X-Force #50 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #50
“Violent Answers”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: Guru-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. It’s the final issue of this run so X-Force pose for the camera. Look, some of them are even smiling.
PAGES 2-4. Beast II and Wonder Man reach Beast Prime.
We’re picking up from the end of the previous issue, with Beast II and Wonder Man heading out to sea in search of the Krakoa-era Beast, and X-Force opening fire because they figure this new Beast has already turned bad on them. The Krakoan Beast – helpfully wearing a distinctive suit at this point – promptly punts Wonder Man back to the surface.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
PAGES 6-7. X-Force rescue Wonder Man.
Does Wonder Man need a towel? Isn’t he an energy being?
Quentin is being a bit harsh about Wonder Man’s acting career, though it’s fair to say that the original rationale for him getting into Hollywood wasn’t “he can act”, but “he can do his own stunts”.
PAGES 8-9. Orchis attack.
Jun Wei is the Orchis agent that Mikhail Rasputin tried to get Chronicler to take control of in the previous arc. She’s also shown up since in Wolverine. But she’s serving here as a random Orchis leader that we happen to recognise.
Orchis are still using the robots based around abandoned Wolverine skeletons that we’ve seen in previous issues.
PAGES 10-13. Beast Prime tries to win Beast II round.
Without his Krakoan suit, the only thing that distinguishes Beast Prime from Beast II is the glasses (which the clone has).
Beast Prime’s argument is framed in terms of protecting the people of Arakko/Mars from Orchis. He claims that Orchis’ plan is to use the mutant population on Arakko to create a “Worldmind”. This does in fact fit, more or less, with Rise of the Powers of X, which claims that Orchis’ AI faction planned to turn Arakko into an AI Worldmind as part of their plan to achieve ascension and merge with an AI Dominion. Whether the mutants were actually intended to be part of this arrangement may be another matter, but Beast Prime hasn’t simply invented this threat.
The younger Beast can understand how he ended up with this worldview but is simply left convinced that his “future” self has gone the wrong way.
“Magneto was right.” A slogan which didn’t start being used until the Grant Morrison era. Beast II has been placed as coming from around New Defenders #142, i.e. 1985. That would be just before the trial of Magneto in Uncanny X-Men #200, published towards the end of that year.
PAGES 14-15. X-Force smash up some Stark Sentinels.
According to Wolverine’s narration on the final page, Jun Wei is not dead here. For some reason, X-Force wipe her memory of the last few weeks and send her home. (Why? They already let her return to Orchis after they encountered her the first time round.)
PAGES 16-17. Wolverine intervenes in the Beasts’ fight.
Beast II’s glasses are broken in the fight; from this point on, the two Beasts are visually identical and only their dialogue allows them to be distinguished.
PAGES 18-21. Beast is killed saving Wonder Man from the exploding Black Hole Gun.
The fact that the two Beasts are visually identical by this point seems to be leaving a back door to claim that the “good” Beast died and the evil one took his place. This might also explain why Sage and Kid Omega were both randomly left behind on this mission, with page 7 going out of its way to establish that they can’t read minds at this distance.
On the other hand: The Beast who dies declares without prompting that “I am the last hope for mutantkind”, and he calls Wonder Man a fool. He also assumes that Wonder Man doesn’t know that the gun is powered by a nuclear reactor, but Wonder Man does know that – he discussed it with Beast II as a plot point last issue. And this is the final issue, approaching the end of the Krakoan era, so there’s nowhere for any switch to pay off.
All of which suggests that it is the evil Beast who dies, but that the story has left a back door in case anyone wants to change their minds on it. Or it’s just trying to be ambiguous for the sake of it, even though the surviving Beast’s identity could be easily verified by any telepath the next time he appears. Both readings seem to me to detract from the ending, to be honest.
PAGE 22. X-Force gather around their table.
A weirdly abrupt epilogue page – we’re left with Wolverine’s narration to tell us that the surviving Beast is staying with Wonder Man. (While Orchis are dominating the USA? Seriously? He’s not just a mutant – he’s visually identical to a high-profile terrorist who’s actually a legitimate target even for normal law enforcement officers. And he’s just… living in LA?)
PAGE 23. Farewell message from the creators.
Cry because it happened, smile because it’s over.
I think I’ll miss getting annoyed at having to read this. It’s the only book from Dawn of X in 2019 that was still around.
I’m baffled that this has the same kind of abrupt, incoherent ending as Krakoan X-Factor while also being five times longer than Krakoan X-Factor. Ben Percy truly is the poster boy for failing upwards.
I had precisely the same reaction: 50 issues of X-Force on its longest, most drawn out storyline, in addition to occasionally offloading plot driving duties to Wolverine in the midst of wrapping up its own 50-issue run…and Percy still couldn’t write a more satisfying payoff or at least something better paced.
What will the legacy of these dual runs even be? The only thing Percy did of significance was ruin Moira MacTaggeert, and that didn’t even happen in either title.
Weren’t we supposed to look out for Alpha Flight in the pages of X-Force? Did that ever happen?
I know Aurora showed up somewhere, but I thought that was in Wolverine.
“Bad Beast was atomized, Good Beast went to live with Wonder Man.”
First… as a very young reader, the very first time I saw Simon and Hank together, I thought Beast was Wonder Man’s pet. Nice of them to finally canonize that.
Second… we can’t even get a freaking unambiguous death for the Bad Beast? Because “atomize” is code for “he can come back the second some writer has the appropriately bad idea…” and I honestly can’t see any reason to bring back Bad Beast when we still have AoA Beast in this timeline. Just once, give us the win… I’m not surprised that even at the end, Percy can’t give us a solid ending for this story.
