Fall of the House of X #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #3
“The X Deaths of Dr Stasis”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artists: Lucas Werneck & Jethro Morales
Colourist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Wolverine pins down a terrified Dr Stasis. Wolverine doesn’t actually appear in this issue.
PAGES 2-4. Orchis attack the Juggernaut.
Last issue, the Juggernaut rescued Krakoa from Orchis. God knows how he ended up in the middle of a desert.
“It’s said that ‘nothing’ can stop the Juggernaut, but that’s not true.” Even at full power, the Juggernaut was in practice stopped on a fairly regular basis, but following his most recent re-powering (in Juggernaut vol 3 #4) he seems to be just very big and strong, as opposed to literally unstoppable. In X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023, he did survive what seemed to be a devastatingly lethal attack.
“[T]he discarded adamantium skeleton of Weapon X”. As seen in Inferno, Orchis wound up with a bunch of adamantium skeletons from dead Wolverines after a series of failed attacks by X-Force. We’ve seen them repurposing them as weapons in X-Men and X-Force.
It’s not entirely clear why the threat to Krakoa is being presented as an existential matter for mutants by the narrator – particularly since even Cyclops doesn’t seem to think it’s a top priority in the next scene – but presumably the point is that they need Krakoa to re-build their island nation.
These particular Orchis thugs are still looking surprisingly confident, given that the human side of the organisation has been presented as on the verge of collapse in other stories. But maybe word just hasn’t reached these guys yet.
PAGES 5-7. Magik rescues Cyclops and Alia Gregor.
At the end of the previous issue, Alia Gregor used an EMP to knock out Omega Sentinel and prevent her from executing Cyclops. She then asked Cyclops to ally with her against the AI contingent within Orchis (despite her dialogue here).
“The X-Men are here for everyone.” Cyclops rightly sees Orchis as the more pressing threat, but more to the point, his whole vision for the X-Men in their Treehouse era was that he wanted them to be heroes for humans as well as mutants.
Apparently, Orchis took the stitches out of Cyclops’ eyes at some point and they just got better. Why? Mind you, I’m not saying I wanted to see any more of that angle.
Magik rejoined the team in X-Men #32. Again, it’s not exactly spelled out here, but Orchis shut down her powers in Hellfire Gala precisely because her high-power teleporting ability was such a problem for them to deal with; now that she’s been repowered in X-Men #32, she immediately gets Cyclops out of there.
PAGE 8. Recap and credits. The story title, “The X Deaths of Dr Stasis”, seems to be referencing X Deaths of Wolverine, though it has no apparent connection to the story.
PAGE 9. Apocalypse addresses the people of Arakko.
X-Men Red ended with Genesis’ army being defeated, and Arakko being more or less restored to normal. In panel 1, the people on the left hand side are generics. The group on the right includes:
- Redroot, the red character two to the right of Apocalypse.
- Bei, three places further along the line in the red and black armour.
- Kobak, the armadillo-type guy.
- Jon Ironfire, facing us with the horns.
- Syzya, the purple woman near the front.
- Khora, standing to her left.
Woofer is one of the mutants who was exiled to Arakko by Orchis in the aftermath of the Hellfire Gala. Shadowkat assigned him to catalogue the mutants on Arakko (presumably just the exiled ones, since she can’t have intended him to do a planetary census) in X-Men #25.
Storm is absent because she’s busy in the Resurrection of Magneto miniseries. Apocalypse gives an evasive answer about where she is, possibly alluding to the recurring theme in Al Ewing’s stories that Storm never seems to be where she’s most needed.
PAGES 10-12. Manifold, Rogue and Gambit arrive to collect the Arakkii mutants.
Rogue and Gambit woke Manifold last issue, and evidently this is (or is part of) the role that Destiny wanted to set him aside for.
The Arakko version of the S.W.O.R.D. space station – normally referred to as the Keep – has been in working order throughout “Fall of X”. Presumably it’s just easier for Manifold to get everyone on the station and move the whole thing than it is for him to shunt a large number of individuals.
