UNCANNY X-MEN #199: The Spiral Path

Magneto begins to atone for his past as Rachel sets her sights on the future.

Originally Published November 1985

We begin with Cyclops in the Danger Room - having returned to the fold (and I'm sure Madelyne is just thrilled about that). Cyke is getting a little bit of a workout in, and Wolverine and Moira are impressed by the degree to which he has not lost his mojo.

Cyclops is called up to the control room for a  chat with Moira, saying a quick hi-bye to that Rachel kid who is hanging around these days. Barely paying her a second glance, Cyclops displays all the facial recognition abilities he had when he met Corsair for the first time (and the second, when he drilled him for a plausible explanation why the space pirate had a picture of him as a child with his mother in a locket.)

Moira interrupts this frivolous convo to deliver the shocking news.

That's right, Professor X is dying -- again. This time, it's due to complications from the injuries sustained from last winter's brutal beating at the hands of some racist students. He was supposed to take it easy after his healing regimen at the Morlock HQ, but instead he has opted to work himself to death. According to Moira, everything is breaking down - his nervous system, his liver, his blood--

Wait, his blood? His blood is breaking down? His blood?

Now that's alarming.

This all explains why the Professor has started hanging around with Magneto, a fact that has Scott in disbelief, since Magneto has always been a villain and in fact tried to kill him personally on multiple occasions over the past however many years. Wolverine tries to tell Scott he's got a good feeling about Magneto, but Cyclops is obstinate - no Magneto, no how.

Meanwhile down in Washington, D.C., Valerie Cooper (special assistant to the President) comes home from grocery shopping to find herself sitting on the couch.

Wait, what?

That's right, it's Mystique, the shapeshifting leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, a terrorist group operating within the United States (in fact, right under Val's nose at the Pentagon, where Mystique srcretly works umder the guise of Val's friend, colleague and confidante Raven Darkhölme.) Toying with Val, Mystique shapeshifts into a vision of pure horror to try to convince her to make a deal.

It's too terrifying, look away!

Yes, seeing which way the wind is blowing with anti-mutant sentiment, Mystique is offering her group up for a big fat government contract to be the Department of Defense's very own in-house mutant weapons. Sort of like Blackwater, but less evil. They'll even rebrand - as "Freedom Force", which is unquestionably amazing.

Val is very intrigued by the offer, and agrees to a trial run, provided they succeed at one small little errand to test their mettle...

If it's not too mich trouble.

Elsewhere, in the Upstate New York hamlet of Annandale-on-Hudson (home of Bard College) Rachel visits her mom at the cemetery for some catharsis.

Thinking about all the ways the world is different from her time and place, how she is a stranger to her own family, Rachel wanders her grandparents' house, imagining startlingly accurate visions of the conflict there when Jean was Dark Phoenix, of Professor Xavier delivering the news that Jean had sacrificed herself, and of her own infancy, in another version of the world where she was allowed to be born.

TBH, a lot of pressure for a baby

Rachel breaks down - she feels like she has betrayed the faith her mother placed in her, that she is weak, and lacks the strength that led Jean to either sacrifice herself, or to survive the ordeal and live to see the future (depending on the timeline.) Happening upon the holempathic matrix crystal - the snowglobe that houses remnants of Jean's essence - she feels inspired to take on a new persona, to reclaim her mother's legacy: as Phoenix!

This is her way of stepping up, to fill the void to protect Earth and Mutantkind once Xavier is gone. She wants to make up for all the bad things she did in the future, and that her mother did in the past. She wants to live up to the legacy of the woman who saved the Universe.

But once this statement is made, having seemingly overexerted herself by adopting the Phoenix persona, Rachel falls, and the holempathic crystal is shattered.

Down in Washington, Magneto, Kitty and Lee have arrived at the Holocaust Memorial for a day of Remembrance, where survivors like Magneto and their descendents like Kitty try to reconnect or learn the fates of those who have been separated or lost these many years. (As a remarkable coincidence, Magneto and his friends David and Ruth all knew Kitty's great aunt in Auschwitz.)

But the proceedings are interrupted when Lee unmasks as Mystique, here to apprehend him on behalf of the U.S. Government.

Magneto, not recognizing the dominion of any nation over his person, does not go quietly, so Mystique calls in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants Freedom Force to take hold of the situation.

The Force has added a new member since we last met them, in the form of the six-armed Spiral (far right). She hails from the Mojoverse, a satirical dimension based around TV ratings, as depicted in the miniseries Longshot (on shelves now, in 1985,, written by X-Men editor Ann Nocenti and drawn by superstar artist Arthur Adams.) You can read more about her there, and you might need to because her powers are very nebulously-defined sort of magickiness (great, more wizards and witches in this book!) Of course, as out of place as she seems, she would absolutely be an asset to any group, and is also operating alongside a woman who can see the future, so there's really no limit to who can be a member here. I'm just saying it's possible Spiral could find a better application for her talents than the civil service.

The X-Men arrive and the two factions have it out, with Destiny directing traffic so that the Freedom Force can stay one move ahead (but seemingly only one)...

Until Shadowcat is able to dispatch Destiny with a phasing nerve pinch of some kind.

From there, the X-Men start to run the table, taking out Pyro, the Blob and Avalanche, but Spiral - the real MVP here - is able to neutralize Magneto with a fuzzy-wuzzy field of confinement.

I suppose "energy matrix" is a fine slang term for it.

Magneto is saved when Cyclops is able to sneak up behind Spiral and zork her with his optic blasts and Wolverine gets Mystique to drop her gun.

But just when it looks like the X-Men have won the day and will walk away scot-free (albeit with one Scott in tow) Magneto comes to a stirring conclusion - that the havoc he has wreaked on the world is not so different from the Holocaust - the horror that his fellow survivors express at seeing his powers in action is very much like the reaction he got from his beloved lost Magda when he used his powers to exact revenge on the secret police many years ago. 

He decides - to put himself up for trial!

Further Thoughts:

I don't think Magneto is being entirely fair to himself. He didn't exactly go HAM in this fight, using the full extent of his abilities to wreck his attackers, he acted very lightly in defense and was in serious danger. And while he is an enemy of the state trying to turn over a new leaf, this somewhat dents the recent theme we have been exploring, that mutants as a social class deserve an alternative form of justice since human judiciary can't reckon them fairly or completely in good faith. It kind of defers to our human-centric view of law and order.

But then again, he sank a fucking submarine and threatened the world's governments. Maybe that's different.

As always, this speaks to a willingness to deal with things on a complicated philosophical level, not merely "Lawbreaking bad, law good." Similarly, Claremont uses a decent tact to apply the Mutant/Holocaust metaphor, and doesn't quite override it as badly as he did a few issues back. I know he has a great deal of respect for the history of the Holocaust, and that is probably what drew him to not only write the X-Men but to explore it so fully in his work here.

Lastly, we keep an eye on the developments with Rachel, as she processes the return of her father and trying to embrace mother's legacy as she sees it. In so doing, she destroys the holempathic crystal. To me, it was this odd artefact that had been hanging around waiting to be brought up, just in case they ever needed to invoke Jean again, but now that it's destroyed I suppose it's off the table. Too bad. Perhaps if we were able to leaf ahead and see what would become of Jean's legacy, there might have been a different way to deploy it. But, that's Thursday morning editor-ing.