{"id":3605,"date":"2016-11-25T22:43:26","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T22:43:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3605"},"modified":"2016-11-25T22:43:26","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T22:43:26","slug":"death-of-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3605","title":{"rendered":"Death of X"},"content":{"rendered":"

Death of X<\/em> is pretty wretched. \u00a0But at least it has\u00a0the decency to be revealingly wretched.<\/p>\n

When the Marvel Universe picked up again after\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>, we were told that\u00a0during the gap, Cyclops had got himself killed doing something fairly awful involving the Inhumans. \u00a0Death of X<\/em>\u00a0is tasked with filling in that gap, presumably to lay the groundwork for the upcoming\u00a0Inhumans vs X-Men<\/em> crossover\u00a0(though how much it really adds is debatable).<\/p>\n

The oddity of this crossover is that\u00a0given the raft of X-Men titles already announced for launch in the new year,\u00a0it rather gives the game away that the X-Men seem to be coming out ahead. \u00a0That doesn’t necessarily make the promotion a bad idea:\u00a0sometimes it’s no bad thing to send a clear message that the storyline is coming to a climax. \u00a0If people didn’t\u00a0like it until now, maybe at least they’ll show up to see it end.<\/p>\n

But regardless. \u00a0Death of X<\/em> is co-written by Jeff Lemire from\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em> and Charles Soule from the Inhumans books. \u00a0Both are talented writers,\u00a0even if\u00a0neither is doing their best work on those\u00a0franchises, let alone\u00a0the checklist that must have come with this title. \u00a0Artist Aaron Kuder is perfectly fine. \u00a0The problems here lie with the idea itself, far more than with the way it’s carried into practice.<\/p>\n

The series starts off doing a parallel structure where it cuts back and forth between\u00a0Cyclops’s X-Men team\u00a0discovering that the\u00a0Terrigen Mist is\u00a0lethal to mutants, and the Inhumans cheerfully celebrating the arrival of the Mists in\u00a0another city to\u00a0activate new\u00a0Inhumans. \u00a0(There were two separate clouds at this point;\u00a0Death of X<\/em> explains what happened to the other one.) \u00a0Obviously, this leads to Cyclops declaring war on the Inhumans.<\/p>\n

What actually stems from that, though? \u00a0Issue #2 has Storm\u00a0alerting Medusa to the issue, and Medusa at least giving a few orders to\u00a0try and have mutants evacuated from the path of the cloud. \u00a0So you’ve got both women trying to be vaguely co-operative while recognising\u00a0that there’s a potential conflict here they might not be able to avoid. \u00a0Then Cyclops makes a global announcement that the Mists are fatal to mutants and, hey, who knows, quite possibly fatal to humans too. \u00a0Which\u00a0he doesn’t\u00a0really<\/em> have any evidence for, but hey, the Inhumans\u00a0completely missed the problem with mutants, so it’s not a completely absurd point. \u00a0This brings us to one of the central problems with the whole set-up,\u00a0namely that the story asks us to accept that\u00a0people\u00a0had hitherto been pretty chilled about the whole idea of mutagenic clouds coming into their city and\u00a0possibly giving them superpowers\u00a0and changing what they look like. \u00a0I don’t believe for a second that people would be relaxed about that, no matter how “safe” the Mists were. \u00a0It’s\u00a0nonsense.<\/p>\n

At any rate. \u00a0This leads to Crystal\u00a0and her team\u00a0(the cast of\u00a0All-New Inhumans<\/em>)\u00a0trying to\u00a0keep the Terrigen\u00a0Cloud away from Madrid until the mutants can be evacuated, and\u00a0finally succeeding with\u00a0Storm’s help, because Yay Teamwork. \u00a0But then\u00a0Scott and Emma bring in Magneto to provide a distraction, and miscommunication ensues, and you know the drill. \u00a0Meanwhile, Scott’s group enlist Alchemy, of all people – you know, the kid who can change one substance into another, he was in a couple of issues of\u00a0Excalibur<\/em> back in the day – with the perfectly sensible plan of getting him to just change the Cloud into something else. \u00a0Which sounds like a solution, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

