enigma.
Sometimes the reader has to wait until a story ends to properly critique. Can I guarantee everything will be satisfactorily answered? Of course not. Some seeming plotholes may exist for a story reason though. We just have to wait.
I am wondering if the seeming ludicrousness of everything except Krakoa (the nation, itself) seemingly existing outside of time and space now might end up being explained by the Doug Ramsey clone. There was a hint in Rise #2 that Sinister’s Doug clone is a chimera…maybe using Legion’s DNA. Just a guess.
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I was under the impression that Rachel just meant the Moira engine timelines were based off of life 10 (not that she labels them as such) while the other timelines that Prodigy wants to go to are lives 1-9. Moot point anyway since she was able to send them.
We the readers know that the key to destroying the Dominion is the Phoenix based on the solicits. But to our knowledge, in-universe the only characters who know this are Enigma, Omega Sentinel, Nimrod, and robot Moira I believe. The last two are only because OS told them. So far the X-Men to stumble upon this knowledge, they would somehow have to end up in 10A somehow… but they don’t have access to this timeline, or am I far off here?
There’s a question as to how the mutants discovered this information in 10A. Obviously, Omega Sentinel wouldn’t reveal the information. Perhaps Moira is aware of this fact from her sixth life, rather than due to Omega Sentinel. Although, I’m pretty sure that the Librarian did not share that information with Moira…so, maybe not. There was fan conjecture that the data pages in Hickman’s comics were actually records kept by Doug Ramsey and Warlock based on what they discovered while spying on Krakoa (rather than simply the author speaking to the reader). If this is true, it would mean that Doug is aware of this fact, and most likely would have gained the information through spying on Moira.
@Rinoa, Chris V- the characters DO know that Mother Righteous tried to sacrifice the Phoenix to become a Dominion, though, so that might make them think the Phoenix is the answer. It’s likely that Mother Righteous knows that the Phoenix is a threat to Dominions and that’s one of the reasons she tried to kill Jean.
[…] X-MEN #2. (Annotations here.) Apparently Dead X-Men has already fulfilled its mission for Rise of the Powers of X, but […]
@Chris V: “How do Moira’s timelines differ? Because they end at the point where Moira dies.”
Right… and that already happened. We couldn’t be in life 10 if she hadn’t died and erased the timelines in lives 1-9. They’re all supposed to be Earth 616. Therefore, the lives have become alternate realities that just happen to have an endpoint. I find that annoying.
“What is Enigma’s agenda? I think there may be a surprise reveal still to come with Enigma.”
You are probably correct, but I have a hard time seeing the Enigma as such a threat when we haven’t seen why. It diminishes the sense of grandeur and menace. I didn’t have all the answers when, say, Age of Apocalypse began, but the dire circumstances were evident. Everything being business as usual, but something bad might have happened or happen later isn’t good enough.
ChrisV: I’m presuming that in life 10A when the topic of Dominions came up, Jean just knew instinctively that she could end them. The Phoenix itself presumably knows, and she and it have been in more of a sharing mood, off and on.
Is there any particular reason that both this issue and the first take their story titles from Björk songs?
I got the impression somewhere that Moira lives 1-9 had been completely overwritten, gone, inaccessible, Earth 616 redone instead of alternate timelines as Mike said above. I’m not sure where I got it, maybe something Hickman stated? But I didn’t doubt for a second that they’d end up like Age of Apocalypse and have characters popping in and out. Comics continuity won’t leave any meat on them bones.
Unlike AoA, I’m not sure all the creators are going to be on the same page as far as the ground rules of how everything works (because it’s a LOT more complicated that “Legion killed his dad”), so I expect a mess.
“I got the impression somewhere that Moira lives 1-9 had been completely overwritten, gone, inaccessible, Earth 616 redone instead of alternate timelines as Mike said above.”
Would that be an obstacle if you have time travel? Could you go back to before it got overwritten?
I guess this goes into the whole inherent contradiction in the concept of timelines being erased or otherwise changed if you think about it too hard. Change requires the passage of time; there’s a “before” and an “after.” How does that even make sense when we’re talking about things that are the same moments in time? How does one version of, say, 1993 come “after” another when they’re both 1993?
(I have no idea if any of what I said above makes sense, but it does in my head.)
@Karl_H: I suppose one can imagine the timeline being overwritten again and again as a form of archaeology – the buried layers are inaccessible and can’t normally be seen, but one can dig through to uncover fragments (which is what the Dead team are doing)
“I suppose one can imagine the timeline being overwritten again and again as a form of archaeology – the buried layers are inaccessible and can’t normally be seen, but one can dig through to uncover fragments (which is what the Dead team are doing)”
This also sort of accords with what Al Ewing was doing in his Defenders minis (every so often the cosmos ends and is reborn with one cosmic survivor from the previous iteration, as per the origin of Galactus, but it is possible to travel back in time far enough to visit those prior universes), and we know there’s at least some level of integration between those books and the cosmic corner of the X-books because he foreshadowed Enigma in them.