Not sure Apocalypse’s battle cry of “For mutant dominion!” is entirely on brand for the “liberation” angle.
PAGE 13. Data page, kind of. This is a combination of two speeches by Destiny. The line “So much death and destruction, and it all culminates with a giant X in the heavens, with the fall of the Krakoans”, comes from X-Men: Hellfire Gala #1, just as Destiny is walking through the gates. Rogue wasn’t actually there to hear it. Apparently, the crossed space stations fulfil this.
The rest comes from X-Men #24 (the issue before the Gala), where Rogue asks Destiny to tell her what she sees in the future, and gets this speech in return. The “Jovian bolt from the heavens” is presumably Nimrod’s attack at the Hellfire Gala. The “false captain” is presumably the Captain Krakoa impostor from Uncanny Avengers. None of the rest really makes much sense in terms of what’s on the page, but might well relate to dropped plots. The obvious candidates for the white and black kings would seem to be Iron Man and the Kingpin, but they haven’t really been fighting. The “fool who speaks the truth” is probably Deadpool, and the Free Comic Book Day one-shot set up a story where Orchis went after his family, which was trailed as continuing in Uncanny Avengers. And then nothing happened.
PAGE 14. Iron Man tells Emma and Kate about Firestar’s distress call.
Firestar was taken hostage by Dr Stasis last issue when he fled Orchis.
PAGES 15-16. Dr Stasis is defeated.
Well, that was simple.
PAGE 17. Synch rescues Firestar.
Um, if Stasis is on the run from Orchis, why is Firestar still being guarded by Orchis thugs? Maybe he doesn’t really care about holding on to her – he just needs to keep her hidden long enough to be able to leverage her absence. It doesn’t work, anyway.
PAGES 18-21. Emma kills Dr Stasis, and Firestar destroys the body.
Ah, one of these scenes that Gerry Duggan seems to like writing.
Emma and Firestar’s bonding moment at the end is evidently intended to suggest that they’ve reconciled after Emma’s abuse of Firestar in the Firestar miniseries back in the 80s.
PAGES 22-26. Cyclops and Alia return to the Summers House.
Sentinel City has been mentioned in the last couple of issues; despite the name, it’s apparently a weapon designed to wipe out life on Earth and leave it to the AIs. (Why, if they’re about to ascend to Dominion status anyway?)
Apparently the Summers House was converted into a communication station with Sentinel City, presumably to keep the details hidden from the human members of Orchis.
Alia still sees Nimrod as at least connected to her late husband, and gets duly killed.
PAGE 27. Another data page, just recapping how various characters perceived Orchis as a vehicle for their own agendas. The only person who doesn’t have a hidden agenda is Killian Devo, and we know he was effectively brainwashed by Omega Sentinel to front the organisation.
PAGE 28. Trailers. The Krakoan reads RISE OF THE POWERS OF X.
Sooooo… did Duggan get confused and think he was writing Sinister rather than Stasis?
This stinker of a series just keeps getting worse. Why are things happening? Tactical genius Cyclops great plan is to go against Nimrod alone, and is shocked when Gregor is killed? No one new to expect Manifold, except Rogue, so is Stark’s ships were a red-herring than how did any of the Arakki’s plan on getting to Earth? And we’re supposed to just accept that the mutants will safely descend to Earth in space suits, even those who can’t fly and aren’t invulnerable? To say nothing of all the haphazard characterization, dropped plots, and rushed art. Still hoping Gillen’s series will give the Krakoan Age a proper send off, but this series should be an embarrassment to the x-office.
Re:Sentinel City-In Rise of the Powers of X #1, we see a future ten years from the present where Nimrod and Omega Sentinel are preparing for Ascension. So, apparently, it will take time for them to contact the Phalanx and/or a Dominion. I guess this is just their plan in this version of Life 10, to just get rid of humanity now before preparing for Ascension.
I burst out laughing for a moment on page 12, then a smaller laugh at 14. So everyone just jumps out of the Keep to dive down through re-entry to Earth? Apocalypse and Rogue, sure, but otherwise they forgot to mention the mumble mumble magic shield enabling them to do this. Too bad Jean Grey didn’t just tell everyone to jump out of the spaceship and dive home, she never would have needed the Phoenix in the first place.
