UNCANNY X-MEN #142: Mind Out of Time!

The X-Men battle the New Brotherhood to prevent a dystopian future!

Originally Published February 1981

The X-Men are in Washington, D.C., where the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by shapeshifter Mystique, intend to assassinate Senator Robert Kelly, in order to prove that mutantkind as a whole are not to be messed with.

However, thanks to the time-traveling brain of Kitty Pryde's future-self Kate, the X-Men have been alerted that this particular event sets off a chain reaction that leads to the return of the Sentinels, who will in turn enslave all of mankind as a way of "protecting" it from the mutant menace. As we saw last issue, that led to a Bad Future where humanity is on the brink of nuclear annihilation, lawlessness rules the streets, and buses are pulled by horse.

The X-Men and Brotherhood pair up and square off in various combinations.

But in the chaos, Mystique gets the upper hand by using her shapeshifting abilities to trick Professor X - gassing him before he realizes she's using a device to block his telepathic abilities (available at every Radio Shack in 1981 I'm sure.) She gives the old "I could kill you but you're more valuable as a hostage" excuse for why the villain can't straight up murder him right there.

Read: Editorial wants you alive.

It's at this point that Destiny - the mutant whose power is to see the future - notes that something flukey is going on and obscuring her sight, some random element that is keeping her from getting a clear view of the outcomes of things. That would be the aforementioned time-travelling Kitty, whose existence seems to throw a wrench in the gears of her very abilities.

I mean, if I were hinging my entire plan on my friend with the power to see the future, and she told me "Ask Again Later," I would find that disconcerting to say the least. But Mystique is nothing if not bold. Brazen, even.

Back in said horrible future, the X-Men are busy infiltrating the stronghold of the Sentinels, f/k/a the Baxter Building, onetime headquarters of the Fantastic Four. With stolen intel, the Future!X-Men are able to ride the private elevator all the way up to the penthouse, encountering minimal resistance.

Again, we see how badly the X-Men have been put through the wringer - Ororo pines for her happier days as a street urchin stealing to survive. She laments that she who had once sworn never to kill has done so multiple times by now, and likely will again.

Does she consider the robots to be people? Or is she killing people these days too?

As to our present-day Storm, she flexes her leadership muscles a bit by updating Wolverine on best practices for using his claws, demanding he sheathe them against Pyro. Wolverine doesn't take kindly to his team leader trying to lead him, but Storm insists that it's really because he's just so tough and strong and smart and a good fighter that he doesn't really need to use his claws, because you're already so great, Wolverine.

Wolverine reluctantly accepts this logic and agrees to only use his claws on things that don't bleed.

Elsewhere, Nightcrawler is brawling with a doppelganger, Mystique in disguise, and as usual nobody is able to tell who is who (presumably only the real Nightcrawler can teleport but he doesn't bother.) Eventually, Kurt  is able to bash the imposter into revealing her false nature, and she drops this tantalizing tidbit:

Oh come on, don't leave me hanging!

Back in the future, the trio of Colossus, Storm and Wolverine have made it to the Sentinels' executive suite atop the Baxter building. They prepare to execute a sneak attack and handily dismantle the robots as they have countless times before, including earlier in this issue. Only...

He dead.

Yes, in one of the most iconic shocking moments of the era, Wolverine - who in our time has long since been built up as an unstoppable badass fighting machine - is zapped like a bug, fried down to his adamantium skeleton. Bet you thought they wouldn't do it.

Colossus and Storm fight on, but the effort is wasted; both are killed fully dead before too long as Rachel, the psychic, watches from afar in stark horror. Kate Pryde's mission to the past is now their only hope.

Back in the past, Destiny has a crossbow of all things pointed at Sen Kelly.

Kelly says he won't run (as that would be futile given his assaulter can see where he's going to run before he does) but does inform her that killing him will just make humanity dig in its heels and work harder to oppress mutants. Destiny's response is "Yeah maybe, but we're going to kill you anyway because it's better than leaving you alive."

And honestly, given what we know, and given that Destiny is supposed to be able to see the flicking future, this seems like a monumentally stupid thing to say.

Luckily, at the exact crucial moment of truth, Kate pops through, using her powers offensively in a way the young Kitty wouldn't know how to do, disrupting Destiny's shot, rescuing Kelly, and saving the future all in one fell swoop.

The instant it happens, Kate is sucked back to the future, leaving young Kitty to awaken and wonder whaaaaaat is going on.

