The X-Men must discover a way to defeat the deadly Sentinels, or else mutantkind is doomed... and so is humankind. Basically it would be bad news for everybody.
Story: Stan Lee
Layouts: Jack Kirby
Pencilling: Jay Gavin
Delineation: Dick Ayers
Lettering: Art Simek
Originally published January 1966
So here's where we're at.
The X-Men are the prisoners of the Sentinels, with four of them specifically trapped within a crazy kooky glass bubble that contains extra gravity, just to mix things up. Each of them tries to use their powers to break through, but their fishbowl prison proves resilient. Well, each of them except Angel. What's he going to do, flap hard at it?
Even Professor X is a little stumped by this one, with this mental powers unable to affect them because, you know, they're robots. And Bolivar Trask, the creator of the Sentinels, is getting killer-robot-creator's-remorse when they reveal that they want him to make enough Sentinels to dominate the human race so as to better protect them. See, that's why you don't put an anthropologist in charge of programming your killer robots: that's a soft science.
Xavier hitchhikes back to town, where he recalls one Sentinel collapsed two issues ago during their original confrontation for, and I'm quoting Stan Lee's narration here, "No apparent reason." He feels that learning what felled the Sentinel would be the key to defeating them.
I almost don't even want to describe what happens next, but it's my sworn duty to summarize a comic series that hates and fears me. Xavier deduces that the Sentinel's programming was disrupted by a giant crystal atop a nearby skyscraper. This was not shown, mentioned or hinted at in the previous two issues, it's just... there. It has a very "Finishing your essay the night before" feel to it. Even by the improbable standards of the X-Men barely eking out victories over their enemies, this is bizarre.
The X-Men escape their prison when the Sentinels open the globe to add the Beast, which just proves how dumb these idiot robots are. As the X-Teens fight their way through a throng of Sentinels - nearly bested once more when the robots activate their stun beams - Xavier arrives, dangling a giant crystal from a helicopter, instantly shutting all the Sentinels down.
All of them, that is, except Master Mold, who is still ordering Trask to create "eight Sentinels, then eight more..." and so on. It never occurs to him to perhaps try building a few extra apparatus so he can get more than eight at a time, but I guess that's a pretty good rate of production, depending on how long it takes to create a batch.
Trask, at last, comes to his senses and realizes he's on the wrong side of history, taking a literal spanner to the works by smashing the console that creates Sentinels. As is typical, the entire base explodes and the X-Men make a narrow escape.
At the end of the story, Trask lies dead atop the defeated Master Mold, and the X-Men never learn of his change of heart.
Further Thoughts:
The story ends with an admonishment: "Beware the fanatic! Too often his cure is deadlier by far than the evil he denounces!"
It's interesting that a business predicated on black-and-white good vs. evil smackdowns would espouse such a moderate stance, but that shows an impressive level of awareness of the kind of applicability these stories have. It's a story of good vs. evil, but the evil in question is ignorance, prejudice and extremism - ultimately, these are the true enemies of the X-Men, whether it's against militant governments or evil mutants.
Like I said before, the concept of the Sentinels does resonate, as absurd as it is in practice. It's a pity this story is slightly cluttered by clumsy robots tripping all over each other and a giant transmission-disrupting crystal that appears out of nowhere. But the ultimate climax, of Trask seeing the error of his ways, is satisfying. The vehicle for the message may be clunky and out-dated by now (and let's face it, can it have been the height of sophistication in 1966?) but the message is hella-timeless (unlike my usage of "hella.")
Hella indeed.
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