That escalated quickly! The spotlight falls on Kate Pryde as Sinister steps up his game in Immortal X-Men #9, written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by Lucas Werneck, colored by David Curiel, lettered by Clayton Cowles and designed by Tom Muller, Jay Bowen and Kieron Gillen.
Mark Turetsky: Do you ever get into a fail state in a video game? One where your latest save point seems to lead you right into an impossible situation? And so you just give up?
Austin Gorton: Mark, I’m old enough to remember when video games didn’t have save points and Moira MacTaggert was just a fiery Scot with a Nobel Prize and a super powerful son, but yes, many a game controller has been slammed down in frustration when that save point just Keeps. Killing. Me.
Mark: This issue really reminded me of a video I saw years ago, where someone was stuck in a death loop in a Fallout game, and finally solved it by opening up their inventory and taking every chem (illegal drug) in there before rushing in and taking out all of the monsters in a speed-powered fury.
In Kate We Trust
Mark: We spoke last issue about how this series seems to be moving away from deep character explorations, and this issue seems like an entirely clean break. It starts out somewhat teasing that it could be one, but, well, that bit keeps getting interrupted by an attempted mass murder.
Austin: Immortal X-Men #9 is the “Kate Pryde” issue of the series. You’re right that it’s arguably the most plot-forward issue of the series yet; even the “AXE” tie-ins still managed to explore their POV character amidst all the crossover happenings. Some of that is due to necessity — with both “Sins of Sinister” and the presumed end of the series looming, more room needs to be made for things to happen. Plus, this is the “AXE aftermath” issue the series sidestepped last issue, so there’s some wrap-up to do in the wake of the crossover’s conclusion. And tensions between the Quiet Council and Sinister have been simmering since issue #1. So this is hardly out of nowhere.
All of which is a lengthy preamble to my question: Was there anything about Immortal X-Men #9 that stood out as being particularly Kate-focused? Anything to suggest she needed to be the POV character when Sinister launched this assault versus another of the remaining still-be-spotlighted characters?
Mark: No, but I think that’s kind of the point. It starts out being very Kate-forward, and then Sinister interrupts, throwing off the pattern that’s been established for the series. It’s meant to throw you off. We’ve had eight issues of character-centric stories. It’s become the comfortable rhythm of the series. This is the first issue where Sinister has actually pulled the trigger on resetting the timeline. Issue #1 starts just after the last time, and Sinister has been prevented from restoring his save points ever since then. Still, we do get a few good Kate POV lines, even if Sinister denies us getting a deeper character study.
Austin: And Kate is leading the charge of the surviving council members at the end of Immortal X-Men #9, suggesting she’s going to play a leading role in terms of whatever is coming next, even as the POV moves on.
To your point, Kieron Gillen does get in some good Kate stuff via her POV captions, like an assertion of her sexuality, and the way she manages to bring Exodus around to the idea of the Phoenix Foundation before Sinister starts his spree is a smart illustration of why she belongs on the wheeling-and-dealing Hellfire bloc: She can be as good at reading people and selling an image as Shaw and Emma.
Mark: Even from the first panel, her referring to “Xavier” and “Erik” brings a certain informality to Kate’s narration, not to mention that avoidance in discussion of Magneto’s death by Xavier implies the depth of feeling that Xavier has for his lost friend (the precise depth and nature of that relationship I couldn’t possibly speculate on). Kate’s just really great at reading and playing to a room, even if that room includes a significant number of telepaths.
And then, as most pre-credits sequences of this current run of X-books do, everything blows up. (Everything, in this case, is Sinister).
Make a Better Plan
Austin: So, in the first iteration, Sinister storms into the council chamber, Destiny immediately pegs him as a threat to Hope, and Exodus blows him up. Emma delivers a scathing bon mot: “That was actively embarrassing. Was this a plan of some kind?” We flashback to earlier, and learn that Sinister is finally making his move against the council. But because he doesn’t want to reset back to his last save point, before “Judgment Day”, he creates another Moira clone and a new save point. Honestly, even though this is a little more complicated, I had an easier time wrapping my head around how this is all meant to work here than when it was first introduced.
Mark: And for the first time we’re given a limit on how much Sinister can abuse his save-scumming system: Each Moira clone is afforded only ten lives. Which is fun because that’s how many Moira Prime got before being depowered and turning into a robot. But in that case, it wasn’t a hard limit on her mutant power, it was just what her destiny dictated. Here, it seems to be that having so many threads going at once is straining the timeline. Maybe if he abuses this too much, time itself will start to break in pretty bad ways.
But before he engages in serious time shenanigans, he has a little meeting with Destiny. It serves as a little bit of a debrief from their “Judgment Day” plans (sacrifice Reykjavik to save the world), but most importantly, Destiny tells Sinister not to give up, which turns out to be the key to his motivations throughout the whole issue. He doesn’t give up and instead presses on in his plan to take out Hope, and with it, Mutant Resurrection. To what end? We’ll probably find that out in “Sins of Sinister”.
Austin: I love the bit about Sinister only being able to reboot the Moira clone ten times as a parallel to the number of lives lived by Moira Prime. It’s a neat way to impose a limit on Sinister while tying back in with the larger X-narrative.
I’m glad you zeroed in Sinister targeting Hope, as that stuck out to me as well. I don’t believe we’ve seen much of Sinister railing against Hope before, so that definitely seems an important step in whatever his still fully unrevealed plan is. But in all the lives of Moira VI we see unfold in this issue, Hope remains his principal target. I wonder if it’ll come down to her being the key to mutant immortality in a way that undermines Sinister’s “clone ’em all and let God sort ’em out” approach to immortality.
