We don’t get many\u00a0stories that focus on Rachel Grey these days. \u00a0I suspect that’s because she\u00a0looks\u00a0increasingly\u00a0like she could have been productively put out to pasture some time ago. \u00a0When she was\u00a0added to the cast\u00a0back in the 80s, she was a high concept character – a refugee from a\u00a0nightmare future that the X-Men had already\u00a0averted,\u00a0where she had been\u00a0the daughter of the then-deceased Jean Grey, and thus the presumptive heir to the Phoenix.<\/p>\n
That gave her a\u00a0bunch of potential story directions, but\u00a0they’ve pretty much been followed through to their logical conclusions. \u00a0She came to terms with being the next Phoenix; her home world got a resolution in which the day was saved. \u00a0Her mother came back (and then died again).<\/p>\n
She could, I suppose, have settled into a\u00a0relatively straightforward role as a character who represented a reminder of what could happen if the X-Men ultimately lost. \u00a0Instead, she’s largely wound up\u00a0as a sporadically grumpy background character. \u00a0A decade or so back, Chris Claremont had a stab at\u00a0re-energising her by having the Shi’ar wipe out her family, in the hope that this would stop\u00a0the Phoenix from finding another host. \u00a0This wasn’t a very good idea, and it’s\u00a0rarely been mentioned since;\u00a0it\u00a0felt at the time\u00a0like a rather heavy handed attempt to\u00a0top up her angst quota, and it still does.<\/p>\n
But here we have Marc Guggenheim\u00a0trying a Rachel Grey story, and that long-dormant plot thread is dusted off again,\u00a0albeit perhaps in an attempt to provide some sort of closure to it. \u00a0“Exogenous” is certainly gunning for some sort of emotional weight,\u00a0but it feels like a story a good few drafts away from actually working.<\/p>\n
The basic\u00a0story involves\u00a0SWORD picking up Deathbird, who is inexplicably found floating outside\u00a0their space station. \u00a0SWORD call in the X-Men,\u00a0on the\u00a0perfectly reasonable basis that they have three telepaths and they know about the Shi’ar, so they ought to be able to find out why she’s there. \u00a0Examining her reveals that she’s pregnant, and that she’s escaped from people who were experimenting on her. \u00a0Well, that’s what\u00a0the dialogue says the telepaths uncover, at any rate; the actual art shows\u00a0a recap of her career, which seems like a weird storytelling breakdown.<\/p>\n
Two other groups show up in pursuit of Deathbird – the Providian Order, who were experimenting on her, and the Shi’ar, who’d like to sling her back in prison. \u00a0The Order turn out to be basically obsessed with developing crossbreeds between various alien races, apparently because this will somehow\u00a0result in a galactic population\u00a0where everyone has all the same talents. \u00a0As for the Shi’ar, they turn out to be led by the guy who recommended killing Rachel’s family in the first place,\u00a0which is obviously a Source Of Tension. \u00a0Fighting ensues.<\/p>\n
There are some reasonably good ideas in here\u00a0that feel like they could have been developed into something effective but the\u00a0actual result is a bit\u00a0half-formed. \u00a0Given that two pencillers and five inkers are credited for it – the styles of Harvey Tolibao and Dexter Soy mesh reasonably well but by the final issue there are some moments that looked decidedly rushed –\u00a0you have to wonder how tight the deadlines were on this one.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0story’s multiple plot strands tie together\u00a0coherently enough (though we never do get an explanation of why Deathbird was floating in space), but only in as much as the plot logic largely dovetails. \u00a0What we don’t get is\u00a0any real sense that all these threads have any particular theme in common.<\/p>\n
The core of the story, obviously, is Rachel’s reaction to D’Keth, who is a reasonably interesting character in his own right. \u00a0He\u00a0freely accepts that\u00a0killing the Grey family\u00a0only made sense\u00a0if\u00a0the Phoenix was indeed linked specifically to them,\u00a0and that subsequent events\u00a0have proved that he was wrong about that. \u00a0But, he argues, that’s all hindsight, and the decision was a fair one at the time given what he knew then and the scale of the threat. \u00a0So there’s an element of him recognising that he got it wrong, even if you couldn’t go quite as far as to say that he was apologetic; as such, he winds up as a more sympathetic character than might have been expected.<\/p>\n
There’s something in their interaction. \u00a0It\u00a0ends up, though, boiling down to a very familiar routine where Rachel doesn’t initially want to save his life, but eventually decides\u00a0to do it because it’s what her family would have wanted from her. \u00a0This is serviceable enough, but doesn’t feel like it really gets to grips with the full potential of the characters.<\/p>\n
But what does that tension have to do with anything else in the story? \u00a0Ultimately, nothing\u00a0that’s particularly well defined. \u00a0There’s an attempt to draw a parallel with Deathbird wanting revenge for the Providian Order\u00a0experimenting on her unborn child, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, and ends up feeling like a slightly strained parallel between two\u00a0vaguely similar plot points in unrelated stories. \u00a0And the Order themselves have nothing much to do with any of this. \u00a0The concept of a bunch of genetic Marxists trying to bring\u00a0the ultimate equality to the races of the universe\u00a0has a certain appeal (even if it’s obviously crackers), but they’re the main threat in the story and so far as Rachel’s arc is concerned, they might as well be random invaders. \u00a0Conceivably there’s supposed to be some sort of contrast\u00a0in the idea that Rachel cares about her family line while the Order are utterly uninterested in individual heritage – but again, it goes nowhere.<\/p>\n
Alongside this we have a subplot about an Order mole\u00a0within SWORD, which is largely just busy work to keep Storm, Jubilee and\u00a0Cecilia occupied. \u00a0That becomes painfully obvious\u00a0when the story racks up the artificial tension by suggesting that Storm has been left on the verge of death, only for her to be absolutely fine for the big climactic battle in the next issue. \u00a0Her injuries have served their function (by keeping her out of the way for\u00a0a couple of issues), so\u00a0now they can be ignored again.<\/p>\n
For all that,\u00a0I can’t quite shake the feeling that this all fitted together rather better in Guggenheim’s head than it does on the page. \u00a0The title, “Exogenous”, simply means something that\u00a0enters a system from outside, and you can\u00a0sort of see how it could be applied to most of the plot threads here –\u00a0Rachel is an outsider\u00a0come to our world, the Shi’ar intruded into her life, the mole is an intruder into SHIELD, and the Order are all about introducing new genetic material into existing species\u00a0– but for the life of me I don’t see where that parallel takes us in terms of the story actually being about anything. \u00a0The emotional centre of the story, after all, is about Rachel deciding whether\u00a0she can bring herself to help\u00a0her family’s killer, which is not really anything much to do with outsider-ness.<\/p>\n
So it doesn’t really work. \u00a0I do suspect\u00a0there was a big idea in here that got lost along the way – or perhaps it’s in there and\u00a0it’s just going over my head, though I doubt it. \u00a0It has its moments\u00a0as a five-issue runaround,\u00a0but it never gets much higher than that.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We don’t get many\u00a0stories that focus on Rachel Grey these days. \u00a0I suspect that’s because she\u00a0looks\u00a0increasingly\u00a0like she could have been productively put out to pasture some time ago. \u00a0When she was\u00a0added to the cast\u00a0back in the 80s, she was a high concept character – a refugee from a\u00a0nightmare future that the X-Men had already\u00a0averted,\u00a0where she […]<\/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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2785","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=2785"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2861,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2785\/revisions\/2861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}