Then two pages later we have the two swords looming over everyone and.. honestly I don’t know if they’re meant to be falling to Earth as well? There’s no way they’re that big without going through re-entry too, but they aren’t drawn with any signs of that.
In general that’s my feel for the entire issue. Lots of things happen and they often don’t make a lot of sense.
Kate and Emma happen to just be flying in to help Juggernaut, get overhead, and then fly off instead to get Stasis? Hope that the Orchis humans surrendered immediately instead of finishing off Krakoa as a last desperate victory.
Stasis has a psi-blocker? Good news, Kate somehow intuited that and phased it out of his head in the middle of hitting him.
Juggernaut is in some desert, Kate and Emma fly over him, then quickly instead divert to Stasis “in the middle of nowhere”. The pacing implies they got there fast. Okay, it’s a deserty sort of nowhere, they’re in a plane. But then Firestar is freed on the waters outside of apparent NYC, and is able to fly over to them in what the text says is just a few minutes.
This is all bad action movie plotting, with an aim to big bold scenes and not bothering to fill in the needed details. And as the ending to the Krakoan era, that just sucks.
Re: the cover- to be fair, Stasis IS killed by an illusionary Wolverine in one sequence.
Orchis had a bomb implanted in Scott that would explode if he tried to escape in issue 28. Yet there’s no trace of it this issue. Did they remove it? Why?
I’m not buying Scott’s claim that he could have escaped any time. The X-Men just got access to Magik’s and Manifold’s teleportation powers back. So if Scott managed to escape Orchis’s custody before that. he’d be a blind man in the middle of Paris.
I agree with Joseph- if Rogue and Gambit freeing Manifold and Polaris restoring Magik’s teleportation wasn’t part of the plan, then how did the mutants plan on getting from Mars to Earth? And for that matter, how did Sunspot get from Mars to Earth in the X-Men Unlimited series, since that takes place before this issue? Did Lactua send him? If he did, then why couldn’t Lactua transport everyone?
I think the “Jovian bolt from the heavens” was Polaris attacking in Knowhere in issue 2- she came from JUPITER. The “death of the Red Queen” was Kate abandoning her Red Queen identity. The “kings clashing in black and white” might have been SHAW and the Kingpin, since when we last saw Shaw he was plotting to take the Hellfire Club back from the Kingpin.
Re: the stars ripped in half- In Uncanny Avengers 5, Grant Rogers rips an American flag in half. The American flag is called the Stars and Stripes.
Agreed that the “fool who speaks the truth” was supposed to be Deadpool but I think Duggan is trying to shoehorn Alia Gregor into that role in this issue.
@Jon R- not only that but for some reason Kate couldn’t phase the nanites in Illyana in X-Men 32 but now has no problem phasing the psi-blocker.
The scene with Emma, Kate, Stasis and Firestar didn’t work, largely because Duggan doesn’t understand Emma”s and Firestar’s relationship. Emma tried for years to turn Firestar into an assassin but Firestar refused to kill. At the end Firestar had Emma at her mercy and could have easily killed the pathetic creature that Emma was at that point but chose not to.
So of course, Duggan manages to completely screw this up. First, he has Firestar ask the X-Men to punch [Stasis’s} ticket. Then he has Emma kill Stasis without reflecting on the irony that Emma only got to be a hero because Firestar showed her mercy.
The wife Stasis speaks of is Mother Righteous.
It’s not clear if Stasis is really dead. There was a plot with him forming an alliance with Orbis Stellaris against Mother Righteous that’s supposed to be resolved in next week’s X-Men Forever. But it’s not clear if that sequence takes place before his death in this issue. It would be consistent with how well coordinated this crossover is if Stasis got killed the week before the plot with him, Stellaris and Mother Righteous was resolved.
Stasis is supposed to be a mad geneticist obsessed with post humanism but you’d never know that from his appearances in Fall of the House of X.
