Ultimate Sentinel my @$$ in Rise of the Powers of X #4

XAVIER! NO!

Xavier, shocking no one, compromises his morals in pursuit of his dream, as he teams up with Orchis to give mutants a chance. What’s left of the Quiet Council, however, has their own plan in place — it is time for the Phoenix to rise from the ashes that Orchis has left behind. Rise of the Powers of X #4 is written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by R.B. Silva, colored by David Curiel and lettered by Clayton Cowles, with design by Tom Muller and Jay Bowen. 

Armaan Babu: This issue opens with two simple words (if we ignore the caption box): “XAVIER! NO!”

I think it’s safe to say Rasputin’s feelings mirror our own. Professor X goes off the deep end in this issue, and while none of us are surprised, I think we can all say we’re very, very disappointed. What a jerk.

On the other hand, I am also … confused. The Quiet Council’s got a backup plan in place, but Jake, I’ve read this issue through twice, and I still only have the foggiest of ideas as to what’s going on here. Are things any clearer to you?

Jake Murray: Between my second readthrough of this issue, reliving the nightmare of last week’s Fall of the House of X and this week’s X-Men Forever, I’m starting to slowly piece things together, but wow is there a lot being thrown at the reader in one go here. There are non-sequiturs left, right and center that only make sense if you’ve read X-Men Forever, and I’m not sure that that’s what I want from a series that up to this point I was really enjoying?

Armaan: As I said in the Slack, I feel that either something very clever is going on, or that an overly complicated concept is being rushed out in a way that does not work, and the more I think on it, the more I feel that it’s the latter. Let’s take a closer look at the issue and see what we feel by the end of it.

Charles Xavier: The Ultimate Sentinel

Armaan: We’ve seen Xavier do awful things for what he believes is the greater good before, and while I have not read every X-Men comic, I think this is as bad as we’ve ever seen him (not counting, of course, clones, alternate reality dupes, possession or mind control)?

Plan A was to go back in time and murder a child. It’s somehow gotten worse. We open on the immediate aftermath of him killing Rachel, and teaming up with Mother Righteous to take Rasputin IV out of the picture. He knows they’re both going to get better soon, but still, for a man who claims to care about the mutants under his care, he sure is spending a lot of time shooting them.

Jake: Rachel aside, the company he’s been keeping is a great signifier of how far he has fallen, yet the failsafes and pre-emptive strikes are a great indicator of his determination and brutal pragmatism. For really one of the first times in his history, he’s decided not to hold the door open for humanity but rather shut the door in its face. He’s in full martyr mode here, and there’s a disconnect between the cold and calculated dialogue Gillen’s giving him and R.B. Silva’s use of body language, with Charles bent over head in hands for the majority of the issue. Charles will act decisively to win at all costs, but is still utterly defeated. In sacrificing humanity, he has lost his, and like the AI he must balance the lives of those he loves and who love him back against those who don’t, reducing the fate of the world to an equation. The scene also suggests, as X-Men Forever more directly addresses, that there’s a grander plan at play that justifies his actions. But he’s very much still responsible for the deaths of potentially thousands here. 

Armaan: He pried into the secret thoughts of anyone at Orchis who wasn’t 100% committed to the cause, knowing they’d be killed immediately. He impaired the cognitive functions of world leaders. He gave Orchis worldwide nuclear codes (as an aside, world leaders should probably just have Magneto-like-psychic-blocker-helmets on ALL THE TIME in a world where psychics are a known threat) — he is everything people have feared he would be. He does it with regret, but without a moment’s hesitation.

I want to take a moment to look at the deaths he’s complicit in. I’ve made no secret of my distaste for the way the X-Men have been murdering Orchis agents with such cavalier attitudes in the companion books written by Gerry Duggan. It feels out of character, even in a war, to see life so casually disregarded. Here, however, it feels completely in character — and it is given narrative weight, even if we don’t always see the direct consequences. The human deaths are brutal, and horrifying. Xavier’s pain is real, and his hypocrisy is loathsome. 

He has a moment when he’s asked if he wants to know just how many deaths he’s been complicit in, where he says, “Even one is too many.” He knows what he is doing is wrong, but he has no qualms about doing it anyway, simply because he believes it’s ultimately right. There is no principle he will not immediately sacrifice for what he believes is a good idea.

