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In which Professor Xavier is a jock; all of Shadowcat’s friends are dead; Storm recruits a team; Bishop makes new pals; and everyone gets festive.
X-PLAINED:
- Some of Mystique’s secret kids
- Uncanny X-Men #389
- X-Men #109
- Charles Xavier’s workout routine
- Two funerals
- Rave (the drug)
- The wrong necklace
- Destiny’s doodles
- A large knife
- Charles Xavier/Moira MacTaggert backstory
- A snowball fight
- A very sketchy circus
- A break-up
- “Christmas cheer”
- A mysterious package
- An X-Men nativity
- Sage (Tessa)
- Origins of X-Treme X-Men
- Several gifts, some more mysterious than others
- Charles Xavier’s legacy
- Warwolves (more) (again)
- Archangel’s color vision
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This Gambit/Rogue panel immediately made me go, “Gambit’s given Rogue the severed pieces of his vas deferens, from the vasectomy he got when he was 23. The doctor let him keep them after the procedure. Gambit never mentions his vasectomy because he learned the hard way that SOME people don’t understand being childfree from a young age.”
That was IMMEDIATELY where my brain went to.
They’re in a little vial of formaldehyde. Rogue puts them in a locket, or something.
Re: Gambit’s bowie knife’s origin. He clearly Thieved it off Strong Bad. Less likely, Remy completed one of Crazy Go Nuts University’s career programs, and he received one instead of a diploma.
Some interesting throughts stirred by this episode… well, interesting to me, your mileage may vary, but that’s not my problem! 😀
I agree that Charles also being an Oympic level athlete seemed forced. Keepng fit? Absolutely. Performing flips’n’shit at Kurt’s level? Not so much.
Destiny’s diaries… are any of them likely to be truly “lost”? Since Destiny knew what was going to happen to them, I can’t imagine they would be anywhere other than where she wanted them to be for a particular point in time.
Forgetting that Rogue is so young is exceptionally easy to do, since no one (including Claremont) has written her as anything other than a mature young woman in her twenties in YEARS, by this point. I wonder if stressing how much younger she is, is Claremont de-aging her the way he de-aged Kitty.
Like Miles, if I was being exceptionally forgiving, I might view the pentagram pendant as a hint it was a present from Illyana (to whome Pentagrams were a part of her life), since Kitty would have been wearing her Star of David as always….. but yeah, I’m not that forgiving.
By this point, Sat-yr-9’s impersonation of the deceased Courtney Ross had been revealed to everyone (including Kitty… though maybe Kitty isn’t aware of how long the impersonation had been going on for, explaining why she still thinks she had been friends with Courtney when she’d barely met her), and Sat-Yr-9 was defeated and arreseted over in Excalibur during the Alan Davis run (the issue where Alysande Stuart is killed and Kurt and Cerise experiment with “human lip-massage” for something like fifteen solid minutes). I don’t think she’d shown up since then, but might be wrong.
I’d always wondered about Desinty’s perceptions. Was her precognitive sense translated into “conventional” senses like sight and hearing? Or did she have some other, inconceiveable to humans, sense which tracked and displayed possibilities in her mind in another way. This seems to answer this question, as she not only draws faces, she draws them in the correct colour. I suspect that someone who has been completely blind since birth would have no shared frame of reference for colours or shading.
I am tempted to “Umm… actually” at Miles’ mentioning that Tessa’s “living computer mind” status hadn’t been referenced before. Honestly, I’d say it’s about the only thing we DID know about her for quite a few years.
As you say, she was introduced as Shaw’s aide, who had a photographic memory and exceptional calcualting skills who Shaw also described as a “mentat” (the “Dune” novels term for a human trained to be a human computer). Karma notes in a New Mutants issue that Tessa’s mind is so structured that it’s nearly impossible to possess, but there’s no mention of psychic powers being involved, just her brain being under exceptional self-control.
So I think her even being a mutant was a retcon IMHO (and as it wasn’t even in a Claremont issue I’m sticking with that) and, as such I don’t think Tessa being a good guy and plant for Xavier was originally on the cards at all (Sorry, Jay). But I totally agree it pays dividends, even if Claremont can’t resist giving her another unrelated power with the “activating latent mutants thing” still to come)
I was honestly more surprised at the apparently naked Rogue standing at the back of the banner image for this episode. Skin tight clothing has to be handled carefully when your colourist is taking shortcuts. (Though nearly everyone in that image appeas to be wearing some sort of shiny lurex clothing as civilian wear as light does not relfect off textiles like that)
In terms of the Christmas presents… probably being way too mundane, but I did wonder if Betsy gifted Neal one of her negligees (sp?) from a memorable happy-fun-time session together.
Naked Hank on the Christmas tree would surely have been Kurt in a just and fair world… at least we’re spared Angel naked on top of the Christmas tree… which I imagine he did more than once when drunk at X-Men Chirstmas parties. (Well “spared” might be the wrong word as it would be pretty, so perhaps more “wildly inappropriate”)
My overly forgiving explanation for the star necklace: Kitty partook in a necklace exchange from when she met Kitty of earth 8107 in an unseen part of the cross-time caper.
Oh, and whilst it’s hard to ignore the “Charles Xavier as martyred icon/actual Christ” subtext at the best of times, isn’t giving him the literal nickname “The Good Shepherd” a BIT on the nose? Even for an X-Men title.
If only his comrades had just called him “the shepherd” it might have been a ilttle more subtle or, for preference “our St Bernard” (or even “Bernie”) after the Alpine moutain rescue dogs, because I can think of few things Chuck looks less like, and that’s hwo nicknames somtimes work.
Darnit! Knew there was something else.
I can understand Cecilia wanting to go cold turkey with her addiction issues.
However, given the impact this is having on her powers, would this not have been a time to actually utilise one of those mutant power dampening devices which the X-Men must have a closet full of at some point, until such time as she had stabilised.
Her body is in enough pain and trauma, that throwing in uncontrollable power fluctuations wrecking everything near her and potentially injuring other people would make this, I’d argue, a positively therapeutic thing to do, at least temporarily.
Let her mind and body sort themselves out without adding in the randomness of property destruction or wounding people.
Has it ever been addressed exactly how skin-to-skin Rogue’s powers have to be to work? For example, do keratinous structures count? Could she drain someone by pulling their hair? By touching one of Angel’s feathers? Are fingernails safe?
At a guess, there must be at least some slight range to her power since the outer layers of skin are technically dead. So I would expect that touching a fingernail and maybe petting Wolfsbane would be out, but hair-pulling and feather-touching would be safe.
As I recall, her power doesn’t extend to her own hair, so I’d think it doesn’t apply to others, and it needs to be flesh to flesh.
(I’m thinking of the time she got her hair styled and had a make-up makeover at a store, and only warned the make-up artist to not touch her bare skin)