New X-Men: "Here Comes Tomorrow" (#151-154)

“Planet X” is on one level a story about how it’s impossible to truly change these corporate icon superhero characters. Morrison can spin the X-Men into a totally different world, one where they’re not even fighting people, they’re just trying to change the world. But, eventually, things will tend back towards the norm, if he didn’t do it, the writer after him would have had them fighting Magneto once again, back as a superhero team.

However, I think the amount of regression in “Planet X” can be a bit overemphasized by some fans. I’d argue it’s one last confrontation with the old paradigm, by defeating Magneto there, they’re proving once and for all that his way doesn’t work, and ensuring the continuation of a new paradigm. In the context of the story itself, the end of the arc isn’t telling us the X-Men are doomed to perpetually fight Magneto, it’s telling us that Magneto has been so utterly defeated he can never really threaten what Charles has built. The immediate follow up to Morrison’s X-Men may have been Joss Whedon putting them back in spandex and battling orcs, but in my mind, the motley team surrounding Xavier in that final panel goes on to change the world and keep things evolving.

But, there’s one last foe to battle, and that’s the destructive force of war itself, Sublime! The first time I read “Here Comes Tomorrow,” it soared over my head, much like Volume III of The Invisibles, I struggled to process everything that was happening, even as I loved the essence of the story, and the surreal-emotional finale. It reminds me a lot of what Morrison did with “Glitterdammerung!” at the end of The Invisibles, flinging us into a future world with different rules and strange happenings to provide an emotional closure and answer some lingering questions about the run as a whole. It’s a challenging arc, but on this reread, it’s one of, if not the, best arcs in the entire run.

New X-Men on the whole gets a lot of criticism for its artistic inconsistency. And, the first year or so on the book really is crippled by some awful Kordey fill ins that don’t mesh well at all with what Quitely was doing. But, from “Riot at Xavier’s” on, this book has a series of artists who perfectly complement what Grant is doing, and give each story its own unique feel. Obviously it would have been cool to see Quitely do the whole run, but I don’t know if even he could have topped the cumulative coolness of having a perfectly chosen artist for each story. It reminds me of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, where each track has a different superstar producer and a unique feel. Because everyone’s just coming in for one arc, they don’t get worn down, and Jiminez, Bachalo and Silvestri all produce career best art. I can’t say for sure, but I think the success of the rotating art teams on this book probably inspired the similar diversity of styles on Seven Soldiers. And, in each case, the artist gives the arc a distinct flavor that works really well.

Silverstri presided over some of Claremont’s best stories in the 80s, including the fantastic “Fall of the Mutants” crossover and the over the top insanity of “Inferno.” I liked his art on those issues, but he looks a lot better with today’s coloring and reprinting technologies. I really wish that Marvel would get their act together and get Claremont’s entire X-Men run out in omnibus format, I got the first volume a while back, and had no idea that the coloring on those issues was actually pretty good. It’s just the reproduction on the single issues was awful, and didn’t display the art to its best advantage. Here, Silverstri is tasked with building an entire world and introducing an entirely new cast. He does a fantastic job, giving everything a kind of dirty, reckless future feel. It’s alien in a way that very few other comics are. This may not be our future, but it’s definitely not the world today.

The story itself has a couple of functions. On one level, it’s just about Morrison doing his take on one of the quintessential X-Men riffs, the dystopian future that could be. Morrison’s a bit more ambitious than most writers of this kind of story, building a world that’s totally credible, and not just about killing off the characters we know. I love “Days of Future Past,” but it has produced a lot of bad stories in its wake. Morrison’s gang here is enjoyable enough that it transcends the shock value of a future story and becomes a valid world in its own right.

The other, more significant level of things is the final battle between the two essential forces that have been in conflict throughout the entire run, evolution and stagnation, the Phoenix force versus Sublime. Or you could view the entire thing as a Mulholland Dr./Bardo like passage to death, in which Jean constructs this entire world as a way of coming to terms with her own passage to death, to come to terms with Scott and Emma getting together. It all works equally well, and that’s part of the beauty of the storyline, it’s a frantic mess of ideas that leaves room for interpretation while still telling an entertaining surface level story.

We open 150 years in the future, where Tom Skylark is under attack from a band of genetically modified Nightcrawlers. I like the replacement of the traditional foes in this scenario, sentinels, with a genetic creation. It fits more with the X-Men world and ties in with the concept that underlies Sublime. Let me delve a bit deeper into Sublime first off, as much of the story hinges on it. The way I see it, evolution is about adaptation, organisms modifying themselves to survive better. The ultimate destiny of evolution would be to transcend death and live forever in peace. Sublime is the genetic death wish, the drive to destroy ourselves and perpetuate old conflicts.

Virtually all of the philosophy in Grant’s works can be traced back to The Invisibles. Sublime is the ‘war,’ the us vs. them posturing that makes King Mob or Sir Miles want to destroy his enemies. It’s the war that prevents us from evolving into something better. The counterpart of Sublime is the Phoenix Force, which is evolution incarnate, burning away that which doesn’t work and leaving something that’s stronger and better. The Phoenix force is the rescue mission, and the early part of Grant’s run is all about the Phoenix in ascendance, the X-Men transcending the wars that have doomed them in the past and becoming something new and better.

The latter part of the run, specifically the battles with Quentin Quire and Magneto are about sublime in ascendance, the tendency to destroy combating the positive growth of the Xavier institute. While Quentin Quire may have had some valid points, he’s motivated entirely by hate, by the desire to destroy humanity simply because they destroyed other mutants in Genosha. Taken to its extreme, this tendency will doom all life on Earth by creating a cycle of destruction that won’t end until everyone is destroyed. Here, we get the retcon that Kick contains Sublime, making it clear that Quentin Quire and Magneto weren’t exactly themselves, they were under the influence of this evolutionary death wish. You could view that as a way to excuse their actions, but I’d argue it functions more as a metaphor. The hate that made them want to destroy humanity is given a name in the form of Sublime, but really, all that kick is is the power that we get from anger and aggression.

The future X-Men in this story are notable for their diversity and their co-dependence on each other, the opposite of the solitary Beast and his mutinous, selfish assistants. Tom Skylark is in a symbiotic relationship with Rover, the sentinel who protects him. Tom is now the hunted minority, a solitary human in a world where almost all of humanity is extinct. Now, the sentinel that existed to kill mutants, a force of Sublime, is in service to Tom, a protector and creator. Apart, they’re each powerless, together they are a force to reckon with. The same is true of Cassandra and Martha. E.V.A. is also a symbiotic being, though her familiar, Fantomex, has died. The X-Men are now a robot, a human, a brain in a jar, a giant bird, an old woman and Wolverine. It’s a radically different vision of the team, a truly post-human bunch. They’re also pretty badass, as we see in the two page spread with all of them walking through a rainy night in issue #152.

Next, we jump over to the Beast in his castle for a rant about the nature of the new universe. Why did Morrison choose to have Beast become the leader of this evil movement in the future? Part of it is a desire to tie into traditional apocalyptic mythology, having everyone refer to the beast ties into book of Revelations stuff about the “number of the beast” and all that. It’s also a spin on the Dark Beast character from the 90s, a misbegotten concept who perhaps didn’t need to return. And, on some level, I think it’s just about giving every character in the run something to do, and making clear just how bad this future is.

From there, it’s over to the Cuckoos, who are connected to a giant version of Cerebra, three sages in this desolate future. They feel very much like characters out of Greek mythology spouting cryptic dialogue about a “terrible flaw at the heart of things.” They know that this world isn’t right, things went wrong back at the end of “Planet X,” and it continues here, awaiting Jean to heal it all at the end of the arc. Notably, the Cuckoos seem to exist outside of time, perceiving things like the reader does. They ask “How did this happen so quickly?” Wolverine takes it to mean the total dissolution of society in such a comparatively short time, but I feel like their consciousness flings forward direct from “Planet X” to here, in the same way that Jean’s does.

What is the flaw in the heart of the universe? It’s found 150 years earlier, back in the present of the rest of the run, where Scott’s guilt about what happened with Jean causes him to step away from running the school and set off a chain of events that will bring the universe down. While I really like the rest of Silvestri’s art, his Emma is awful. For one, it makes no sense to wear a giant fur coat and leave it open on her barely there outfit underneath. And, the way her face is drawn, she looks like either a porn star or a blowup doll.

But, that aside, I like the concept of this scene, and the way it’s repeated at the end of the arc. Scott has been consumed by guilt the entire run, he doesn’t want to be with Emma because he thinks it will somehow be betraying Jean. He’d rather walk away and abandon the kids, the next generation for his own self indulgent self loathing. How can the world be healed? It will take the intervention of Jean herself from far in the future.

The Phoenix Egg is the mcguffin for the first part of the story, allowing Morrison to build this world and indulge in a number of cool action sequences. E.V.A and Tito versus the bunch of nightcrawlers in #151 is awesome, as is the band of early 90s style characters versus Appolyon and hundreds of crawlers in #152. There’s a majestic beauty to the panel with Rover standing in the city, surrounded by crawlers, explosions all around him.

Cassandra Nova reappears, dressed in the same outfit she wore back at the very beginning of “E For Extinction.” As we find out later in this arc, Ernst is the rehabilitated version of Cassandra Nova, but her presence here implies that she might actually be a force for positive evolution. As Xavier says in the “New Worlds” arc, it took Cassandra to force him out of stasis and start really changing things instead of just accepting the world as it is. Obviously she did some pretty awful things, but on some level, she was a force for positive change. I guess Cassandra’s presence here is the ultimate testament to what the Phoenix can do, burning away the destructive parts of her personality and leaving only the positive force for change.

Cassandra asks the Cuckoos what they see in the future, and all that’s there is “Consuming fire. The judgment of the Phoenix.” But, this is not a bad thing. The destructive power of the Phoenix scares people, but in the end, it is a positive force for change. The Phoenix will remake this world and take away all the pain within it in favor of something better.

This raises the question of what it feels like to watch your world remade in favor of a better one. For all the sadness in this world, there are still some beautiful moments. Do they exist anywhere? This is not what the future is meant to be, but the moments still happened, the feelings were still felt. Jean does not so much eradicate this future, as spin the present in a different direction. Outside of time, this world exists, but in the forward progression that will be the rest of the present day characters’ lives, it is gone.

It’s kind of like hypertime. In this story, the HCT world is the river, the way that everything flows forward. What Jean does is redirect time at the source of Scott’s decision so that the HCT world is no longer the main river, it’s a branch that dries up 150 years in the future, sacrificed so that the main timeline, the river itself, can continue on a better path, far into the future.

The dark Shakesperean feel of the Beast storyline continues as he prepares to raise the Phoenix from the fire. I love how epic this is, the fiery cave like something out of Lord of the Rings, and Beast himself shouting these over the top words, begging the Phoenix to “Arise!” There’s a lot of similarities between him and Magneto in “Planet X,” reinforcing the idea that Magneto was under the possession of a force beyond his control. The Beast claims he has waited three billion years for this moment, to finally control the Phoenix. He has overseen the wars that have guided all life to this present moment, and if he should control the Phoenix, he would have possession of the ultimate weapon, a way to stop positive change and finally win this war of absolute ideas.

I love the representation of Jean in this arc, she exists first as an entity of pure energy, more Phoenix than human. She says “I was in the crown,” a reference to Keter, the peak of the Kaballah, a place of pure divinity. She has been pulled down from Keter to serve one final role on Earth and end this war once and for all.

One of the best things about this arc is how epic everything is. We move from the fiery pits of the Beast’s lair to Panafrika, where Phoenix battles a bug mutant and ignites nuclear blasts over the plains. It’s the kind of thing that only comics can do, and Morrison manages to give us this epic imagery without sacrificing the emotional content of the story. So many people make comics that just feel like storyboards to movie, what makes Morrison and Moore so much better than everyone else is that they understand intrinsically what only comics as a medium can do. In comics, this massive story “costs” the same as two people in a room talking. That’s not to say that two people in a room talking can’t be great, it’s just that when you can depict anything, it’s a bit frustrating that so many comics remain Earthbound, using the visual vocabulary of films rather than the imagnation.

Phoenix kills Bumbleboy, then ushers him into death in the same way that Xorn helped Quentin move on out of this world. When Xorn/Magneto did that, it first read as a beautiful moment, Xorn acting out of mercy to help Quentin leave behind the pain of this world an become something more. In retrospect, it becomes one of the major examples of Xorn’s malevolence, the Magneto lurking underneath. But, perhaps he truly was motivated by a desire to help. That was the good piece of Magneto, recognizing a kindred spirit in Quentin, and helping him pass into another world without pain. In the end, we see Quentin in the White Hot Room, part of the Phoenix Force, not consigned forever to Sublime.

