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In which the X.S.E. miniseries is future copaganda; Earth-1191 has no room for moral ambiguity; Bishop pulls a Marty McFly; Malcolm and Randall get distinct personalities; and you really shouldn’t give officers a symbol of authority that there’s no way to revoke.
X-PLAINED:
- Some of Bishop’s further adventures
- X.S.E. #1-4
- The future, sort of
- Earth-1191 (more) (again)
- The X.S.E. (more) (again)
- Lucas Bishop (more) (again)
- Shard Bishop (more) (again)
- Grandmother (who may or may not be Storm)
- Hancock (who may or may not be Cyclops)
- The deeply baffling Bishop family tree
- The fallability of childhood memory
- Exhumes
- Dubious reclamation
- Heca’te
- The Witness (more) (again)
- Trevor Fitzroy (more) (again)
- Several potential continuity errors
- Malcolm and Randall (more) (again)
- Emplates
- Shirley
- Mexican-American mutants
- A cross-media quote
NEXT EPISODE: The return of Carl the X-Cutioner
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I was pleased to discover that the Bishops were of Aboriginal Australian descent. While I’m white myself, I’ve got biracial types in my extended family. For fantasy casting, I would like to nominate Madeleine Madden to play Shard. https://www.instagram.com/madeleine_madden/ I’m not really up on Aussie TV and movies for Lucas, I only know her because she’s in the upcoming Wheel of time show.
As for the whole copaganda thing, yeah. I’ll confess to being a little blind before, but in the last two years every action movie with police characters has aged extremely badly. Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Mad Max, even Dredd. It’ll be a long time before I watch them again.
Dredd is such a frustratingly ironic one, too, given the origins of the character.
Probably yeah; Law enforcement will always be needed but police definitely need to be viewed with more skeptically
I’m going to defend the XSE/police in this story (and only in this story) from the perspective that I took when reading it. Which is to say, I saw the XSE as the X-Men of their time, though granted authority that the X-Men have never had. Even being young and reading this I was well aware that the police were not the paragons of virtue that earlier comics in the silver age were forced to portray them as. Do I think this story could have used more nuance? Absolutely. It is ridiculous to assume that the XSE lacked for corrupt members (if not a corrupt working system). However, given the three issue run I feel like such nuance would have been clumsy with what was already being covered. It might be interesting to see a limited series exploring the concept of the XSE today and how certain members might have taken a hard line approach if not outright power abusive members.
Wasn’t Rictor from Mexico? I always thought Skin was too, but can’t remember any specific heritage.
Yep! The questioner asked specifically about Mexican-American mutants.
Is the Fitzroy-doesn’t-have-a-soul twist from later a writer commentary on what a one-note villain his original characterization was?
He had a note? I always saw him as more of a lacuna sort of a character
https://photos.app.goo.gl/YCiwDFmk6jwQBrH48
I know I’m a bit late adding a comment, but I have Strong Feelings about the St. Croixs and non-biological family.
I really want the family tree to just be that Gateway was the twins’ mentor. (Or Monet’s, I GUESS.) One of them is Bishop and Shard’s mom (or grandma, since we later get names for their parents). So Gateway is the Bishop family’s grandpa. Not being biological doesn’t make it less real.
I feel incredibly vindicated by Wolverine being called Shogo’s grandpa. Validates all my 15 year old mental fanfic. Now I just need my mini about how, after Claudette accidentally sends Monet and Marius through a weird chalk portal, Gateway decided these kids needed training and starts training them in magic. To retroactively make ANYTHING about The Weird Pooka Period of Gen X make sense. (While most of the magic from that period seemed to be Irish, at least we could tie in the portals?)
I totally agree: non-biological / chosen family is just as valid as (and sometimes more valid than) biological family. That’s a good point to bring up here; I think it tends to get lost in the midst of comics continuity’s focus on bloodlines.
That upcoming Gen X era… I’m really looking forward to getting there in the podcast. So delightfully strange.