It’s important to know he’s working alone. Everyone he’s worked “with” is someone he’s been manipulating up until the moment he betrayed them. His current plan sees him take everything on his shoulders, making choices for mutantkind without asking a single one of them what they think about it. His plan isn’t a good one; it’s a panicked one, made of desperation, and plans made from that are rarely good ones. It’s important to remember that when the whole “RESIST” thing began, that’s been popping up again and again in this whole “Fall of X” event, it was Xavier they were resisting.

Jake: Xavier’s plan to help Orchis destroy humans in exchange for “a nice little island cage of your own” is an unequivocally terrible plan, and it’s important to acknowledge that the issue highlights this very directly. Overlooking Charles’ bargain with the devil are Enigma and Moira, who observe that there’s a conspicuous Dominion-shaped hole in Xavier’s plan, which suggests he may be a distraction for something of more cosmic significance. 

Moira is a little too quick to believe Charles, and I wish it had been left unsaid. There’s a beautiful panel of Moira looking over her shoulder at Charles as she strides into the future, ostensibly to leave him behind forever, that could have achieved this. Her facial expression conveys genuine sympathy as Charles pleads from off panel, “For once, mutants must be on the winning side.” Unfortunately it’s the fifth of a five-horizontal-panel page and isn’t quite prominent enough to feel significant.

Enigma’s reticence to intervene is the plot thread binding all of this together, which I am happy to suspend belief for because it ties brilliantly into Gillen’s story arc for Charles. Despite Storm entreating him to learn lessons from the “Sins of Sinister” timeline, despite the tragedy of the Hellfire Gala, despite Cyclops in Fall of the House of X begging him not to take this course of action, here is the father of the mutant dream again acting unilaterally, placing the burden of his people on his shoulders out of sheer hubris. Whether he succeeds or fails is no longer important. As he said to Moira in ROPOX #3, “Xavier, the curator of the dream, is dead. We killed him together, you and I. The dream must go on without me.” 

Armaan: There was always a poison at the heart of Krakoa, and it wasn’t Moira, or even Sinister. It was Xavier, and his belief that his vision was greater than anyone else’s. I never wanted Krakoa to fall, but if it did, I wanted to see that being brought to light. In giving us that, Rise of the Powers of X has given me the only satisfying thing about this era’s end that I’d hoped to see. The situation sucks, but damn if it isn’t good writing.

From Spring to Winter to Summers

Jake: I think we’re in agreement that the fall of the future “Prisoner X” is the most successful part of this issue, but there is a LOT more going on. If the Xavier plot is concerned with the death of a dream, the other half of the issue is concerned with the rebirth of a new one. Having been rather rudely shot in the back by her erstwhile mentor at the end of the last issue, Rachel is resurrected by The Five in the White Hot Room. The plan of the Quiet Council in exile, composed of Destiny, Exodus and Hope Summers, is twofold: resurrect the Phoenix and return the mutants in Atlantic Krakoa (the White Hot Room) to Pacific Krakoa (the material world). 

This is where the issue starts to unravel for me because it’s attempting to tell two partial stories. For example, we’re seeing elements of Jean Grey’s resurrection without knowing that it’s Hope and not Rachel resurrecting her. Now, most of this is explained in X-Men Forever, but it doesn’t thread that neatly into this issue. For example, we’re told that Rachel kick-starts the Phoenix and that she won’t be “getting back to Earth as the cavalry,” but then later in the issue we see Rachel, Jubilee and a red-headed character who can’t be Hope (but sure looks like her?) emerging from a flower on Earth’s Krakoa to fight Sentinels. This splash page is absolutely beautiful work from Silva, but isn’t resonant because it’s not entirely clear at first glance what’s happening.

Armaan: We have Tony Thornley and Austin Gorton getting a lot into the Phoenix’s resurrection specifically, and the two issues feel vitally intertwined. My only question is, why did it need to be this complicated?

There’s a lot of ritual that goes into bringing the Phoenix back, and tying it to Jean. Like a lot that is happening with the Fall of X, it feels both needlessly complicated and like a tragic step backward. One of the most exciting parts of Jean’s most recent resurrection is that, for the first time, she had completely moved beyond the Phoenix. To have a near-unconscious Jean, barely aware of what’s happening, be tied to the Phoenix again without having any say in the matter is a disturbing choice to say the least. She deserves better.

I also don’t understand why so much ritual is involved in the first place. The Phoenix has always just come and gone as it pleased, tying itself to Jean whenever it had the chance. The last we saw of it, it had left Echo behind in a multiversal war against a group of Mephistos (the less said about that the better). Nowhere is it established why Rachel — a former Phoenix host herself — can’t simply telepathically reach out and ask for its assistance. 

