It was confusing, but the way I understood it was this:
When Scott pulled them all out of the present, they were all trying to save Tabitha, in a certian location. When they went to the future, they were in those same locations, but way in the future. When the return to the present, they will reappear in the past, not in the location from which they disappeared, but in the location wherever they happen to be in the future. So if they want to save Tabitha, they have to get back to their original positions. Only, most of them can't make it back because being in the future beyond a certain time is killing them. But X-23 is all badass, so she tells the rest of them to just cut off their time-thingies where they are, go back to the present in the wrong positions, and leave it to her to make it back to the RIGHT position so that she can save Tabitha. Which she can do before she gets ripped apart by temporal fluxes (or what-the-hell-ever) because of her healing factor?
Anyway, just a guess.
Now someone explain to me what happened at the end of the new issue of Fantastic Four.
Ri-i-ight... okay, that makes sense. The idea is that they need to be in the exact place they left, and they'll reappear at the exact time they left (and they know this).
But it's not properly explained in this issue at all, and to make sense of it you have to (a) remember a scene from three months ago before the crossover started, which isn't even mentioned on the recap page, and (b) even then, engage in a bit of lateral thinking. Not good.
Time travel should be banned. This is why they removed Thor's ability to time travel back in the 60's, because it was too confusing.
Silver Surfer could do it too - by circling round eath *really fast*. To go back in time he went the other way... I wouldn't say it should be banned entirely, solution?
I didn't get that scene either, it didn't really explain anything, everyone just suddenly seemed to stop talking. It wasn't helped by the fact that they reemerged at a place which still looked distopian.
Alex: nobody reappeared anywhere. If you look carefully, everyone just disappears when they cut off their time-thingies as they can no longer bare the strains of being time-displaced. One by one they're gone. The last one left is X-23 who is the only team-member to make it back to the 'X', which is where she needs to be so she can return to the spot she needs to be in to save Tabitha.
And yes, to figure all of this out, a far more careful study is required than should be necessary. Rather murky.
To be fair, Paul, X-23 does say something along the lines of 'you saved my friend, I'll save yours' to Domino while sending her back, so perhaps it need not have been in the recap page. I was just glad that they bothered to remember the precarious departure point at all.
I understood so it made sense to me, but to be fair I just got caught up on Messiah War a day before the final issue came out, so it was fresh in my mind.
Hm. I think I still don't get it. But I don't mind not getting the hand-waving mumbo-jumbo mechanics--I'm calling them that in the assumption that the narrative doesn't even have internal logic; if it does in fact, please correct me.
What I'd like to know, if anyone who understood can be bothered to type it out, is what the status of things is at the very end (re: Hope, particularly; what is it we know about her at this point? What was the revelation?)
The revelation is that future Apocalypse stood in front of her and said "I know who you are and what you do" to give us the impression that something very big is around the corner. Aside from that it was 7 issues of fluff.
I read the end sequence 3 times, didn't get it and moved on.
At this point I'm still just assuming that Hope is supposed to be Jean Grey, or somehow tied to her ressurection (clone? new host body?). Maybe that's why they've been trying to make Cyclops/Emma's relationship fall apart, so Scott can be single when Jean rolls back.
Thanks for the replies, guys.
I'd been assuming that the revelation couldn't be something so slight; it's not like we all didn't go "Jean Grey" the second we saw the kid's red hair. Nasty habit of having the (thing that would normally go in the) climax of an event be the (vague and momentous) setting up of the next thing. So exactly zero payoff on the whole enterprise; fluff indeed.
I'll enjoy Paul's evisceration of this whole thing; there is that.
I think the ending is vague to leave it a bit of a surprise for next month. I'm not really going to fault them for what was initially a bit of a confusing scene, particularly if they're going to (I assume) follow-up on it at the very start of the next issue.
One character did go back to the present on panel - Vanisher. He just happened to be standing on the Xavier school grounds at the time and that's all destroyed at the moment, so it didn't look much different.
The Fantastic Four big reveal villain was the one from Millar's 1985 miniseries set in 'our world' which was largely rubbish. Basically a wheelchair bound invalid in our world taught Doom all he knew. Hmm.
Now someone explain why Daniel Way is writing Daken in a different way to virtually everyone else even himself have in the past in Dark Wolverine.
Has anyone read the new Cable yet? So Messiah War ends, and in the aftermath...Bishop is traveling through time to kill Hope, while Cable desperately attempts to protect her.
How is that a different story again?
Also, Paul Gulacy's portrayal of Hope looks creepily like an adult head on a child's body.
"Now someone explain why Daniel Way is writing Daken in a different way to virtually everyone else even himself have in the past in Dark Wolverine."
Because Liu is writing Dark Wolverine. And maybe someone noticed that the character sucked and could use a change?
