Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) Issue #12 – “Dangerous (Part 6)”! If you can believe, we’re at the end of the Dangerous story arc. In the previous installment, Robot Medusa flies to Genosha to battle Professor Xavier, and he successfully bashes her with a semi truck (that he could drive without legs), sends her flying into a high voltage switchyard, and that fries her circuits long enough to mention a God paradox that scrambles her circuits further and renders her defeated!

The X-Men team fly to Genosha to help Xavier, and they arrive just as Medusa is finished! But lo, another beast rises out of the waters. A much bigger, meaner beast! It’s the beast that razed Genosha the first time around, and now he’s here to make short work of the X-Men once and for all!

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #12 [August, 2005]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Dangerous (Part 6)”

Another “previously on” recap page fills in a major backstory point for me: Emma Frost was present in Genosha when this particular beast destroyed the city and killed 16 million mutants. So she’s probably gonna be all traumatized and fucked up and useless in this fight. OR, she’ll be the last one standing to annihilate the threat. WE’LL SEE IF I’M RIGHT.

“MODE: WIPEOUT. TWENTY-SECOND POWER-UP TO FULL BURN CAPACITY” announces the Mega-Beast. The X-Men are staring up at it with looks of angered determination…except for Emma Frost, she’s cowering with her hands over her ears like someone who saw 16 million mutants get murdered! Look, I just retained some information!

Robot Medusa is rubbing it in. SHE just uploaded her database into Mega-Beast, so SHE’S safe. SHE won’t be destroyed! HA! Wolverine sneers at her, but he sneers at everything, so who cares?

Beast is still the only one scrambling for ideas, and proposes getting far the fuck away in the jet. Cyclops shoots that idea down, they’re on a time crunch here. Gotta fight! Frost stops Cyclops and lets him know that his super blasty beams will only increase Mega-Beast’s strength. Wolverine asks Colossus to throw him at the Mega-Beast, but Colossus appears to be catatonic.

Pryde, after Mega-Beast declares “POWER-UP COMPLETE”, tells everyone to grab onto her. Hey, I’ve done this before in Paper Mario! You use the ghost partner to disappear after the boss takes a turn charging up and then attacks with the GONNA-KILL-YOU-WITH-10,000-ATK-POINTS ability on the next turn!

Everyone grab something…AHH! No Professor, not there.

So Mega-Beast unleashes his blast, engulfs the entire ruins in a giant wave of fire and flames, and the team is still standing untouched after the smoke clears. “That all you got…bub?” Pryde taunts, sweating profusely.

Cyclops orders Beast to get Xavier to safe ground. Colossus stays near Pryde while she recuperates, and Wolverine demands that Colossus snaps out of it and launches him like he asked! C’MON!

The Mega-Beast opens up a sort of abdomen cavity and unleashes thousands of hand-sized robot bugs. Colossus flings Wolverine toward Mega-Beast.

Beast (Regular-Beast) is carrying Xavier like a big sack of flour, or a big fat baby, and looking for ANYWHERE that could be considered “safe ground”. He scurries up to a higher location, which I would think would be less safe than literally any other option, but I‘m not the big strong smart X-Man here so I guess I’ll just SHUT UP. Beast asks Xavier why this Robot Woman doesn’t just bring every machine around her to life instead of just screwing around being stupid. Xavier responds that she’s just being irrational. Like a woman. Good job, Joss Whedon! He doesn’t actually say that, but Joss Whedon meant it.

“No living being is completely rational?” Oh yeah, what about Joe Pesci?

When they get to the top, Robot Medusa is waiting with brand new robot wings. Like a beautiful robot butterfly hatched from her robot cocoon.

Cyclops and Colossus are on the ground fighting some robot bugs. Cyclops asks for Frost’s help and notices she’s just walking farther inland, away from the battle. “Emma? Honey?…War?” he nudges, but she ignores him. She walks down some steps into a dark underground, uh, basement? There’s a man waiting there for her.

“What are you doing here?” Frost asks.
“Did you think I would miss this? Your triumphant return?” answers the shadowy, so-far unrevealed man. Much clandestine commiserating happens. It’s shady.

Thank God. You know, just between you and me, these X-Men are really annoying to be around.

We see a scene where Beast drops Xavier from the top of the structure, slashes at the hovering Robot Medusa, and grabs onto Xavier and a rod jutting out from the structure while Xavier was less than a foot away from hitting the ground. “Sorry, Professor, but when you’re surrounded by psychics…you gotta work on instinct.” Beast says, shortly before dropping him the rest of the way and landing another blow on the robot. Comedy!