Jake: This part of the issue feels really rushed to me. Firstly, the juggling act of scripting this issue and X-Men Forever #2 has resulted in both issues feeling a little confused (but especially this one). More importantly though, Silva’s artwork falls a little flat because it sacrifices the creative paneling that makes his storytelling so special in favor of formulaic horizontal panels on almost every single page. It even gets a little messy at times, like the page of Exodus fighting the Sentinel. The fact he’s not drawing issue #5 is a real shame, but unfortunately you can really see the effects of the time pressures on his work here.

Dominion Group Chat

Jake: Rise of the Powers of X is now operating on three planes of existence that loosely map the concepts aligned to the mathematical “powers” of 10, 100 and 1,000 in Powers of X, except they’re happening in real time. If the human vs. Orchis plot is “The World” 10 years on from the birth of the dream and the AI vs mutants vs humans fight is “The War,” then the Dominion plot is “Ascension.” It’s the conclusion to the high-concept plot seeded by Hickman and Silva from the very beginning that will see the Phoenix attempting to stop Dominion from subsuming all of existence. 

Thematically, the two contrast brilliantly — the silent, cold and unfeeling death of the universe against the white hot flame of passion and creation; the embodiment of machine vs. humanity on a cosmic and conceptual level. Naturally, Jean will be its host, and toward the end of the issue we see the group of Dominions contacted by Enigma monitoring her rebirth from the flame. Bookending this page though are two data pages of what is essentially a text thread between Enigma and other Dominions which, while on theme for the clinical nature of the Dominion, makes me think we’ve missed out on a potentially amazing visual had Silva just had more time. Enigma is given a physical depiction in this series, so I don’t feel like it’s a stretch to suggest this could have been done in a more exciting way, particularly because the Phoenix has such a strong visual signifier.

Armaan: What’s missing here for me is making the Dominion feel like an actual threat. So far, Enigma has managed to do very little. As we’re made to understand it, he has godlike power over time and space, but there are so many restraints immediately placed upon him. He can’t change events too much, because he’s worried about undoing the sequence of events that led to his creation. There are a convenient number of places outside time and space where people can plan his downfall. He feels little more than a big, angry head grumping that his plans aren’t working out the way he wanted them to — and we already have MODOK for that.

He’s outplayed the other Sinisters, sure, but it always feels like all the other mere mortal merry mutants are a few steps ahead of him at every other turn. Calling on other Dominions to help take on the Phoenix Force (which has, in the past, been defeated by people a lot less powerful than what the Dominion is meant to be) only makes Enigma seem even less powerful, rather than raising the stakes. It’s the ninja problem — one ninja is a dangerous threat, but the threat level of each ninja is divided by the number of ninjas on the page.

I enjoyed this issue a lot more than I’ve been enjoying anything else X-related recently. It does, however, feel rushed, and it’s straining against its constraints. It wants to do more than it’s being allowed to do, but damn if it doesn’t look breathtakingly gorgeous while doing it.

Inside the RoPoX Tox Box

• Have you ever noticed how much Enigma looks like Charles Xavier? Not saying there’s anything in it, just an observation.
• It’s clear from Omega Sentinel’s vision of mutant paradise (Page 16) that hers would feature elephants. Sadly I don’t think they’ll quite make the cut for ascension. Maybe they could just take two? Wait, that’s a different story.
• Who is the mysterious redhead popping out of the flowers as Spring follows Fall? It can’t be Jean, it’s definitely not Hope or Rachel, and the costuming is wrong for Firestar. Is it a miscoloring, or are there any redheaded mutants we’re forgetting about?
• What do you think the Dominion group text chat talks about on its off days? Do they share memes from across the multiverse? Do they have links to articles discussing the rise of AI and have a hearty laugh? Do they discuss how to pull strings across timelines to ensure they get the franchise reboots of stuff they really want to see? We’re curious.
• Nimrod’s “Splish! Splash! Sploosh!” as he murders Orchis scientists, combined with his sulky adolescent language in Fall of the House of X, is starting to feel like he’s genuinely regressing into the mind of a child.
• At some point, there needs to be a reckoning for how, in their darkest hour, their greatest threat wore the colors and used the tech of a man who should have been their ally, Tony Stark, regardless of whether they were stolen from him. He doesn’t get to wash his hands of that easily.

Buy Rise of the Powers of X #4 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)

Armaan Babu

Jake Murray

Jake Murray spends far too much time wondering if the New Mutants are OK. When he's not doing that, he can be found talking and writing about comics with anyone who will listen.