The X-Men take a beat to confirm through the usual sources that they've won the day and everything is back to normal. Effectively, they've won, but perhaps not.

Sometime down the road, Kelly is meeting at the White House with Sebastian Shaw (the wealthy industrialist, not known to be a mutant and probably only assumed to be a supervillain) and a pair of shadowy government figures.

Kelly, shockingly (or perhaps not) reaffirms his belief that mutants are a threat to the American Way of Life. Sure, his life was just saved by mutants, but it was only in danger in the first place because of mutants. And really, it's not like there's anything in the Constitution or the American legal code that says you can't just treat a large portion of the population as though they are criminals even before they have officially done anything wrong, right?

So yes, the American Government is here to double down on its commitment to oppression with something called Project: Wideawake, to be headed by this flat-topped government stooge, Henry P. Gyrich. The first order of the day is more Sentinels dammit, to be followed by an exploratory committee to decide on fresh new ways to hound the mutants. Should be a fun few years!

Further Thoughts:

Personally I am trying - and mostly failing - to not fixate on all the wackiness of time travel. Midway through the issue, Rachel - our resident mysterious redheaded telepath and time travel medium who really only vaguely understands how what she did actually works - supposes that maybe even if Kate changes time and stops the assassination, things won't change. Instead she'll be creating a new branch of history (which is what we will be watching play out) while Kate returns to a future where more of her friends - and her husband Piotr - are dead.

This is our first glimpse of Marvel's patented "alternate future" concept, which the comic company to tell all these time travel, past-changing stories and still let the bad futures exist in the end. This way, there's no messy paradox of "how can Kate travel back if the Sentinels don't take over," if you're the type to go haywire over such things. But it also seems, I guess, a little cruel, since it means all this was for nothing from where Kate stands, especially since we see Kelly doubling down on his anti-mutant stance. But the X-Men did "win," yeah.

My big thing is, you've got this big story about a bad future stemming from one event... and you choose to use it to introduce a character, Destiny, who can see the future - who is heavily involved in the planning and execution of that event! It's her fault all this happened! Was it what she wanted? Is it, as she said, that reality will somehow be that much worse with Kelly alive? (In which case Kate is the villain.) Is it that she is as much of a radical terrorist as the rest of the team despite her seemingly wise, thoughful demeanor and thus chooses only to see the potential upside of the assassination? Is she a true nihilist hoping to bring about the end of civilization? Or is she just bad at her job? I don't buy that Kate's presence blacked out her vision so completely during the assassination-planning stages. If I can normally see the future and I'm using my abilities to plan out a major public political assassination, but I can't see the outcome of that action at the outset, I probably have second thoughts. Bit of a red flag.

On the plus side she makes some real tangible contributions to the effort.

Peetty shoddy work from Destiny if you ask me. To me, it really adds unneeded questions to an already complex story tgat ruin it. All they had to do was just not include the character of Destiny in this story.

As to the Bad Future Action, this is the first opportunity the franchise gets to play with alternate possible outcomes for its characters, and it takes the opportunity to show us some grisly deaths - with the winking acknowledgment that "this doesn't really happen, this is an imaginary story" but then upends that with an Alan Moore-like "But aren't they all?" kind of undercurrent (years before Moore himself did it.) But it kind of exposes that line of thinking. How, after all, is the death of Wolverine as seen here any less valid that seeing the Wolverine of the present-day get killed? We are assured it does happen, in some "alternate future," and they're both fictional at the end of the day, and yet it still feels less impactful, less true. There's a notarized certificate of authenticity on the "real" X-Men that these future ones lack... or maybe I'm just jaded about alternate time travel versions of characters here in the real world 2019.

At least we don't have to think about it too much more. We saw it, it was cool, and we don't have to worry about Wolverine really being dead. The real one, anyway.

Is it confusing? Sure, but it's not like characters popping back from bad futures is going to be come like, a regular thing here in the X-Men. That's the kind of thing you do once, maybe twice.

Despite the loftiness of the premise, the issue is primarily about the all-out brawl-out between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, the action is good, and the new Brotherhood prove formidable foes, the X-Men's team dynamics as much in flux as ever with Storm awkwardly adjusting into the leader role.

I do like how, with all the work done to differentiate last issue from your run of the mill superhero caper, the fate of the universe really does come down to two opposing forces punching each other until the right side wins. That's comics.