Either way, the scene with Phoenix holding the skull is amazing. I love the way Silvestri draws the moment, and Phoenix saying “You were always here, waiting for yourself to arrive.” It seems that the White Hot Room is the place we all go where we die, the pure energy consciousness from which all humanity springs. In the worldview of The Invisibles, it’s the supercontext. To die is to be absorbed into the White Hot Room and reunite with the universal essence we lose touch with when we’re on this world. On Earth, we mistakenly believe that we are individual beings, in the White Hot Room, we’re once again reminded that we are all part of something larger, a singular organism that is growing and evolving together.

Apollyon and Beast have a relationship similar to Magneto and Esme in “Planet X.” Beast’s hubris prevents him from seeing both how frustrated Apollyon has become with him, and the inevitability of his failure. If Sublime is about the negative force of evolution, our tendency towards self destruction, it would make sense that he constantly sabotages himself. He believes he can control the Phoenix, but in the end, the Phoenix will burn him away. Even as she becomes more and more self aware, he only rages on about tying to stop these new lifeforms from multiplying, to stop them from becoming “immortal, unstoppable supermen.” If they were to reach that level of existence, he would lose power, to him the fight against mutants is the fight to protect himself.

Next up, the X-Men go into battle to save their whale ally. I particularly like the sentient whale saying “Help! They’ll mak’ tallow and soap o’ me!” Luckily the team roars into action. Cassandra says smething interesting here, describing a painting as “Like some sad memory of a future that never happened,” which perfectly describes the very story we’re reading. We also get the fun moment where Tito is excited about doing the fastball special. Tito is a next generation X-Man, still awed by the legacy of the original X-Men, including Beak. It’s funny to hear him say that he can never live up to the legacy of his great grandfather, Beak, both because of the ironic juxtaposition of the Beak we knew with the apparently legendary figure in the future and because it makes clear that for all Tito’s mutation, the lack of self confidence is a hard coded genetic trait.

From there, we see the sad fall of Rover, who is apparently jealous of the close relationship between Tom and E.V.A. Judging from their relationship here, it’s not verboten for humans and robots to have “intimate” relations, and it seems that Tom is making his play when Rover is torn apart by an army of ‘crawlers. Rover collapses into the sea in a haunting panel where his hand reaches out even as he sinks deeper into the depths. These characters have only been around for a couple of issues, but I still really care about them and that moment hits a real emotional note.

I love pretty much any story that involves a flashback to three billion years ago, which Morrison uses in issue #154 to explain the origin of Sublime. I’ve discussed the basic concept quite a bit already, what he’s saying here is that Sublime, the fighting itself, was the dominant species on the planet for three billion years, and it’s not until mutants that someone comes along who could transcend that paradigm and create a new world. That’s what the entire run is about, Xavier trying to find a better way to do things, a way that isn’t bound up in human prejudices and pettiness, that instead helps humanity evolve and create a new world. The Beast is devoted to stopping that from happening.

Despite the fact that their relationship is at the emotional core of the run, there’s precious few scenes where Scott and Jean are actually together. I think that done intentionally to sway out sympathies towards Scott and Emma getting together, and make it clear that Jean has moved on to post human interests. Jean is a lot closer to Logan throughout the story, from their kiss in the woods to their journey into the sun together. So, it makes sense that they’d be the last ones standing in the future, debating the future of mutantkind.

The Phoenix spouts the party line, that “Extinction is part of the cycle of natural growth and death.” Sublime made her believe that no species can last forever, but Wolverine proves the exception. He personally has evolved into “a potentially viable species,” and many other mutants have to. Logan then ties Sublime into everything that’s come before in the series, and the entire history of X-Men. The X-Men are designed to evolve, Sublime is the anti-evolution. While I love the concept of Sublime, and think it enhances the story and gives it a thematic cohesion, I won’t deny that it does kind of come out of nowhere here in the last storyline.

It’s retconned in nicely, but the connections between this Sublime and John Sublime from the U-Men storyline are shaky. If that story had given us a hint that Sublime was part of something larger, it would have made more sense, as it is, the groundwork is there, but you still have to do most of the work yourself. In that way, it works a lot like Magneto/Xorn. I think both revelations do work, and I’m glad the last two arcs happened as they did, but they could have been better integrated into what came before.

Jean and Logan’s conversation is interrupted when Cassandra plunges her plane into the head chakra of the Phoenix, to “unplug the crown.” It’s a glorious moment of metaphysical action. The crown is the entry point to the White Hot Room, where individual humanity transcends into the collective entity. But, to save the world, Logan needs to tap into Jean Grey herself. Only she knows how to heal the whole in time and prevent the world from ever going this way.

In one page, we see the history that led us to this moment. Scott is the anchor of the school, and without him or Emma or Jean, Hank couldn’t keep things under control. This page has two really important functions. One is to make it clear where the hole in time began. According to Logan, Magneto killed Jean as part of his service to Sublime, to eradicate the opposing force in a never ending war. The hole in time wasn’t Jean’s death, it was Scott walking away from the school, Jean now has to reverse that decision and heal things.

Equally significant is the revelation that Kick is Sublime in aerosol form. Sublime didn’t have the hold on mutants that it did on other species, the rise of mutants, and the impending death of humanity threatened to make Sublime irrelevant, to push him towards extinction. His first attack was the U-Men, an attempt to turn mutant and human against each other. When that didn’t work, Sublime took a more covert form, infiltrated Xavier’s with the drug, and used Quentin Quire and Magneto to attack Xavier. This is the last of those battles, the moment when Jean has to make a choice between giving into her human side, and holding onto Scott, or letting him go, and transcending with the Phoenix force into something more.

From here, everything spirals into chaos. Cassandra is ripped apart, and the Cuckoos self destruct rather than be absorbed into Cererbra. Here, it’s revealed that the Cuckoos were Weapon XIV. The Weapon Plus program was started by Sublime as a way of manufacturing mutant killers. It’s notable that three of the core of X-Men here, the Cuckoos, Wolverine and E.V.A. were created or modified by Weapon Plus. The force of Sublime may be powerful, but it can be overcome. The Cuckoos are the government traitor alluded to in “Assault on Weapon Plus,” but thanks to the training at Xavier’s School, they now fight for good. While the revelation that they are Weapon XIV is kind of out of nowhere, it makes the stakes clear. It’s Emma’s training that helps save them, and if she and Scott aren’t there to teach the next generation, mutants will be doomed.

Much like in the Magneto battle in “Planet X,” the Beast emerges and the X-Men gradually tear him apart. One of the high points here is Tom screaming at him “Why does there always have to be people like you?” The answer is the Sublime force, if they eradicate that, then maybe there can be a world without power mad tyrants bent on destruction. With Tom’s life at stake, Rover emerges out of the sea and flings the Beast to the ground. But, the Beast tears them all down. I love the moment at the end where E.V.A. is dying and sees Tom as Fantomex.

In the end, as before, it’s Jean and Logan left to end things. He tears at Beast, but Jean tells him “Don’t let Sublime contaminate you! Don’t fight!” The best way to destroy Sublime is to love it, to integrate it. It’s the same concept we saw with Jack and Sir Miles back in the end of Invisibles Voume I. Logan falls, but Jean is actualized. “Did you think you would live forever, little speck?” Against the power of the Phoenix, Sublime will fall. Life has grown and flourished in spite of Sublime, and now Jean tears him out and heals Beast. Henry returns for a moment and dies, along with everyone else in a mad rush. Appolyon tearing off his skin suit seems to come out of nowhere, but just adds to the manic mood. Much like “Planet X,” we leave the battle in media res and spin off to another world as Logan hands it off to Jean.

The White Hot Room is a concept I love, an extradimensional space within the M’Kraan Crystal where the Phoenixes of many worlds gather together to help move worlds forward. This scene echoes the end of the original Phoenix Saga, when Jean goes into the M’Kraan crystal to heal a rift and save the world. Morrison makes it a more emotional thing in his conception, the rift isn’t an abstract idea, it’s the pain that Scott feels, and the only way to save it is for Jean to send him a message and liberate him to move on with his life.

There’s a lot of reference to the dichotomy between her humanity and her godhood. She talks about losing her concentration when “Heart got stuck.” She needs to play one last role as Jean before passing into the collective. The X-Men are the “parents” of the world they live in, without them all that’s left is “A badly wounded orphan universe,” a world ravaged by Sublime. But, the Phoenix can heal that. Quentin Quire appears to tell her that healing the universe requires her to “water it with your heart’s blood.”

Quentin then speeds off into the cosmos, telling her they’ve met hundreds of time and “if it was me, I’d just let it die.” Is this referring to Quentin’s possession by Sublime, in that capacity, he and the Phoenix certainly have met hundreds of times, and it would make sense that he would abandon the world to die. However, if that’s the case, why is he wearing the Phoenix outfit? Perhaps he is the rehabilitated Sublime, now serving the cause of the Phoenix masters. Notably, he refers them as “they,” like he is not one of them. The way I took it, Jean is not outside the Phoenix force, she is part of it, she would refer to “them” as “we.” This Quentin does wear his Omega Gang hairstyle, perhaps he clings to that part of himself even in this collective space that is the White Hot Room.

In the end, Jean recognizes her duty. The only time we saw her enraged in the entire run was when she caught Scott and Emma together. She was fine with abandoning Scott for large chunks of the narrative, both of them knew they were drifting apart, but a part of her still felt possessive of him and couldn’t stand to see Emma with him. That was when she gave into Sublime, now she is confronted with that moment again. She could keep Scott and Emma apart, as she apparently did the first go round, to create this future. But, in the end, she has become part of the Phoenix Force, she understands the way that petty human jealousy can tear them apart, and she gives Scott her blessing, “Live, Scott,” and is echoed by the Phoenix Force, which empowers the orphaned universe and sets everyone off in a new direction. The old world, ruled by Sublime, is dead, there will be a new, better one now.

Speaking with Emma, Scott expresses sadness at the fact that nothing they do makes a difference. He sees only the conflict, not the progress. But, they are changing things, and without him, the entire world will crumble. This is where Jean comes in, giving him the power to not get bogged down in that despair, to choose a new path for himself. Now, when Emma asks Scott if he wants to inherit the Earth, he says “Yes.” He and Emma will be at the forefront, molding a new generation of mutant minds free from the influence of Sublime, to become something better. The run ends with Scott and Emma finally kissing for the first time in the real world, Scott is free of his guilt, able to pursue what he really wants without trying to cling to an image of himself that he has outgrown. For Emma, this moment indicates acceptance. To be loved by Scott, the ultimate boy scout, means that there must be something good in her. And, because she has so many flaws in her past, Scott doesn’t have to hide any of his own inadequacies or bad feelings. Together, they become something stronger, together they will build a better world.

In the end, this whole trip to the future is about this single moment, showing how much a single person can change the world. It’s about Jean coming to terms with her passage from this world, it’s about Scott and Emma learning to live and get out of the cycle of grief, it’s about the X-Men finally triumphing over the force of self destruction and paving the way for a new world. It’s about evolution.

And so ends the only run on X-Men since Claremont’s that really matters. I’ll be back shortly with a wrapup of the run as a whole, though this storyline functions as such a successful summation of the themes, there’s not that much more to discuss. But, despite having written 10,000 words on these past two storylines, I think there’s always a bit more there.

New X-Men: "Planet X": Part II (#148-150)

One of the interesting things about the arc is the way it positions Magneto’s revolution within the political climate of a post 9/11, Bush governed world. Magneto realizes that he needs a few soundbites rather than big speeches, The fickle nature of the populace is central to the arc, they don’t want real change, they just want to hold on to their comfortable lives. In that respect, it’s easy to sympathize with Magneto. In stories, a desire to maintain the status quo generally isn’t an admirable trait. People who just want to live their lives aren’t the ones we care about in a story where the stakes are global. Particularly because they remain largely off screen, the fickle populace acts essentially as a drain on the revolution. Magneto’s ideas fail because people don’t care enough to engage with them.

Or at least that’s how he views it. What Morrison would probably argue is that the kind of revolution Magneto poses was always flawed because it’s very much an Invisibles Volume I “Us vs. Them” showdown. It’s fingers fighting for control of the hand, that kind of thinking will never lead to real growth or change. Even if Magneto’s plan succeeded, he makes it clear that he’s going to keep humans around as a servant underclass, taking the jobs that mutants don’t want.