When Emma says that the X-Men won bexause of Angelica, she means that Angelica told Feilong the X-Men were attacking in Australia which enabled them to draw most of the Sentinels into the Outback where Tony’s Sentinel Buster armor took care of them.
Alia Gregor being killed seems to confirm that the author of the Fall of the House of X data pages we’ve seen so far is a repentant Moira, since the author knew a lot of inside information about Orchis.
To back up what Chris V said, in Rise of the Powers of X 2, which takes place during the X-Men;s assault on Orchis, Nimrod tells Moira that she’ll be part of a Dominion in ten years. So Nimrod seemed to be saying that they needed time to contact the Dominion.
So I guess next issue is where Rise of Powers of X and Fall of the House of X’s plots intersect, since Moira’s on the cover and Enigma just told Moira that he wins and not Nimrod and Omega Sentinel.
I feel like Duggan’s part of things, like so much of the entire Fall of X, is a real mess in a lot of different ways, and this really isn’t helping matters.
Of course Alia Gregor gets brutally murdered before she can actually develop into an interesting and complicated character while engaging in her potential redemption arc.
Of course Emma kills Stasis horribly and then Firestar incinerates the body. Because while Emma’s totally within character to kill someone… Angelica really isn’t that sort of person.
Except this is the age of Krakoa where everyone’s down for casual killin’.
I guess Dr. Stasis isn’t as invulnerable as Diamond Sinister, who I have seen shot through with holes plenty times without seeming like he had internal organs at all.
@The Other Michael: I don’t like casual killing in super-hero comics. Killing as a last resort, because one has no choice, in a war… okay. I understand that circumstances lead to such ends. But killing a helpless foe, no matter how evil they are, rubs me the wrong way.
I absolutely hate when characters resort to torture, too. Did Stasis do horrible things? Sure. Torturing him only makes the heroes worse, and does not produce any catharsis in relation to his actions. Torture is evil, and diminishes any character who engages in it.
I liked this book more than most. But I do have to call a couple things out:
1. When Magik tells Cyclops “If it needs doing, then it will be done,” I believe that was a callback to HoX, where Cyclops agrees to the suicide mission to the Forge. I’d have to double check the line, but if so… I like it.
2. When Magik throws a spare visor to Cyclops, how does he catch it? It should just hit him in the chest and then she says “Oh, right, oops” or maybe have Gregor catch it and hand it to him on solidarity. Not a huge art whiff, but it could have been a cooler moment.
@Michael: In keeping with the fact that Duggan can’t seem to distinguish between the character he created and Gillen’s interpretation of Sinister (down to eye color and the scene of Emma humiliating him while he grovels in defeat, which is of course lifted from the much better version in Sins of Sinister), I wouldn’t be surprised if Stasis also has backup clones.
It would have been better if Stasis had bragged about his blocker only for Kate to grab it in mid-sentence.
I could write something about Emma and Angelica being brought together by the healing power of violence, but honestly why bother? This is pretty mediocre.
I can get behind killing when there’s no other choice, and obviously the X-Men have been set up to consider this a time of war, and certainly I can’t object to killing fascists…
But in the past, the willingness to do certain things is what set apart Wolverine, Bishop, Cable, and X-Force from the others.
When Piotr killed Riptide during the Mutant Massacre, it was a genuinely chilling moment to see him pushed so far.
When Storm fought Callisto for leadership of the Morlocks, and later ripped out Marrow’s heart, those were character-defining moments that showed her own ability to do drastic things.
But when you have Piotr flinging Logan at people and cracking jokes about what to call this move, when you have Kitty using her phasing to brutally maim and murder people, when you have Polaris unleashing the Brood upon a space station full of people, when you have Firestar incinerating with intent to kill, when Kurt is teleporting people into the depths of space…
All of a sudden, they all feel equally edgy and I doubt many writers will take the time later to have them address the toll killing should take on the less experienced characters.
And now I hope Stasis isn’t dead-dead simply because it was such a lousy way to go.
