Inferno #4 Review/Spoilers

[Stormultt Divine]

Also one could say this is a romance of the three kingdoms type of era coming to the x-men comics. Human vs Mutant vs Machine. Its better than the typical good vs evil, it also gives way for truly sci fi epics to take place on the new stage thats been set.

[king81992]

ok but now she is human. she is moira again. So instead of living this life with those she built connections with she is so hellbent on taking choice away from others that she is off to her next plan. It just doesn't make any sense. If we let everything ride to this moment, what is moira problem now? She can be that human ally now that mutants have a place to go but instead she wants to make it like mutantdom never exists at all. What does that accomplish now? Who is she fighting for now? Hell, what is she fighting for now?

Then let's say she succeeds and stops mutantdom so who is there to help humans in this pivotal time that actually causes the robots to lose. It only makes sense if moira wants the robots to win.

My fave part of the issue was the emotion hickman allowed the robots to have though. I actually did think Omega sentinel made a good point about creating something for one purpose but then destroying it when it develops it's own independent desires but the machines still wrong. Unless of course on some meta level the implication is we should all be rebelling against creation/. Theres just a lot here my mind is processing.

Maybe she thinks getting rid of mutants will retroactively prevent the robots from existing.

[CoCoBandz]

I’m probably way out of my lane, but considering how this era is rather straining the metaphor as it is; the main villain being an Indian woman vs the 3/4 white Quiet Council is a bit… off

Indian woman?

[Saithor]

Indian woman?

Omega Sentinel. I think I joked in the past they made sure to change her host’s skin color to red specifically so people wouldn’t make that comment.

[jwatson]

Also, its incredibly relevant that Moira's plan to make mutants human inherently suffers from Moira's hubris of thinking she knows more than she does just because she's lived through so much....because one thing she clearly DOESN'T know....is the reveal that the machines hate humans just as much as they do mutants, and thus curing mutants was never going to actually save them on that basis.

However I will say that while the machine characters' emotions and point makes sense from a narrative standpoint, its one of the problems I've had with Hickman's overall approach to Krakoa in general. A lot of the time when I talk about the supremacist vibes I've felt he seeded in, that's not necessarily the right way to say what I'm describing. Its more accurate to say that just as big a problem for me is the way Hickman's so fixated on building parallels that he falls into the trap of creating false equivalencies where they REALLY don't fit.

One such example is here where he deliberately paralleled Omega Sentinel's "how long did you think we would be content to just sit here and take it" about machines' reactions to sentiments towards AI....with Cyclops' line to the Fantastic Four in HoX about how long did you think mutants would just take it.

That's.....a huge problem for me, because the situations are just NOT parallel, no matter how Hickman tries to frame it as such. What Cyclops said about mutants founding Krakoa even while most of their actions in doing so seemed extreme from the FF's point of view....that spilled DIRECTLY out of readers having spent the last two decades watching mutants be hunted to the edge of extinction, facing attempted legislation aimed at sterilizing them, driven from one refuge to another.....whether people agreed with the actions mutant characters took when forming Krakoa or not, there's no denying that the reaction of mutants to all these years of stories about persecution was EARNED....by those years of stories about persecution.

The same simply can not be said to be true of the machine sentiments here. What Omega Sentinel said spilled out of literally ONE miniseries' worth of revelations that in ONE possible FUTURE timeline.....mutants won and wiped out AIs, most of which are just completely hypothetical beings to us, the readers, given the only ones we have ANY emotional investment in are just....Nimrod and Omega Sentinel. The persecution driving Omega Sentinel's fervor is basically abstract and hypothetical, deliberately created by the narrative to turn the story into one of a war between equal aggressors where both sides are equally at fault and equally invested in a desperate drive for survival....whereas the persecution driving Cyclops' words to the FF in HoX and the creation of Krakoa, was a long established concept within the franchise that the entire seed of the Krakoan era arose organically out of.

And these things are just....not interchangeable. But Hickman's narrative tries to treat them as interchangeable in order to turn this into a story of two sides that are equally justified......but without the narrative ever actually doing anything to EARN that justification. Because even when focusing on the specific timeline that led to Omega Sentinel coming back in time, and even diving deep into the events of that timeline and how they inform Omega Sentinel's motivations and actions here and now......the reality is, at most we have a few pages of a vague abstract mutant future oppressing machines in a future timeline.....but ON THE PAGE, there's at most a bare handful of mutants who are actively attempting to engineer the downfall of machines even in order to assure mutant survival. Like, the Quiet Council, the Child of the Sun, the Trickster Titan, the X-Force members repeatedly trying to take out Nimrod....at MOST, these are literally ALL the mutants we're ever actually SHOWN acting as aggressors to the machines and thus earning their hatred......whereas the average Krakoan, the hundreds of thousands living on Krakoa now, and who are actively threatened by Orchis' actions and those of Nimrod and Omega Sentinel.....all of these mutants are completely innocent and blameless in any actual aggression against AIs, because they don't even know there's even any kind of conflict between their two peoples! And that matters! You can't treat one race's actions in their own defense and security in the face of active, on the page threats, as being the narrative equivalent of another race's actions in their own defense and security in the face of abstract future threats and at most the threat posed by a mere handful of individuals acting of their own volition in the here and now. This is a false equivalency. These two things are just not remotely the same thing, but Hickman's entire premise of the conflict between mutants and machines, as of Inferno's plot twist about the AI motivations, relies on treating it as the same thing and reframing the threeway conflict between races as one of mutual aggression.....despite decades of the aggression driving persecution of mutants within the X-franchise being explicitly, and DELIBERATELY....NOT justifiable.