Perhaps the toughest scene to reconcile with previous presentations of Magneto is the opening of #149, where Magneto and the gang oversee the movement of humans into a crematorium. On one level, you can reduce any narrative inconsistencies to Magneto was on kick and insane, there anything goes. However, it’s more interesting to consider what Morrison does present, to not necessarily try to justify it with previous stories and instead accept it on the terms of what he’s presented in New X-Men. What Magneto is doing is presenting the extreme other side of what Xavier does, the kind of confrontational viewpoint that Quentin Quire also advocated. He’s powerful enough to destroy all existing social order, and pave the way for a world dominated by mutants, but his revolution gets tripped up every step of the way because it’s not practical for the real world. As Xavier makes clear at the end of the arc, what he stands for makes more sense as a t-shirt than as a real world practice.

That said, on a base level, much of the arc is about the basic insanity of Magneto’s viewpoints and the spiral into a nightmare world of a man with way too much power, and little relevance in today’s world. Magneto is George Bush, he is the American military-industrial complex, frustratingly one note in a world that’s infinitely more complex. I love the absurdity of Magneto smacking Beak to win the argument about whether a carrot can feel pain, and if it’s a fruit or vegetable.

After killing Basilisk because of a fart joke, Magneto has a falling out with Esme. She says “Are you waiting for them to stop you,” which functions on a number of levels. On the one hand, it’s a meta comment about the nature of superhero comics. Villains will always push things to the brink, but never pull the final trigger, always leaving the door open for the heroes to come in and save the day. Esme felt empowered by a Magneto who offered the chance to upend the status quo and become the ruler of a new mutant empire. As part of a hive mind, she’d be particularly interested in asserting her singular identity. Under Magneto’s wing, she drops the prim and proper Emma Frost inspired clothes she wore with the other Cuckoos for an Omega Gang inspired vamp outfit. She’s playing at the being the bad girl, wielding a whip just to add to the image.

But, she’s growing frustrated with Magneto. She’s from a younger, instant gratification generation, the kind of people who don’t have time for Magneto’s Shakespearean speeches. If he’s going to flip the world, just do it already. She doesn’t understand what the hold up is. Of course, she does recognize the self destructive streak in Magneto, he has everything he wants, and still he’s obsessed with showing up Charles and proving that his way is the right way.

This all leads up to the central scene of the arc, in which Magneto is confronted by Xorn, who appears to have gained his own consciousness as an entity separate from Magneto. It’s reinforced throughout the arc, the fact that people prefer Xorn to Magneto, and now Xorn shines through as Magneto’s conscience. You could argue that this Xorn is Xavier speaking to Magneto, but I prefer to think it’s the Xorn fiction suit reclaiming agency and saving the world. People who criticize the Xorn/Magneto twist harp on the narrative implausibiltities of it all, ignoring the rich allegorical layer. Xorn is the best in Magneto, the kick addled old man we see here is the worst. He says “I am your inner star, Erik. I will never let you be.” What’s doomed Magneto’s schemes in the past is his conscience, he’s never been able to be fully evil, to wipe out humans, because he has an innate decency. On some level, he is Xorn, and as reconfigured in this story, it’s that part of him that continually makes him lose when he battles the X-Men.

When Magneto speaks to Charles, he makes it sound like this entire assault on Manhattan is an attempt to prove that his way can work. As Xorn, he saw Xavier changing the world, making it a better place for mutants, and transcending the human/mutant conflict in a way that Magneto never could. Magneto wants to prove that he does have relevance, but in reality, Xavier took the best of Magneto’s ideas and applied it to X-Corps. Ernst sums it up when she says “Nobody likes what you’re doing, Magneto. It’s boring and old-fashioned. It’s all coming to an end and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.”

It all builds to issue #150. Claremont’s #150 was a major turning point in the redemption of Magneto, when he almost killed Kitty Pryde, he hit bottom and started down the path that would eventually lead to his rehabilitation around #200. Morrison’s #150 is a strange climax, an emotionally charged spiral towards insanity for all involved. Let me first note that Jiminez’s cover for this issue is one of my favorite comics covers ever, a singularly epic image, that’s nicely echoed by the beautiful image of the Phoenix that opens the issue.

Jiminez kills it again with the outré image of Wolverine reforming himself as he and Jean cross space to confront Magneto. Jean says “I had to die to come back, Logan. But I don’t know how long they’ll let me stay,” reinforcing the idea that it’s not really Magneto’s energy charge that kills her at the end of the issue, she’s always dead, this is just her fading ember doing one last cleansing duty in the universe.

The issue is structured as a series of assaults on Magneto, each destroying a little piece of him. Beak shows up and doesn’t even fight him, he just shouts “Xavier school is the best school,” a cutting refutation of the revolution Magneto is trying to create. It’s all about showing up Charles ideologically, and he can’t do that here. A more showy assault is Fantomex’s dive from E.V.A into the building, guns blazing, bullets screaming. I love Fantomex, and I’m glad that Grant brought him back here to spin through the air and spout catchy one liners like “You and whose knees?” I think Fantomex would have been a great fit in Seven Soldiers, he’s the kind of guy who, if written right, could headline a mindblowing ongoing series.

Again, it’s not so much the bullets that bother Magneto as it is Fantomex asking “Is everything you say a cliché?” Magneto in this storyline has old ideas, and with each passing moment, the X-Men prove him more and more irrelevant. Scott does this too when he tells Magneto how much he loved Xorn. Magneto constructed Xorn out of a piece of himself, a piece that he now claims to hate, but deep down knows may be better. But, he’s stuck in the old paradigm, he’s got to be the bad guy. He won’t evolve.

Next up, Esme turns on her mentor and assaults his mind. She talks about being inspired by Magneto as an idea, then getting gradually disappointed as she comes to know the real man, another pointed comment on how Magneto is more powerful as a symbol than as a person. He sends her earrings through her brain, killing her. The scene where Emma holds her dying body is particularly interesting. Emma talks about how proud she is, even as Esme rails against her. Esme is in a period of rebellion, she has to reject her parental figures to claim her own self identity, even as she follows much the same path that Emma did, latching on to a powerful man and trying to use her sexuality to make her way. When she speaks to Magneto, she even notes that he doesn’t look at the way she dresses, she wanted to be everything for him, but he was just an old man. Emma knows that rebellion, it’s the same rebellion she had. In the end, Emma has more in common with Esme than with the Cuckoos who blindly follow her.

This all leads to the frantic climax as Magneto struggles to prove that he is in fact Magneto. Wearing Xorn’s helmet to protect his scarred face, he finds that the people no longer believe he is who he says he is, and the X-Men are reacting against Xorn’s betrayal, not to Magneto’s attack. In the end, Magneto is beaten down, the populace he inspired from beyond the grave now rejects him and won’t even acknowledge him. I love the panel of him tearing off the Xorn mask, and screams “See you morons! I AM MAGNETO!” The Phoenix mocks him, asking “Is this the Magneto anyone knows? Is this what he looks like?” Identity is fluid, a construct. Magneto stands for certain things, he appears a certain way, beaten down, Magneto can no longer match up to the symbol who inspired people. The revolution has come to pass, and it’s failed miserably. He says that the Xorn mask is suffocating him, the identity that represents the best hope of what he can be has prevented him from achieving his goals. It is his conscience, tearing him down.

Xavier sums it all up when he says that “the worst thing you ever did was to come back, Erik.” Xavier has learned from his experiences, he wants to “put away the old dreams and manifestos,” and just listen to the new generation. That’s probably why he’s stepping down as head of the school, he got obsessed with his own new vision, and it backfired when he alienated people like Quentin Quire. There will always be forces in opposition with each other, that’s the way that change happens. What Xavier is saying is that his and Magneto’s ideological opposition did not breed positive change, it only reinforced their previous biases and locked them into ideological corners. Xavier saw the need to change and did so, Magneto can’t make that same adjustment, he has been rendered irrelevant in the face of a new group of X-Men. I particularly like that Xavier says all this while surrounded with a cast of new characters from Morrison’s run. Sure, Beast and Cyclops are there, but it’s the new faces who stand out, the universe has expanded, and the old villains don’t have the place they once had.

So, Magneto kills the Phoenix, and asks for death. It’s a strange set of beats, but the scene works for me. The entire arc has been pitched at this insane level and having Wolverine chop off his head in a single panel is as good a way to end it as any. We’ve already seen Wolverine acknowledge that is place in this world is to be a killer, in this case, it’s a mercy killing. In that sense, Wolverine is much like the Phoenix itself, he destroys things that don’t work, paving the way for people like Charles who can build things that do. A lot of the run has dealt with the fact that it takes a crisis to produce a change. Cassandra Nova provided the impetus for Xavier’s new vision of the world, and now Magneto’s insane assault on Manhattan gives Logan the excuse to kill him, and by extension prove that his ideology is a destructive dead end that doesn’t work anymore.

The story ends with Jean literally slipping away into white light as chaos continues to spin all around. After such an insane arc, it’s appropriate to go out with any sort easy denouement. The Cuckoos claim that “something’s gone wrong with the whole universe,” Scott screams for Xorn, Jean slips away and we jump 150 years into the future.

So, that’s Planet X. It’s an arc that has some issues, but it’s also thematically fascinating, hugely ambitious and beautifully drawn by Phil Jiminez. Is this the Magneto I knew and loved from Claremont’s run? Perhaps, you can make the leap, but I don’t necessarily view Morrison’s run as a direct continuation of what Claremont did. He has his own spins on the characters, drawing from their essence as defined by Claremont, but molding them into something that makes sense for his storytelling purposes. I can forgive the disparity between 80s Magneto and this Magneto because I think the story he tells gets to the core of the character in an interesting way.

I particularly love the way the arc begins by telling us that Xorn is a construct, a total fiction who’s just been playing us the whole time, and the arc ends with Xorn saving the day. Xorn makes Magneto doubt himself, he brings Magneto’s conscience back, and in the end, Xorn obscures Magneto. He makes it so that the populace doesn’t know who’s real anymore. The X-Men believe he’s Xorn, the people don’t know who he is, and by the end, it’s Magneto who’s not real. He’s just a face on a t-shirt, an abstract idea that’s tied to a man who can’t match up. And, in the end, Wolverine returns him to a pure idea state.

Next up is “Here Comes Tomorrow,” an arc I’ve only read once, and struggled with the first time. I’m eager to delve into it again and figure out exactly what is up with the most avant garde section of Morrison’s tenure.

New X-Men: "Planet X:" Part I (#146-148)

In “Planet X,” the series we’ve been reading for the past thirty issues is hijacked by an insane Magneto, and taken down to hell for the big action climax to top off the run. It’s a story that got a wildly mixed response when it was first coming out, and you can feel the controversy as you read. With some Morrison works, you get the sense that he’s moved on by the time he reaches the end of a long run on a book. This story had probably been in his head so long that he stopped worrying about specifics when it came time to put it on the page. It’s hypercompressed in the same way the Final Crisis is, skipping over some of the major beats, and frequently relying on the reader to fill in the gaps.

As such, it reads best not so much as a literal story, but as a psychogenic fugue, the chronicle of a drug addled insane man’s schizophrenic break with reality. The core of the storyline, the scene that makes it work for me, is when Xorn speaks to Magneto, the persona he created, the light he could have been, tearing down the realty of what he is. There’s a lot in here that doesn’t make sense, but so much of it is brilliant, I still love the storyline. It’s a lot like “Riot at Xavier’s” in that sense, on a narrative plausibility level, it doesn’t make much sense, but emotionally and conceptually, it’s brilliant.

The first issue was famous for breaking the internet in half with the Xorn/Magneto revelation. Even before that happens, we’re approaching the end, scenes spiraling faster and faster. Jean goes into space in one page, Xorn’s pitch the special class happens off panel, and by the end of the issue, the X-Men are all separated and out of commission.

This all sets up the revelation that Magneto was Xorn all along. I love this moment, though it can be tough to square this version of Magneto with the character from Claremont’s run. Before unmasking, he says that Charles had his chance and hasn’t been able to do much with it. This ties back to what happened during the riot, Magneto saw Quentin as a kindred spirit, and he was shut down by Xavier’s establishment. Back then, the Cuckoos said it was about in vs. out, and Magneto’s always been out. He has a martyr complex, and needs oppression to survive. When he talks about flipping the map, what he’s really talking about is the need to change the paradigm of the world so that the oppressed are now the ones with power, and the establishment is broken. Esme, the quintessential insider, is waiting for this to happen, waiting to be the queen of a new world, but Magneto never does it.

Morrison’s Magneto has a lot in common with his depiction of Lex Luthor. As a comment on the cyclical nature of superhero comics, he has them perpetually failing to ever upend the status quo. Perhaps they know deep down that their way isn’t the best way, and doom themselves to failure. That’s the idea posed later on, as the Special Class waits for Magneto to actually do something. In the context of this scene, Magneto is looking at Xavier’s failure to assert mutant dominance. Xavier has moved beyond Magneto’s us vs. them paradigm, and Magneto sees that as abandoning the war.

