As titles go, “Prestige Dark” is… not good. \u00a0It conjures up images of inexpensive aftershave, or perhaps pretentious late-night soft porn on obscure channels on the third screen of the Entertainment section. \u00a0The main hits on Google are for laminate flooring and rum. \u00a0None of these connotations seem likely to be intentional.<\/p>\n
For a while now, Marc Guggenheim has been building a subplot about Mesmero tinkering with Rachel’s mind. \u00a0This is where it comes to a head, but not in an especially satisfying way.<\/p>\n
Rachel is a refugee from a dystopian future where she was brainwashed into hunting down other mutants. \u00a0So doing a story where a mind-control villain takes her back there in her own mind, and uses her to go after the other X-Men, is pretty obvious, and has been done before. \u00a0In this two-parter, we do it again.<\/p>\n
In fact, the best thing in issue #31 is a subplot scene – a coda to the abortive wedding issue in which Peter leaves the team. \u00a0His thinking is that he’s probably not going to be focussing very well if he’s on a team with Kitty, and that seems fair enough. \u00a0It’s a suitably awkward sequence, and it works quite well.<\/p>\n
But after that, we’re into an extended Days of Future Past riff, with the current cast re-enacting a variation of the future segments from the old classic story. \u00a0This goes on for\u00a0fourteen pages<\/em>, and the pay off is a closing panel where Iceman and Pyro tell her she’s hallucinating. \u00a0The problems with this are glaringly obvious. \u00a0One, it’s fourteen pages on a nostalgia riff. \u00a0Two, Rachel isn’t even there for most of those fourteen pages – she can’t even be logically off panel until page 9 – so how does the idea of it being in her head even work? \u00a0And three, if it’s all an illusion, what do we care about any of it? \u00a0It’s wasted space, surely?<\/p>\n Well, not necessarily. \u00a0I guess you could do something clever about how Rachel sees the characters, but that doesn’t really seem to be here. \u00a0It doesn’t track with the original Days of Future Past, so it doesn’t seem to be anything she actually remembers from her home timeline. \u00a0I guess you\u00a0could<\/em> argue that the timeline has been changed, but even if you make that generous assumption – and it’s not how things have worked in the past – there’s still not much of interest going on here. \u00a0The main points to take from it are presumably that Peter and Kitty are a couple in this future, and so are Rachel and Kurt; but again, if it’s all an illusion, so what?<\/p>\n It’s a shame, as Pere P\u00e9rez does a good job on art of echoing the style of the original story and homaging the key moments. \u00a0His flashback material is actually the highlight of his work here; his present day scenes are fine but a bit blander, as if the DOFP timeline gives him more visual hooks to work with.<\/p>\n Issue #32 is a bit of a mess. \u00a0Storm and Illyana have a reasonable little scene with Illyana feeling guilty about wrecking the wedding. \u00a0Iceman and the new Pyro are established as a potential couple, which seems a bit thematically forced, but could maybe work once Simon gets fleshed out a bit further. \u00a0Given Bobby’s mentor role for the newbie, it’s a relationship that’s blatantly problematic, but that’s potential story material, so fine. \u00a0But then the issue spends most of its time re-telling what was going on in the previous issue from the perspective of the X-Men, because there’s really not much left to do by the time you reach the cliffhanger. \u00a0Cyclops gives a little speech talking Rachel down, she’s very angry, she turns on Mesmero, the end.<\/p>\n The story at least avoids the pat result of having Rachel feel that she’s vanquished her hang-ups about her past, and leaves us with her feeling unsure of herself. \u00a0But it’s a weak couple of issues considering how long Guggenheim has spent building it up. \u00a0Stories that work better as teases than they do in execution have been something of a recurring problem for this series, and this is an example.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As titles go, “Prestige Dark” is… not good. \u00a0It conjures up images of inexpensive aftershave, or perhaps pretentious late-night soft porn on obscure channels on the third screen of the Entertainment section. \u00a0The main hits on Google are for laminate flooring and rum. \u00a0None of these connotations seem likely to be intentional. For a while […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4219","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\/4219","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=4219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4220,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4219\/revisions\/4220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}