I do half-wonder if any vagueness about which Beast died is related to what Brevoort & co have planned for post-Krakoa. (Beast’s meant to be in MacKay’s adjectiveless, right?)
So after 50 issues of Evil Beast, not to mention the parts in Wolverine, that’s the resolution. Evil Beast sacrifices himself to save someone who didn’t appear until issue 49.
That’s just bad storytelling, Percy.
“Whether the mutants were actually intended to be part of this arrangement may be another matter, but Beast Prime hasn’t simply invented this threat.”
I think this is an attempt to explain why Orchis was sending the mutants to Mars.
“For some reason, X-Force wipe her memory of the last few weeks and send her home. (Why? They already let her return to Orchis after they encountered her the first time round.)”
It’s explained that if the Sentinel confirms X-Force’s presence, innocent people will die. Remember, this takes place before X-Men 31, when the poisons in the Krakoan Drugs are removed. X-Force is worried that Orchis will follow through on their “Kill 10 humans” threat.
I’m not sure why Jun Wei gets to live while the other members of Orchis are killed. Is Percy planning on using her In Ghost Rider? Or is she going to be one of the villains under Breevort?
It makes no sense for the Beast that died to be the Good Beast. The Beast that lives says “We can save him yet! I know it! Don’t protect your weapon–protect your friends! Please. Don’t prove me wrong…you can do better!”That makes no sense if it’s the Evil Beast. Besides, Good Beast was nearsighted and Evil Beast had perfect vision- it’s not possible to convincingly fake nearsightedness.
This issue does read like Percy intended it to be double sized and it got cut to a regular issue- probably because of something to do with Breevort’s takeover.
So I guess it’ll be up to McKay to deal with the issue of Hank’s memories.
The funny part is that McKay has experience writing a character whose older self turned evil- he just did it in his Doctor Strange run.
It might be funny to see a conversation between Hank and Strange:
Hank:”Doctor, you have no idea what it’s like to know that your future self became a war criminal.”
Strange: “Actually, Henry…”
@Thom H- Aurora, Northstar and Fang showed up in X-Force 47.
I think Percy is mistaking the concept of “Worldmind” with “Singularity”. In Moira’s Ninth Life, Sinister’s Omega-class Chimeras formed a hivemind on Mars which collapsed the planet into a “self singularity”.
To achieve Nibiru becoming the Worldmind Nimbus (Life Six), they copied the minds of multiple elite post-humans into a nanotech shell which they launched into the core of Nibiru. The self-replicating nanotech spread until the planet, itself, became a self-aware intelligence.
So, I’m not sure how Orchis was planning to create a Worldmind on Mars using mutants. It seems they were setting themselves up for disappointment when Mars collapsed under the Omega mutants.
In Rise it was stated that Omega Sentinel had returned from the future with the advanced technology which would allow them to pursue a Worldmind a 1,000 years early and it would then only take ten years to transform Mars.
I think Omega Sentinel might have mentioned that by “technology” she meant “filling the planet with lots of mutants”.
I think that it makes slightly more sense for the Beast that died to be the good one. Good Beast would expect a nuclear explosion (btw, _was_ that what we had? Seems to have been portrayed a bit ambiguously and downplayed too) to be threatening to Wonder Man, while Bad Beast probably would not – the two of them co-starred in “Avengers Two” back in 2000 and much of the plot was about how Simon was resolving some left over issues from the time he was dead. He had recently resumed living after dying in Force Works #1 six years prior, and AFAIK we have since assumed that Simon is too much of an energy being to actually die.
It is easier for me to believe that Good Beast learned to recreate the pressure suit from watching his other self than to believe that Bad Beast had such a sudden change of heart and also failed to even ask whether Simon expected to survive the explosion.
Of course, that does not explain why a telepath, two of which were readily at hand, would not verify the identity of the surviving Beast. It is easy enough to circumvent, though. Beast had asked Forge for a surface thoughts camouflage device, and carried it at the time calibrated to the very same mind patterns that he took trouble to spare some time ago; or he carries a telepathy jammer around; or he had established overriding post-hypnotic code words for Quentin and Sage during the time when he was X-Force’s head; or the Shadow King or John Sublime are involved in this mess somehow.
@Michael: Thanks! Blink and you’d miss it, though, right? Imagine if Northstar and Aurora hadn’t mysteriously disappeared from the book and instead were around to help fight Evil Beast. Another dropped plot point, I suppose.
“Another dropped plot point, I suppose.”
I don’t think. I think the showdown between Beast and X-Force was always intended to be about the main group only.
The arrival of Northstar and Aurora brought the various “exiled” mutants from Canada under the protection of X-Force, something that is later taken up in Wolverine during Sabretooth War.
Ugh, what a bad ending! Just kill off Evil Beast. If you want to bring him back later, you can yadda yadda the technobabble. The ambiguity was dumb, and a transparent ploy to keep Evil Beast a twist in a future story. Why even have Wonder Man in the final conflict? Make the potential sacrifice Sage, Quentin, a Wolverine, anyone actually connected to the series.
X-Force (2019): could have been way better.
The Beast has undergone several physical mutations between THE NEW DEFENDERS and Krakoa and more than a few between X-MEN #1 and X-FACTOR #1.
So is an identical appearance and physiology, physiognomy between the two Beasts something that was set up in the past year or is this just lazy set of assumptions by the writer(s) that all blue beasts are samey..?
@Chris- I think the idea is they just plugged Young Beast’s backup into a clone of Old Beast.
I would be traumatized if a thinner 2020 me got uploaded into a 2024 body complete with 50 more lbs and more scoliosis