More fighting. Pryde can’t keep it up much longer. Colossus tells her to find a place to lay low away from the battle, but Pryde has a new idea: throw her at the Mega-Beast too. She can do a lot more damage ghostin’ through the enemy. She should know, she’s done a lot of ghostin’ in her day. Colossus is hesitant, but Pryde cannot hide the whole team again if the Mega-Beast powers up another fiery blast. “I promise to come back.” she tells him, and that was the bargaining chip she needed! OFF YOU GO! She phases through.

Frost is back. She chides Cyclops for allowing Pryde to get her way, but Cyclops agrees with Pryde’s decision. Beast is currently preoccupied by gnawing savagely on the metal lady’s leg. Xavier tries to relay that he’s not picking up a signal from Robot Medusa anymore, that she had left her body, but Beast is out of his mind with primal matters so Xavier leaves him be.

That dang school-issued underwear always rides up.

Pryde is phasing through everything she comes in contact with as she soars through the Mega-Beast’s enormous industrial plant of a body, causing random minor system errors and disruptions along the way. On her path is a big CSI-lookin’ command console, which she stops herself at and attempts a manual override. The Mega-Beasts internal workings warn Pryde that any attempt to override will be rerouted. Any thought, ANY INKLING, of becoming solid and attempting shutdown will cause the Mega-Beast to “shoot her head off”.

“Or…you can access Mempath 164.3-9alpha6. Can’t you?” she politely inquires. The Mega-Beast pauses at this, and then finally says “That pathway is blocked.” The Mega-Beast cannot access it anymore after Genosha was razed since it “no longer contained necessary data”. Pryde points out that Robot Medusa blocked it deliberately when she reanimated him.

Later, the Mega-Beast is gone. Pryde fills the rest of the team in on what transpired. “It’s pretty simple, really. When ‘Danger’ brought the wild sentinel to life, she repressed his memory of Genosha. Of the massacre. She knew he couldn’t handle it.”

In short, she made him feel bad about committing 16 million murders. She made him feel really bad. So, he needs to spend some time alone to think about what he’s done.

Yeah, maybe Putin could use a taste of this brain math empathy.

Such a Buffy conclusion.

Cyclops isn’t so sure. Robot Medusa still has his ear. Beast tells him to take the victory for today. Professor Xavier is one proud papa! But Colossus has a bone to pick with the bald little shrimp. “You knew. She told me in my head as I was about to crush her. The moment you ‘upgraded’ the Danger Room…the moment she was born, she called out to you. Professor, will you tell us what she said?”

Professor Xavier looks ashamed of himself, and then admits that she asked “Where am I?”. And Peter surmises that the Professor deliberately ignored her for years while running Danger Room experiments, and only recently did Robot Medusa realize this. Xavier defends himself, saying that it was necessary to properly train his students, to prepare them for real dangers, to build up everyone’s skills and confidence, to protect mutantkind “whatever the cost”.

“What you been doin’, Prof? Hanging with Magneto?” Wolverine sneers bitterly with his bitter, curvy lips, “‘Cause that @#$% sounds just a little too much like him”.

Oh, god, when? When will someone finally kill us? I can’t take it anymore.

The team is UP IN ARMS! UP IN ARMS with the Professor’s unsavory lack of scruples! Frost tries to interject and side with the Professor on this whole fucking-with-the-lives-of-robots problem, but Cyclops won’t hear none of it! “You wanna tell me something worth hearing? Tell me why you walked out in the middle of a firefight!”

Now it’s Beast’s turn to interject. “Our ride’s here.” he says, motioning toward the jet. As the team slinks and slumps off to their self-flying jet and out of Genosha, the shadowed figure, Frost’s thus-far unrevealed consultant, speaks to his thus-far unrevealed groupmates. “Bad and good. Good that they are shaken. But Summers learns yet again to trust no one. Emma needs to work him very carefully now. If he learns her true loyalty…bad. And they were such a cute couple, too. Oh well. Nothing lasts forever…”

“…Hellfire does.”

And the reveal is a dainty looking widow’s peak motherfucker with sideburns wearing fancy foppish clothes, a woman with long, dark, spiky hair and an Axl Rose bandana, a fancy-dressed small bald man sitting with one leg cross over the other, and a man in a hooded cloak.

And I don’t know who the fuck they are supposed to be at all!

Final Thoughts

Things are getting better, and with this storyline I know the main characters and their personalities a little bit better! Watch: Cyclops = boring. Wolverine = angry. Kitty Pryde = smart. Colossus = boring. Frost = untrustworthy. Beast = smart and boring.

That’s it!

Also I insist on calling her Kitty Pryde instead of Shadowcat. This is because she barely has a costume! I think that must be it.

I haven’t decided yet if I will continue with Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, or if I will pick up another X-Men series and see how that looks. Until then, space cadets, live long and prosper. Nanu nanu!