Joe I said: This also sort of accords with what Al Ewing was doing in his Defenders minis (every so often the cosmos ends and is reborn with one cosmic survivor from the previous iteration, as per the origin of Galactus, but it is possible to travel back in time far enough to visit those prior universes), and we know there’s at least some level of integration between those books and the cosmic corner of the X-books because he foreshadowed Enigma in them.
The Silver Surfer also managed to travel back to the prior cosmos — in Ewing’s definition, the Sixth, I think? — during the Dan Slott run. Note quite as far as his Defenders team making it back to the Third Cosmos, but still a precedent Ewing was probably consciously drawing on.
In relation to that, Ewing has also done some stuff with a being Slott introduced in that Silver Surfer run — the Queen of Nevers — that Ewing has since defined as the Eternity of the Fourth Cosmos, surviving into the current one as a being representing possibility, especially possible futures. And, of course, Ewing made a major villain out of the First Firmament, the First Cosmos gone mad that hates everything that came after it.
While I doubt the Queen of Nevers or the First Firmament are going to show up during Fall of X, Ewing’s work seems to be built on the idea that prior universes don’t entirely go away, and there are a lot of ways to either go back to them or find things and beings that have survived from them.
There’s also the Exterminators from that late arc in the Greg Pak/Marjorie Liu Astonishing X-Men, who supposedly predate the Multiverse, eat universes, and are the reason the Celestials crated the Death Seeds that make people into Apocalypses.
SAtretching even farther, there’s also the stuff from the 1990s X-Men animated series comics tie-in that shoed that the animated X-Men existing in the prior cosmos, which rebooted into the current universe after an old Dr. Strange villain called the Dweller-in-Darkness got hold of the M’Krann Crystal and ended that universe. Not sure if that is still considered canon or not, but a surviving version of the animated X-Men do have their own Earth in the multiverse, so….
Have we gotten a good explanation yet of how the Dominions or Moira’s timeline-reboot powers fit with the whole multiverse/What If? structure? Like, are there presumably alternate Earths where, say, Life 6 Moira’s timeline is still running because she somehow doesn’t die there or loses her X-gene?
I think the difference between traveling into a prior universe and traveling into Moira’s past lives is that the various universes are still a liner sequence. Galactus’s universe is destroyed, Galactus survives and has adventures in the current universe. So in that sense traveling back in time to Galactus’s universe and meeting Galactus’s relatives is no different then traveling back in time to Krypton and meeting Jor-El.
In contrast, Moira’s past lives are more of a Groundhog Day loop. Everything reboots and only Moira and the Dominions remember. Except that now we see that Rachel can send the Dead X-Men into Moira’s past lives. So if Rachel can do that, then why can’t Kang or Zarrko travel into Moira’s past lives? Or have they?
@ylu: the questions you posit are the same ones I wondered, and I don’t think any of the explanations make sense. I’m ok with comic booky handwaving, but not the undercooked yet overly complicated material surrounding the Dominions and Moira lives.
@Omar Karindu: “Have we gotten a good explanation yet of how the Dominions or Moira’s timeline-reboot powers fit with the whole multiverse/What If? structure? Like, are there presumably alternate Earths where, say, Life 6 Moira’s timeline is still running because she somehow doesn’t die there or loses her X-gene?”
I think you’re right that there are alternate universes in which Moira survives and presumably gets depowered or extends her life artificially. I’d rather that the Dead X-Men team traveled to those universes than overwritten lives.
As to why the issues are titled after Bjork songs… Possibly Maybe, Bjork is in the White Hot Room right now, watching what’s happening. [She’s] Seen It All from her Hidden Place, and she does not like this Human Behavior. She’ll emerge from her Cocoon with cosmic powers, which she’ll be Violently Happy to unleash on the Enigma, as… the Dark Swan!
As I’ve said before , its likely at somepoint that they’ll more or less retcon Moira’s universal-timeline-reset power as the solipistic delusions of an untrustworthy narrator , its too incredible to suspend disbelief , she’ll end UP just being a mutant with GroundHog-Day levels of personal timeline resets
Presumably there have been What Ifs and alternate timeline stories that have featured versions of Moira. Galactus only knows how those are supposed to work now.
(I’d guess the simplest explanation is those Moira’s didn’t have the same power Moira-616 has.)
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