In issue #127, we saw Magneto through Xorn describe the tragedy of a mutant destroyed by human action. There, it was a sad story, Xorn lamenting that if he could save everyone, he would. That’s the core of Magneto’s motivation in this arc, through his Kick addled insanity, he thinks that he’s going to make the world safe for mutants. In his world, on “Planet X,” that mutant child would survive because he wouldn’t be subject to the human idea of normality. What Magneto fails to acknowledge is that the best way to move beyond the human idea of normal is to live like the world is the way it should be. Xavier’s idea in the mid section of the run is to create a school that’s so great, humans have no choice but to acknowledge his way works.

Magneto is a violent revolutionary, and this arc, like “Riot,” is largely about the way that violent revolutions are almost inevitably doomed to failure. Both Magneto and Quentin were motivated by rage, hopped up on kick, they used their powers to disrupt the status quo, without offering a plausible alternative for a new world. In issue #147, Magneto destroys Manhattan and plunges the entire world into chaos. The revolution happens and it’s successful, but he soon finds that even mutants aren’t ready to have their lives so disrupted in search of Magneto’s dream.

We first see the city at sunset, beautiful with the strange metal coils lacing through it. This is the last time it won’t look like a nightmare. Magneto has big plans for the city, he wants to build a mutant utopia, with the aid of his new Brotherhood, the Special Class. The question arises, why would he use the Special Class as his army? And, what was his pitch to them as Xorn that brought them all on board? I’m guessing he told them basically what he says here, that he’s going to flip the entire world, so that they can be the rulers and it’ll be a new mutant utopia. Spoken by Xorn, the zen master, that’s an appealing thought. So far, they haven’t gotten a real idea of what Magneto’s limitations are, and that’s why I can see Beak going along with things. He’s naïve about it, happy that someone would consider him worthwhile.

As I mentioned before, a critical component of the arc is the fact that nearly everyone he encounters actually preferred Xorn to Magneto. Ernst keeps asking what happened to Xorn, and it’s got to hurt Magneto to find out that people preferred this fake him to the real person. He claims that he was biding his time, setting things in motion while he was hiding as Xorn, but the question arises, why did he have to do that in the first place? Couldn’t he have just killed the X-Men with the nano-sentinels in their blood? Would it really have been so hard to find mutants to back his cause? Why go to these elaborate lengths to infiltrate Xavier’s Academy?

That question gets to the core of the arc, the schizophrenic nature of Magneto’s personality. He’s always been written in a way that fluctuates from hero to villain. Claremont’s run takes him from the over the top villain of the Lee/Kirby era to a nuanced character who Xavier trusts enough to leave in charge of the school. By the end of the run, Magneto has been forced back into the role of villain by editorial, though Claremont actually writes him as a guy who just wants to be left alone, but keeps getting dragged back into action. In X-Men #1-3, he’s a guy who’s struggling with a legacy of violence, who’s seen more as a symbol of revolution than as the actual person he is. That portrayal squares nicely with what we see here. So much of this arc is a meta comment on the way that comics franchises inevitably spiral back towards the status quo. Magneto has to be evil because that’s the platonic idea of X-Men that’s sold to the media. Because of that edict, Magneto is on this perpetual slide between reform and villainy, depending on how the writers and editorial see him at any moment.

The Xorn/Magneto dichotomy is a way to magnify his changing motivations and nature. Xorn is Magneto at the best he could be, using his powers in ways that aren’t destructive at all, but instead heal people. It’s notable that Magneto chooses to create a character who is utterly non-violent, much more so than even Xavier himself. He likely chose that persona because it’s the best way to remain under the radar. If he was more aggressive, people would suspect Xorn, but even when he kills Quentin Quire, they assume that Xorn is on a higher level and doing what needs to be done. As Xorn, Magneto is well liked, he’s accepted and treated well. It’s partially a performance, but on some level, I think Magneto gets so lost in the role, he believes it. Xorn is the person he could be if he gave up the old grudges and decided to live a better life.

But, in the end, the old Magneto shows through and he gives up the Xorn ruse, and tells the world, “Brother mutants. The great day has come.” He has “liberated” them, but it turns out they’re not so eager to be liberated. I think this story was written before the War in Iraq, but it feels very much like a comment on the hubris and inevitable failure that comes from deciding you need to “free” a people without any plan for what to do afterwards. Magneto defeats humanity and upends the governmental system in one day, but what then? The jokes about how distorted his voice is coming out of the speakers are great because they bring this grand scene down to a practical reality. No one has any clue what’s going on, and Magneto just monologues to salve his ego.

Throughout the story, Toad functions as a Shakespearean fool, constantly tearing down the illusions Magneto builds up about himself. I particularly like what he says “you’ve been declared dead so often…I just don’t think they know it’s really you.” That’s a critical concept in the final issue, where it turns out that the real Magneto is less ‘real,’ has less power than the fake Xorn. Most of the comedy in this issue comes from the fact that Magneto can’t live up to the legend built up around him in a world with “short attention spans and high expectations.” Revolution has become another commodity, and just like the real Che wouldn’t do it for people who wear his shirt, the real Magneto is a disappointment to people who saw him as an all purpose symbol of what mutankind can be.

This speech is also a comment on the fickle comics audience, who “want you the way you used to be. Or preferably better.” It’s the classic “the same, but different” demand for franchise stories. Either way, I really like this stuff because it ties into the theme of identity as a construct that’s been present throughout the entire run. The idea of Magneto is more powerful than the real person. Magneto is a symbol of mutantkind standing up for itself, fighting for a better world, but the actual Magneto is just a violent terrorist, ranting to a world that can’t hear him.



On the streets, the special class gets the first real idea of what Magneto’s plans are. Esme boasts that she’s “pushing the humans along my mind—the whip’s just for show.” She buys into Magneto’s dream, she wants to be like Emma, the White Queen ruling the world. Beak and the rest of the gang have their illusion about what they’re doing broken, this isn’t about creating a mutant utopia, it’s about punishing humanity for what they did to Magneto. It’s still about those old grudges, about us vs. them. Magneto’s revolution was one born out of rage, and after that initial rage is gone, all that’s left is violence, chaos and the promise that once they get through the ‘birth pangs,’ everything’s going to be so much better. It’s the way that most violent revolutions inevitably fail, if all you have is a hatred for the group in power, what happens when the group in power falls?

Magneto celebrates using Xavier’s “pacifist insititue” to train his soldiers, unaware that the Special Class does not buy into his doctrine. Magneto clings to these old ideas, he’s become a self absorbed old man, totally out of touch with the present day world.

Issue #148 features one of my favorite sequences in the entire run, Wolverine and Jean on the satellite, plunging into the sun together. I haven’t talked about Jiminez’s art on this arc yet, but I think he does a fantastic job. He has a huge amount of stuff to render, and I don’t think anyone else could make it the convincing big budget ending that he pulls off. And, as I’ve said before, Jiminez draws the best looking people in comics. In the “Morrison Manifesto,” Grant talks about wanting to make the X-Men sexy, to have a comic that the women who loved Hugh Jackman in the movie could pick up and get into. The sequence with Wolverine and Jean Grey getting progressively sweatier does that, two great looking people just sitting around, waiting to die. It’s some of the best Jiminez art on the run.

Jean says that the Phoenix isn’t like a god, it’s a force that “burns away what doesn’t work.” The Phoenix is evolution itself, the same engine that motivated Cassandra Nova, the challenge to the status quo that produces change. As the pages pass, we can see Wolverine and Jean getting progressively more run down, and as they move closer to death, more open with each other. I particularly love the moment where Wolverine tells her that they chose to make him a killer because of who he was, that Jean would hate the real him. But, it’s not the past that matter, it’s the present. She’s seen the good in him, she loves the man he’s become. “How could I ever hate you?”

This leads to the absolutely epic finale of the issue, where Logan stabs Jean to liberate the Phoenix force and save the universe. The way I see it, Jean essentially dies here, when she returns in issue #150, she’s a construct of the Phoenix, there for one last mission before being flung into the White Hot Room and the craziness of “Here Comes Tomorrow.” Jean is dying, and Logan senses that the only way to unleash the Phoenix Force, to unleash her full potential, is to kill her here. It pains him to do so because it confirms that all he’s good for is killing. But, by this point he seems to have come to terms with that part of himself. If he’s a killer, he can at least kill for the right reasons, and here, his killing gives life.

This leads to the startling series of panels where Wolverine and Jean walk into a sun. I know I’ve complained about X-Men in space stuff before, but this is brilliant, an undeniable high point of the run. It works because it’s so epic, the emotion of the scene is transposed into this astonishing rush of sunlight that tears them all to pieces. The pages themselves seem to be crackling with heat energy, the two figures gradually turning to fire, then nothingness. It feels like watching a sci-fi movie as a kid, when things are so much more epic. But, it’s grounded in adult emotion, it’s one of my favorite Morrison moments.

New X-Men: 'Assault on Weapon Plus' (#142-145)

“Assault on Weapon Plus” feels very different than the rest of Grant’s run on New X-Men, it's a European feeling over the top pop art experience. Drawn by someone else, this arc would probably feel like the previous Fantomex arc, drawn by Chris Bachalo, it’s a totally different experience.

The first time I read this, I wasn’t a huge fan of the Bachalo art. I didn’t get his aesthetic, and felt like it was too stylized, a major departure from the relatively realistic style we’ve seen in the series to date. However, after reading the arc a couple of times, and enjoying Bachalo’s art on Death: The High Cost of Living and Mike Carey’s X-Men, I came around. Reading a Bachalo comic is as much an aesthetic experience as a narrative one. Particularly in the last three issues, most of the pleasure of the arc comes from experiencing this intricately detailed, alien looking pages. The panel layouts are great, and create a really unique reading experience. He’s not the most clear storyteller, but for this arc, his style really works.

The best issue of the arc is the first, which chronicles Scott’s nightlong struggle to get drunk at the Hellfire Club. The entire issue is punctuated by shots of a stripper who’s using her psychic powers to look like Scott's fantasy version of Jean. She’s wearing Jean’s Black Queen outfit, but Scott punctures the mood, choosing to focus on the reality of the situation rather than the illusion. He knows that she’s acting, playing a part for him, and he is unable to go along with that. Part of that is probably that after Emma’s all convincing illusions, this doesn’t do it for him anymore.

The greatest strength of the issue is the subtle comedy stuff, the way that the bar plays on the X-Men’s history. In this post-Genosha world, they don't fight their enemies, they drink and bicker with them. Unlike the classic Claremont issue with Wolverine and Colossus go out drinking and fight Juggernaut, there’s no fights here, just a gradual spiral into wastedness. It’s a very adult, sophisticated feeling issue. I’m kind of surprised that Marvel allowed them to do an issue where the ostensible heroes of the book drink so much.

‘Decompression’ bothers me in comics, spending whole pages on pretty much nothing is tough when you’re paying so much per page. But, I love the use of the whip cracking panels as transitions here, they build the mood and give a visual rhythm to the pages that really works. It feels very cinematic, like a dissolve between scenes. And, I love the way Bachalo draws her as all legs.

Scott makes clear the essence of his character arc when he says “Every time I look at Jean I see this teenage girl I met…and I feel like a teenage boy.” He’s placed into a role he doesn’t want to play, and it’s so liberating to be with Emma and have the chance to ‘be himself.’ The notion of put on identities/fiction suits is key to a lot of Morrison work, here he spins it through the lens of the X-Men soap opera. Similar thematic ideas are present in the Magneto/Xorn mess that culminates in ‘Planet X,’ or in the arc with Cassandra and Xavier.

The core of the run is the idea that sometimes it takes an agent of evolution, like Cassandra or Emma, to help someone become what they’re really meant to be. Xavier is much better as a global representative of mutants, out in the open and unashamed, but it took the awful experience with Cassandra Nova to make him realize that. Similarly, it took Emma’s meddling to realize just how bad things had gotten with Jean, agents of chaos disrupt order, and in the end, make things better.

Scott claims that he’s totally lucid, moments before he collapses onto the floor. I love the way Bachalo draws floating green bubbles around his and Wolverine’s heads to convey the effects of alcohol. It’s a choice that has no grounds in reality, but makes perfect sense in a comic book world. I’d love to read more X-Men comics like this, that scale back on the action and just spend time exploring the world that mutants live in.

