Ms Marvel<\/em>). But this is the end of Orchis, 2019-2024.<\/p>\nIn many ways people are right to say that this is the strongest issue of Fall of the House of X<\/em>. The art feels more polished and epic than in earlier issues; the pieces that needed to be yanked into place were already there. Now, the book can go out with the X-Men defeating Orchis by restoring Omega Sentinel’s real personality, and defeating Nimrod. We can just get on with the fight scene. And Nimrod does look good here.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There are problems even on those terms. Why are the characters who know Omega Sentinel was possessed still treating her as a villain in need of redemption? It’s fine for her<\/em> to think that – it’s the obvious direction for her – but it just makes the X-Men look weirdly unreasonable. The art, even if it hits the right tone, is meant to be showing two simultaneous fights with Nimrod in different locations; but there’s no sense of place to either of them, because the backgrounds are all just fire and energy effects. And if you can read “The storm that Nimrod faced even wiped out the duplicates of himself he hid from combat” without groaning, you’re a better man than me.<\/p>\nAnd… seriously, that last one? The issue literally goes out of its way to hammer the question of “how do we beat Nimrod when he exists in multiple places at the same time.” And then its answer is “punch two of them hard enough at the same time and all the others switch off for some reason.” Really? We’re not even going to pay lip service to, I don’t know, a computer virus or something?<\/p>\n
In fact, when I read X-Men<\/em> #31 I thought the direction must be that Synch was using his powers to somehow get the disembodied Talon into Nimrod so as to stop her from dissolving altogether. Then you’d do Talon taking down Nimrod from the inside while the X-Men fought him from the outside, and she dies heroically destroying the body that’s keeping her alive, and… I mean, it’s not Shakespeare, but it’s better than this, right? Maybe something like that was the idea and it got cut for space. Who knows.<\/p>\nThere’s a wider problem here, though, which was locked in place years ago when the post-Hickman direction for Orchis was settled on. Hickman’s version of Orchis were a mirror of the X-Men, with very obvious parallels; there was a very obvious theme that the X-Men kept accidentally accelerating Orchis and Nimrod with everything they did to try and stop them. I can see why you’d have second thoughts about going in that direction, given the fan reaction to Krakoa. But once all of that was stripped out, Orchis were left as one-dimensional fascists, who just weren’t very interesting. Now, you can absolutely make the case that this is not a moment in American history for nuance, and fair enough. You can make that case for the humans in Orchis.<\/p>\n
But the AI contingent in Orchis are… what exactly? They’re in the odd position of being the power behind the throne in Fall of the House of X<\/em>, and Enigma’s dupes in Rise of the Power of X<\/em>. By sheer luck the X-books committed to AI as a major theme in 2019 before it was a big deal, but the plot isn’t really set up to engage with what people are saying about AI in 2024. They want to wipe out humanity and ascend to Dominion status because… reasons? Why do they even need to wipe out humanity? Was that ever explained? They can’t be a cosmic threat beause Enigma’s doing that, so is their role really anything more than to enable Orchis to self-destruct?<\/p>\nDid we start with the ambition and scale of House of X<\/em>, and wind up with a fight scene with a robot? Well, in this book, yes we did, because once you’ve decided that Orchis are just going to be one-dimensional bad guys, how else was it going to go? Still, the Enigma plot is going last, and that has more ambition and scale. Whether it can serve as a resolution to the broader themes of Krakoa seems more doubtful to me, but we’ll find out next week how it manages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This shouldn’t take long. X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #140. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Nick Roche, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. Well, if nothing else, we’ve reached the final boss phase. And a giant Selene made of blood is at least a strong image. But it’s pretty much just random fighting at this stage. Hey, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10119,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10114\/revisions\/10119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}