Mark: Not to mention that getting Hope on the council was part of his greater plan. Was it to give him a better shot of killing her? It’s certainly a shot, but as we see, it takes some doing to off her in the company of ten of the most powerful mutants there are. But maybe it was even harder to take her out at Arbor Magna.
Austin: The extended sequence in the middle of Immortal X-Men #9 showcasing all of Sinister’s failed attempts at killing Hope is an absolute delight of absurdity and gore, beautifully (and disgustingly) rendered by Lucas Werneck. We usually think of telekinesis just as a power that lets you float things through the air or throw up a protective shield, but Immortal X-Men #9 makes it clear it can also rip someone apart quickly and viscerally.
Mark: The ways in which Exodus and Hope kill Sinister ring as very The Wicked + The Divine, which prominently featured gods snapping their fingers to make people’s heads explode.
Austin: My favorite bit from this sequence might be Moira VI lives 4-6 aka “the 90s”, when Sinister tries to take out Hope and/or her de facto bodyguards on the council via a series of weapons and body armors which ludicrously escalate in size in each subsequent reset. The way Gillen and Werneck present this — an entire “life” rendered via simply one panel, one page that tells a story encompassing multiple rewrites of reality known only to the reader rendered omniscient by dint of our perspective — is a great example of using the form to tell what is essentially a very complex and sweeping story in a straightforward way, the machinations of three separate Sinisters across three timelines conceived, executed, and thwarted in just a few panels.
Mark: Once we get to Moira VI.10, the final and possibly permanent timeline, Sinister comes to a realization: “You’re an Englishman with a problem. Be a sneak.” Can you tell that Gillen harbors no romantic notions about English fair play or “may the best man win?” Sinister gets through the telepath problem through sheer deceit and skullduggery.
Austin: He gets through, as Kate points out, by thinking like a super-villain, a term that has become somewhat complicated by the Krakoan status quo (in which traditional villains sit shoulder-to-shoulder with ostensible heroes to chart the course of a nation). This observation, perhaps, is another reason Kate is our POV character for these happenings, as she is one of the most traditionally-heroic coded of all the current council members (aside from Nightcrawler, Storm, and maybe Colossus) [Ed. Note: Nah, Colossus sucks]. She knows super-villainy when she sees it, even if Krakoa has blurred those lines. Lethal communion wafers and guns that shoot Unus the Untouchable bullets that blow you up from the inside are super-villainy.
Mark: A few interesting things to note: he never gets the best of Storm. In order to “win,” he needs to wait for her to leave (and if you’ve been reading X-Men Red, you know that Storm is getting quite good at fights to the death). The other thing is that Kate’s refrain of “What’s going on?” becomes “What the hell is going on?” It’s likely because Sinister is resorting to more and more outlandish tactics, but it’s also possible that some part of Kate has an inkling that things are repeating themselves, like that one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Cause and Effect.”
Austin: Ah yes, the episode where Data figures out they’re in a loop because of how Riker straddles his chair.
Mark: It’s also fun to go back and look at the Sinister timeline chart from Immortal X-Men #3, because we now have a much better idea about what it represents: each node represents a Moira clone, each representing a different save point he’s created. And we are now firmly post-Judgment Day, and I’m betting “Sins of Sinister” is set in “The Empire of the Red Diamond.” Will we reach “The Storm System?” Will other timelines be represented in that upcoming event as time itself starts to break in unpredictable ways? I kinda hope so! Anyway, it’s safe to say that we are firmly in “Sins of Sinister Prelude” mode.
Austin: It’s not a bad mode! All in all, I enjoyed Immortal X-Men #9. It’s not as character-focused as some of the previous ones, but the series has largely eschewed this kind of high octane plotting, so it’s a pleasant break from the norm. And we’re at a point — especially after “AXE” — that plots specific to the series need to start busting open. It’s time, and both Gillen and Werneck make the most of it.
Mark: Agreed. Immortal X-Men #9 is a fun issue that really starts to pay off the setup created in issue #1. It’s just a shame that it comes at the expense of the Kate Pryde issue. Now, if it had been a Colossus-focused issue, I probably wouldn’t have cared [Ed. Note: You’re damn right, nor should you].
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Kate notes that Shaw is running a book on when Sinister gets thrown in the Pit.
- According to “Sinister Secrets” from issue #1, next month, “Finally! Someone who actually deserves it gets thrown in the pit. Good riddance.”
- Kate also refers to Exodus as “Mister Sulky Pope” which is pretty funny.
- Sinister makes two Moira clones in this Immortal X-Men #9: VI and VII. While VII is still a baby, she presents a hard out for everything starting with her creation in this issue. Perhaps when Sins of Sinister is done, Sinister’s attack on the council will be undone entirely.
- We see that Sinister has Dark Beast (or a clone) hanging out in a tube in his lab. Dark Beast is not happy, but Sinister smartly notes he’s not even the darkest Beast anymore.
- Hope calling Exodus “The Rock of my Church” is a reference to John 1:42, where Jesus renames Simon Peter, which means Rock. (The folks at Apocrypals refer to him as Simon “The Rock” Peter).
- Shortly before executing his (seemingly successful) final attack, we see Sinister plotting it all out via a model of the council chamber. It’s very Doc Brown, and I’m sure Sinister is equally upset it’s not to scale.
- Kate’s Magen David (Star of David) seems to grow between the first page and the rest of the issue.
- As a Jewish person with similarly curly hair, I can’t say I’ve had the experience of needing to remove brain-gunk from it. But I’ll try to keep Kate’s warning in mind. [MT]
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