Anyway, the whole X-Force cliffhanger into Messiah War pissed me off. The way time travel is being presented makes no sense. If they have a time they need to jump to in the future, why the hell does it matter whether they leave before or after they rescue their friends? Spending a few more minutes in the present doesn't mean they'll arrive a few minutes later in the future. They're jumping to a specific point in time, not a specific distance forward in the timestream. That whole thing just played so false. This whole time travel business has been so poorly handled, right from the start, and in the meantime has taken Cable and Bishop, two of Marvel's most powerful, competent mutants and brought them to new depths of mediocrity and incompetence.
Rob: I get who the villain is, but why the hell are they suddenly fighting a horde of other Fantastic Four's on the last few pages?
Mastadge: if a little logical hole like that is going to bother you, I can't imagine how you've ever managed to enjoy any comic book, ever. Concerning the use of time-travel in the series, I actually like it. The idea that Cable can only jump forward into bleaker and bleaker futures is an interesting one, and Bishop resorting to world-side genocide as a means to an end works for me. Although, I think that as of this new arc, they've jumped to one bleak post-apocalyptic future too many. I enjoyed the cross-over (time-travel plot-holes and all), but I'm thinking its time to ACTUALLY shake up this book's status quo, instead of just pretending to.
I was always under the impression Marvel time travel involves only creating new branches for events to unfold, but will never change what has gone before.
In FF: A Death in the Family, no matter what Johnny Storm did to prevent his sister's death, she would still be dead when he went to the present, she would just live in the branched off timeline. This is why Bishop didn't disappear when Onslaught didn't kill the X-Men.
Cable is the exception to the rule because he was born in this timeline, and I thought this was the whole point for time travel split with Madrox in Messiah Complex; they knew they couldn't change anything, it was just to see what could happen. Yet no one in Messiah War seems to recognize that.
Marvel needs to take a line from DC for time traveling: If an event occurs to change the present, it can be easily fixed to make it as it was before the ripple spreads. There are also certain things that cannot be changed, as these points in time are pillars (like Barbara Gordon being shot by the Joker no matter how many times someone tries to stop it).
I couldn't care less about Bishop. He's been turned from psycho soldier from the future to cool bald cop over the years, and it just wasn't interesting for me.
Cable's new status quo, however, saddens me. After the amazing Cable & Deadpool I just can't stand what they have done to him here. He's an oversized guy with guns, but not just like it used to be during Liefeld's ternure. No, the guy here is just a mediocre muscle-head obsessed with a little girl. He can barely string more than two words together, and those are all about "Hope".
Mastadge: If you look back several months to the start of the crossover, X-force basically tried to make that case before Scott catapulted them into the future. It played off to me as Scott's obsession with helping the Hope situation (as seen with the whole bit about the baby room he built) over riding his better judgement about waiting not making a difference.
maxwell: I don't mind that Cable can only jump forward -- it's a moderately interesting device, even if the whole plotline has overextended its welcome. My problem is that, given Bishop's ability to travel both forward and back, he's choosing to go the needle in a haystack route, burning down the future, rather than going back to where he knows the infant was and getting to her before Cable did in the first place. (Unless that was explained somewhere and I've forgotten it?) (Maybe it's the whole "you can't alter the past so if he wasn't there then there's no use his trying to get there" time travel theory?)
On FF: That comatose character was from 1985? Really? That's pretty goddamn arrogant on Millar's part. He's been building/executing the "Masters of Doom" plot in FF for the better part of a year now, and in the end it turns out that the whole thing is predicated on a (frankly lousy) pet mini-series of his that seems to be almost totally unrelated? Just because I'm reading Millar's Fantastic Four doesn't mean I'm versed in every little scarp of paper he's ever written on. I dropped 1985 like a stone after 2 issues, but it finished in December didn't it? Even if it were by someone else, and considered a modern classic, I don't really think that's enough time and distance to go about referencing it out of the blue as if it were well known cannon.
Millar's never made a secret of the fact that his FF, 1985 and Old Man Logan are all tied in to each other.
The deeper problem with the Master of Doom concept in specific is that Clyde *didn't* teach Doom 'all he knew."
Frankly, I've got no idea in reading the story what the alleged relationship between Clyde and Doom is even meant to have been.
"Master of Doom" is just another of those "my new character is soooooo tough he can beat Important Character X" writing cheats, and in this case an especially self-defeating and narratively incoherent one.
Not that anyone is reading these comments anymore, so chances are I'll post the exact same thing in the full review of Messiah War, but, IIRC, the whole "X-Force has to go to the future NOW NOW NOW and not wait five minutes to save their friends" thing ws because Beast had "found" Cable's location in the timestream. It seems that we are meant to think that this is a slippery thing and that Hank could lose the "lock" at any second, thus enabling Cable and Hope to wander for god knows how long in their time before the present day X-Men can find them and help them. So it wasn't rushed because too much time was passing it was rushed because the opportunity was passing to get X-Force to where Cable is.
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