But, it’s time to move on, and the next three issues take us inside ‘The World,’ an artificial space in which time can be manipulated to accelerate evolution at will. It’s a classic Morrison concept, recalling the fantastic moments in JLA: Rock of Ages, where our heroes see a whole civilization arise and destroy itself in a matter of hours. That said, it also feels a bit like Morrison on autopilot, the core concepts of the arc could easily fit into a mid level JLA storyline. I love a lot of the panel layouts, but most of the important character and narrative stuff is confined to the first and last issue of the arc.

I do enjoy the Super Sentinel’s philosophical journey, he has spent his whole life inside this concrete dome, and doesn’t know if there’s anything beyond those walls. When he bursts out of the dome, it’s the equivalent of us leaping through the sky and breaking into a larger, totally different universe. Weapon XV crafts this mythology around himself, and imagines himself the ruler of a new universe that he has just discovered. As much as I appreciate the action stuff earlier in the issue, it’s that moment that makes the whole thing worthwhile. He asks “What is the purpose of life,” and literally wants an answer. He was programmed to obey orders, but doesn’t have any orders. What should he do?

This is a major contrast to Fantomex, who has chosen to betray against his bosses and spread chaos instead of playing the role he was supposed to. The human government behind this program wanted Fantomex to play the role of an action hero in a superhero team created to destroy mutants. This concept, like most X-Men stuff, plays better if it exists in a world without the other Marvel Universe heroes. If mutants arose in our world, it would make sense that the government would create their own superhero team to destroy them, through genetic engineering. But, in a world with the Avengers, why would they need to go to all this trouble?

Either way, I love when his supervisor says “We’d have scripted you be the kind of character people love…and you choose to go Faux French!” It’s all constructed personas, they wanted him to be one thing, he chooses to defy that and go another way.

This theme ties in with what’s going on with Wolverine. He wants to find out who he “really is,” but it turns out there’s only layers and layers of false personalities designed to control him. I hate the idea of the Wolverine: Origins miniseries they did a few years back because a large part of the character is his mystique, a mysterious past is always going to more interesting than any concrete answers about who he was. This issue seems to deliberately debunk that ‘James’ persona, pointing to it as just another way to control him. In that sense, the constructed personality is much like the personality that Scott keeps himself in, if you believe that you are a killer, you’re going to kill, if you believe that you’re a good person, you’ll do good. But, trying to live up to a self image can lead to trouble when you don’t want to be your self image any more.

Wolverine talks to Weapon XV about the purpose of life, a conversation he could be having with himself. Weapon XV is destined to be a killer, but “I could have been a painter as well” he says. Wolverine has seen his past, he realizes that he, like Weapon XV, was built to kill, so why not save the world and kill Weapon XV. The station blows up and the arc ends in that fire. It’s an abrupt ending, but I really like it. Everything’s spiraling into craziness, and then all of a sudden it’s over. Things will pick up right here with ‘Planet X,’ but this a great final moment for Bachalo to go out on.

This isn’t my favorite New X-Men arc, but it’s got a lot of great moments. I’d love to see Morrison and Bachalo work together again since they created something really unique and cool with this story. It’s one last burst of fun before the heavy darkness that’ll fall on the series in the next arc, the controversial nightmare fever dream ‘Planet X.’

New X-Men: "Murder at the Mansion" (#140-141)

After the amazing prelude issue, “Murder at the Mansion” proper begins in issue #140. This storyline is kind of a mixed bag for me, there’s some great character bits along the way, but the main murder mystery is a dud. We never find out the reason the murder happened, and the murder victim is back alive in the end. The story works best if you view Emma’s death as a metaphorical representation of Jean’s range, and the story as the process of her recognizing that Emma may actually have valid feelings for Scott. But, what the hell does Bishop have to do with all that!?

I mentioned in an earlier review that I don’t mind the random cameos in this run because I’m familiar with pretty much all the X-Men characters. I know who Bishop is, but at the same time, I think it’s kind of a mistake to bring him in. Part of it was probably about crossing over with Claremont’s X-Treme X-Men, which was in a kind of war of influence with Morrison’s X-Men at the time. This was his homage/shot at Claremont, and while it probably worked during the monthly publication, Bishop’s appearance seems to come out of nowhere here. That’s one of the major problems with writing for the monthly vs. writing for the trade today. Back in the 80s during the original Claremont run, he had total control over the entire line and could make crossovers seamless, now the X-Men are so fractured, trying to connect to what’s going on in the overall world makes the collected story feel incomplete.

If I was to get the chance to run the X-line, what I’d do is turn it into a weekly series, kind of like Spider-Man now, and have it be a huge, sprawling epic with many different individual subplots. Basically, instead of having ‘spinoff’ books, you’d have one mothership, with all the characters filtering in and out from week to week. I liked reading the books during the ‘Messiah Complex’ crossover, when there was something new out every week, but with a few exceptions, I don’t like getting only 22 pages of story ever month. That’s why I’d rather pick up the X-books in trade, if I buy them at all now. Mike Carey’s stuff had its moments, but nothing now feels as important as Morrison’s run on the title did.

There’s a lot of wheel spinning as they investigate the murder, some good scenes in there, but nothing particularly important. Things don’t get great again until near the end of issue #141 when Jean embodies the Phoenix Force and looks at Emma’s consciousness. In #139, Jean used the Phoenix Force was a way to indulge her human jealousies, her personal anger. Here, she seems to have transcended humanity entirely, exactly what Emma said she was doing. Jean at this point has become something so much more than human, she recognizes that maybe she doesn’t need Scott anymore, and can’t be with him like he needs her to be. Jean has learned to harness the Phoenix force and using it, she can make things better. I love the way Jiminez draws her here, his Jean is the definitive Jean for me, at least of Morrison’s run.

The critical moment is when Jean realizes that Emma really does love Scott, and that Scott needs her. They can give each other something more than she can give him, and here, she empowers Emma to pursue Scott. This scene is echoed in “Here Comes Tomorrow,” where she once again gives Scott the go-ahead to be with Emma and move on after she’s transcended to another plane.

In practical narrative terms, Jean dies at the end of the run, but in reality, she becomes something more. Her ‘death’ is merely the end of her human existence and a passage into the white hot room, or the supercontext. Like Quentin Quire, she burns too hot for this world and has to become part of something new.

Things end with a lot of ambiguity, Esme walks away and teases a secret foe with in, setting up the forthcoming Xorn/Magneto revelation. This isn’t the high point of the run, but I’ve got such affection for the characters, and Jiminez’s art, that it works. Even throwaway moments, like the Special Class’s “Professor Sex in the toilet with the lawnmower” gag work, and keep the story fun in spite of some fundamental problems.

True Blood: "The First Taste" (1x02)

True Blood’s second episode does a successful job of expanding the universe a bit, and clarifying some of the elements that remained rather ambiguous after the first. The second episode is typically the toughest for a series, after pouring all kinds of time and money into the first episode, the second one comes along and you’ll frequently see shows stumble as they figure out what to do. With both Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, the second episode is arguably the weakest of the entire series. Here, I get the sense that Ball knew the show would be picked up for the whole thirteen when he made the pilot, so there’s not that lurch of trying to get a bunch of ongoing plots into motion after a semi-standalone first episode. This is an unabashedly serial show, jumping from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, and the best elements of this episode all flow directly out of the first.

The best scene in the episode, on all levels was undeniably Sookie feeding on Bill while out in the swamp. I love the way the swamp feels so artificial, the moody lighting and carefully placed trees give it a very theatrical feel, like the characters have wandered onto a stage and are now playing out a drama in the most consciously stylish way possible. I enjoy works that embrace the stylistic potential of departing from a strictly “realistic” space. I’m sure people will be complaining about the fake looking sets, but that swamp environment felt so much more distinct and dreamlike than a real swamp would.

The Sookie/Bill relationship is interesting because it feels quite consciously drawn from the archetypal beautiful girl and brooding vampire archetype, we’ve seen this before, we know that the story will inexorably push them together, the characters can sense this magnetic pull, but remain unaware of its exact nature. Either way, Anna Paquin as Sookie remains the sun shining at the heart of the galaxy that is this show, eclipsing everyone else on screen with her great performance. She’s a really likable presence, and her sunshine persona contrasts with his darkness.

There’s a major contrast between the very physical relationships that the other characters have and the more chaste flirtation that Bill and Sookie share. The juxtaposition of Jason having sex in an extremely graphic scene with Sookie and Bill just holding hands in the swamp works well to demonstrate which one is about real affection. That’s not to say there’s no physical connection between Sookie and Bill, the blood drinking scene would say otherwise.

So, after two episodes, I’m definitely on board. I don’t know that it’ll ever become as great show as Six Feet Under, but there’s a lot of intriguing stuff here, Anna Paquin is fantastic and the tone and atmosphere really work. It’s trashy TV for smart people.

New X-Men: #139

Let me start off by praising Phil Jiminez’s fantastic art on this issue. The weird coloring/inking issues from his previos New X-Men story have been generally resolved and his art looks a lot more like the fantastic stuff he drew for The Invisibles. Jiminez’s art isn’t as distinct as the work of someone like Quitely or JH Williams, he doesn’t have any tells that make it easy to instantly identify his art. He just draws very clear pages, with innovative layouts and absolutely beautiful characters. Nobody draws prettier people than Phil Jiminez. So, his work often ends up looking like a great big budget movie, with glamorous actors and stylish costumes and environments. Just look at the cover to #139, you feel like you’re backstage at a photoshoot with two supermodels.

#139 picks up where “Riot at Xavier’s” left off, with a big showdown between Jean and Emma. A large part of this arc is about Jean realizing that Emma really does love Scott and that she might be better for him than Jean herself is. She is moving towards a more cosmic perspective, and by the end of the arc, she’s ready to give up her possessiveness towards Scott and let him be with Emma. However, here she has not come to that conclusion yet, and she’s quite angry at what’s going on.

It seems odd that Scott would try to justify his actions by claiming that what he and Emma were doing isn’t real, that “it’s just thoughts” when he’s dealing with telepaths for whom thoughts are just as real as physical reality. Scott is just repeating the justification he had for his own actions. He knows what he’s doing was wrong, if he didn’t think that, he wouldn’t have protested so much when Emma got involved with him. But, he’s still clinging to that reasoning because it makes it okay for him to do what he did. Scott is someone who doesn’t think he does bad things, everyone else places him in this “boy scout” role, and consequently, he can’t imagine himself as the kind of guy who has an affair.

Marvel did all they could to protect that image of Scott because it’s a large part of their branding. Wolverine is the bad boy, Scott is the safe guy who’s always going to do right by you. “Inferno,” much as I love the story itself, is largely designed to alleviate Scott of his guilt for abandoning his wife and child to get back to his high school sweetheart. Mind you, this is after Scott married a woman he probably never really loved simply because he looked like Jean. This was a pretty twisted character, and some of those early X-Factor issues do a good job of dealing with the repercussions of what he did. But, the X-Office gradually bought him back to the stable rock he has been for a while. Morrison’s innovation is to play with the corporate sanctioned image of Scott as the image others have of him in the world of the story, the image that’s impossible for him to live up to. In Morrison’s run, it’s not Wolverine running wild, he’s trying to keep Scott on the straight and narrow, but Scott is bored by trying to live up to this image the world has of him, and that’s why he escapes into Emma’s head, where he can be as bad as he wants to be.

In a lot of ways, Scott’s position here reminds me of the way Tony Soprano and Don Draper deal with women. They each have a safe woman at home who loves them, and they care for, but don’t necessarily feel passion for. They seek that passion from a more challenging, morally ambiguous woman outside the relationship, someone who can be the ‘bad girl’ they don’t want their wives to be. Again, Morrison skillfully uses the sexual BDSM imagery of the Dark Phoenix saga within the world of the story, by making Scott jealous that Jean will dress up like that for others, but dresses sensibly around him. He claims he wants that fire, but at the same time, it scares him, he has put Jean up on such a pedestal, does he really want to wallow in the dirt with her, like he does with Emma?

Jean confronts Emma, and claims that she took advantage of Scott, while he was dealing with possession by an evil spirit. In the series to date, Scott’s possession has been used the excuse, by both Morrison and Scott himself, to explore the darker side of his persona, and that’s what Emma echoes here, claiming that Scott was only possessed by the horror of a loveless marriage. I really like thie staging of this scene, Emma’s ultrastylish apartment looking hollow in light of the emotions she’s dealing with. She sulks in her 2001: A Space Odyssey chair, while Jean rages in the background.