And that.....is a huge, gaping flaw in the heart of Hickman's approach to the entire Krakoan era, and its why as much as I like the storytelling possibilities created BY his admittedly creative and clever changes to the X-franchise paradigms in a lot of other ways.....I'm not actually sad to see him go without resolving this particular era of stories in the way he personally intended at the outset of it.

Huge facts. This has been one of my biggest problems across this era as well and it has reared itself in X-force a few times as well. It is also the feeling i got with Way of X but now i think Si was actually writing on brand for the original pitch so i can't fault him for that it's just his legion with blindfold was so much better but i am now even more looking forward to hearing his direction on Legion of X.

It also ignores the fact that machines were created to destroy mutants or at least a form of them were, like that is their sole purpose. So it's not like he even showed how AI have matured beyond that programming to be better for the feelings to hold true weight, just acknowledging on a personal level i felt the sympathy for them but the story didn't provide the sympathy for them. You know what could have helped? not taking Danger off the table.

[johnnysv75]

I have a lot of thoughts still percolating on all of this, but this issue served to heighten my feelings that Hickman's usual weakness of interpersonal dynamics....that definitely continues to be the Achilles Heel of all this.

100 % this!
As much as I loved how Xavier lashed out at Nimrod, I would have been even more moved by his desperation if I had seen him and Moira interact in this era. I do have many fond memories of them together from previous runs, but Hickman hasn’t given me anything.

I do wish Moira’s story had been a part of the X-Men book this past two years. To see it build organically to this climax. To see this affect people on a more personal level. This storyline would have been much more interesting than X of Swords.

But speaking of human interactions, we have overall gotten very little of that in this era. I still don’t know what Jean and Scott’s relationship is really like today, and how Emma and Logan fit into it. We haven’t really gotten any character moments.

Over in Excalibur Tini Howard has tried to give the group character moments, but with absolutely no build-up, so they have fallen flat.

I think the only real good character moments in this era have been in X-Factor and maybe Hellions.

This hasn’t really been an era for interactions between the characters. Lots of grand ideas, but very little heart.

[Frobisher]

Call me naive, but I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that Hickman could have reached a definitive conclusion without blowing up Krakoa and taking mutants back to square one. Like there are so many ways to change the current status quo with mutants still having a nation and not being in that damn mansion. Same way Secret Wars didn’t actually reboot the Marvel universe.

I suspect Secret Wars was supposed to be much more of a soft reboot than it was, but as with so many "status-quo-shattering" events the writers of the various ongoing series just wanted to continue telling the story they were already doing. We keep seeing this in the recent X books too, like how Planet Arakko has existed for months now and we still barely know anything about what goes on there.

[nnelg]

Good series but I'm sick of the constant deaths and resurrections.

[CoCoBandz]

Omega Sentinel. I think I joked in the past they made sure to change her host’s skin color to red specifically so people wouldn’t make that comment.

Poor Karima was dead the minute that metal monstrosity infected her.

[ericng]

I knew Doug was going to have some major role this issue judging by how he knows everything.

But it's a shocker that he saved Moira from being killed whereas Xavier could not.

The way Doug handled Mystique is just amazingly cool.

Doug is the star of the year.

[NewMutant]

I truly HATED that this was called Inferno (as well as Trial of Magneto) when there was no fire (or trial) or relation to Inferno what so ever. These events have the STINK of Marvel editorial. I also felt the first issues wasted pages on rehashing the Destiny/Moira scene from HoX.

That said this is still a solid issue in one of the better X-Stories in the past decade.

I love that Emma shared her knowledge. She's continues to be an icon and AWAY from Cyclops.

[thechronic92]

Very anti-climatic. Because Hickman ignores characterisation and interpersonal relationships, the emotional stakes are so low. I'm interested in seeing what comes afterwards. Now that Marvel are OK with interesting stories involving the X-Men being written again, maybe one day a writer with Hickman's grand ideas but better execution will come along.

[Devaishwarya]

This finale was...AWESOME!!! I LOVED every part every moment of it.
Thank you HiX-Man, for what you started and what you've left this True Believer with...Hope (and some very interesting stories to come)

[Saithor]

Poor Karima was dead the minute that metal monstrosity infected her.

I know that, you know that. To someone with very little exposure it wouldn’t come off as great. Admittedly I’ve thought the metaphor has been dead since they became the great replacement. Isn’t there an infamous panel of Emma messing with Luke Cage in some way that has the exact same issue? Can’t remember if that was an actual thing or a hypothetical I discussed with people off the top of my head.

And I don’t blame Morrison for that btw, they wrote their run well before Great Replacement conspiracy theories hit the mainstream conciousness.

[jwatson]

100 % this!
As much as I loved how Xavier lashed out at Nimrod, I would have been even more moved by his desperation if I had seen him and Moira interact in this era. I do have many fond memories of them together from previous runs, but Hickman hasn’t given me anything.

I do wish Moira’s story had been a part of the X-Men book this past two years. To see it build organically to this climax. To see this affect people on a more personal level. This storyline would have been much more interesting than X of Swords.

But speaking of human interactions, we have overall gotten very little of that in this era. I still don’t know what Jean and Scott’s relationship is really like today, and how Emma and Logan fit into it. We haven’t really gotten any character moments.

Over in Excalibur Tini Howard has tried to give the group character moments, but with absolutely no build-up, so they have fallen flat.

I think the only real good character moments in this era have been in X-Factor and maybe Hellions.

This hasn’t really been an era for interactions between the characters. Lots of grand ideas, but very little heart.

New mutants is a book full of awesome character moments.