At some point I thought Orchis would be worthy of a mini, or maybe a couple of one-shots exploring the petals, their figureheads, their contrasting philosophies and power struggles. This flew out the wibdow when they were turned into a bunch of one dimensional fascists. Sigh.
Stasis really suffered from the wildly differing characterizations – unfortunately he gets to die as Duggan’s Diet Sinister and not as Gillen’s way more interesting version. As for Dr Gregor, she gets the mother of all shaggy dog stories – her ending being unsatisfaying by design doesn’t make it better. M.O.D.O.K. never amounted to more than a redundantly wacky guest member.
I expect Devo’s and Feilong’s resolutions to be equally unfulfilling, and really hope that Gillen is the one to get the final word on Moira.
My take on Cyclops’ stitched-up eyes was that he blew the stiches out with the force of his optic blast and he could have done that at any time but didn’t because of the reasons (like the other ‘reasons’ he did things in this issue I guess?).
Doesn’t really add up but that’s how I read that scene. This book’s still inferior to ROPOX.
I was shocked to find out Stasis was Duggan’s idea first and then developed in the four suits sinister stuff. I would’ve assumed it was the other way around and Duggan checked out when coming up with his sinister. Considering how not only he didn’t participate in any part of that metaplot. But Stasis was always a nothing burger of a character who I only found interesting when Gillen was writing him.
I think I called last issue “amateurish”. This issue can only aspire to amateurish. I genuinely don’t understand how this goes through multiple levels of creative and editorial and still hits the shelves like this.
Cyclops catching the visor actually does feel like an art mistake to me, in light of the earlier moment where he says he memorized the layout of the place to explain how he’s walking around blind without any issue. It’s a really weird beat that’s well explained by the artist forgetting he can’t see and Duggan covering it with dialogue.
Oh yeah, and this one is just me nit-picking but “I thought you were blind without the ruby-quartz visor?” does not actually seem like the question to ask in that situation. He’s been wearing a big shiny obvious blindfold. That’s the thing that’s been keeping him from seeing. “How are you seeing with that thing on?” is a more natural question.
(Though the reason is probably to set up Magik bringing him his actual visor. That’s valid, but it’s still clunky.)
All I can say about this whole arc is, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows….” (bwah ha ha ha)
I think Duggan has defaulted to just writing for cool moments. Why teleport the Keep into space and force everyone to jump out in space suits when Manifold can land the thing on a planet? Because it’s cool. Why did Kate sneak-yank Stasis’s psi-blocker out when she shouldn’t even know about it? Because “Aha, I already did it” s cool. Why does Stasis even have an anti-telepathy brain implant when the entire Firestar plot required him to not have one? Because cool. Why is the lighthouse keeper around when it was huge plot point that Kingpin was the only human witness? Because Lockheed saving him is cool.
Well, cool to Duggan at least. I don’t think I agree.
I bought this just because I saw Gregor would be deleted by Nimrod, but it wasn’t worth – the plot is very convoluted and there are a million things happening all at once (All of those discarded adamantium skeletons reminded me of the Mila Jovovich corpse piles that were often showed in those awful Resident Evil films)
Scott is also supposed to be paralyzed after being thrown from the Treehouse, saying he couldn’t feel his legs.
@Michael: Sunspot said he borrowed tech from Cable.
Sinister himself doesn’t have his old powers. He said he stopped altering his body.
@Mike Loughlin: Killing a helpless opponent was a big red line for Claremont. In the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine series, Wolverine was going to kill her if she crossed it. Duggan on the other hand rewrote it so Ogun won, as part of his hate porn.
@The Other Michael: Who decides who’s a fascist? Putin claims he’s killing fascists in Ukraine. Orchis doesn’t even qualify since they aren’t nationalists.
@neutrino- It was said in X-Men Red that the tech stopped working, which is why they couldn’t get reinforcements from Earth and why Kitty had to use the gates to contact Mars.
And BTW, I’m a different Michael than the Michael that talked about Sinister.
[…] OF THE HOUSE OF X #3. (Annotations here.) Well. I mean, I’ve read worse. But it’s not good, and as an anchor series paying off a […]