This issue, more than any other in the run, reminds me of Claremont at his best. The soap opera elements are played to the max, with a psychic catfight and a broken love triangle, but the soap opera stuff is made into something much grander through the use of genre elements, specifically Jean’s psychic attack on Emma. What Jean is doing is tearing down Emma’s illusions about herself, trying to make her feel as bad as possible. Where a normal soap opera would do this through dialogue, here the emotional attack is made into a literal psychic attack, and the tearing down of illusions is a literal trip through Emma’s memories to belittle and hurt her. It’s the kind of subjectivity you can only do in genre works. Much like Neon Genesis Evangelion, what is ostensibly genre action is in reality a device used to explore the characters’ inner self. Claremont would use strange devices like this from time to time to go deeper into a character, notably when he had Storm and Forge live through the entire life of an alternate world in the middle of the “Fall of the Mutants” storyline.

During the issue, we hear a number of people expressing fear that angering Jean could lead her to go all Dark Phoenix again. This gets to the core of Scott’s problem, which is that he can’t necessarily express his true self to Jean because she’s so potentially dangerous. The knowledge of what she did as Dark Phoenix hangs over all his actions, and rather than risk angering her, he hides his changing self and clings to the image of himself as the uncomplicated hero.

The trip through Emma’s past gives us a lot of insight into who she is, and the way she has built up her own self identity to deal with the pain of the past. This ties into the notion of fiction suits from The Invisibles, the idea that identity is malleable, and you can become someone else if you believe in that person enough. Everyone builds up personalities to protect their weaknesses from the world at large. Emma has left her family behind, and sculpted herself into something else. She initially thinks that Jean is looking at her physical differences, the way she was before her breast implants, but in reality, Jean is looking at the lies her family was built on, and forcing Emma to confront what happened to her brother and mother.

Emma’s primary mentor was Sebastian Shaw. He’s one of the most powerful men in the world, and Emma worked to become “exactly what Sebastian wanted, the ice queen, the dominatrix from hell.” Sebastian Shaw made the White Queen, Emma rode that identity to power, and the character we see in Morrison’s run is struggling to define herself. The X-Men still see her as the persona she put on, and she still carries around that defiant, cynical streak, but deep down, she doesn’t want to be that person anymore, she may have started out trying to use Scott, but at this point, she realizes that she really loves him.

I love Jiminez’s art throughout this entire sequence. It reminds me a bit of Sir Miles’ psychic interrogation of King Mob, with the free floating panels in space, and seamless moves through time. I love the way he draws Emma dancing, and particularly the page where Emma defies Jean and her face becomes a pop art distortion, eyes suspended around her.

Jean eventually breaks through and sees what happened between Scott and Emma in Hong Kong. I’ve heard some people complain that the fact that the affair between Scott and Emma never got physical strips it of its teeth. But, I think that fact is critical to Morrison’s conception of Scott. Emma sums it up when she says “All you’re saying is that some mind monster put a lot of dirty thoughts in your head and you’re embarrassed in case your telepathic wife sees what you’re really thinking about her?” Being married to a telepath, Scott always has to be on guard, particularly one with the power and capacity for evil that Jean has. Scott represses himself so that he won’t disappoint her. It doesn’t seem plausible that he would really sleep with Emma, he knows that Jean would see it in his thoughts. But, as time goes on, he comes up with this justification that Emma will help him through his issues with Jean, and that their thought encounters are therapy.

Jean is like a lie detector, he has to believe what he’s saying all the time, and if he justifies his “affair” with Emma as therapy, he can be honest with Jean. The nature of the therapy changes as time goes on, but Scott still can justify it. He could never justify a physical affair, and frankly, that would be a lot less interesting and thematically appropriate for what Morrison is trying to do. In the end, Scott runs away rather than let Jean see more of his thoughts. The great tragedy of their relationship is that he feels he can never be fully open with her because she can see into his mind, see any thoughts he has. If he doesn’t remain guarded, something bad might slip out, and that could make her evil again, or, in emotional terms, it would mean losing her again.

I’ve been trying to sum it up for a while now, and writing that, it really clicked for me. Morrison makes it clear that Scott’s repression, visually represented through the visor he wears to protect his eye beams, is a result of being in love with a telepath who can see his inner thoughts. If he even thinks something bad or transgressive, she’ll know, and that means he’s had to remain the anchor, the boy scout, even as she soared off to the stars as Phoenix. In perhaps the iconic Scott/Jean moment, their picnic on the mesa during the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” Jean uses her power to stop Scott’s eye beams and let him really see her for the first time. Notably, it took Jean embracing her dark side to make it okay for Scott to open himself to her. She stopped being worried about being ‘good,’ she embraced her dark side, and in so doing, she allowed Scott to open himself up to her, visually represented by the removal of the visor. It’s all there in the Claremont stories, but Morrison spins it in a new, really interesting direction with the Emma storyline, a natural evolution of what Claremont did.

That’s one of Morrison’s greatest talents, the ability to make these crazy superpowers and sci-fi elements so tied into the characters’ emotions. Like Claremont before him, he ties the soap opera and the superpowers together such that rather than playing out as a genre pastiche, or as two disparate parts, they synchronize and soar together. It’s like the best Buffy storylines, where the genre elements and the emotional stories collide and become so much more meaningful because of the way they work together.

After all this craziness, perhaps the best scene in the entire issue is Wolverine’s discussion with Emma in her room. Her painting’s lying on the ground, the walls cracked, a literal representation of the way Jean tore through the self image she built up around herself. Throughout the issue, we’ve been seeing things more from Emma’s point of view than Jeans, and here, that culminates with the brutal moment where Emma cries and says she can never be with Scott because she’s “so shallow…and spiteful…and manipulative.” Few images are as sad, or beautiful, as Jiminez’s drawing of Emma with mascara running down her face.

Again, Morrison’s Wolverine is amazing, sympathizing with Emma like no one else can because he too has been on the wrong side of the Jean/Scott love triangle. Emma sees such sadness between them, but she can never live up to their ‘mythic’ love, and in spite of herself she’s fallen in love with Scott Summers. It’s such an on point scene, so emotionally raw, and beautifully rendered by Jiminez, unquestionably a high point of the run.

This is the kind of story I want to read, the kind of story I want to tell, spinning from very real emotions to crazy surrealism and subjectivity, with each element working together to build a more satisfying whole. Thinking about it, it may actually be my favorite issue of the entire run, a perfect example of what the X-Men can be. I love the world building Morrison does, the intellectual side of things, but when he puts his mind to it, he can craft such beautiful, perfect character pieces, and this is one of them.

New X-Men: "Riot at Xaviers" (#134-138)

“Riot at Xavier’s” is the most thematically essential storyline since “E for Extinction,” the first time that the new order Xavier has created has to stand up to a real challenge. Cassandra Nova posed a great threat, but was ultimately just another villain to be defeated, Quentin Quire is a twisted hybrid of Xavier and Magneto, a testament to what can happen when an incredibly powerful teenager decides to rebel against every authority figure around him. There’s definitely some pacing and development issues with the arc, but on the whole it’s a fantastic storyline.

The arc begins with further exploration of the idea of mutant as the new cool minority. The death of Jumbo Carnation makes clear the interesting dichotomy people have when relating to minority groups. People who are racist in their everyday life will still look up to black athletes or musicians. Here, Jumbo makes clothes like “tentacle stockings and wing gloves” that let everyone look like the craziest mutants out there. Jumbo is a cool countercultural guy, but when he steps out of the safe space of mutant town, he’s just an over the top mutant, ‘flaunting’ his mutation. Notably, his outfit is inspired by superhero clothes, logically in the Marvel U, high fashion, particularly mutant high fashion, would be drawing on the style of its most famous citizens, superheroes.

The most interesting thing about this arc from the perspective of Morrison’s canon as a whole is the fact that Quire is in many ways the archetypal Morrison hero, the rebellious kid trumping authority and seeking another, better way. Quire describes the “insane pop art masterpiece” Daily Bugle photo, which could be Morrison himself describing a 60s comic. Quire experiments with drugs, challenges the status quo and in the end, ascends to another, higher plane. Sounds like he’s one of the Invisibles, right? That’s where things get complicated because Quire’s behavior is essentially condemned over the course of the arc, his riot leads to little change, and in the end, we’re let to believe that everything he did was just to try and win the affection of Sophie, the archetypal insider cool girl.

When they’re battling Quire at the end of the arc, the Cuckoos tell him that it’s never about authority vs. rebels or right vs. wrong, it’s always been about “in” vs. “out.” Typically, Morrison heroes have been the outsiders, like the Doom Patrol, but here, the X-Men themselves are in, the Cuckoos are in, while Quentin’s group and the Special Class struggle to be like these people who are ostensibly our heroes. To use the archetypal high school metaphor, this is a series about the cool kids, and this arc is about the cool kids telling the outsiders to stay in their place.

I think there’s a lot of deliberate moral ambiguity in both this arc, and the run’s view of the X-Men as a whole. Xavier is trying to do the right thing, but without Magneto to check him, he’s become a bit high on his own power, and isn’t ready to confront the threat from within that Quentin poses. In Morrison’s cosmology, it is the conflict between two opposing forces that moves us towards a higher plane of existence. Cassandra Nova and Quentin both serve as agents that challenge the status quo, and force Xavier to refine his vision of a new world, in the same way that Magneto used to.

Investigating the death of Jumbo, we hear Beast talk about why he came out as gay, despite not actually being gay. In a lot of ways, it sounds like what Quentin Quire does later in the arc. He is deliberately challenging the status quo, where Scott worried earlier in the run about scaring the Republicans, Henry is confronting them with a self identity that’s as far from “normal” as possible. Unlike the other core X-Men in the run, Henry is not an insider, he’s dealing with the fact that he’s mutating further and further from humanity, and though he puts on a bold front for the kids, in private moments, we can see how scared he is. So, like Quentin, he deliberately pushes things further and becomes the very thing the human world fears most.

This conversation also features the interesting line, “After Genosha, the old troublemakers don’t seem to bother, do they?” Morrison used the Genosha event as a device to build a new world for the X-Men. It gave the X-Men an excuse to remake their own organization and a reason for why the villains of the past aren’t there anymore. Generally speaking, X-Men stories where they fight someone who’s wholly evil don’t work so well. During Claremont’s run, we saw many ostensible villains, Magneto, Emma Frost, Mystique and others shift towards the good side of things, or at least reach an understanding with the X-Men. The stories centered around defeating pure villains, like Cameron Hodge in X-Tinction Agenda, were generally less successful. Ultimately, the series is about the core characters and their relationships, with the threat of human prejudice out there in the distance. The characters aren’t interesting because of who they’re fighting, they’re interesting because of what they’re feeling.

The scene where Quentin Quire “strips” Slick of his charisma powers and reveals the real him is really interesting. Quentin says that “It’s all fake and illusion. That’s what cool is. That’s what charisma is. That’s what everything is.” But, surely if everything we see is an illusion, if reality itself is an illusion, then illusion is actually reality. Slick’s cool may not have been anything more than an illusion, but people believed in it and that’s all that matters.

Of course, the Quentin arc is largely about teenage rebellion, about the desire to confront authority and rail against anything that’s positive. It’s tough to say anything definitive about this arc because our moral allegiance is everywhere. Is the arc a lengthy satire of upper class rebellion, the absurd idea that Quentin should do all this simply because he finds out he’s adopted. If children are starving in China, isn’t it a bit ridiculous to get so worked up just because you’re adopted? I don’t think so. For Quentin, this is an apocalyptic event, it throws his entire self image into question, if he’s not the person he thought he was, it means he’s no longer bound by the limits he had placed on himself. He had reluctantly accepted the role of “loser,” of “outsider.” He could never be like Slick, but liberated from that old self by the news, he is able to become a different person.

A scene like Quentin on the street, looking at Jumbo’s body is hard to assess. Quentin says “The drugs can’t hurt me…can they?” We know that they will, there’s not many stories where people get addicted to drugs and all goes well. But, at the same time, don’t real people, particularly teenagers, feel like they’re invulnerable. Nobody who drives drunk thinks they’re going to get in a crash, they’re not like those other drunk drivers, they know what they’re doing. Objectively, it may seem stupid to drive drunk, but in the moment, people make stupid choices, and that’s why I think the scene works in spite of being clichéd. The conflict between cliché and real behavior is a major issue as the arc proceeds, Quentin’s story is the archetypal teenage rebellion writ large, and as such, the beats of the story feel predictable at times, and some scenes out right don’t work because they feel like something out of a 50s teen rebel scare film. It’s “Kick Madness.”

As way of pointing out the many tiers of personal troubles, Morrison spends a bunch of time in this arc with Xorn and the Special Class. Everyone feels like their lives are shitty sometimes, like things could never get any worse. Later in the arc, Emma and Scott feel terrible despite being powerful, beautiful people. Quentin would kill to be Scott Summers, just as someone like Beak would kill to be like Quentin. The Special Class is the lowest group in the social hierarchy. I really like the goofy dynamic these characters have with each other, and Xorn’s seeming total obliviousness to the way that everyone is mocking him.

