{"id":5028,"date":"2020-01-15T22:06:37","date_gmt":"2020-01-15T22:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5028"},"modified":"2020-01-15T22:06:37","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T22:06:37","slug":"excalibur-5-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5028","title":{"rendered":"Excalibur #5 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGE 1 \/ COVER:<\/strong> Rogue in her bed of flowers, with Apocalypse standing over her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGE 2: <\/strong>Recap. For some reason the recap says that Brian is &#8220;possessed by an evil sorceress&#8221; &#8211; he&#8217;s been <em>corrupted<\/em> by Morgan le Fey, but he isn&#8217;t really <em>possessed<\/em> by her in the normal sense of that term. The recap also clarifies that Coven Akkaba were telling the truth last issue when they claimed that Shogo&#8217;s dragonfire had damaged the fabric of Otherworld and allowed the invasion of mythical creatures which we saw there. In the previous issue, it was at least ambiguous whether this was actually a Coven Akkaba plan that they were trying to blame on Betsy to undermine here; here, it&#8217;s much clearer that they&#8217;re taking advantage of a genuine collapse of the boundaries between Earth and Otherworld, brought about by Shogo thanks to the manipulations of Apocalypse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 3-4:<\/strong> <em>Rictor rescues Gambit.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we left this plot thread, the druids had decided that Rictor was just awesome, and thrown Gambit into a pit, with Rictor&#8217;s powers conveniently choosing that moment to play up. Being the hero, Rictor dives after Gambit and apparently uses one of the magic stones to power himself up so that he can save Gambit &#8211; maybe these things don&#8217;t require any magical training to use, or maybe Rictor really is just attuned to them in some way because of his earth-based powers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(It&#8217;s worth pointing out here that <em>Excalibur<\/em> seems to be writing Rictor as if his mutant power was something to do with controlling the earth. Traditionally it&#8217;s just been the ability to create destructive vibrations.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGE 5.<\/strong> Credits. This is &#8220;Verse V: Panic on the Streets of London.&#8221; We&#8217;ll come back to the title in a moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGE<\/strong> <strong>6. <\/strong><em>Rictor and Gambit return to the surface and discover the invading monsters.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;Panic on the streets of London&#8221;<\/strong> is the opening lyric from &#8220;Panic&#8221; by the Smiths, which was a number 11 hit in Britain in 1986. &#8220;Panic&#8221; is a song <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Panic_(The_Smiths_song)#Release_and_reception\">that was often accused of racism<\/a> even before Morrissey&#8217;s more recent comments on right wing politics (such as his endorsement of For Britain). Taking the song in isolation, I&#8217;ve never found that a particularly convincing reading of the song, which seems more like a general whinge about apolitical music as the opiate of the masses. Nonetheless, Morrissey is not an especially fashionable figure in Britain in 2020. I&#8217;m not entirely convinced I buy Gambit as a Smiths fan; I suspect he would always have seen Morrissey as painfully self-important and over-serious. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"400\" height=\"225\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wMykYSQaG_c\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>&#8220;My coven.&#8221;<\/strong> Apocalypse has unilaterally decided that Excalibur are his &#8220;coven&#8221; and simply expects everyone to play along with this. You might argue that he&#8217;s being unrealistic in ignoring Gambit&#8217;s attitude&#8230; but then in practice Gambit <em>has<\/em> been doing what he wished, at least on the surface. Rictor does query it, but is met with a promise to discuss it in &#8220;another of our long talks&#8221; &#8211; we still haven&#8217;t found out what was actually said in the first one, but Rictor emerged from it fairly convinced of Apocalypse&#8217;s agenda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apocalypse spells out pretty explicitly here that the invasion from Otherworld is all part of his plan, giving him the energy source he needs to create a permanent gate to Otherworld (which he apparently wants to colonise with mutants). He leaves just enough wiggle room for it to be a happy accident, but it&#8217;s fairly obvious even by this point that he&#8217;s engineered everything to date in order to undermine the barrier between Earth and Otherworld and enable him to establish his beach head there &#8211; though as we&#8217;ll see later, Gambit has screwed it up by accelerating the scheme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 7-8.<\/strong> <em>Captain Britain and Pete Wisdom take refuge in his flat, and he points her towards the gate to Krakoa.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Self-explanatory, really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 9-11.<\/strong> <em>Rogue has her own version of the dream with the fire dog.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We saw Captain Britain have a version of this dream in issue #2. Rogue appears not to remember anything after the point where she fell into a coma, so presumably she&#8217;s only just started dreaming as she begins to wake up. The dog is identified later in the issue; we&#8217;ll come back to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rogue sees what appears to be a stone circle where the stones are giant Sentinel heads. It&#8217;s presumably meant to echo both Stonehenge and the Easter Island statues. For whatever reason, standing in that circle and &#8220;listening&#8221; leads Rogue to realise that Apocalypse did something to her to put her into a coma in issue #1; an image of Apocalypse appears and tries to shut this line of thought down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 12-13.<\/strong> <em>Excalibur fight the monsters.