As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-FACTOR vol 4 #3
“Suite No. 3: Mojoverse Sonata the 2nd, a Celestial Rondo”
by Leah Williams & David Baldeon

The title of the previous issue was “Suite No. 2: Mojoverse Sonata Xf. 3 Op. 45, Danse Macabre”, so we’re continuing a theme here.

COVER / PAGE 1. Mojo (who doesn’t actually appear in the story) watches various police shows starring the X-Factor cast. Though surely X-Factor aren’t actually the Krakoan police…?

PAGES 2-3. X-Factor make short work of Durkitt’s crew, and Spiral welcomes them to her show.

This sort of playing to the crowd is out of character for Spiral, but we’ll see later that people in her position need to keep up the act. She describes Mojo with a bizarre pile-up of titles – benefactor, executive producer, democratically-elected ruler, king, supreme leader, and “most holy”. Clearly Mojo remains firmly in charge despite the supposed democratisation of the new Mojoverse. The logical end point of this direction for the Mojoverse is Mojo as Mark Zuckerberg.

PAGES 4-5. Recap and credits.

PAGES 6-11. Spiral reveals who the dead mutant was, then packs X-Factor off to an arena.

Wind Dancer. Sofia Mantega was a major character in the early-2000s iteration of New Mutants, where Prodigy also made his debut. She was depowered on M-Day, and was last seen in the depowered-mutants version of the New Warriors, where she was wearing a bootleg set of Dr Octopus tentacles and calling herself Renascence. She hasn’t been seen since that volume of New Warriors was cancelled in 2009. What on earth she’s doing in the Mojoverse, and why she’d be remotely interested in killing herself for views, all remain obscure, but of course that’s the plot. I suppose she might just be trying to sidestep Crucible and get herself resurrected with her powers restored, but that would be a high risk strategy given the obvious difficulties for Krakoa in verifying her death.

“Her identity was hidden behind a paywall.” This doesn’t really make sense to me. Spiral seems to say that she has the power to conceal the dead girl’s identity from nonsubscribers (and let’s assume that Mojoworld technology lets her stop them from spreading the knowledge). But in the data page later on, we’re told that Sofia allowed herself to be killed for views after polling her own followers. So… why is any of this information under Spiral’s control?

The Headshot dancers are dressed like Rachel Summers as Phoenix from the early years of Excalibur vol 1 – the costume Rachel wore when she escaped the Mojoverse.

Ginny and He-Lix. Spiral’s two aides are both pre-existing characters though very obscure ones. Ginny Guzman was a supporting character in the 2013 Uncanny X-Force run. She’s a psychic, and Spiral was initially using her to induce drug-like experiences in customers. They seem to have settled down into a working relationship. He-Lix is obviously a male version of Spiral; his only previous appearance was as a henchman of Mojo in Howard the Duck vol 6 #9 (from the Chip Zdarsky run).

The battle pits have the logo of the fast-growing top streaming service, which we saw on a data page last issue. We’ll see later that this belongs to Shatterstar. It’s possible that Spiral is also trying to help X-Factor, though in a less heavy-handed way than Shatterstar, and that this is why she sends them in his direction – but she seems to be enjoying herself too much for that.

PAGES 12-14. Daken and Aurora talk.

“Psychic voicemails”. As explained in issue #1, these floating things are messages about missing mutants, submitted via “fleet seeds” by the inhabitants of Krakoa.

In asking his questions to Aurora, Daken is still trying to fully understand the plot of issue #1, but he’s (uncharacteristically) getting ahead of himself in terms of earning her trust – perhaps he’s actually trying to do it without using his powers.

PAGES 15-20. X-Factor reach Shatterstar.

“Arize & Shine”, advertised on the blimp, is covered in the next scene.

Shatterstar has been seen on Krakoa before, but his last major storyline was a miniseries where he was trying to live a peaceful life. Here, he’s reverted to his original role as a gladiatorial showman for the Mojoverse. But Shatterstar is very, very obviously playing a part here and keeping up appearances while not-very-subtly hinting at what X-Factor ought to be doing. The Mojoverse inhabitants would have to be really slow on the uptake to miss this, but then it’s not like they’re known for their intelligence or their grasp of subtext..

Shatterstar dodges the question of why Wind Dancer let herself be killed, but implies that he intervened to stop Sofia’s body being used as a source of DNA for Mojoverse clones. He seems to have pitched the live-streamed autopsy as a way of stalling for time while hoping to get a message to X-Factor. His data page later in the issue confirms this more explicitly.

PAGES 20-23. X-Factor retrieve Sofia’s body from Arize & Shine.

From context, you’d assume that Shatterstar’s one line of Krakoan reads NO. But in fact, it reads HI – apparently the closest Shatterstar can do to giving a direct answer is to repeat what he just said in mutant language.

Arize is the scientist who created Longshot’s lab-grown slave race. He’s a member of the same race as Mojo, but developed an exoskeleton to compensate for his lack of a spine. In the original Longshot stories, Arize is a broadly sympathetic character who tries to design the slaves so that they’ll eventually turn on their masters, and who gets exiled by the Spineless Ones for not building them weapons. Arize hasn’t been seen in many, many years, and his depiction as a part of mainstream Mojoverse culture is unusual. Shatterstar clearly sees him as a villain. On the other hand, the data pages at the end of the issue present him as a somewhat harmless yoga guru.

PAGE 24. Data page – fragments of heavily encrypted messages from Shatterstar which explain some of the plot more directly. The “DR” who translated them is Cypher (Doug Ramsey).

PAGES 25-26. More data pages – Aurora reports on Mojoverse television.

Major Domo is Mojo’s longtime aide, who has apparently taken up ASMR (“autonomous sensory meridian response”)

Adam X, or the X-Treme, is the notoriously uber-90s character who was teased for a while as a possible third Summers brother. He’s not a villain, but for some reason he’s now the fifth biggest streamer in the Mojoverse, making reaction videos where he reacts to people dying. It’s not immediately clear why Adam X would have an interest in this.

Aurora goes out of her way to stress that the cloning of her body for resurrection is definitely very different from what’s happening in the Mojoverse. Definitely.

PAGE 27. This is a trailer page for Fortnite – Storm, Psylocke, Domino and Mystique are briefly transported away to appear in the game story, and come straight back again afterwards. Yes, that’s Gwenpool sitting with them – she arrived on Krakoa at the end of her last miniseries, having apparently managed to define herself into being a kind-of-sort-of mutant in order that she could live on in peace as a background character.

PAGE 28. The trailer page, as always this month, says NEXT: X OF SWORDS.