The frequent discussion of “No-Girl,” the student who’s entirely conceptual once again brings up the issue of another conceptual character here, Xorn himself. Despite being nothing more than an invented persona, the class bonds with Xorn and his embrace of “the beauty and memory of this great world” is probably a stark contrast to the dismissive treatment they received from the rest of the world. Perhaps Magneto is steaming inside the helmet as they stick that “Jack-ass” sign on him, but for all the class knows, Xorn is a bright shining star who just wants to team them a better way.

In class, Quentin confronts Xavier with exactly the sort of rhetoric that both he, and Grant, have been spouting for years, “Butterflies from caterpillars and all that old stuff.” Quentin claims he’s seeing things from a higher perspective, no longer interested in working with the humans that he views as mass murderers. In Morrison’s philosophy, the goal of evolution is to remove oppositions and bring people together. Xavier’s way is close to what we see Jack propose at the end of The Invisibles. And, Quentin looks quite a bit like the student we saw Jack speaking to at the end of 3.2.

Quentin is trying to move things in the reverse direction. New X-Men has started out with the end of The Invisibles, “post-war” status quo. Now, Quentin is saying that things are so dangerous it’s not possible to try and work with humans, they need to isolate themselves. It’s a kind of war on terror sentiment, the idea that Genosha was such a crushing blow, it’s naïve to try to use peace to solve the problem. And speaking of The Invisibles, the guy that Quentin and his gang beat up on the street is the spitting image of Jack as drawn by Quitely in 3.1.

This issue foregrounds the power enhancing drug Kick. Kick is a perfect metaphor for mutant aggression because it literally enhances mutant powers, makes Quire and his gang feel less and less like humans, more like something amazing and different. I particularly love Emma saying how she tried it, “in the interest of science,” and “felt angelic and violently insane for five hours.” In previous Morrison works, we saw drugs in a generally positive way, a window into another world, a new mode of perception. Tripping on a mesa opening Jack and Buddy Baker to new worlds, but doing Kick only seems to drive Quentin towards violence.

What’s the difference? One could view it in the us vs. them, me vs. you dichotomy that’s so critical to Morrison’s philosophy. What kick does is enhance the individual’s power here on Earth, whereas the drugs in The Invisibles took people out of their own heads and connected them to a higher plane, moved them closer to the supercontext. Quentin has selfish motives, as do most of the other kick users during Morrison’s run.

During the tattooing scene, the characters in the text once again subvert the epic nature of Quentin’s rebellion. Quire sees himself as the next Magneto, someone who’s going to tear up Xavier’s idea of right and wrong and remake the world in his own image. But the tattoo parlor guy sees them as “suburban neo-nazis. Fratboys on dope!” He’s trying so hard to rebel, but nothing he does is enough to really change things. As Wolverine says earlier, every generation is the same. They have to go through the process of rebellion, experience the extremes of an argument before coming to terms with the more balanced position that Xavier holds. Xavier wants everyone to believe the way he does, but they haven’t been through the struggles he has. It’s easy for adults to tell kids what’s right and wrong, but it’s not until you experience something for yourself that you really understand.

The problem with Wolverine’s advice is that Quentin’s rebellion has turned violent, he killed people, and that’s crossing a line. Without the influence of kick, he might have just crewed with things at the school, but the kick emboldens him to more extreme tactics. As we see during the U-Men assault, the Omega Gang has become out right cruel in a way that even Magneto wasn’t. I think this is where the story slips up, Quire goes so far over the top with his violence that it becomes a bit hard to believe. There’s a major disconnect between the Quentin we saw in the first issue and the person we see here, and there’s not quite enough development on his emotional arc. I suppose you can write off the change to Kick, but that’s sloppy storytelling.

The U-Men assault on the special class leads us to the best page of art in the arc, the haunting scene of Xorn destroying the truck while Angel looks on. Xorn says that the entire scenario has been designed to teach the children their own worth. But, Xorn himself seems to have betrayed his non-violent exterior. This arc really makes clear the dual motivations of Xorn, and he’s never more creepy looking than when steam is pouring out of his helmet, fire behind him.

As I said, this page is amazing, but the art in general is a bit disappointing for Quitely. I don’t think it’s so much his fault as the post processing. In the same way that Phil Jiminez’s stuff looked weird, all the people have a strange reddish shine to their faces. In the panels were lighting is weird looking, like Beak in the flashlight or the special class standing in the glow of the helicopter, it looks great, like typical Quitely, but in other scenes, it just doesn’t look right. I’m glad that Quitely got a better finishing process for his recent work, Marvel really botched things here. And, they also apparently forced ugly looking goatee Wolverine on Quitely, a design that’s far from the cool guy we saw back in “E For Extinction.”

This brings us to the riot proper. If there’s one major missed opportunity here, I think it’s the chance to show the human reaction to what Quentin Quire has done. If the Xavier Academy is supposed to be the bridge between the mutant and human world, this open day would be its shining moment, when they show humans that it’s possible to peacefully co-exist. So, Quentin Quire’s riot would be the ultimate blow to that hope. Humans aren’t going to give them another chance after a disaster like this. Unfortunately, after this storyline, Morrison never really goes back to that idea. The story moves out of the more reality based world it’s been in so far and back into an over the top comic book world. It makes for some great stories, but I think there are missed opportunities in exploring the effects of what Quentin did. As it is, the death of Sophie is the major emotional moment, where it should be the death of the dream that gets to us.

Emma Frost and the Cuckoos make plans to stop Quentin. As the insiders, apparently the most popular, beautiful girls at school, it’s in their interest to protect the status quo. They’re the ones who would shine when humans come to the school, and they don’t want to see things disrupted by Quentin’s “gang of bad haircuts.” As the series developed, the Cuckoos became the most interesting of the student characters, a hive mind that’s gradually breaking apart. Here, we see Esme questioning Miss Frost about the deaths of her previous students, drawing the ire of her fellow Cuckoos.

It’s strange that Morrison should choose to place our emotional alignment more with the Cuckoos than with Quire. Shouldn’t we be drawn to the revolutionary figure, not the entrenched establishment? Again, I’m not sure how much we are supposed to sympathize with Quentin. The end of the arc makes it seem like he had some good points and got led astray by Kick, which he did, but as the arc plays out, he seems like a sadistic destroyer. The reasons for that are the over the top drug stuff and the actual murders he commits earlier in the arc, they pull our sympathy away from the Omega Gang.

Of course, calling that a failure is assuming that the goal of the arc was to make Quentin sympathetic, when perhaps the entire arc is designed to show the failure of violent revolution, particularly when it’s predicated on such flimsy motives. Quentin latches on to the violence in Genosha, but the implication in the story is that this all happens because he’s distraught about finding out he’s adopted, and that he’s hoping to do something that will make Sophie attracted to him. It’s the dichotomy between that motivation and what happens that makes the storyline stretch credibility at times. We just don’t have enough time to watch things get out of control.

Anyway, the ending moments are well done, when Xavier diminishes Quentin, claiming “the revolution lasted minutes.” I’m not sure that’s the best way to win the affection of your students, but it does show a Xavier pushed a bit over the edge. He wants to punish Quentin in this moment, and thus becomes the malevolent authority figure he never wanted to be.

But, the real payoff is the amazing moment where the Cuckoos, functioning as a five in one legion entity, tear Quentin apart, ripping through his exterior down to his nervous system. It’s a crazy panel, like only Quitely could do. The moment also features the line I was talking about earlier, the idea that it’s all about “in versus out.” Quentin tried to get in, and wound up destroying the person he hoped to make love him. Again, this would play better if Sophie was the first person Quentin hurt, not one among many.

The next issue opens with another Xorn/Magneto hint. Pouring the cement mixer onto Herman, we see the metal ladder bending behind him. Magnetism was in use there. It’s interesting that Magneto should be so central in quelling a revolution that’s largely about carrying on his ideals. The best scene in the arc is Quentin Quire’s transcendence beyond this physical plane, which is full of both Xorn/Magneto stuff, foreshadowing for “Planet X” and “Here Comes Tomorrow,” and some core Morrison philosophy. The scene also benefits from the werid lighting, which makes Quitely look like Quitely again.

Quentin says that he hears everyone thinking the “same stupid thought” in different languages. This recalls the talking head in “Arcadia,” as he moves toward transcendence, the divisions of our world fade and Quentin becomes more connected to the universal oneness. Here, we get the first moment where Quentin and Xavier really connect. As telepaths, they’re much closer to supercontext perception than the rest of us. When Quentin talks about people jabbering in little boxes, he’s really talking about us, locked in our own heads and unaware of anything outside ourselves. Xavier speaks of “A hand scared of its fingers. The loneliness and loss felt in a world without telepathy.” Being a telepath for Xavier isn’t a curse, it’s a blessing, a way to know that everyone feels the same things and isn’t as alone as they think they are.

Xorn enters to heal Quentin, but winds up euthanizing him. He tells Quentin that “There is something in you that is like me,” tying back to the idea of Quentin as Magneto’s successor. There’s a strange aura over the whole scene, for a moment, we’re out of the world of the X-Men and closer to the world of The Invisibles or The Filth.

The other major development in the issue is the rift between Emma and the Cuckoos. Emma at first speaks with her usual attitude, praising the “glory and panache” with which Sophie gave her life. She’s not ready to be opposed by the Cuckoos, who once again confront her with the many children Emma has led to their death. The Cuckoos tear Emma’s ego apart, puncturing the self image she’s built, and bringing everything she hates about herself to the surface, prefacing what Jean will do in the next issue.

This leads Emma back to Scott, and the safe place they made in issue #131. She wants to explore all those “difficult feelings without guilt,” escape to a world where she doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of her decisions and can indulge in psychic role play. She puts on the costume of Dark Phoenix, but in being with Scott, she’s also wearing the suit of Jean. As Emma Frost, she’s got a lot of actions in her past to be ashamed of. But, if she can make straight arrow Scott Summers love her, then she can’t be all bad. Scott’s central issue is that he wants Jean to be bad for him, to unleash her feelings like she used to, but with him, she’s always boring and good. Emma’s issue is that she has seen how dangerous and nasty Jean can be, but people still idolize Jean and always question her own motives. So, in wearing the Phoenix costume, and even mimicking Jean’s hair, she can make herself more like the woman she simultaneously hates and wants to be.

She mentions a number of times being left mentally broken the last time she fought Jean, she has clearly not forgiven her for what happened. Being with Scott may have started as revenge for that, but it turned into something else by this point. He is her refuge from a world Emma is losing control of, together in her thoughts they can both indulge their desires.

I love when she tells Scott to “stop being such an old superhero,” and he seems baffled, saying “I’ve never been allowed to be anything else.” Recall back in issue #126 when Jean said that Scott was her favorite superhero, he’s trying to keep up that image for her. With Emma, he can let his guard down and be whatever he wants. At the same time, he can play with his darker fantasies about Jean. Emma mocks the hyperbolic prose surrounding Dark Phoenix, claming that “I’m going to explode with passion and fry the stars, darling.” There’s definitely a sexual component to Jean’s power in the Phoenix Saga, unleashed as it is by an elaborate role playing BDSM ritual. Emma plays on that here, giving Scott the fire without any real danger. In this space, he can have it all.

Except, oh wait, his wife has found her way in. The safe space is not so safe, and Scott finds his darkest desires exposed to the person he had hidden them from for so long. But, more on that next time.

So, “Riot at Xavier’s” is simultaneously a fantastic arc and a troubled one that never quite matches its potential. There’s two ways of viewing a work, all too often people view a work for what it’s not, grading a work based more on its flaws than what works in it. I’ve seen films I considered essentially flawless that I still didn’t love. This arc is full of problems, but it’s also got some of the best stuff in Morrison’s run to date. I am aware of the negative, but I choose to focus on the positive.

Mad Men: "The Gold Violin" (2x06)

It seems like every episode of Mad Men leaves me saying that was one of the series’ best episodes yet, and this was no exception. It’s not so much the overall narrative, of which there wasn’t that much, it’s individual scenes and moments that shone, for their sadness, awkwardness or funniness. Amidst this series of interesting singular moments is a continuing shift in Don’s character, as he moves up in society and is again confronted with what his serial philandering has done to his character.

Let me start with the first standout scene, Harry Crane and Cooper’s discussion of the painting. This painting has been built up so much, Harry just needs to comment on it, and in the process, winds up opening exactly the problematic door he was hoping to avoid. The verbal tennis is fantastic, with Harry seemingly winning when he asks Cooper what he thinks of the painting, only to be totally shot down by Cooper, who’s actually trying to do work. It’s a mix of humor and awkwardness that would make Ricky Gervais proud.