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apocalypse acknowledges planning it all, which Gambit had already figured out; however, Gambit has messed things up by getting another telepath (represented by the fire dog) to wake Rogue. This is, apparently, a problem for Apocalypse because his plan depends on an alignment of something or other, and Gambit is rushing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 14-16.<\/strong> <em>Rogue&#8217;s dream continues.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The fire dog is identified as <strong>Prestige (Rachel Summers)<\/strong>, who was Phoenix in the original Excalibur. She changed her codename in <em>X-Men Gold<\/em>. Evidently Gambit asked her to wake up Rogue, and the implication of this scene is that Prestige has been working very carefully to do so without causing any damage, given whatever it is that Apocalypse did to her. Presumably, the fire represents her long-time connection with the Phoenix force, and the dog is to do with her role as a mutant-hunting Hound in her home timeline (though this is a rather more dignified dog). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The dog leads Rogue to a throne, which she sits on, causing two suns and two moons to appear in the sky. The significance of this is &#8211; kind of &#8211; explained on&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 17-18.<\/strong> Data pages, both extracts from Apocalypse&#8217;s grimoire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first is about Apocalypse&#8217;s mystic conjunction. It involves the sun and moon being present at the same time, together with &#8220;conduit arrival twins&#8221; (whatever that means), lined up to form an X across a circle (the X-Men&#8217;s symbol, in other words. The centre of this circle is apparently the &#8220;apex conduit&#8221;. The data page seems to indicate that the suns and moons are supposed somehow form a square (don&#8217;t they do that already&#8230;?), at which point the conduit will form a quincunx. A &#8220;quincunx&#8221; is just five things arranged in a cross. You know the pattern of dots that represents 5 on a dice? That&#8217;s a quincunx. It&#8217;s also an astrological term, where it&#8217;s to do with the angles between heavenly bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The second is a note by Apocalypse on astrology. Essentially, he says that astrology can&#8217;t be used to predict individual lives (which are far too trivial for the stars). He says that humanity has a romantic attachment to the night sky as a universal experience, despite the lack of community in the real human world. Apocalypse&#8217;s theory seems to be that a mutant &#8220;inherently seeks quincunx alignment for higher power formation&#8221;, i.e. mystical empowerment. He seems to believe that mutants are able to do this because they are better able to survive the experience, and (for some reason) have an &#8220;increased ability to exist as a communal organism with shared interest&#8221;. We&#8217;ve seen quite a bit about the supposed communal mutant society of Krakoa but relatively little so far to justify the claim that mutants are psychologically and socially different from humans in that way. They never have been before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The suggestion here seems to be that the X symbol somehow connects mutants with the quincunx pattern &#8211; either because it&#8217;s so associated with mutants as to give it some mystical significance, or because a pre-existing connection led mutants to adopt the symbol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 19-25.<\/strong> <em>Gambit and Apocalypse fight, and the ritual is seemingly completed by Rogue absorbing and killing Apocalypse.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Things continue to go wrong for Apocalypse, as Gambit keeps fighting him, and he realises that one of the crystals has already been used up by Rictor, leaving him short of power. Apocalypse apparently considers trying to get the power out of Gambit (though it&#8217;s not clear why that would work, since the energy didn&#8217;t go <em>into<\/em> Gambit, it was <em>expended<\/em> in the course of saving him). At any rate, Apocalypse apparently figures out that the sacrifice of any sufficiently old mutant energy will do, and that the way to complete the ritual and permanently open the gate to Otherworld is to let Rogue kill him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apocalypse <em>seems <\/em>to be saying that he engineered matters so that Rogue would use her powers to absorb the energy from the boundary between Earth and Otherworld, presumably making her a power source that he could use to complete his ritual. It&#8217;s unclear whether his &#8220;death&#8221; here is genuinely intended as a sacrifice for the benefit of mutant kind, or whether Apocalypse is simply reasoning that he will live on within Rogue (as Carol Danvers&#8217; persona did) &#8211; or maybe just that the Krakoans will restore him from back-up, so what the heck. In the short term, he does indeed seem to have been absorbed by Rogue, but the only symptom is a change in her appearance which she doesn&#8217;t notice (no mirrors being on hand).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rogue tells us that Apocalypse&#8217;s plan was to conquer Otherworld and make himself King, so it seems unlikely that we&#8217;ve seen the last of him (to put it midlly). Also, he&#8217;s on the cover of the next issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Note, by the way, that we don&#8217;t check in with Morgan, or Coven Akkaba, or the plot thread about Betsy as a controversial figure in Britain, at any point in this issue; the series is juggling an awful lot of plot threads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>PAGES 26-27.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: REVELATION.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. PAGE 1 \/ COVER: Rogue in her bed of flowers, with Apocalypse standing over her. PAGE 2: Recap. For some reason the recap says that Brian is &#8220;possessed by an evil sorceress&#8221; &#8211; he&#8217;s been corrupted by Morgan le Fey, but [&hellip;]<\/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":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028","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=5028"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5031,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5028\/revisions\/5031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}