And\u00a0in issue #4… that’s what they do. \u00a0Alchemy does indeed simply destroy\u00a0one of the Clouds by turning it into\u00a0something harmless,\u00a0but\u00a0in doing so he gets infected and dies. \u00a0Scott then goes to confront the Inhumans and gives a little speech about how the ideas he represents will never die. \u00a0And then Black Bolt blasts him into oblivion. \u00a0For reasons which are wholly unclear, this is described later in the issue as “suicide”, when it seems pretty clearly like murder.<\/p>\n

Now, there’s a twist\u00a0at the end – spoilers! – which is that\u00a0Cyclops\u00a0didn’t actually do any of this. \u00a0In reality, he just dropped dead from the M-Pox in issue #1, and Emma has been using a telepathic illusion of him to motivate other characters and to allow him to make\u00a0the grand symbolic sacrifice that was denied him in real life. \u00a0In theory there’s\u00a0something to this idea, but\u00a0it’s patchily handled in the rest of\u00a0the series. \u00a0On a re-reading,\u00a0most scenes do indeed fit with this – Emma stands on the\u00a0edge of the group, and occasionally other characters say something that\u00a0indicates that they’ve twigged. \u00a0The scene of Scott’s pep talk to Alchemy is definitely improved on a re-read:\u00a0presumably Emma\/Scott wasn’t kidding when she said “I want you to make a choice of your own free will”, but she’s still manipulating him. \u00a0And yet then there are scenes in issue #3 where she’s talking to Scott\u00a0when they’re alone, and unless we’re supposed to think she’s having a breakdown – which is not otherwise implied –\u00a0that’s just odd.<\/p>\n

But never mind that. \u00a0The upshot of all this is that the dreadful, villainous thing that Scott did was, apparently… to get rid of one of the Terrigen Clouds in a way that harmed nobody.<\/p>\n

What?<\/p>\n

The fundamental problem here is that\u00a0“Scott” is plainly right about everything,\u00a0other than when\u00a0he’s stirring about the possibility of Terrigen killing normal humans too. \u00a0The Cloud is poisonous. \u00a0It kills people – never mind whether they’re mutants or not. \u00a0It’s a massive pollution problem. \u00a0If it can’t be contained – and nobody suggests that it can – then\u00a0eradicating it is\u00a0not just perfectly reasonable, it’s a moral imperative. \u00a0For this story to work – to work in the slightest – we need to accept that there’s some sort of moral grey area\u00a0here,\u00a0just because the Inhumans are quite keen on Terrigen and place great\u00a0cultural value on it. \u00a0At best that’s not a properly explored theme, but in any event, some serious heavy lifting would be required to persuade me that the\u00a0Inhumans have any\u00a0arguable case that their cultural sensitivities are deserving of\u00a0greater weight than\u00a0the fact that the Cloud kills\u00a0people.<\/em><\/p>\n

It occurs to me\u00a0that this\u00a0might be a story that went off the rails by cranking up the peril too far. \u00a0Suppose the Cloud didn’t kill mutants. \u00a0Suppose it just depowered them. \u00a0Then you’d\u00a0be able to tell a story\u00a0where the Cloud\u00a0is powering up Inhumans and powering down mutants,\u00a0and it’s a bit of a zero sum game. \u00a0The mutants are the only ones who lose out and even they just wind up as normal people again. \u00a0At that point maybe you’ve got a story about whether the mutant identity is worth fighting for,\u00a0or something on those lines. \u00a0Maybe.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0as it’s set up, the concept just\u00a0fails. \u00a0It’s a big cloud of poison gas. \u00a0Cyclops tries to get rid of it in a way that hurts nobody. \u00a0What’s the problem?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Death of X is pretty wretched. \u00a0But at least it has\u00a0the decency to be revealingly wretched. When the Marvel Universe picked up again after\u00a0Secret Wars, we were told that\u00a0during the gap, Cyclops had got himself killed doing something fairly awful involving the Inhumans. \u00a0Death of X\u00a0is tasked with filling in that gap, presumably to lay […]<\/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-3605","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\/3605","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=3605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3606,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3605\/revisions\/3606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}