The next striking scene is the strange moment where Don is called into Cooper’s office and offered the chance to ascend to the elite of society. Is he an initiate of the Illuminati, a Freemason now? Will he and William Gull be working on the Queen of England’s secret agenda next? In our world, the rulers of society aren’t an elaborate secret organization, they’re right there for all to see, the heads of corporations, making the choices that affect all our lives. I really liked the odd tone of the scene, the way Don is somewhat confused about this social promotion.

Don lives with this constant fear of being exposed as a fraud, of everyone finding out that he isn’t who he’s supposed to be. At the end of season one, Cooper made it clear that he didn’t care who Don was, he just cares who he is. But, when he’s thinking about buying the Cadillac, he flashes back to a moment when he was exposed as a fraud for the first time. I feel like the whole adopted persona functions as an allegory for the way everyone feels as an adult. Getting older, I still find it hard to believe I have a ‘real job,’ my own apartment, all that stuff. There’s no moment where you wake up and realize you’re an adult, but at a certain point, you just are.

For Don, the process of forming a self identity is wrapped up in the adoption of the Don Draper persona. If his “true identity” came out, everything he has could be stripped away, he’d be exposed as a fraud. Betty may have ostensibly fallen in love with a lie, but he’s been living that lie so long that it’s a more real identity than Dick Whitman. Don doesn’t buy the Cadillac at first, he’s scared that everything he’s got could come crashing down. Cooper welcomes him to the club, reassures him that he’s safe, and at that moment, Don decides to fully embrace the thrill of writing a $6,500 check and not caring.

Don loves the car, and driving in it, he seems to re-embrace the role of husband and father. Sitting in it, he and Betty are drawn to each other in a way we don’t usually see with the two of them. It’s like buying the car seals him into the Don Draper persona, he’s not faking it anymore, he’s made it and he can fully embrace the excess of suburban life.

This excess is depicted wonderfully in the picnic scene, where Don and his family stake their claim on the land. There’s the literal act of Bobby pissing on a tree, as well as the hard to believe dumping of garbage at the end of the scene. How could people be so careless of the environment back then? Notably, this is probably the happiest we’ve ever seen them all together as a family. Don seems to totally embrace the role of father, he’s relaxed, watching the clouds, not worried about work or anything else. Sally asks if they’re rich, a question that’s likely prompted by the sudden change in attitude. Don has accepted his role in society, yes, they are rich, and he’s going to live that way.

This all leads up to the party at the Stork Club, where new Don goes out to live it up with the rich and famous. Here, the perspective shifts, and see things through Betty’s eyes. Jimmy once again lavishes attention on her, though in light of the end of the episode, his motivations with her are a bit less clear. It would seem that he’s trying to sleep with her, but could he actually be motivated by a desire to get back at Don and ruin his life. Jimmy claims he’s at the “kids’ table,” which in business is more typically the womens’ table. He’s sitting over there with Betty, out of the loop. The only way to reassert power is to attack Don through Betty. And, when she doesn’t take the bait, he decides to go after Don himself.

The scene with Betty and Jimmy is another example of Betty using her “sensitive female disposition” as an excuse not to confront a real issue. Is she really so sensitive that she’s unable to deal with those issues, or is it an act she puts on so she doesn’t have to confront any real problems. It’s what she did with Arthur earlier in the season, and what she does with Jimmy now. She is repressing all these feelings, trying to live up to the image of the perfect family when in reality Don is once again betraying her. I’d argue that she knows exactly what’s going on, her fury evident when she throws up at the end of the episode, a closing moment as bold as anything on the series to date. It’s amazing that things could slide from that utopian moment in the park to something this bad so quickly.

The confrontation between Jimmy and Don is another fantastic moment, one in which Don’s status as a “man-whore” is brought to the forefront. There is an unspoken code that you don’t sleep with another man’s wife, Don has brazenly broken it. When Jimmy says that Don gave him everything he wanted, but he still hates him, it’s exactly the same sentiment that Betty has. They are both dependent on Don, he gives them their dreams, but takes their hearts in the process. The Jimmy/Don confrontation was brutal, if that’s the last we see of him and Bobbie, they went out on a high note.

Reading some online discussion about the series, it seems that people didn’t like the Bobbie/Jimmy arc that much. I find it hard to discuss the series on that level, there’s scenes I like more than others, but pretty much everything with Don is great, and feels integral to better understanding the character. Talking about the painting in this episode, they bring up the idea that art isn’t so much about specific meaning as it is about the feeling it gives you. This show is as close to “abstract art” as you’ll see on television. The narrative is very minimal, the payoffs are emotional rather than story based and so much is unsaid and subtextual. It’s not the story that leaves an impact, it’s the intangible something that knits each episode together. I loved the Bobbie/Jimmy arc, but even if I didn’t care for the characters, I think Bobbie in particular is integral to our ongoing understanding of Don this season.

The arc reminds me a bit of the backhalf of Sopranos season six in that it forces us to acknowledge that our “hero” really isn’t a good guy. Don tying her up and walking out last episode was a brutal act of emotional violence, after Bobbie sinks to the dark place they usually work from, Don all of a sudden decides he’s better than her. But, in so doing, he only seems even scummier, reinforced by that haunting final moment where he looks at his daughter and sees Bobbie. The first season version of Don wasn’t exactly a character you loved, but he seemed like a good enough guy for his time. This season is gradually tearing down the illusions he’s built up around himself. The world is changing, as we saw with the super young team at the ad agency, and Don’s burn through everything and leave charred remains behind approach might not work so well for a generation that ostensibly cares more.

I didn’t write up last week’s episode, but I want to quickly discuss the idea that Don has a “reputation” among a certain class of women. Last week’s episode again raised the specter of Tony Soprano in the way that Don has a loving blonde “virgin” wife at home who is utterly dependent on him, while he seeks out dark haired professional, powerful women “whores” to sleep with. The Sopranos was largely about a man trying to live like his parents did in a world that’s changed and left him obsolete. Don is still in a world that works with his morality, but it’s changing fast, and he has to try to keep up. Later in the 60s, Don’s adultery won’t be seen as acceptable, there won’t be this huge wall between the office and home. Betty has already expressed how trapped she is with just her and the kids at home.

Don is someone who won’t want to be left behind. He’s more self aware than the other people at Sterling Cooper, who write off any sort of change as just a fad. But, their entire world will soon be gone, Don feels that too, and it’s why he doesn’t want to be seen as just a man in a suit. He couldn’t make it with the beats last season, but he still resented being told he wouldn’t like a book of poetry in this season’s premiere. I could see the entire series ending with Don having reinvented himself again for the late 60s, abandoning his wife and kids and starting a new life out West, with long hair. You could read Dick Whitman’s adoption of the Don Draper persona as America itself adopting this suburban ideal after the war. So, as America changes again, he might as well.

Of course, that’s assuming Don can give up the trappings of luxury and accept a new kind of society again. He couldn’t do it with the beats, but he was willing to run away and start all over with Rachel last season. He doesn’t seem to have any emotional attachment to Betty. He performs the role of husband, but it’s hard to think of a time when he genuinely cared for her or the kids. Perhaps at the end of last season, in light of his Carousel presentation, but wasn’t that falling in love with images, with the life he’d created for himself more than the life he was actually living.

Elsewhere, the Sal/Ken dinner party was practically painful to watch, but still a fantastic scene. And, the Jane/Joan rivalry is full of spark and one upsmanship. Joan, who was publicly outed as 31 is getting shown up by this 20 year old, the first person who outplayed Joan at her own game. If Jane can stick around after getting fired by Joan, how fast does Joan’s power over the department evaporate? Either way, she’s a perfect representation of a new kind of woman emerging in the 60s. Even more so than Peggy, she’s not scared of traditional power structures and is making her own way.

So, a top notch episode in what has been an astonishing season so far. The style of storytelling on the show is so far beyond anything else in TV or cinema at the moment. Individual scenes have the resonance of entire films, and compounded, it becomes something even more transcendent.

True Blood: "Strange Love" (1x01)

The last ten minutes of Alan Ball television were quite possibly the single greatest ten minutes of any TV show ever. Hyperbole you say? Perhaps, but this is the last episode of Six Feet Under we’re talking about, a show that went out on the absolute top of its game. Sure, I love the ambiguity of The Sopranos or Evangelion endings, but there’s also something very satisfying about the ultimate definitive series ending.

Anyway, it’s probably good that buzz has been mixed on True Blood. I went into the pilot with lower expectations than I have for something like Dollhouse, just wanting to be entertained, and in that respect, the pilot did a great job. There’s parts of the show that don’t really click, namely a lot of the supporting cast, but Anna Paquin is great, and her energy should be enough to carry the show until the rest of the cast gets a bit more interesting.

Paquin’s Sookie seems like a variation on her Rogue from the X-Men movies. In both cases, we’ve got a young woman with some kind of weird power that prevents her from connecting with other people. It’s not made explicit, but presumably the reason she has “no sex life to speak of” is her psychic abilities, which combined with a delicate sensibility means she’s probably put off by the raw lust of someone like Sam. Seeing inside peoples’ minds means she’s distinctly aware of the difference between true love and animal lust.

Mind reading has myriad narrative possibilities. The dichotomy between peoples’ serene surfaces and their churning inner selves is always interesting, and can be emotionally devastating, as in Buffy’s brilliant “Earshot.” But, this episode doesn’t go too far with the psychic stuff. The most striking use of her powers is the brilliant moment where she walks over to Bill in the middle of a crowded bar, everyone thinking at her until he grabs her hand and everything but him disappears from her mind.

The psychic powers seem kind of randomly placed. Typically, genre shows like this have one conceit that we accept, in this case the presence of vampires. No one is going to call the producers on the presence of Bill, but if a mummy were suddenly to walk along, it would seem weird. The psychic powers are on the borderline of being that mummy, no one else seems to have special powers in the world, and there’s no real explanation for their presence.

I’ve been watching Fassbinder’s TV epic Berlin Alexanderplatz, a work that’s deliberately stylized and removed from the norms of human behavior. If you look at the narrative on a literal level, it’s rather nonsensical, so I’ve taken to looking at it on a more metaphorical level. The narrative incongruities are justified if you view them as metaphor, as a means to tell a better story.

The psychic stuff here could be read in a similar way. Maybe she has psychic powers, or maybe she’s just imagining what these people are saying, the thoughts that are supposedly theirs in actuality a reflection of what she sees in them. She could be creating a mythology out of her everyday life, applying grand stories to the little everyday occurrences in the bar as a way of getting through the day. Surely, an alcoholic hoping to have just one drink is more interesting than a random guy just having an uneventful beer.

Is there narrative support for this theory? Not necessarily, I’m assuming we’ll see that her psychic talents are real in an upcoming episode, and they’ll play an important role in the narrative. But, in this episode, they function as a kind of Greek chorus, a subtle thematic background element that makes the everyday scenes in the diner more interesting, and serves as a metaphoric reinforcement of the society that will try to keep her and Bill apart. The voices in her head could actually be other people, or they could be the societally ingrained values that would keep her from getting together with someone like Bill.

As I said before, their meeting in the bar was the undeniable high point of the episode, a moment where all the disparate elements of the show worked together to create something uniquely powerful. Bill isn’t as compelling as Spike or Angel yet, but I’m assuming we’ll see more of his history as the show goes on. Here, he functions as the forbidden darkness that Sookie is drawn to. This is made literal in the dream sequence, where she goes out and gets bitten. The darkness attracts her, but it’s also dangerous, as we see in the final moments of the show when she gets brutally assaulted.

The weakness of the pilot is the stuff that doesn’t involve Paquin. Six Feet Under had one of the best casts on television, but the major supporting players here feel decidedly generic. Other than Sookie’s grandmother, nobody really jumps out. Tara and Lafayette are played way over the top, while Sam and Jason feel like refugees from a CW series. It was good to see Frank Sobotka back on TV, but his Southern accent didn’t really do it for me. And, William Sanderson is always a welcome presence, but didn’t really jump out here.

The core of the series is the Sookie/Bill relationship, but to make it really work, they’ll need to do a better job of fleshing out the supporting cast, making them emotionally relatable and engaging on their own terms. Will that happen? Hopefully, but I definitely liked the episode, and will be back for more.

And, let me just add that the opening credits sequence was absolutely phenomenal. HBO shows never disappoint when it comes to the main titles, and this is one of the best, a delirious flurry of the sacred and profane. From a purely aesthetic point of view, it was easily the highlight of the hour.